Combat

1) A lot of things are somewhat clear. You can see your weapon damage and chance to hit. The skills and spells give a damage range and chance for an effect, and the combat log shows the dice rolls or explains why an effect was saved against or not. Maybe it could do more, but I think that this game does a decent job of explaining things.


2) I would not mind some spells and such needing charge time, Unfortunately, I think that idea was cut, which is a shame because Willpower could have affected it.

Still though, there is a pretty easy way to avoid having higher-tier skills castable on the first turn: Have their AP cost be higher than your starting AP, which is based on Speed and Perception.

Keep in mind that we're only seeing spells up to Rank 3 - the most powerful ones aren't in the game yet.

Because spells are acquired through plentiful gold, Mages generally can learn enough spells that they're really unlikely to have nothing to do on a turn, and if they do, well, that's what Staff of Magus is for.

As Forktong said in a recent post (and others in that thread), balance is still clearly an issue which has to be worked on.


3) All the schools - not even just magic, but all classes - have different buffs and debuffs available. If you want to incapacitate a certain foe, pile your party members onto it.


4) Personally, I never save in combat ever. I either beat the fight in one attempt or I die. I would not mind at all personally if in-combat saving were disabled. However, I don't agree with disabling saving if you're in some general area where enemies might be.

Also, this is not frickin' Dungeons and Dragons, and D&D is not a perfect gold standard which all games should slavishly follow.


5) This is not D&D, it is a different system with different challenges. Going down a list of features and saying "this works differently than D&D so it must be changed" is missing the point, I think.

It may be a smaller party, but that's part of the challenge, and you'll probably want to swap out your companions from time to time as things change.


Role-playing and decision making

I think this may be a case where Larian's reach exceeded its grasp. The need to accommodate co-op play complicated things. A lot of quests which were intended to have consequences which extended farther seem to have been reduced to one-offs, because it turns out that long quest chains in highly reactive games can be a huge pain to debug especially when you add in free roaming co-op into the mix.

As I've said in another thread, increased dialogue options are nice, but would potentially quadruple the workload for those, so that's a potential issue.


Story, quests presentation and lore

I have to agree, there's not a lot of that kind of thing around. I especially want a Source Hunter's manual. The player is placed in the role of a Source Hunter, but aren't given enough information to understand the things they're seeing.

Why is an ordinary-looking fire, indistinguishable from a normal fire surface clear evidence of Source Magic? If the Source Hunters are going to declare the crime scene as Source Magic, I want to see some proof. Show me creepy runes written in blood. Or at the very least, change the fire to burn with an unnatural purple colour.

If Jake was killed by Source Magic, why is a bloody dagger evidence? I felt like an idiot when the suspect I presented it too laughed at me for being stupid because Jake was killed by Source not steel. If the suspect was the one mistaken and the Source Hunters were right, I have to understand why.

Where is the lore about Cyseal's history, the Source King, Luculla forest, that kind of thing?

Please feed me new lore, Larian, not just references to names from Divine Divinity.


Graphics, sound and design

Walking around Cyseal, it was quite clear that despite the stretch goal of NPC schedules, the game was never designed for them. Yes, a suburb of houses for the generic citizens wouldn't be interesting to put in, but a lot of named NPC's had no houses or places to go. Kelvania, Bertie, Robin - they had nowhere to go even if there were schedules.