Played the game for 40 minutes, and have some thoughts:
It looks beautiful. Seriously, well done.
I don't understand, at all, the terms that the backer update mentioned like damage threshold, health vs stamina, etc. I guess that stamina is basically your health? Since all the priest abilities for healing heal stamina instead of health, and the enemies were damaging stamina. But beyond that, the game mechanics were completely opaque this first time at it. Old RPGs could be that way too, but they came with a manual I could read!
Related to that, either I am the worst player in the world or the game is entirely too hard. I went on the first quest I came across (go take out the ogre that is harassing the town), and went to Dryford crossing since that was the direction I found out I needed to head. The very first encounter wiped me, with no realistic possibility of success. The enemies could drop a character in one or two rounds of them focusing fire, and my rogue/fighter couldn't even damage the enemies. Maybe I somehow stumbled into content that is too hard for me, but right now I have no idea if it's that, if the game is tuned too hard, or if I just suck. There needs to be some clearer feedback to the player regarding whether something looks like it's over their head or not, or at least make the first few fights guaranteed to be doable so that you aren't struggling to learn the game mechanics while also getting your teeth kicked in.
The way skills take more and more points to increase the ranks is neat, I enjoyed that little twist to how skills work.
During the character creation process, please consider not displaying the culture bonus to abilities on the point-buy screen, or move that part of character creation so that it comes before purchasing stats. Kind of weird that you can get your array of stats hammered out, then realize you have to go and change them because the culture choice you made is going to alter your build strategy quite a bit.
The grimoire needs to be surfaced more prominently. I figured it out, don't get me wrong, but it's pretty counter-intuitive to have to dig in the inventory to get there.
As others have said, which character gets sent to talk to an NPC seems completely arbitrary and inconsistent.
Related to that, selecting one party member (when you currently have the whole party selected) should be easier. The most obvious way is to click on their portrait, but that doesn't actually deselect the other party members (and thus, allow you to do things like use abilities). You have to physically click on the party member you want, which is fine, but a little clunky.
Some kind of warning when you have unused spells (and grimoire slots to fill with them) would be useful. I had to rest at the inn twice (and burn my precious coin!) because I didn't realize that my grimoire did not have the level-up spells I chose slotted in. I was quite surprised after the first rest when I expected to be able to use level 2/3 spells, and they weren't there!
Maybe nit-picky, but the heads seem a bit too big for the bodies. Might be something I'll get used to, though.
Overall, I won't lie and say that the game made the greatest first impression on me. But I'm going to continue poking at it and seeing if I can figure out some of the things which were giving me grief on that first (very brief) foray.
