Hi there. Just got to put a few hours into the beta today and I wanted to give some thoughts.
1. Multiclassing feels good: One of my issues with Pillars 1 is that some classes were just so braindead compared to others. Paladins, fighters, and chanters were so incredibly passive compared to, say, wizards or priests. With multiclassing we now have the opportunity to liven up playstyles while also having the opportunity to more specialize our roles. I first started with a witch (cipher/barbarian), and I loved how the barbarian accuracy and damage buffs synergized with my cipher. It felt a little overpowered, but I also didn't have Ectopsychic Echo accessible even at level 6.
2. Mouseover tooltips in dialogue are appreciated: I actually have to disagree with a lot of the other opinions in raised here. It is absolutely true that it is not normal for bilingual speakers to weave individual native words into otherwise foreign speech at the sentence level; it's usually more so a "mode switch" between the two. But while video games are primarily a visual space, there are certain limitations in presentation. Especially if an NPC is unvoiced, these foreign words sprinkled into otherwise common speech is the only real signifier that we have of where they're from. It may not make sense linguistically, and it's absolutely contrived, but so are many elements to game design and narrative storytelling that we manage to overlook. That dialogue flavor is essential when world-building through written text, and I hope Obsidian keeps that stuff in the game.
3. Sound effects are incredible: I love what we've heard so far, and I think the sound design is the single-biggest improvement from Pillars 1 to Pillars 2. Hearing the Lagafaeth gargle while charging at the party and in the middle of combat gives them a lot more character. Spell effects also sound much cleaner in combat than they did in the original. Antipathetic Field, for example, sounds like a legitimate laser ray being channeled from your cipher's body. It makes each class a little more distinct from one another, and it also helps you have a much better comprehension of what's going on in a fight when you can literally hear how it's going. More of this, please!
4. "Pooled" dialogue checks and skill challenges make a much more robust party experience: It was awful in Pillars 1 where it felt like you had to develop your Watcher a specific way to get the most out of conversation checks, and your party members had little input in conversations. I'm sure primary stats still matter to some extent, but I am relieved to see that passive skills are a significant component to dialogue checks and skill checks. It's especially nice to see that there's some element to a shared pool, as well. In a way, it gives party members more identity than just combat and skill challenge helpers, and it encourages you to put some thought into their passive skill development whereas in PoE 1 you basically just dumped everything into Lore/Athletics outside of your lock picker.
I'll try to be a bit more constructively critical in my next post. I just wanted to mention some of the stuff that I felt is working super well for me.
