Patch 3 Feedback – QoL, Bug and Game enjoyment focused
Overall some very nice changes! Cool, nice work! I do like this game a lot.
The most serious stuff, aka awful awful things which often make playing the game painful (sorry, i want to get these out of the way 1st!)
1. Dialogues that start straight after a combat while you have someone downed. Love to have a nice chat while one of my companions casually bleeds out on the floor.
2. Poor implementation of linking jump with disengage – I’m not super mad about the linking itself but what is awful is when you try and jump to disengage only to find that you have moved a fraction of a meter first, before jumping, thus incurring an attack of opportunity meaning you don’t do the one thing you wanted to do: disengage without incurring an attack of opportunity. That’s just bad design. Combine this with all the other frustrations about messy combat (see below) and it’s a recipe for major irritation.
3. At random, combat will sometimes skip the next player-controlled characters turn on pressing space if they are next to each other in turn order. When every single action in combat can be crucial I do not like to have this happen one bit.
4. No pause in singleplayer. Like, not “there’s no RTwP”, but there is literally no pausing the game: when you open the options menu, or the save menu, the game doesn’t pause. So for instance someone can burn to death while you are fiddling with the hotkey bindings, or bleed out while you are turning down the volume. Poor design.
5. Poor triggering-recognition and/or time delay for turn based mode. Sometimes it just takes ages to register/activate, sometimes you can click and/or hit space and it doesn’t seem to register at all. You can click a few times and still nothing happens. You can even click and it does register, but only after you’ve clicked a second time, activating and deactivating turn-based mode in quick succession. I have no idea how this works tbh – I just want to pause the game because I am on fire. Frustrating when you are busy burning to death, not knowing if it has triggered or not: twiddle your thumbs in the hope it will start before you turn to cinders or hit it again and risk activating and deactivating it back-to-back, and you still burn to ash.
QoL and Interface
Spellcasting Pop-out
1. There should still be a way to do default casting at base level without the popout. Quite a few people highlighted on the forum that the popout menu was going to create a click-fest. Buffing 2 mages with false life and mage armour and having them both use arcane recovery after now takes a whopping 18 clicks now which gets tedious. Fast.
Additionally, hotkeys for quick bar spells only go as far as bringing up the popup menu, making the use of hotkeys for spells partially redundant.
A suggestion would be that clicking on the icon casts it at default level while the popup appears on mouse-over allowing upcasting.
2. Spells are not “greyed out” on the new popup if they cannot be cast at a particular level due to no spellcasts left. Many times now I have clicked on a spell to cast it for nothing to happen because it appears to be selectable in popup despite having no available spellcasts at that level. The popup is also actually now covering over my spellcast slots indicators preventing me from seeing this crucial information when the popup is open. It’s medium size problem now, but when you have many different levels you can upcast a spell at the problem will be greatly magnified.
3. For some spells the order in the popout is incorrect with 2nd level casting displayed on the left, followed by first level casting, instead of the logical 1st, 2nd 3rd etc.
Tooltips
This is a big one for me – I don’t think I should need to google bits o dnd rules to work out what things in the game mean and do. These should be more detailed, more prevalent, and more explanatory to dnd neophytes. E.g. what does “simple weapon proficiency” mean, in terms of which weapons you can use? What does “advantage” on a check mean? What is “concentration” and why does it get broken?
Hotkeys
It really feels like there should be a hotkey for jumping as there is for stealth. You end up doing a lot of jumping, would be nice not to have to click on the icon each and every time. Likewise there is no hotkey for default melee or ranged attack – yet you can have one for cantrip attacks on the hotbar. If I want to smash open a door I need to move back and fourth from clicking attack then back to the target multiple times while if I want to blast it open with magic I can use the hotkey in combination with clicking on the target. Pure QoL.
Hotbar
This thing just loves to spontaneously unlock itself. It’s very annoying. It’s got a bit better but is still one of those “why does this game constantly seek to do things when I don’t want it to” things.
Spellbook
Seems to be no particular rhyme nor reason to why the spellbook is organised the way it is. It would make a lot more sense to group spells together first as it is by spell level, but then by spell school so all the transmutation spells are next to each other then to arrange them alphabetically within spell school. Would make much more organisational sense.
Journal
1. Having the scroll bar for the journal on the left for the left hand journal panel is very counter-intuitive and due to it blending in with the golden border it took me a long time to realise the journal wasn’t bugged since scrolling also does not work with a mouse scroll wheel. I literally did not think to look for a scroll bar on the left since in general, for anything they are always on the right.
