Hello, I just got to level 4 on early access, and I'm really having some fun with this game. However, there are a few issues with the interface that I feel are fixable and would greatly improve the user experience. I know this post is long, and it is all "this broke/no good, please fix!" But please understand that I'm really enjoying this game. The items below are all, in my opinion, actionable and would greatly serve to improve my enjoyment of what's shaping up to be a terrific game.
Party Leadership, or the Danger Zone Dance: Currently, whenever a party member is selected to perform some action, the rest of the part instantly starts running around like chickens with their head cut off to follow the new leader. This is extremely frustrating when trying to be sneaky, cast buffs, etc. For example, my party is behind a rock, and I want to have my cleric cast
Blessing of the Trickster on our rogue before he runs off to scout. As soon as she moves towards him to cast it, the rest of my party instantly runs around, some of them swinging out wildly, causing them to participate in one or more activities including:
- running into fire
- running into poison
- getting spotted
- walking the long way around because tight pathing and aggroing the entire map
I want to designate my party leader, and I don't want that to change based on who I'm currently controlling to do some minor action. It's a huge hassle.
Look Who's Talking Now: This is
The Danger Zone Dance's cousin. My party has a face. It's a character with 20 charisma, persuasion, the works. However, let's say that we are walking into a scripted area, and all of a sudden our charisma 8, wisdom 8, charisma 8 fighter is the one who gets chosen to talk because he happened to be up front. It's no fun. Furthermore, in any actual roleplaying scenario the other player would talk. Please give us the option before every scripted conversation to designate which player will do the talking, or at least default it to the party leader instead of the random schmo who happened to cross the invisible trigger line first.
Camera Pitch: There is no reason not to allow us to control pitch of the camera when free controlling the camera. Please, I beg you, unlock that final axis so that if the party is in some caves with overhangs/etc, and a monster is positioned 3 feet above us, we can pitch the camera to see it.
Clicking Things: This game has a severe mouse accuracy problem that can be broken into three categories:
- Cover/Concealment/The Tiniest of Plants: If there is geometry, or even the illusion of geometry, between your cursor and the object of your click's desire, even if that object cannot itself be clicked, you will not be able to click your target
- Pixel-Accurate Frustration: This is the more-destructive big brother of the previous point. Why so? Because this one makes you accidentally attack the wrong character, etc.
- It's the Background, Silly!: There is a severe camera clipping issue where, although the game has removed objects that would obscure the player's view via a clipping plane, those objects can still be clicked. If it isn't visible on camera, it should not accept clicks, period.
Useless Portraits: This is a sister-issue to
Clicking Things. The issue here is that character portraits, both the cards that pop up in a fight as well as the always-there party portraits, should be clickable for targeting purposes. Want to shoot magic missile? Clicking that portrait should be identical to clicking on the middle of a character. This would make so many activities so much easier. Instead, all the portraits are good for is centering the camera so you can try to click things.
Unclear Action Choices: This one is a bit trickier, but basically it can be extremely confusing to know how to "correctly" do something. By the way,
QUEST SPOILER ALERTI managed to retrieve the amethyst from beneath the Phase Spider Matriarch needed to unlock the book. My plan was to give the book to Gale for him to eat. Here is what I tried:
- Put book in his inventory for him to "use" -- Could not do -- Astarion wouldn't allow it as he had at some point purloined the book and would not allow any other characters to have access
- Have my party leader "use" the book from Astarion's inventory and click the option to give it to Gale. This resulted in Gale saying "I need to study this more" or some fluff, and decidedly not destroying it
- Let Gale "use" the book from Astarion's inventory and pass a ton of wisdom checks before nothing
- Give the book to Gale for him to eat via conversation at camp. I couldn't because my only dialog option was "I think I need to keep it" or something along those lines. I don't remember exactly
- Finally, give the book to Gale for him to eat via conversation at camp. I had at this point met some other criteria, and finally he was able to take it from me and consume the weave. side note: the book is bugged and still lives on in Astarion's inventory -- I can feed it to Gale regularly now
Another example is the camp. How the heck are players supposed to know to click the fire to return from camp? Just put one of those teleportation rune circles there for people to click, or put an NPC that advertises, or anything. Don't leave it up to the players to click everything before they finally figure out how to do something as basic as "leave camp". The first time I needed to sleep to recover spells was miserable.
Finding Things, Perception Checks, and Alt-Click: Locating items/points-of-interest in the environment is truly difficult. There are really two culprits:
- Alt-Clicking is Unreliable and Inconsistent: Alt-clicking should illuminate every single clickable item there is unless it is flagged as needing a perception check. Instead, the behavior is: Some items highlight, some items don't, and yet other items produce a title card that cannot be manipulated in the same way as if the item were there (e.g. if you click the title card for a non-highlighted backpack, you will pick the entire backpack up into your inventory instead of having the option to open/loot it where it sits). The solution is simple: highlight everything and let title cards be manipulated with the full right-click context menu
- Players Need Perception Proficiency to Use Character Perception Checks: Seriously. Yesterday, I damn near insta-killed my entire party because literally everyone in my party passed a bunch of perception checks, I alt-clicked, looked around with the camera, really searched, could not find what they spotted. Then I walked out into the river and ran them all over spike traps that bled them and gave them disease. It was not fun. This really goes back to alt-click, but if a perception check notices something, please highlight that thing until the player mouses over it or something. Don't force the player to navigate an already-complex environment to try to find the thing the character just spotted. It's been spotted, show it to us.
Ultimately, we just need more/better tools for distinguishing clickables from the environment.
That's all I have to say right now other than I want to reiterate my overall enjoyment of the early game experience. I'm super-excited to see where you go with it, and I am eagerly awaiting the full game.
Thank you for your time!
