Rosh said:
Well, it will be good when they:
Get rid of the bugs. A hard lock when you're trying to save isn't good. Graphical errors like seeing the ground through a doorway from the outside of the building, and seeing a fire, doors, and other tiles in the black "not seen" areas.
I've never had the hard lock on save. Usually it's a after a load it and quit a half a dozen times. Then again, most Direct3D applications do that.
Get a clue about interface design. That is a classic example of a piss-poor interface. It's hardly functional.
I agree. The interface could stand some improvement. However, there's a good reason the interface is complicated, and that's because there's a lot of things you can do within the game. The more complex the game, the more complex the interface design.
There are hotkeys though.
Now for combat, it's often hard to see what is going on. There's hardly enything to tell you what's going on aside from a blue diamond on the ground and to really know anything, you need to right-click on an enemy and see the attack abilities.
What's worse is that you can't really see who's turn it is when it's dark, because the interface overlays are also darkenned by dark areas for some strange reason.
You don't have to use the right click though, you can just click on the enemies and it'll do a standard attack. There's also several hotkeys, like
W for "wait", and
D for "defend".
A help menu designed with some competence. Digging through multiple pages back and forth is very annoying. Put the combat help in a SINGLE, SCROLLABLE PAGE. Same thing with other topics. It shouldn't take guesswork as to what topic to pick to go "back" (whoa, there's another concept) to check the properties about another race. For ease, I just quit and restarted the help system after looking at each.
BACK! Yeah, I totally agree. That's something the help system seriously needs.
Hire someone to do their music and fire the epileptic earthworm they have currently mixing. Thank goodness you can turn that shit off.
I rarely like music in games anyway.
I think this game also makes a strong argument AGAINST 3d.
I tend to agree. I think the 3D thing works against this title. The terrain has heights, but it's hard to tell because of the texturing and lack of shading, for example.
The game does take advantage of 3D models to show armor and weapons being used though, which is nice. However, they could have still used 3D models and 2D tiling.
Other than that, it's a nice alpha.
I've noticed a few other bugs.
I saw a Mantid's pathfinding get hung on one of my characters trying to get to other character. Fortunately, the program allows you to still exit the program even though the pathfinding is infinite looping.
For some reason, my spells don't work on mantids or humans. They work on lupins and hoppers though. No idea why that is.
Magic is hideously weak in the game. For one, it lacks any type of range at all. You have to get right up on the enemy to use Flame Fountian or Flame Finger for example. This is fairly silly because mages are typically not the kind of people who need to be standing right next to enemies who can kill them in a few hits. The enemy loves to smack the characters with as little armor as possible, and that means your mage. On the animals it does work on, you typically get 6 damage out of a Flame Snake spell which is horribly weak compared to what fighters can do.
Likewise, my healing spell, "Mother's Kiss", only heals
6 points.
Another thing, I've
never seen my magic skills advance. Combat skills and Armor seems to go up in combat by use, but I've cast gobs of curing spells and Flame Snakes, and never had the magic skill advance. Barter and the other noncombat skills don't seem to go up either.
Walks with the Snails said:
Yeah, it needs more polish before I'd be willing to shell out money for it. There's also problems with selecting things, I had to fiddle with the view a bit sometimes (okay, quite a few times) before it would let me select things
Did you try the ALT key? That actually helps quite a bit. Even works on those people that walk too fast to talk to.
I actually restarted again, though.. Farmer, Merchant, and Guardian this time. Screw Flame magic. My Farmer does have Gift of the Goddess though, so he can heal. However, that spell is fairly weak, as mentioned above.
You know what this game really needs is a DIFFICULTY SETTING. I trained my party for days, and eventually I bought the best equipment in Kellen. However, I still can't overcome fights with road ambushes.
But you're right, it does have something that keeps me coming back to it.