Rollcage8

Some elements that BG2 didn't have were somewhat better then the alternative. Stealth is different with circles instead of just eyeballing it yourself from play/practice. The circles are not something i'm fond of. Camp supplies - why do I care, the story, the combat and exploration are great gameplay, Forced camp supplies feels tedious. Food - Character goes to the toilet when I'm not playing, he can eat offscreen too. Grappling ropes - Tedious, getting to a tamogochi in style. Having the skills to cross without penalties is Roleplay enough, no need to go into the fibres of the rope I used. The User interface, the little combat overhead display is distracting and useless. The location of my player characters portait and health bar is as far away as you can possible make it from my character. The Spellbook is hidden behind a bunch of mouseclicks as far away from the combat as it can get as well. I still love the game, because it has plenty of elements that do match BG2 and other older games, these are things that I believe don't need to be in the game, or should be changed to be fun instead of tedious.

Excellent game, loving the direction and feel. Alot of my early complaints and annoyances were all solved by menu driven disable/enable features. Combat was alot better for me once I disabled the overhead swing timers and health pips - this enabled the game to visually show me what was happening rather then a couple of moving bars do it instead of my characters. However the swing timers were nowhere to be found elsewhere on the UI. I also disliked the stealth circles, they take away from the immersion of the graphics as well (same as the combat tooltips). I would love an option to play stealth similar to the baldur's gate games, where you merely go transparent with a sound effect and if you get to close and reveal then bad luck. If it stays as circles I would probably avoid the whole mechanic due to immersion breaking. Perhaps even recolouring of the circles to not stand out so rediculously would help. +Character creation was awesome. +Start menus awesome. +Dialogue awesome. (again disabled the "stat test = 3" dialogue options) Biggest problem with the game was combat sound effects and feedback: - No critical hits sound effect (or didn't play in beta) - No special exploding death animations (or heroic decaps) - No noticable blood on large number hits/crits. - ALL NPC's died without a whimper, silent murder is the game. - Normal speed was sometimes too fast, Double speed was sometimes unexpectedly disastrous. Slow was quite often too slow. I'd prefer a 75%/100%/125% rather then 50%/100%/200%. Or even a combat speed of 80% or so would be perfect for me. If i got the numbers wrong then I'm sure the numbers I used described the issue. - Alot of spells didn't play the effect, or the spell went off but visually the creature didn't seem to care. Fireball - sorta looked like the monster cared, I guess... (Baldur's gate had a fire effect attach to the monsters that were hit, so they ran in obviously singed from the spell) UI elements for speed on the center pause dial were really hard to read. Didn't like the bag management and character sheets at all - but I rarely do, bags were tedious, looting was tedious. I'm no master of UI creation, but again they were confusing and hard to decipher for me personally.