Sunk couple hours into the newest Bard patch and I have some thoughts that I wanted to share.
First impressions
The game starts to look very nice! I was impressed by progress that has been made in some of the revamped cutscenes: animations connect far smoother, framing and shots are purposeful. Kagha/Snake scene nicely traced character’s sight, making cuts to different actors feel more natural. Even Wyll’s intro became less buggy! It had a disappearing sword, and Wyll’s hand didn’t quite align with the handle... but baby steps!
I'm a bit conflicted on this area.
On one hand it's starting to look better, yes, but on the other hand this is not an area that is improving as significantly and especially as quickly as I expected to the start of EA, to the point that there's a lot of what I considered "probably temporary junk" that I'm starting to get use to the idea will probably land on the final game.
And I say this as someone that at the beginning of EA was being vaguely dismissive of people's criticism of the "cinematography" in the game.
Now that some cutscenes went through several iterations, I'm starting to realize that maybe it wasn't just because stuff was "placeholders". Maybe Larian just isn't that good with direction, camera work, etc. I mean, without even mentioning some of the "heavy hitters" in this area like Naughty Dogs, even a direct comparison with something like 2015's The Witcher 3 (which as BG3 used a lot of "automated" stuff) is a bit harsh.
I do like the background actors feature! That said I wish that rather than assigning same reaction to everyone, the reactions would be specific to each companion when appropriate. For example this is a shot
from the snake trial, and I feel the puppy terror face really doesn’t fit Laez, nor her opinion on the matter.
Good point. I have also another personal minor gripe... I wish the placement of companions in the background was a bit more dynamic/procedural. Right now if you tweak the game to include more companions in your party, they end up occupying the same exact spots and overlapping on each other.
Especially since Larian seems to be completely unwilling to give the option for a larger party a chance and determined to leave it to modders, they could at least put the foundations to not make the experience more miserable that it has any need to be.
I also have this small personal frustration – as cutscene takes place I tend to move my cursor to the side for it to not distract from the action. But then the cutscene ends and my screen scrolls to the right. Wouldn’t it make sense to reset cursor after the cutscene is complete?
Eh,reasonable but sorry, we don't do QoL here.
UI
The new skill submenus are delightful. It is exactly what I was wishing for. I also like the new upcasting UI a lot.
I don't know if I'd go so far to describe it as delightful, but yeah, it feels a NET improvement over what we had before. Especially upcasting.
With hotbar shortcuts being gone in this update, I started to wonder how hard it would be to implement PoE1&2 style shortcuts – the idea would be that if player would hover over a tile and press an unassigned keyboard button, that button would become a shortcut for this tile (it could be unassigned the same way, and both should be doable only when the hotbar is unlocked). I think it would allow players to organise and utilise hotbar in the way that would make the most sense for each player.
Barely related, but I was just giving it another go at Temple of Elemental Evil yesterday (turns out it's basically unplayable if scaled up at modern resolutions, by the way) and I found mildly amusing that even a game that old already had this type of "on-the-fly keybinding" as QoL feature.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/29LGlAV.jpg)
