Hello all! I'm a KS backer, and I've just got & installed the Mac beta on my shiny brand-new rMBP, which has a separate graphics card (an NVidia 650m that I mostly use for accelerating scientific tasks on the go with CUDA programming).
Having worked with these, I know that they are quite adaquate but lacking in the ram department.
The game auto-detected that I should probably have the highest graphical settings, looks amazing, has mostly been stable, and, aside from a few crashes, I've hugely enjoyed playing it.
This is incredibly good to here. I hadn't had the chance to test the game on my trio of mac books yet.
Here are a few gameplay-related thoughts that I've had, however:
- It's very easy to accidentally click on an item that doesn't belong to you, particularly when trying to use the trackpad to navigate the camera. This results in an immediate drop in reputation. I find this highly irritating; it'd be nice to have to either confirm that I _know_ I want to steal something, or, alternatively, just get a message in the combat log saying something along the lines of `You know that doesn't belong to you. If you'd like to try and steal it, enter stealth mode.'
However in stealth mode, they can't detect you due to the incredibly simple stealth systems in place. However I agree something should be done about this problem. I have been trying to cook bread, and had an inn keeper grow to hate me because I accidentally clicked on his fire 3 times.
- Likewise, it's quite hard to control the camera sometimes. On OS X, I can pan around by putting three fingers on the trackpad, and dragging to the left or right. This rotates the map by ~90ş at most. Is this by design? I'd love to have the ability to control the camera with the keyboard. It might be the case that it can be manipulated with the numberpad (but, on this computer, I don't have one!)
The game is not built for touch pads, that's about all I can say. This isn't a laptop RPG it's meant for a mouse and keyboard.
- Similarly, I'd enjoy the ability to move my character with the keyboard. How about WSAD for lead character movement directions, and the arrow keys for the camera pan?
There are additional complications that come from taking a movement system that is based around mouse control, and them implementing a keyboard system on top of it. Often times this requires a rewrite of the pathfinding algorithms and movement systems. The quick hackish way to do it, is to basically place a marker 2 pixels in one direction of the character indicated by the key pressed that simulates a mouse click/move command. This brings additional complications however, in handling of errors in the pathfinding code, determining running speed, implementing an autorun button. Anything else however, generally requires a full rewrite, however, I do not work at larian, and can't say how they have it set up.
- It initially took me a long time to work out how to level up. I then felt stupid.
lol.
- In the initial tutorial dungeon, there's a lightning trap. You're given a hint to drop an item over it, to mitigate the, er, lightning. Two points: a) you never say that it's the source of the lightning where you should drop an item -- I'd almost emptied my inventory on the ground trying to fence off some sort of conduction-free path -- and b) if you tread on the electrified bit, you basically have to reload a save game: the characters will get paralysed and you will not be able to move them again. I'm not sure if this is by design -- but I did find it a tad frustrating.
This is by design, lightning fields are very dangerous because of the secondary status they give out. Where poison and fire fields give out dots, and water fields give out an ailment that makes certain other fields more effective, lightning fields stun. Stun for about 3 seconds, and early on, that's enough to kill you. However in reference to your first point, as I recall it they do inform you to place it on the source of the effect. Or at least I figured it out within about 10 seconds.
- Everything is so shiny much like wow
- How about having a more stylised mini-map? It's a bit hard to see what's going on sometimes, but perhaps I just need to get used to it.
Such misuse, much meme, wow.
The minimap is already fairly stylized, but it could use some work I agree.
- On a single player game, with the option to invite other players to join the game disabled by default, why is the chat window on by default? (How about showing it when I invite others to join, or want a multiplayer game?)
HASEOOooooOOOoo:Yo duders, is "this" a bug.
ATOLIIIIiiiiiII:Yeah, they're working on it though.
- For some reason, I found myself wanting more information from the UI -- I don't entirely know why, but I kept on looking for the 'detailed character sheet' button. I think I've been spoilt by other, more information-heavy video games.
I think it's an old skool flavor thing to provide just enough info to be useful, but not enough that you can completely track down what everything does.
- It took me about three hours to realise that you cancel the casting of a spell (or use of an item) by right clicking. Do you say that anywhere?
No, but it's a common convention in this type of game. Kind of like right click having special abilities bound to it in diablo likes.
- If you try and set the key to end turn to be enter, every key will be 'end turn'.
- Lens blur filter when zoomed in == pretty
Bugs and goodness all within two lines, sounds like a good beta.
- Likewise, letting me target hostile effects on my party members -- with an associated loss of attitude -- is rather irritating. It's nice that you can do it, but it's really not what I wanted to do most of time.
So be more careful?
The last bit was already answered by Larian, I hope my little answers helped these are all just opinion of course. But I figured I could help with some of these points.
