Justinian

I recall Josh called out that screenshot specifically in one of his pressos about having the "Scooby-doo" effect where the 3D models didn't match the 2D background enough. I think they went too far in trying to blend everything, and have actually brought out detail better in the background than in the models themselves. Time to start tweaking in the opposite direction I think. I do find the character readability is better indoors in the beta also, but there is still much room for improvement. I think the biggest contributor to that is the play of dynamic lights on chracters bringing out the models better with light and shade, and also the indoor floors being generally patterned and consistent.

A big shortcoming of the game so far is that combat is too difficult to read. This is caused by 2 main factors - the UI feedback (which Sensuki has discussed in depth) and the actual visuals themselves. Even when ignoring the bug causing characters to overlap each other, it's evident that the "readability of characters and enemies in battle is poor. Here is a screenshot which captures some of the issues: In it, the characters are correctly spaced and the overlap bug is not in effect. There is a spell effect going off, and the battle is partly obscured by an arch. While these situations are quite common in combat and contribute to readability issues, there are other factors such as: Low contrast on character models. Also the colour saturation seems lower than the background. Results in characters looking spectre-like and weightless. Not enough edge definition on character models. It's hard to see where one character ends and another begins. This is exacerbated by polygon overlap, but that can't be helped. Sprite sorting didn't have this issue. Poor selection circle visibility High contrast and detailing on background. Especially the tall grass blades. This combined with the low contrast and subtlely defined character models is catastrophic. Stamina and action indicators above characters introduce further clutter. Perhaps, these should be turned off by default or tweaked? The stamina indicators being individual dots instead of one bar also appears to introduce unnecessary visual noise. Now contrast this with a similar combat scenario in Baldur's Gate: While the background is darker, thereby lending selection circles better visibility, there is: Higher definition of character silhouettes in relation to background definition. Higher contrast within light and dark on character models, giving them weight and form. Much better selection circle visibility A higher angle top down view reduces occlusion darker, more defined shadows gives characters further visibility. Please contribute to this thread with visual examples of combat clutter and we can try to discuss what specifically it is that Obsidian needs to do to improve combat readability from a graphical perspective.

I've noticed at a certain time in the morning, the water in each area does not behave correctly in relation to the lighting in the rest of the background. This is most evident in Stormwall Gorge. 1) At night, the water is an intense blue colour, which could be by design, but nevertheless looks strange: 2) At around 6am, the rest of the map begins to lighten, but the water not only doesn't lighten accordingly, but actually begins to darken: 3) At around 7am, the water begins to brighten from the darkened state into a natural light: Ignoring this bug, the daytime and nighttime water looks great in most areas except nighttime in Stormwall Gorge. It would be great if the intense blue in the first picture above could be tweaked to look more convincing.

Most of them are placeholders from IWD2. The first level wizard spells are actual game icons though and they look pretty sweet. Just need them to be bigger!

I'm experiencing a dramatic framerate drop each time when entering the dungeon in Stormwall Gorge. All the overworld areas and other interiors have run at a silky smooth 60fps. The framerate drop also appears to affect the speed of the screen scrolling - is scrolling speed tied to frame rate? If so, this needs to be corrected. My system: intel i5-2500k @ 3.3 GHz 8 GB RAM ATi Radeon HD 6950 2 GB Windows 8.1

I highly agree with the points made here. The UI feels inconsistent for the reasons you pointed out, despite looking vaguely the same. Then there's the whole full screen UI to level up characters thing that just doesn't belong with the rest of the in-game UI at all. For character creation fullscreen is fine, but during level up in the middle of the game it completely clashes with every other part of the UI. Going from the level up screen back to the character screen is like going between 2 different games.

They definitely should be bigger, and while they're at it, also make the UI larger in general. At the moment, I think the inventory item sizes are tied to the spell icon size, in which case a general embiggening of those would be great too.

This is actually a known issue that is being worked on as part of the pathfinding fix. I think a major problem in combat readability (and readability in general) is that the characters don't stand out at all from the highly detailed backgrounds. Especially outside in the grass, there is super high contrast and detail on the ground, but a flat, vague look to all the characters as if they're spectres. Even the selection circles don't stand out enough. All this does is make the eye wander away from the combat itself. Work less on blending the characters into the background and more on readability! It's super vital in a game like this and it's something the sprite based IE games had no issue with. Increase contrast on characters, put edge shading on them, make them pop. Silhouettes are vital for readability in a game with multiple characters on screen at once, and right now character profiles are just too difficult to make out. Get that stuff right, and then work on animations that provide better hit feedback. Lastly, create a better variety of combat animations to liven up the whole thing.

The Wasteland 2 beta is actually the metric I'm using to conclude that the game will unlikely be ready for release in 3-4 months. At release the Wasteland 2 beta felt less buggy than this and it's still taken them over 8 months to get to where they are now. That said, they did add a lot of content and features during the beta period, which Obsidian won't need to do but still... I think Obsidian's reputation with buggy releases is preceding them and influencing concerns aswell.

