Because my friends and I are such huge fans of the first game (and going by our first few days playing the early access of the sequel, huge fans of this game as well), I feel so strongly about the chat still being as cumbersome as it is that I had to sign up here just to share our experience with it.
I assume these are well known issues not specific to us so I won't get into too much detail, but I'll list some of my main grievances just for specificity:
- It's very difficult to chat while your inventory is open and it seems you can't 'send' even though the input field is active - but because it is active you can't close your inventory with the keyboard.
- The chat key often requires several presses which can lead to moderate disaster as you start typing without the input field having focus.
- Using the default hotkey of enter to chat is risky as npc dialogue might unexpectedly steal focus. You can rebind it, but this leads to new issues where you have to use the mouse to start chatting in certain cases. It's generally impossible to chat while in dialogue which requires out of game workarounds when you want to discuss dialogue responses with the other players.
We have learned to live with it and there are workarounds for most of it - mainly to use the mouse for everything and tapping esc a lot, and of course voice chat when it's an option for us - but this is the only element we have to "fight" in this way in an otherwise incredibly fun game.
The only other complaint I have is the lack of time we have to play it. If you could implement some more of that that'd be swell.