2. Journal panels do not scroll with mouse scroll wheel (other menu panels do e.g. char sheets). I feel like they definitely 100% should.
3. No filtering out completed quests from ongoing ones.
Overall the journal has a strong feel of being a placeholder, which It may well be.
Dialogue
Space bar should not select the first dialogue choice. This has been mentioned by a lot of people as very annoying. It’s a minimising accidents QoL thing.
Companion Banter Volume
Often companions will banter when I have the camera not focused on them because I am clicking on where I want to go further down the road. Volume of these banters seems to decrease the further the camera is away from focus on the party, despite the fact that “you,” i.e. the pc character, are actually right next to the companions talking. This highly increases the chance of missing these banters because of the lowered volume.
Movement, especially but not limited to Party “rearrangement” on selecting a different party member
Many many people have talked about this, but one of the most annoying things is that when you select a different member of your party, no matter if everyone is all standing together, they will all run around like headless chickens to “rearrange” themselves, climbing up and down off rocks and the like. This can be very annoying if buffing, and just annoying in general.
Especially frustrating when going up and down ladders, or climbing up and down rocks is concerned. Typical scenario: set pc to go down ladder. Click on other character to see something. Pc reaches bottom of ladder then immediately climbs back up. Auto-jumping has added a whole new level of ridiculousness to this.
Chain and Unchain are still very annoying compared to a select all/select individually. Combined with movement issues it is frustrating to say the least.
Part of the frustration with this is that when selecting someone and then selecting a location to go to, the other members of the party do not seek to go to that location, the seek to go to the selected character and then follow behind them as the selected character goes to a location, regardless of how close were initially to the selected destination. Example: Three party members leave the burning inn, gale has somehow go stuck half way down the stairs, I click on gale then click next to the others, but by this point the other three are all sprinting back inside a burning building, bumbling into burning things, setting themselves on fire and generally having a bad time, as am I.
Enemy Information (examine screen for enemies)
When viewing enemy information, it would be a large QoL improvement to be able to scroll through all enemies currently in combat. Currently you have to right click an enemy, then click examine, then close and right click on another enemy then select examine. It would be a nice QoL to not have to go through this tedious process with large groups of enemies such as if you could scroll, page style, through all enemies in combat. This is particularly frustrating in large combats with lots of similar looking enemies (i.e. the goblins) when you are trying to identify the mages, warlocks, clerics and so on for priority targeting.
Health bar
Mouse position needs to be in a very precise vertical window to have the numerical value for HP pop up from the HP bar. I feel there should be a greater vertical range here.
Party Portraits
Casting spells targeted to party portraits would be a very top addition. It is pretty standard for this sort of game, and considering how much the characters like to move around needlessly every time you select a different character, targeting individuals for buffing sometimes feels like playing a wack-a-mole subgame.
Learning Spells
No indication, visual or audible when learning a spell from scroll. Would be nice to have some sort of confirmation besides the spell appearing in your spellbook, especially considering gold cost of learning new spells.
Barter/selling
1. Ability to sell things from other party members inventories using the charisma bonus of whoever initiated conversations.This would feel like the correct way for things to go, saving yourself the tedium of transferring everything to the inventory of one character before bartering for the high prices
2. Not having the “balance offer” button right next to the “barter confirm” button. Love to find that I have just given away thousands of gold worth of stuff due to poor button placement.
3. The trade screen is much more effort to use than the barter screen because you have to sell each stack individually.[/b] No present option to highlight multiple items for sale. When I realised this I never touched it again.
Looting
Opening a fresh container does not close the previous container. It would be nice not to have to manually close all containers when going through a stack of them and simply be able to open the next one to close the previous.
Camera
The camera is now better in general but very much worse in parts.
For example, the camera is now broken in the undead ruins/crypt fight. Hit O and you now have to look down on the ceiling.
As a second example the ground floor burning inn on the risen road is almost un-navigable due to the changed camera. Too much staring at the upper floor when you are on the lower. Very difficult to deal with.
Major savescum location (poor design)
Scratch: if you are going to provide a potential camp companion, even if it’s a dog, which by the by is a number 1 way to manipulate up your relationship with many of your companions, then of course people are going to reload for success. “Welp, I didn’t get the dog, guess I better just play without” feels like a particularly hard pill to swallow. I would guess that this is on of the number one locations for save-scumming and imo is one of the few instances that should not be locked behind a check.
