archaicEternity

Hi everyone! First, I'd just like to note that I'm very, very excited about this game and I have really enjoyed the time I've spent in the beta so far. I'm going to organize these impressions into things I like, and things that I think are not quite working as intended. Hopefully this will be helpful and I'm not retreading too much territory that's already been covered! For the record, my first character is an Amaua Priest, and I have explored both sections of map, the ruins underneath the western section, the spider cave, and the ruins underneath the eastern explorable map. What's Looking Good: Environments: The environments look stunning, and the design of both the town and the surrounding area also have a lot of visual interest which makes them fun to run around in. One of the things I always liked about the Baldur's Gate series (and all isometric RPG games of the era) is how the settings have to straddle the line between 'a real, living place' and 'a painting' which I think the game is doing really well with so far (wind, lighting, etc.) Character Models: I was a little bit worried about the character models in the creator as there wasn't a lot of options (more on this later) and up close some of the faces looked a bit weird. In-game though the models look very detailed and fluid and the character animations are more detailed even then I'd expected (particularly liked the winding up of the arbalest on reload). Lots of small things make the characters stand out as being real adventurers, and not just a walking cloud of math, like they were in other IE games unless you were really invested in the story. Interactables: I like the choice to make interactable objects cut away to a text page which give you a lot of different ways to play out the scenario. Obviously so far mostly this has boiled down to choosing your strongest guy to try and push the statue, but I'm hoping that once NPCs are fully implemented these will also become a party diplomacy thing i.e. I need to break into a house but my character who's best suited to this has a moral objection to it; I will need to either persuade them to make an exception or to choose a different party member who is less suited to the task What Needs Work: Pathfinding: One of the biggest issues I've had in combat so far has been pathfinding (outside of combat it's been fine thus far). Often, I have won or lost combat due to either my melee characters getting bunched up behind one another and not able to reach their enemies, or vice versa. I think that having to individually move each character so that they can swing at an enemy is an unreasonable level of micro to expect of players, nor is it particularly fun. Combat Difficulty?: Perhaps I just haven't played enough yet but the difficulty of each individual combat seems to vary widely. Even with two priests it's difficult to stop my fighters from dying of beetle poison, and the cast time for the longer healing spells I have found typically means that by the time I'm finished casting the result of the battle is a foregone conclusion. Character Customization: I'm sure this has been mentioned at length in the forums already, but it bears reiteration: there are too few character portraits available currently. In a game like PE, identifying with my character is a big part of how I'm going to engage with the story, and if I have too few options for portraits, faces and hair at the beginning it's going to be a big issue. Even more problematic, I opted to play as an Amaua as my first character, and there are no female Amaua portraits at all. I realize that this is likely a Beta issue and that more will be added before launch but I can't overstress how important character customizability is to me as an end user XP Notification: In my current playthrough I have completed two quests (Dragon's Egg and Thief vs. Police in Dyrwood Village) and I think it would be nice to be able to see more easily what my completion rewards are. I'm certainly earning experience for it, but given how important XP and levelling is in an RPG I think it would be viscerally more satisfying for the game to let me know I'm doing a good job more obviously. Comments? Thoughts? Please let me know!