Double post

I think a distinction needs to be made between HUGE bugs and a HUGE NUMBER of bugs. I went into the beta fully prepared for bugs but the sheer volume on display is staggering. I've only had 2 quick playthroughs and the number of different bugs both major and minor do not suggest to me that the game is only 3-4 months away from release. There are so many that it's daunting even thinking about reporting them all. Not to mention gameplay and visual issues in general. My sincerest wish is for Obsidian to delay the game to at least next year.

If they must have a dedicated screen I sure hope they update the UI and that terrible painting.

I have to say I'm a bit surprised by people's preference so far. I was expecting IE fans to gravitate towards nice solid skeumorphic UI (which just happens to be used for everything else) in favour of character screens straight out of The Sims.

There's been a lot of discontent over the look of the character creation screens for many good reasons. The main beef is with the large zoomed in character model and the clashing aesthetic it has with the rest of the game. While I agree with many people that the character model should be shrunken down, and a UI more consistent with the rest of the game used, it didn't bother me too much since it would be seen just once during the game. In the Gamescom demos however, we see the same full screen zoomed in interface used for levelling up characters too. Not only that, there is a much uglier background (which I dearly hope is placeholder), and even more wasted space than character creation. In the Infinity engine games, levelling up was done in a screen similar in style to the character sheet. This not only makes sense from a mechanical perspective, it's also consistent with the UI used while playing the game. In Eternity, the player is suddenly ripped out of the game to a full screen with completely clashing layout and aesthetics to the pop up windows that make up the rest of the interface. Not to mention seeing our character models blown up like that in the middle of gameplay bothers me way more than character creation. What does everyone think? Please vote above.

You're going to need a *Strong Hold* to relocate THAT water wheel... Am I doing it right?

How do you know? What if that's where they grind up dragons to make Dragon Flour? You don't know that watermill's life! Well that explains it then.

Fair enough. That watermill is just WAY too big though.

That said, the collision areas around models seem to be pretty generous. They could probably increase the character model size by 15-20% and not impact gameplay. They are just polygons and overlapping geometry is by design. Here's hoping...

There's no "eternity" between weapon swings and combat certainly doesn't need to be sped up. Variations in weapon swings is what we're requesting here, yes. Why don't you think it should be sped up? Every IE game I've played has had much shorter durations between attacks.

Nah, the people are still too small. They may appear larger because in the screenshot the party was made up of mostly elves/orlans/dwarves which made it appear worse.

The combat animation right now isn't bad by any means, but there is no heft or character to the weapon swings. Actions are too short without any follow through, and it's exacerbated by the ETERNITY between weapon swings. These combat "rounds" need to be sped up and more variation in weapon swings is required. Also little things like dodging out of the way slightly if a weapon grazes, clearer hit reactions, and general liveliness would be nice.

I would imagine it's impossible actually. In one of Josh's pressos he said they made sure all the scaling for areas and characters were settled upon very early on to make sure movement/collisions were set before the rest of the gameplay was designed. He likened it to going into a Mario game after all the levels were created and changing the scale of characters - all the jumps and gameplay wouldn't fit anymore. It's ironic that this is exactly where they stuffed up.

The size scaling of the environment vs. characters is all wrong in Dyrford. The watermill looks like the biggest man made thing in existence. Where on Eora did they find such huge trees? Even simple things like the size of bricks, lamps and the height of the railings on the bridge... Not to mention the massive door and the man-height grass. The party looks like a bunch of midgets. Come on Obsidian, the Infinity engine games from 15 years ago had no issue getting stuff like this right.

If you look carefully at how Adam is playing, you can tell he's not putting much effort in at all. Half his characters are standing around not attacking; he rarely focus fires; doesn't use the abilities at his disposal and is all round not playing effectively. I wouldn't be too concerned with difficulty until we get our hands on it

Most things looked great in the demo, but a couple of things bothered me. Unfortunately these things look to be fundamental parts of the game's design and will unlikely be tweaked. - The environment adheres too much to an isometric grid. Notably how most buildings and structures are set at 45 degrees, with very little variation. I noticed this in the beginning of the game too. The inn in particular looked like something constructed out of tiles straight from Shadowrun Returns. I've just been playing Planescape Torment and the structures and maps in that game really leverage the prerendered background technique - lots of interesting shaped rooms and dungeons that NEVER looked tiled. - The background looks like it's scaled too large for the size of characters. The smaller statured characters almost got lost in all that long grass and the rocks lying about all look oversized in relation to characters. The inn was also far too spacious to look comfortable. - The time between swings/attacks is WAY too long. It makes each battle look like a bunch of guys standing around occassionally remembering to attack.