In other words, the level design in this game is great. It's consistently excellent, all of the way through, which is the really amazing part. From Cyseal's outskirts all the way to a foreboding hut in the swamp, a huge amount of effort was put into making each area visually impressive, distinctive, and real.
I agree aesthetically it's quite nice, but gameplay wise the pacing was off and there was an excessive amount of unnecessary and dull walking to return to places you'd already been. Even little things like the portals in Cyseal being poorly placed a distance away from the most frequently used places such as Aureus/Arhu and the marketplace. I also took some issue with the excessive placement of barrels of oil/poison/water which felt very gamey and marred the immersion for me.
Agree.
Classlessness and open-ended itemization. I know there's a small group of players out there who want this changed, but I was a huge fan of getting Intelligence on my plate armour.
The numerical and character creation mechanics, in general. Hey, it's another D&D 3.0 rehash instead of attributes, skills, and feats, you have attributes, abilities, and talents!
The problem isn't the style they went with, but the clunky implementation.
Talents are probably the single most imbalanced aspect, with some clear winners and losers and some that are arguably "broken" to the extremes of either direction. They're also pretty limited and on certain builds I end up taking the really basic boring stuff because there's nothing else worthwhile. I shouldn't really have 5 points in man-at-arms on my pure mages but picture of health and weather the storm were such no brainer talent picks it was clearly worth wasting ability points even though I hardly use more than 3 man-at-arms skills.
Abilities have some clear winners and losers too, although part of that is due to items making some obsolete. Their itemization took a lot away from character building by making it too easy to put on different gear to cover many abilities/attributes. Equip requirements were also poorly handled, discouraging players from placing many attributes into speed/con/per.
I'd also add that weapon procs were an entirely useless waste of itemization "points".
Overall their character building and handling of gear is just mediocre, typical CRPG stuff and feels a bit lazy and uninspired.
Agree. Part of this is due to a bad/imbalanced character building and itemization though, I'd add.
The Tenebrium ability. It's been written about a lot on these forums and I don't feel like repeating it here. But it's a rage quit/reroll moment, and those aren't a good thing to have.
Yeah... there's really no good excuse for this.
Traits. I don't have a problem with the concept itself, just the way it was handled. This was my #1 cause of savescumming, especially prevalent early in the game. In many cases it's very difficult to determine which traits are going to be affected, and picking the wrong one can cause you to lose your trait bonus and reload in frustration. I can't fathom any reason why the dialogue choice can't simply state which trait it is which the choice aligns with, at least for high-Perception characters. Knowing this in advance would take away almost all of the "better quicksave, it's a dialogue choice" fear.
My second biggest peeve with the game after the limited skill bars. I'd much rather than choose my traits at character creation, and not have to worry about my dialogue choices ruining my character build.
Invisibility is overpowered, especially early game. There's absolutely nothing enemies can do to protect their valuables or to guard passages against invisible players. Considering this is a high-magic world where invisibility exists, it would only make sense that there would be some way of detecting it. The game needs more "Sees invisible" enemies, including all of those Sentinels (going invisible and just walking past them makes them a joke).
Agree, and would add that AI is just bad at dealing with many player tactics based around stealth/invis.
Glass Cannon is too good. I didn't really want to believe this, because my normal prejudice is that particular abilities like this, with obvious built-in drawbacks, are a mixed bag, and thus I really wanted to argue against the folks saying GC is OP. But it truly is absurdly powerful, even on Hard, and although it might not quite be "OP-must-fix" on Hard, I can only imagine its unbridled power on Normal or Easy, where it would utterly break games. As it stands, it trivializes difficulty, which grants an initial feeling of power followed by a sense of boredom. This is one talent which needs to be reworked, because I truly believe there isn't any way to give a "double recovery AP" benefit on a talent which can't be broken by players.
My suggestion(from
this thread ):
Glass Cannon:
+ X% damage dealt
+ Y% damage taken
X and Y could tuned to whatever seems reasonable. Point is removing AP from the equation. Almost any large AP boost is always going to be a no brainer talent unless it has ridiculous downsides.
Since extra AP is much more than just offensive power, it never made sense for the talent. It allows a player to use extra AP to do more both offensively and defensively.