Combat, combat movement and turn based movement in general - more in depth rambling feedback
Encounter design: There are a large number of encounters which are designed with setting up all you enemies in high-up positions with advantage in mind. With the power of advantage, it becomes an exercise in metagaming to neutralise this. This is a personal issue, but I feel encounter design overly hinges on this as it stands.
Annoying Quality of Life issue: When a container, object or throwable is thrown, the damage shown in game includes damage to the target, anything else animate or inanimate that has been hit and also damage to whatever has been thrown, numbers popping up right next to each other, making the numbers shown functionally useless (MMO colourful mathcasting flashbacks) and then requires checking the combat log to see how much damage was actually done to the target characters. I especially don’t think it is necessary to know that 8 damage was done to, for example, the acid vial that was just thrown at you as it strikes you.
Combat/turn based Movement 1: pathing of party members in combat in some ways seems to have become noticeably worse with patch 3. Pathing to location often seems completely out of wack, and combined with the combat camera being made worse in this patch it really does feel like a significant step back.
Combat/turn based Movement 2: moving past companions is particularly frustrating because of the seemingly huge amount of space that is required. Pathing takes characters on wide, movement distance wasting arcs around others and gaps which are much wider than the character cannot be passed through because the “hitbox”/”character circle” is overly large.
Combat AI: Currently noticed that enemies will frequently run through acid. I can see instances where this would be fine and make sense but sometimes it seems as if they just don’t see it.
The following are all linked to frustrations with running a battle and unexpected things happening because of poor information display or just a battlefield that is cluttered and poorly displayed:
1. Sometimes it is difficult to see when you will incur an attack of opportunity. Many is the time I’ve moved thinking I would not incur an attack and do, or else moved accidentally and incurred the same attack of opportunity. This is especially common with multi-level fighting and fighting with lots of terrain junk due to the attack of opportunity indicator being obsured often inside a rock/bush/corpse/pile of boxes.
2. Likewise it is irritating to find out that in order to carry out the action you have triggered the party member has had to move a fraction of a meter to get in range, thus incurring an attack of opportunity.
3. Messy combat: Some fights are particularly unpleasant due to the sheer amount of junk in the room. The Ogre fight is a prime example: chairs, boulders, acid surfaces, pillars, poor camera, a second story and a mezzanine, and the roof. Combined with the difficulty in disengaging due to jump mechanics makes this a particularly unpleasant fight. If the intention was to increase the difficulty by just filling the screen with crap it has worked.
4. Linking to the previous point, having bodies lootable in combat leads to great difficulty moving because the cursor constantly wants to highlight dead bodies, even when not actually being over the body (just in proximity), instead of locations to move to. Especially noticeable with large corpses where a large proportion of the battlefield is unusable. You can move through a dead body to get from a -> b but you cannot seem to click on a location that is within or even in proximity to a lootable corpse.
5. Copied from above in the super annoying issues because I need to say it twice!: Linking jump to disengage – I’m not super mad about the linking but what is awful is when you try and jump to disengage only to find that you have move a fraction of a meter first, before jumping, thus incurring an attack of opportunity. That’s just bad design. Combine this with all the other frustrations about messy combat see below and it’s a recipe for irritation.
6. Jumping needing a mega-circle much bigger than you actually are, especially when jumping in combat. Combined with all the points above, disengaging can be very difficult because you can’t find an area free of junk and dead bodies to provide a clear mega-circle to jump into.
Focus: combat spell-casting
Combat Spellcasting 1: Great difficulty in targeting who you want AoE HP based spells to affect. It becomes an exercise in moving the mouse round in little circles hoping it will select the particular enemies you wish to put to sleep. Similarly casting bless on your party is just as poorly implemented. I feel you should be able to click on enemies/party members up to HP capacity/individual capacity like when allocating magic missile targets.
Combat Spellcasting 2: surfaces such as blood get in the way of targeting ground effect spells like grease. You cannot target a grease spell where there is blood on the ground, instead needing to find a patch of unbloodied ground to cast on. Poor design considering the large amount of blood which gets everywhere.
Bugs found
1. Sazza did not die when shot with crossbow during cutscene.
2. Characters reading books in the camp move around with them glued to their hand, swinging back and fourth. Sometimes they keep carrying them while adventuring, flapping around. Can be fixed by drawing a weapon.
