I still cannot really understand why or how anyone could possibly like Shadowheart, to be honest... but many people seem to. Mostly people who know all about her underlying hidden back-story and retroactively assign a great deal of sympathy for her as a result... but from my perspective, that's not what's presented in the game.
I literally like everyone better, because I hate Lae'zel sooooooooooo much. As soon as I can change the Class of an OC, so I can have a tank without her, she is out. I need her in my party for this reason, and cant wait until I don't.
My biggest complaint so far is the way the diegetic and non-diegetic elements combine to create a jarring sense of ludonarrative dissonance at times. The camping function is the most egregious example, exacerbated by the just how many pivotal companion moments you miss out on if you don't use it. Really the way time functions in general comes across as counterintuitive and consistently broke my suspension of disbelief. I don't specifically need a day/night cycle and I don't think it's necessary to create immersion: DA:O didn't have one was fine without it; but I think they need to do more to ground the narrative in some semblance of time beyond updates in the journal that are easy to miss.
I Loved Dragon Age, If I remember correctly the camping system in that game was pretty good. The problem with this game, is the D&D system itself for cRPGs. They take the direct rules of the PnP game and write it into this version of it. The camping feature of this game was meant to give you something to do during the many times you have to camp, just to reset spells. There is a reason for this in PnP, because you dont want 1 party member to be able to outclass the rest of the party, or spam fireball constantly. Larian did a pretty good job with how they implemented cooldowns and an AP Turn system in DOS2.(Which thanks to this game I learned about, and am currently playing, since I burned thru EA so quickly here.)
I wish that they would do that with this game, and get rid of the rest to reset spells grind. It's archaic, and has no place in a cRPG. I get that maybe they want to hold true to the original games, but we've evolved past this in the gaming community, and its time to let go of nostalgia for it. They have gained the rights from WotC to use 5E, but if this game is going to be reborn in a new successful franchise, they need to be willing to adapt 5E to a cooldown system.
