My thoughts on the Beta

[wanderon]

I played a gazillion hours in IE games and the thing I disliked the most was the mage battles in BG2 what with the buffs and strips and buffs and strips and save or die I just did not find it fun at all. Fortunately I was a chronic restarter and could have fun in the early to middle game then restart with my next concept party or character before we got to them...

[YunikoYokai5]

This pretty much sums up my experience. I've never played an isometric RPG before and I purposely kept myself in the dark about everything just to see how easy it is for someone with no knowledge to get along. In short, not very well. At all. It took me a keybind change to learn how to talk to people (which I then changed back once I realised what you had to do), took me about an hour before I realised my priest and mage had spells tucked away above their profiles and then it took me nearly losing my team to learn there were no healing spells/items and it took 2 team members to die for me to learn about maiming and team death. For someone who has only played RPGs like Dragon Age, Mass Effect and TES etc, I found this to be very confusing. I am getting the hang of it though!

 

I don't understand the combat at all though. I just pick spells/moves and pray whatever I'm attacking kills it. I'm not sure what is a good damaging spell, a good crowd control move, what is best against certain enemies (I'll be looking at the bestiary to see if that has anything). I think this is all just a lack of research though. I'll also need to do some more research into the classes and what the level-up points actually do in terms of conversations and combat, since the game didn't really make it easy for me to figure out the difference between a monk and priest for example. Either that or I wasn't reading close enough!

 

And the bugs...my priest has glitched out (no longer on the team but her location icon is still at the edges of my screen), a battle with a stone beetle proved my Paladin had bugged out and was immune to damage for a time (it saved me from though, so I'm not too upset), my FPS crashed horribly (dropping to about 6fps) when I started fighting a Crystal Eater (and only freed up when all but one of my characters had 'fainted'), the text in storyboard is cut off (as they team well know), characters have teleported at times and a few other things. 

 

Overall though, I've gotten used to some things and enjoying the experience. Now I just need to figure out how long the beta actually is

[Namutree]

This pretty much sums up my experience. I've never played an isometric RPG before and I purposely kept myself in the dark about everything just to see how easy it is for someone with no knowledge to get along. In short, not very well. At all. It took me a keybind change to learn how to talk to people (which I then changed back once I realised what you had to do), took me about an hour before I realised my priest and mage had spells tucked away above their profiles and then it took me nearly losing my team to learn there were no healing spells/items and it took 2 team members to die for me to learn about maiming and team death. For someone who has only played RPGs like Dragon Age, Mass Effect and TES etc, I found this to be very confusing. I am getting the hang of it though!

 

I don't understand the combat at all though. I just pick spells/moves and pray whatever I'm attacking kills it. I'm not sure what is a good damaging spell, a good crowd control move, what is best against certain enemies (I'll be looking at the bestiary to see if that has anything). I think this is all just a lack of research though. I'll also need to do some more research into the classes and what the level-up points actually do in terms of conversations and combat, since the game didn't really make it easy for me to figure out the difference between a monk and priest for example. Either that or I wasn't reading close enough!

 

And the bugs...my priest has glitched out (no longer on the team but her location icon is still at the edges of my screen), a battle with a stone beetle proved my Paladin had bugged out and was immune to damage for a time (it saved me from though, so I'm not too upset), my FPS crashed horribly (dropping to about 6fps) when I started fighting a Crystal Eater (and only freed up when all but one of my characters had 'fainted'), the text in storyboard is cut off (as they team well know), characters have teleported at times and a few other things. 

 

Overall though, I've gotten used to some things and enjoying the experience. Now I just need to figure out how long the beta actually is

If you're not an IE veteran; than the poe beta will crush you. Things will get better over time though.