3. The secondary entrance to Mol’s hideout: It says you are too big to fit through when trying to go in, but you are able to leave through it no problem.
4. My hair changed colour when I started my patch 3 save back up again this evening.
5. Cyrel sells a mirror image scroll with a value of 1
6. When approaching the Risen Road collapsed pass the pc says “bodies everywhere, accident or sabotage” but there are zero bodies anywhere.
7. If I hit a firewine barrel with a firebolt it bursts open and spills firewine everywhere, but sometimes (often) does not ignite. It can then be ignited with a second firebolt. Intentional?
8. In my inventory, the rightmost column of boxes has lost its right-hand vertical edge leaving the this column of boxes with only 3 sides, top, bottom and left. This is a new bug in patch 3.
9. Dice rolls display information is very (very) bugged (in new and interesting ways since the advent of patch 3): There is disconnect between the bonuses shown when picking a choice in dialogue and the bonuses shown when mousing over the DC in the dice rolling screen, and the DC shown vs the 1d20 + x value shown. With guidance up, often you are shown 3 different potential DCs + a fourth one in dialogue.
10. Sometimes when making dialogue checks approval gains/losses with companions after the choice is selected in dialogue before the dice roll is visually made so you know you have succeeded or failed before you see your roll. I noticed this happened when taking the southern entrance into the goblin village.
11. Buying and selling: I have noticed that items with different values are purchasable for the same price: A potion of force resistance and a potion of cold resistance have values of 10 and 20 respectively, yet (checked with charisma 16) they both cost 22 gold each to buy.
12. A PC’s tiefling tail often flips out with ridiculous ragdoll physics. Sometimes it stretches to about 5m, sometimes it just twitches around like it is possessed.
13. Inventory: frequently items of the same type do not stack. I have 1 stack of 4 apples and 1 stack with 1 apple with seemingly no way to combine them. The same thing happens with caustic bulbs and a few other things.
14. If you sort your inventory by e.g. type, then sell things, then you select sort by the same method e.g. by type it will not re-sort (it seems to be assuming inventory is already sorted by that method). Instead you have to sort by something else, e.g. weight, then sort again by what you want.
15. Windmill recommences turning after freeing deep gnome despite the brake being on? Unsure if intentional or not?
16. When fighting the ogres they throw stones which frequently get stuck half way up a character, sometimes wedged in their face. Or else the stone will be thrown, and the party member will magically rise up to be stood on top of it.
17. An upcast witch-bolt at level 2 only does 1d12 damage on re-activation. I believe it should be another 2d12, though I might be wrong?
18. Magic Missile can hit things in the way of any one of the 3-4 paths which seems to go against its whole rational. IF one misile can hit then the rest of them should be able to. This has been flagged by others.
19. Bloated hyenas lying on the ground which according to the examine text are “restrained due to sickness and bloat”, get a dex save against sacred flame which seems counter-intuitive.
20. During the Gnoll-cave fight, If you stay in the cave and fight, the hyena furthest from the cave entrance will just sit there, and does not engage in any combat behaviour until you leave the cave.
21. Fires outside the Gnoll-cave fight continue to burn indefinitely after combat.
Personal desirable additions 2 the game which would be very nice 2 see
Character customisation!
This is my priority imo, the more the better.
1. Other clothing – I see lots of npcs wearing nice and varied clothing, but for the entirety of the EA areas non-armoured characters are restricted to the less than flattering cloth sackrobes.
2. Male hairstyles available for female characters and vice versa
3. More faces
4. More hair
5. More (curly) horns (for npcs as well: if there are going to be a whole host of Tieflings at the beginning it would be nice for there to be less repetition of horn appearance.)
6. More tattoos (especially not on the face)
7. Black hair that actually looks black
Beyond that, any and all additional customization options
Written Content:
Slightly extended magical item descriptions similar to BG2 length would be really nice to see. I haven’t known a game since that really nailed the interesting text that came with magical items.
Spell buff appearances
Currently the game sufferes from some over-ly sparkly buff appearances – walking round with allday buffs which you often tend to have always up makes you look like a walking strobing glowing Christmas tree, and that’s just with mage armour + false life.
Dialogue/shouts:
Shouts on being downed/very low health like in BG2 would be nice.
Some sort of thanks/acknowledgement on being resurrected/revived.
Stability:
Fewer crashes when alt+tabing away from the game.
Anyway, good luck in making your game for nerdlets, *starship troopers voice* "I'm doing my part!"
