eatplayhate

I also have an immortal summon - it happened when I used the Horn to summon an Animat. Eder, who did the summoning, was knocked out before the combat ended, and I think that's why it wasn't correctly unsummoned. Anyway, it started with the Animat following me everywhere like a bonus party member, but eventually he disappeared and now I get copies of them appearing in every area I go to. Here is an example: As you can see, I have two Animats (one invisible) which I cannot control and which appear when I load the game. They will sometimes aggro enemies even when they are in unexplored areas of the map. It's pretty special. I have a savegame which demonstrates this issue: http://cygnus-core.net/animat.zip Please fix this

Seconded.

I think combat is possibly slightly too fast, and very difficult to follow. I'd very much like to see some improved VFX and animations (such as hit reactions, more obvious casting effects) as well as ease of use features like target indicators for enqueued actions (even the old IE games at least changed the targets selection circle if you had a pending spell/action). The big issue I see is that the exterior maps are very difficult to differentiate with the characters, and that, combined with the overlays, close positioning, and unpolished VFX/SFX make combat just seem frenetic and very non-obvious. It's much better in the interior levels, but it still lacks a lot of weight and polish. Also I think you should look at changing your VFX blending from being primarily additive to premultiplied alpha, where you can use the alpha channel to mark out regions which are non-additive (leave the RGB channels the same), which will help readability (it came up in a Blizzard talk at GDC13).

A single enemy seems to have got tipped over! This happens when I load the save as well. Running v257. As soon as he engages in combat, he returns to normal.

Non-voiced PC and semi-voiced important characters is the best setup. I think fully voiced NPCs are great, but I would pick more dialogue and more story over that any day. Voiced player characters only really work for me when the character is well defined (e.g., Geralt from the Witcher), not when they are my own creation.

I think this would be great - the Vancian spell system was so weird when I first encountered it, but it provided a huge amount of tactical depth; that said, a cooldown/mana based system can be a good foil to keep it accessible. I really didn't like the Neverwinter Nights spell setup, where resting was basically instant and had no danger - giving it the worst of both worlds.