Okay fired it up again.
Clearly not perfected yet. I saved my progress in the morning, but can't continue -- the Load Game screen hangs and the Continue button is grayed out. So starting over.
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Camera is awfully lively. It zooms and pans on its own whenever I focus on something significant, with "kinetic" acceleration too, instead of being only crisply mouse-controlled. Would work great on a controller, mouse and keyboard, not so much...
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Made a Wrathful Glaive. Wanna see how that plays out. Conversation with the Spectre was more infodumpy than I remember it from the last build. Lots of "What are you?" and "Who's hunting me?" and "So this is my mind, huh?"
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Yuuuuge "Crisis Initiated" notification, with "Current Objective: Kill the reflections anchoring the Sorrow to your mind" in a panel. FUCK FUCK FUCK this is SO non-Torment. Fuck console kiddies to Baator and InEptile with them. This is NOT what I Kickstarted!!!
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Camera is jumping around a LOT during the crisis. Very irritating.
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This does look pretty though. The UI, icons, and environment art blend together a lot better than before, and the pretty-boy Last Castoff portrait fits well too. Visually it's quite close in style to the Numenera sourcebooks (which is not a bad thing).
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Voice acting is still bad. Actors carefully reading their lines from a paper, enunciating clearly and speaking slowly.
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Big "Quest Received" notification. What's wrong with "Updated my journal" FFS?
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Aligern's and Callistege's new portrait art looks gud. But man this start is infodumpy. A bit less than in the first beta, for sure, but still this is no Mortuary with its glorious sense of WTF and mysteries everywhere.
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Taking a look at the character sheet. It looks very pretty and Numenera. Cyphers are arranged in two rings with nodes, some of which are locked. The inner ring represents cyphers I can carry without cypher sickness, the outer ring, with cypher sickness. Guess my absolute, hard cypher limit is the number of empty nodes, but I'd probably be dead of Hiroshima syndrome before I hit that anyway. Hooly shit, Aligern has a cypher limit of 5 already, what an awesome mule, I know whom I'm gonna dump out of the gate.
They've tinkered with the basic Cypher System mechanics a quite a lot. There are four new stats: Health, Resistance, Evasion, and Willpower; each of the Pools affects these stats. Don't know yet if these secondary defensive stats will go down as my pools drain. I never was a huge fan of the Numenera mechanics, but I still think this is a bit of a shame -- they were
different and these changes dilute this uniqueness quite a bit as well as making things murkier overall. Perhaps they were necessary for gameplay balance reasons or something though. There's no indication of how Health is calculated, other than that Might contributes 1:1. I have 28 Heath and 8 Might so that 20 Health came from somewhere.
I have a bunch of abilities not from the PnP game, like Opportunist that lets me forgo an attack on my turn to get an AOO with bonus on the enemy's turn, if applicable. I also picked Hook which lets me pull an enemy to me. Could also have picked Taunt which does what you'd expect it to. Other than that I'm good at Intimidation and excel at Smashing and Heavy Weapons.
Max Effort is 2 right out of the gate. That is in my opinion rather derp as Effort tends to trivialise things anyway. IMO would've been better to leave it at 1 like in the rulebook.
My Journal is 100% new-skool modurn. Neatly organised into Main Quest, Secondary Quests, with Quest Objectives listed in 3d grade English.
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Loading screens look purty.
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Bloody hell this self-moving camera is annoying. When the clock spouted those energy things, the camera just HAD to centre on each of them at a time, to make absolutely sure I noticed.
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I really don't like the moment-to-moment interaction here. It's that camera and the way it stops taking inputs whenever there's an animation of something happening. It makes it plod, and takes away the feeling of being in control. Pillars got this bit perfectly right (basically by carefully imitating the Infinity Engine). Why did they feel the need to change it? I suppose it'll look cool on a Let's Play video and of course it'll work better if you're playing with a controller rather than a mouse that lets you pan with a flick of the wrist. It even does it in mid-conversation if there's more than one character involved -- every time one of them speaks (even if there's no VO), the camera centres on them.
Also, the UI animation when I interact with things is starting to grate. It's very smooth and all, but it is much more intrusive than a UI that just mostly stays put. That pretty UI is very much in-your-face actually, like when you hold down the Tab button to highlight interactables, the icons for Look and Interact are really huge and obvious, much moreso than the subtle highlight used in the IE or Pillars.
The whole thing is really busy and really, really idiot-proofed.
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And they still didn't find the time to fix those flagstones.
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Okay, that's enough for now, that self-moving camera is giving me a migraine.
tl;dr I am not a fan of where this thing is going. The stuff that was good is still good (lotsa writing, some of it pretty neat, quest resolutions etc), but apart from general polish (which they've done a lot of) this isn't any more enjoyable to play, the opposite in fact.
