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.
But what are the chances? What is the basic value? I don't share your opinion that D:OS explains its systems well. Maybe you just know everything because you've already put hundreds of hours in the various alphas and betas? I don't want to offend you but put yourself in the shoes of someone who hasn't played more than 10 or 20 hours...
Can you explain me for example what "10 percent fire resistence" means? Does that mean that I receive 10% less damage from every attack based on fire? And how much is 10%? Do I have to calculate that myself?
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.
Well, if they do increase action points by a large margin for powerful spells there would be two effects:
1) Mages who want to use that spell would just stay around for one or more turns (saving action points).
2) Once they have saved enough points they would perform the spell in one turn.
To me that doesn't sound like a well designed system. It's basically a system based on "casting times" but without proper animation and any roleplaying feel. Just letting mages stand around for multiple turns doing nothing is plain silly, from a lot of points of view imo.
But I indeed have a solution for that which would greatly improve the system and wouldn't require that much of extra work or basic changes of the system in place:
Mages should be able to cast spells without having enough action points. In that case we would see the mage performing an "endless casting animation" and he would use up all his action points for this round. The system then remembers how many action points are left and needed in the next turn. If there are enough points available in the next turn the mage would automatically end the casting animation and the spell would be accomplished.
Even additional systems like the possibility of enemies to break the casting (combined with enemy attrackting skills of warriors...) would be possible to improve the system.
But I guess that will stay a dream...
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.
Sure, but there is no point to use Stuff of Magus every second turn. Staff of Magus doesn't make enough damage to be useful and it more seems like ergotherapy to use it.
As Forktong said
in a recent post (and others in that thread), balance is still clearly an issue which has to be worked on.
I know, I know. But I didn't even talk about balancing here. I talk about the systems themselves. Creating a certain system and balancing it are two different things. On top of that I compared the game/beta in its current status with BG2. It's definitely possible or even likely that there will be changes in D:OS' combat system (and balancing) until release. This topic is meant as a stimulus to rethink basic design.
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.
I know. But many of them just feel "the same". And there is no variation in effects. In BG2 there were nets, plants from the ground and other stuff. Just some more variety would be nice. It's ok as it is though.
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.
I don't even vote for disabling savegames out of combat in this case. This only makes sense in combination with a resting system which is not implemented here. But saves during combat are still pointless. I usually don't use them myself as well. But the temptation is always there, especially if you are in a hard fight and beaten. Then the temptation is quite high to load a game from the middle of a fight in which things went good for you (at least if difficulty is set higher)...
As for D&D: of course D&D has weaknesses itself. And I haven't said that D:OS should be based on D&D. But it should be possible to compare systems and their pros and cons. And imo the D&D system implemented in BG2 had a way "better" combat system than D:OS as right now. It just have more strategic and tactical layers and more depth of combat (it's not a turn-based or RTwP issue for me).
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.
You can swap out companions in every system. And it's again not about "D&D is better than anything". It's about the direct comparison of two games and how I've personally experienced them. Imho 6 party members offer a more tactical and strategcial combat than 4 party members (backed up with enough meat on the system). You can of course disagree with me. And I can't recall me saying that D:OS "must" change anything. I've said that some things are worth a second thought.
And I indeed think that a system based on four characters is "easier" to make than a system based on six characters. That's perfectly understandable if you want to come up with an own, new system (Bioware has done the same with Dragon Age...) which isn't playtested. Balancing a tactical fantasy RPG properly for a party of 6 must be a developer's nightmare tbh. But nevertheless it's imo sad that "modern" party RPGs are all only based on 4 characters or less...
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.
Only half true. Many people erroneously think that multiple answers would lead to multiple results in most RPGs. But hat's just not the case. Mass Effect is a good example in which clever and well done writing leads to the feel of having a sophisticated choice, to "player agency". Behind the curtain many answers lead to (almost) the same result but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that the player feels that his answer can have some impact. You only notice the "trick" if you play the game several times, trying all different answers.
Good writing is the key for making a good RPG, not much writing or even branching storylines like in Witcher 2. That's nice of course but you can reach much with a lot less work but clever design...
I recommend this video about "the illusion of choice" on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45PdtGDGhacCo-op dialogue could be a little bit more tricky because it's based on trait rewards and player interaction here. But every other dialogue, like the ones of the main quest, could profit from more choice.
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.
I agree.
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.
Yeah, true. But that's not only a "problem" of D:OS, it's a problem of most more or less open-world games I know. They are either out of dimension or without internal logic or generic as well. Here it's just the workload which limits the scope. It's indeed one of my personal biggest points of critique of open world games in general.
