Have you seen utility cantrips (Shape Water, Druidcraft, Prestidigitation, Mold Earth, Gust etc. pp.) or VHuman in character creation? Is exhaustion a thing? Did you try to make a full custom party from start and is it possible to save our char builds?
I didn't see utility cantrips, but then I didn't look at any places they might be, sorry Lotus Noctus. Nothing to confirm or deny on that front.
Variant Human no, but then it did look as I noted before that all races get a configurable +2 and +1 to ability scores. I'm kicking myself for not checking to see what, if anything, humans got as well as that. I kind of feel they should get something, given that in EA they don't have any racial abilities, just the +1 to each attribute. But then giving them a free feat might be overpowered as I think VH just has +1 to two attributes? We might need to wait and see on this one.
I didn't see any way of exporting/importing our characters, but again I didn't specifically look. Swen did happen to mention in response to a question in the morning presentation that characters from one campaign couldn't be imported into another, but that's slightly different.
With respect to custom party from the start, I get the sense that the official plan for a custom party is via hirelings, and that these will be picked up later. We assume from Withers based on prior information received, though I didn't see any of that either in a demo or my own game where I didn't have time to go find Withers. Swen did mention that hirelings were customisable, though.
There's one more thing I saw that might be relevant here. In the demo in the morning, at one point Swen fired up split screen co-op part way through the game, picked up a second controller and created a custom character on the fly and then had them join the party (bumping one of the three AI companions). He then exited the split screen, and the second custom character was left in the party of the original player. I did kind of get the sense that something didn't go as planned in all that, though, and he ended up reloading, so I wouldn't depend on that as a way of sneaking additional custom characters into the game rather than using hirelings.
Sounds very disappointing so far, but thank you for your insight.
