Beta 3: 1 bug and some suggestions

[Borissimo]

After taking another dream team through the game (suck it, Xanesha!), I checked out the forums to see if I'd encountered any bugs/suggestions not mentioned here. Here's what I got:

 

Bug: When Ezren uses a War Razor +1, the difficulty of the combat check is increased by 4. However, the text of the War Razor +1 does not indicate that it requires weapon proficiency to avoid a penalty.

 

Bug, of sorts: When you finish a scenario, change people's decks, and hit the continuation arrow, you get some gold for doing this. However, the next screen comes on before you can see how much gold you earned. You only get to find that out if someone's deck is incomplete; in that case, you get to see the gold amount because the screen doesn't fade to black.

 

Bug, of sorts, similar to above: You get gold for killing a villain (I think?), but the screen always changes before you can see how much it was. Ideally, there'd be an in-game reference explaining what you get gold for and how much (I still don't know why I get gold for deck management or what that's based on), but at the very least, players should be able to see how much gold they're earning each time they earn any.

 

UI conundrum: During a character's move step, there's no way to examine what has been scouted at other locations. Actually, I don't think you can ever "examine" a location the current player isn't at, but this is most critical in the move step. My latest game had Seelah Green, Harsk and You Shall Receive, Ezren Pound (with Augury), Lini Vamilli (with Augury), Merisiel Christmas with Ilsoari (who doesn't crash the game anymore, yay!), and Amiri Canapparel with a Spyglass. Literally every character could scout, and I lost a few scenarios because I forgot what I had scouted where and lost turns moving characters to the wrong locations.

 

Now, to be fair, the physical game does not (to my knowledge) explicitly allow peeking at decks that have previously been scouted. Thus, it could be argued that the "examine" feature for the current location is already a luxury and that remembering what's been scouted at other locations contributes to the game's skill cap. However, it seems to me that this game is targeting a much wider audience than just the players of the physical game, and those players are going to be frustrated by the fact that the game gives them useful information but only lets them access it a subset of the useful time. I'd suggest finding a way to finagle the UI so that it allows players to "examine" locations the active character isn't at, ideally all of the time but at the very least during the movement phase.

 

Opinion: The animation for Ezren's Expanded Spellbook ability is too slow. By contrast, the animation for the Garrison's closing effect is too fast. Memorizing the cards in the 0.5 seconds that they're shown on the screen is a minigame that's like harder than the entire rest of the game. I'd love to have the weapons/armor revealed, inspect them at my leisure, and then press a button to continue.

 

Opinion: Seelah's +d6 ability should automatically discard/recharge the top card of the deck without needing to be dragged. I do understand the likely reason that this isn't automatic -- if it were, then because new information is revealed, an undo wouldn't be possible -- but that button isn't likely to be pressed by accident, and the pain of regretting it 0.2% of the time seems worth not dealing with the annoying drag of it 99.8% of the time.

 

Opinion: Lini's Animal Trick should be automatic. I get that there are corner cases where you wouldn't want to use it, but again, that occasional annoyance doesn't seem worth the otherwise constant annoyance of pressing a button every single check.

 

Opinion: There should be a way to cancel the end-of-turn button. I once hit End Turn with Ezren, and the game stopped to ask if I wanted to do an end-of-turn action. The reason for this was that I was holding Haste. This made me realize that, actually, I could have used Haste to move a character and ended the scenario that turn, but I couldn't undo the action to end the turn. This was a huge "feels bad" moment, because I had no choice but to confirm an action that I deeply regretted. I'd love to see a "back" button here, just like for canceling any other effect that doesn't reveal new information. It would give a minor advantage to characters that always get an end-of-turn prompt, but that doesn't seem like a big deal.

 

Opinion: Harsk should be able to trigger the end of the turn by hitting his Scout button. It's weird that he always has to hit "end turn," and then hit Scout as an end of turn action. I realize this is a controversial suggestion because some players might hit Scout and then be shocked that their turn is over, but hey, our job as beta testers is to put forward all suggestions, not just the good ones, right?

 

I've really been enjoying Build 3 and can't wait to see what's in store!