Okay, played for a few hours. First off, it's immediately clear that some important issues got fixed in this build, even though they didn't necessarily get mentioned in the changelist:
+ You can now scroll down and to the right regardless of any interface elements. Thank you for this, it really improves the playing experience.
+ Markers can now be put on the map simply by pressing Enter instead of having to click Accept. However, I'm still not sure how to remove them, does anyone know? Perhaps this should be more obvious.
+ There is now a quicksave message. This is an improvement, but I think instead of a pop-up I would prefer a discrete message in the top corner of the screen, the way most modern games do it.
+ The healing spell is no longer completely useless.
+ Flare no longer has unlimited range.
However, some problems still persist and it seems that some new ones were created. Fortunately, the latter should be easy to fix. In no particular order:
- Enemies sometimes still make saving throws against elemental damage after they have died.
- Dead enemies will turn into either a body or a grave, presumably depending on the way in which they died. I assume this is not the intention.
- Markers persist even after starting a new game. This was actually fairly useful for me, but again I'm assuming it's not intentional.
- The Resurrect Scroll is still called 'Resurect Scroll'. It's missing an R.
- The economy is broken because random junk items mostly sell for either 11 or 16 gold. Loot a bunch of random crates and you will have enough money to buy new equipment. Just outside of Cyseal, I found some wheat worth 31 gold. It's too easy to get money in this build.
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Completed quests still don't get filtered automatically, this seems to be a difficult problem to fix since it's one of the only major interface problems still around after all the updates.
- Sometimes there is no option to say 'I'll take my leave' when you start a conversation, meaning you have to click something else first.
- I made Roderick sleep in one of the beds in Thelyron's clinic. There were some animation problems as part of his body clipped through the bed. I assume this holds true for many other character/bed combinations as well.
- Suggestion: an optional autosave feature. I am assuming this will get implemented anyway, but I think it would be useful even in the alpha.
- There is still no Game Over screen when both your characters die.
- I can still walk through the horse carriage in the side room in the warehouse.
- If you load a game while playing, the message still reads 'you will loose all unsaved progress' instead of 'you will lose all unsaved progress'.
- When you ask Reginald about the story of the talking head, he mentions 'hubub' instead of 'hubbub'.
- This one might be due to my own lack of understanding of the trade mechanics, but Arhu kept refusing my offer even though his attitude was at 0 and the two sides were evenly balanced in terms of value. I couldn't figure out why.
- During the mayor's tour of the library, at one point he talks about 'Vicotria' instead of Victoria.
- You still have to spend all skill points before the leveling arrow goes away. It should be enough to just allocate however many you want while saving the rest for later if desired.
- One of the bookcases in Evelyn's house (the one that doesn't contain her diary) only seems to be accessible through the outer wall of the house.
- There is a graphical glitch with two-handed axes where characters like to wield them in a rather unorthodox fashion:
- Suggestion: different icons for regular books and skill books. I assume this is in the works anyway, but still.
- It is not clear to me what the difference is between Dust Devil and Whirlwind, except that the latter does more damage.
- My party got stuck inside the lighthouse and was unable to leave through the door opening. The only way I managed to get out was by using the Teleporter Pyramid. I have no idea what triggered this bug. The door itself was destroyed during the fight in front of the lighthouse, maybe the debris were blocking my path, but somehow only when I wanted to leave.
- It is possible to gain infinite Exploration XP. This is the case in Esmeralda's back room and at the very least. You can just run around in circles there and trigger the XP over and over. The last two issues are the most serious ones since they are potentially game-breaking. Again though, this build seems to be an improvement in many ways. It introduced new bugs as well, but they should be much easier to fix.