The hype around surfaces/elements is well-founded – it’s innovative, it’s different. It’s entertaining. It just needs more investment, and I like where they’re going with the recent ideas around summoning: the totems and the creature that both take on elemental properties. This is great – where else do you see this happening?
I read too many posts focusing on the clichés of the genre when it comes to battles. The mindset appears to be Baldur’s Gate and the like. I played Pillars of Eternity and have forgotten the entire experience, because the battles are the same old business that’s been done a million times before.
It takes more balls and ingenuity to turn the genre its head and walk the path no one else has walked, because you’ve a massive challenge on your hands – the fine line between being so innovative you alienate to the point of commercial death and being so formulaic that you’re just another copycat squeezing the masses for dimes you know they’ve already surrendered for ‘what works’.
The problem with CC is that it’s too powerful and too readily available at present: aka, it's boring because the player knows it's nukes versus swords when they've got it equipped – a distinctly unfair advantage. I even think if CC skills/spells were simply grouped together it would solve the problem without drastically altering the formula. Ie – once you cast one CC spell (say pyro-based), the other (CC based skills) also go into cooldown.
It’s a tad bland and heavy-handed, but I’m trying to suggest something that doesn’t rock the boat too much. I’m hoping the modding tools will be powerful enough to allow for more experimental and drastic solutions outside of the commercial experience.
Either way, it’ll likely be the only game I play this year, thanks to the chasm it’s created between itself and other games in the same genre. So I'll be hyping up the surfaces and elements till the cows come home, no matter what...
