I will start this out by saying that me and a few friends have been having fun with this game even in this early alpha state. We see great potential for diversity, replayability, options and just fun times. We also see a lot of the bugs and things that we think could help improve the game from its current condition. Some of these may already be big topics and some may already have fixes on the way. I have not really poured through the forums at this point to see. I just want to do my part to add a bit of feedback that may or may not catch the attention of Larian Studios. So without further hold up here is what I have seen, experienced and come across in the game so far.
1. Magic Pocket is always a fun feature, however when it comes down to joining an open session in a random player's world having the ability to lock "non-story" items to your inventory such as a gear, food, scrolls feels like it will be a necessary so that someone doesn't jump in and grab all the things from your inventory, consume them just to screw with you and then leave. Yes, yes I'm sure this is not a majority issue and you can "always revert to a previous save, but I can see not being able to lock your inventory as becoming a potential "trolling" target.
2. The Enemy AI Script is very clearly long and complex. With all the options available to players being available to them as well. That being said I cannot count by this point how many enemies have "plotted their next move" and then done absolutely nothing. Does this make my encounter a bit easier.....Absolutely, but if I kick a hornets nest / goblin camp and it's an "Ooops" moment as a player I feel like the AI could perform a bit better in some of these circumstances.
3. When I play a spell caster having 4 buttons for the same spell because each level of the spell I want to use is its own button becomes cumbersome and clutters the hotbar in an inane fashion. If possible changing the spell buttons to have a pop up menu, similar to the throw action, that has the other levels of the spell in them would alleviate this in my opinion and make spell casters hotbars feel far less cluttered or like they have to have 5 hotbars to have all their individual leveled spells on each hotbar.
4. Which brings me to my next point. In the keybinds there is a "hotbar next/previous" keybind that even though I have tried several re-maps of I cannot get it to work so quick swapping between hotbar 1 and 2 from your keyboard does not seem possible at this time. I hope this is just a small bug that is already in process of being fixed.
5. Having a clearer indicator in combat of when you have passed your turn (pressed spacebar / clicked the hourglass icon) in the initiative order at the top would be nice. There are several times I find myself pressing space bar a few times because one of my friends hasn't finished their turn, but I'm trying to make sure it's not me that is holding up the initiative. A obvious and clear indication for each character that has finished their turn when multiple players have a shared initiative would be helpful to prevent this.
6. General issues with cutscenes which I hope have been brought to light already:
- Black screen when jumping into a cutscene
- Voice over happening, scene not playing out in sync
- parts of scene being skipped making it hard to follow what was just said
- Having the ear symbol appear, but not being able to jump into the scene
7. Lastly when returning to camp at times npcs become hostile, seemingly related to their approval / disapproval of your character, but since they were waiting in camp there is no way to see this change and when you return to complete a long rest you suddenly find yourself attacked by a character that you had no idea would be hostile towards you. Perhaps having those characters do a cutscene when you return to camp telling you that they disliked your actions so much that they are abandoning the camp could help remedy this? I'm honestly not sure what a fair and good solution to this would be but I am hoping that at the time of this writing it is already been brought to Larian Studio's attention.
Thank you for taking the time to read through these and I look forward to many more hours of playing Baldur's Gate 3!!
