I finished the EA content. I wouldn't say it's good outside of the combat. And the combat only has the potential to be good, rather than what has been placed in front of me. Encounter design is abysmal and some of that has to do with how overleveled we are, but not everything. Most encounters feel placed randomly in an effort to just have an encounter there. We also have a lot of long rest zones, so that's also suspect. I'll just write a train-of-thought-style post and if there's some demand for a more in-depth review I'd do that too.
1. Presentation - it's rough. The voice acting is superfluous and very hit and miss, one of the actresses mispronounced the word "paladins" (she said palAdins, instead of pAladins). The spell FX are okay and probably the best of the visual aspects, but the casting animations need to go imo, or only to be used for very high level spells. You don't need a 2-3 second wind-up time for a cantrip which is supposed to be a snap of the finger. The graphics are NWN2-like, but they do have their charm *for me*. Objectively, however, this should've been a 2D game. Something, somewhere, is too expensive for the budget and it shows in everything.
2. Story - it's nerdy in a basement-dweller kind of way. It's okay if you are only expecting a typical fantasy romp that your local DM might cook up over the weekend. I'm not entirely sure what's even happening at the end and why the people who are there are there, but maybe it will be cleared up once we get the finished product. There are waaay too many concepts that pop up and aren't explored properly (Copperan's little Seven Suns problem for example), but I don't want to get that much into it, I'll leave it for the hypothetical review.
3. Gameplay - it's one-dimensional. Like I said many times before, the maps are very linear and the only thing you do is move from combat encounter to combat encounter with little hurdles along the way like puzzles that only require you having eyeballs in your face. The combat is theoretically fine, but it needs better encounter design. I can't stress this enough. Most encounters are samey and pointless. Maybe they'll be better if we aren't so grotesquely overleveled/overpowered, but as it stands now I dreaded getting into an encounter because it's just a slow inevitable victory for us by just auto-attacking and spamming cantrips in order to "conserve" spell slots we don't actually need. It's 5E with bad encounter design, bad AI, fewer classes, and no multiclassing, what more can I say?
I just now remembered the verticality aspect of the whole ordeal. It's there, alright. Apart from literally the first dungeon, it didn't change pretty much anything. Just like the lighting system, it's there to consume turns that could be spent not casting Dancing Lights or Fly/Spider Crawl. There's literally 1 build idea I have that utilizes verticality in any meaningful way. It's a gimmick, I think we are all familiar with those in games. Tabletop verticality is there because we are inhabiting a 3D space and it's a thing that exists in 3D spaces. It can be used as much as it can be used irl, but not so much in the very artificial world of a video game.
4. Art - it's fine. I'm lumping music in here as well, but the art/art direction is better than the music. The music is there, but I can't remember any of it, so there you go. There are some pretty cool environments, though, like the library tower. I'd say the maps need more set pieces like that library. Because the maps are so linear, they need something else to distract from that, and more set pieces would be great.
Overall, there is something going wrong with the development of this game. It feels uneconomical in a sense, it's not using its real estate in the most efficient way possible, but I'm not sure how to express this. The way the maps and the overall mission-like structure are put together doesn't scream "RPG" to me. From where I'm standing, you have 2 choices - either make it pseudo-open world like BG1, or more of a hub-based structure like Athkatla in BG2 or a myriad of other RPGs like that. There is a reason there are no RPGs like BG1 anymore, it's either time and resource intensive or it leads to samey forest maps like in BG1. Don't get me wrong, BG1 is one of my favorite games of all time, but those endless forests don't contribute much (apart from it feeling big). This kind of ties in with the "stuff isn't very developed" point I made earlier. The maps could be bigger and have more stuff in them, rather than small and corridor-like. You have a gothic Curse of Strahd-inspired castle, but there's nothing to do or see outside of drab and dreary piles of rock. There could be a whole story told here, you even have named characters and 1-2 pieces of scattered lore/journals, but nope, it's encounter after encounter and then it ends, woohoo. Copperan could be more of a hub than it is, with more side quests and a more involved main quest.
Instead of moving so fast from map to map, you could squeeze more out of each map by giving us stuff to do and explore. If I were to guess, I'd say the creation of a map consumes the most time and resources out of everything else atm, so why not utilize them better? Writing a few more quests per map to flesh them out and give us some more context is probably the easiest way to meaningfully stretch the usefulness of a map. I'm not gonna lie, it's kind of anxiety-inducing imagining you guys frantically creating map after map that gets consumed and discarded in a heartbeat. Having ideas is not as easy as it seems, so why treat them like disposable? Populate your maps, develop your ideas.
I'm screaming into the void, aren't I? There's too much wrong for it to be fixed during EA to become a great game. It could be a good combatfag game once the encounter design is improved, though.
PS
I still hate the UI.
