Just my .02 cents, after spending a couple of hours with the demo last night:
1) I have to agree with those complaining about the targeting -
a) it is VERY difficult to pick up and move garbage, decapitated heads, rotten food, etc. It is incredibly frustrating that it takes 7-10 tries before picking something up. Actual "drop" items (gold, weapons, potions, etc) are very easy to click on and pick up, but "interactive" items are much more difficult.
b) Targeting enemies is much too difficult. It seems that you have to click on their torso, not on the ring below their feet, and even then my character seems to move more often than attack. I have used the CTRL button, and that works for basic (left-click) attacks, but in my experience, it doesn't seem to work for right-click attacks (see next item).
2) I can't get right-click attacks to work when both characters are selected. It seems like I have to pause, select one character, target the enemy, right-click, then select second character, target enemy, right-click. I would like to hold down CTRL and right-click for "special" attack from both characters simultaneously - but can't get that to work. right-click only seems to work for me if only one of my characters is selected. Is this correct? For example, my main character has a spell in the right-click slot (fire arrow or something - learned from Edmond) and the DK has whirlwind. Right-clicking with both players selected does nothing, but selecting one at a time does work. Very tedious, though!
3) Pause does not work when you are holding down the CTRL key! Maybe this is a Windows limitation, but it is sure frustrating. Since targeting is so difficult, I tend to hold down CTRL during all battles, and in one case it was getting down to the wire - either my DK or the Skeleton was going to die very soon. When it became apparent that my DK was probably going to lose, I tried to pause to collect myself and drink a potion - but it didn't work! After clicking the space bar 3 times (thinking my keyboard was going wonky), my DK died, and it was only later that I realized it was because I was instinctively holding down the CTRL button during battle. (maybe re-mapping from CTRL to a different key would help?)
4) Other minor frustrations -
a) Edmond disappears(?) after the first encounter. Since I didn't have enough gold to learn both skills the first time, I bought one of them, ran around and killed some things to get more gold, and came back - only to find there was no Edmond and no tunnel...
b) On a related note, and to make it even MORE frustrating - it turns out I did have enough gold, but since each character holds onto their own gold, it told me I didn't have enough. Why isn't gold pooled for all characters? Is there actually a situation where it will be beneficial to have separate gold stashes for each character? It's going to get really frustrating if we have to keep swapping gold back and forth between characters to make purchases. I can understand if gold has weight, and therefore must be distributed between characters so that no character is "encumbered", but shouldn't the total amount of gold be available to all characters, regardless of who is carrying it? (Maybe I'm just too used to Baldur's Gate and similar games where gold is not an inventory item)
c) The screen scrolling takes a lot of getting used to, and tends to scroll WAY too fast for my liking. If I move the mouse toward the bottom of the screen to click on a door or other item, and move the mouse that extra cm too far, the screen starts scrolling like crazy. As others have mentioned, I would prefer a keyboard option to move the screen, or at least slow down the scrolling a little bit. Maybe I've just been playing BG II too much lately, so I'm used to the much slower, more controlled scrolling in that game?
d) Inventory is a bit frustrating. Having to drag items all the way across the screen to the portrait to transfer between characters is more work than it should be. I can see that I'll never be able to play this on my laptop, because I don't have the dexterity to drag items over long distances using the touchpad. Inevitably I would end up dropping half the items before they got to the character.
---
Overall, I'm still excited about this game, and looking forward to its release. However, if the targeting is as poor in the full game, I can see myself getting very frustrated and quitting before the end. I play RPG's to "get away" for awhile and take a break from the frustrations of every day life - so any unnecessary aggravation within the game just defeats the whole purpose for me...
OK, so that was a little more than .02 cents - sorry!
Cheers,
John (aka Lord Bubba)
