I posted this on steam discussions also if you see it there.
I’ve played it once through full COOP and almost through solo. Its a great initial release, its early access on the first few days. It only crashed a couple times Coop, which isn’t bad really.
Game spoilers follow as I explain the issues.
Locations and details I remember, this isn’t a walk through just some areas I found issues with some suggestions having modded NWN2 servers for almost 4 years.
1: Dialogs – You should color code the dialog options to help people understand the ramifications of the decision. Setting the entire Druid circle or a trader faction agro on you because you were being cheeky is a bit of a pain. Usually causing a full reload.
Red for evil or agro making,
Regular white for normal dialog.
Blue perhaps for helpful with faction/person.
If nothing else please make the options that agro a faction either warn you or be Red on the line. All though it was fun killing all the druids and the rats, I’m fairly certain finding the one druid alive later for a reward after I know he was dead, isn’t what was wanted.
Dialogs on the ship with the Int Devourers as you run up the burning ship stairs can crash the game as they will dialog as you agro some of them to while killing their neighbors.
The night hag in the final encounter near the lift just stood there in conversation mode and I could just kill her without a fight.
Fix the barter button, auto barter/calculate. Having to remember to push that barter button is a pain and cause a couple reloads for various reasons. I would never give all my stuff away for 0 gold.
2: Some of the cut scenes were just piles of people in the camera view or shut off completely in coop…
Perhaps have either none speaking characters not render or have them move behind where the camera isn’t looking at say a back the whole time.
While we are on cut scenes, which I did find quite good for the most part with great animation and voice acting.
Sometimes the people’s mouths didn’t move for chunks of the scenes, all though the heads nodded the mouths would stay closed on more than a few occasions.
Sometimes as in when we first get the cleric after the crash, you see her speaking self disappear while her Companion self appear in the same spot, this was kind of confusing initially. We also had the same issue with the Baa sheep redhats, they didn’t animate in correctly making the cut scene kind of wonky seeing 5 heads in the same spot looking different directions.
The Gyth encounter at the bridge, failed to render many things multiple reloads trying to see the whole thing. That should be reviewed for coop play.
In general some of the cut scenes were really polished such as the raising of the dead scene and a few others, some of the on the fly ones need that same polish.
3: Character creation and options.
It appears we have limited characters to force people to have the minimums for subclasses, great for testing but I hope you remove this ability point lockin for the release. Having the option to turn that on would be great as finding all the points needed for some of the classes could be a pain later as you want to subclass and do not have them. I really suggest you take a look at the pathfinder character panel for those of us that will want to tweek our character to the extremes. Having a cleric with 16 wisdom makes specializing them in that one thing such as epic healer, much harder. Is great for generalists, but not something I’d want in the full release to play for all the toons. Free up the ability points and add more description to the subclasses for a given class, early on before choosing the base class.
You can spend hours in the character creation screen on a good game, why? Because you want to try different options. I hope you have a more advanced creation system in the works, simplyfied isn’t really for everyone. Especially given the unforgiving nature of the game play in classic mode.
The character panel all the right side during creation and levelup isn’t going to work. Again look at the pathfinder one, tabs for spells, tabs for ability points, tab for feats, etc… DnD is complex, you will want to break it out into chunks.
More faces would be nice along with hair/beard styles. I guess thats always a request, but some more hair styles is a must. Look at any of the oblivion/skyrim/nwn2 mods if you want to see what player bases liked in those.
4: Spells – some of the spells had animations but didn’t work as expected.
Charm, blind, several others – didn’t work on enemy creatures. They acted completely unaffected after the casts even though they failed the resist and you saw the spell animation on them. I expect your need to change their faction to player vs enemy for charm wasn’t working. The blind didn’t work either, as they ran straight at the other characters vs wandering a bit before leaving the cloud. Again in these cases all of them failed their rolls to resist. There are a few others that were broken but I didn’t write them down.
5: Actions and abilities -
Phasing and teleporting seems to be a bit overdone at this point, some of these creatures are doing it none stop, which I do not remember that being a thing for level 1-4 critters in the past.
Burning some of the spider webs under spiders didn’t always drop them to the ground near walls, they got hung up in odd ways.
The push ability seems a bit OP with all the ledges, you can attack with a push then push with the push ability. Perhaps that should be a shield bash animation vs putting it away and using 2 bare hands on a dangerous burning monster for example. I like the mechanic, all though I did chuck a few gyth off a very high bridge and they took 0 damage, not sure how that happens considering the drop.
Some of the fighter encounters in the first 2 rounds if they all trigger their extra action abilities, will wipe a team before anyone else moves. I’m not sure if that is intended either given the initiative to go process in Coop mode. There is a fair amount of planning needed to defeat that type of group, which guarantees a reload from save.
Overall I had a lot of great laughs in coop and single player mode with some of the funny things that can happen. I appreciate the complexities of the dialogs and events. Its a great initial early access build. 25 Hours if you clear all of it roughly depending on reloads needed. I look forward to the next content release.
Props to your voice acting and animation crews, those were very high quality and easily noticed.
