Played a bit till the adventure guild. Some short impressions:
Technical stuff first:
The sound is nice and voice work well done in my book.
Game is not optimized. But not too shoddy either. The biggest problem are actually some graphic settings like motion blurr. It looks absolutely horrible and is horribly implemented. I never got motion sickness in a game before. First time for me here. Deactivate that shit. Deactivate that shit. DEACTIVATE THAT SHIT!. After that the game runs decent with textures on ultra (but not flawless and passengers going by are always sort of out of focus). I have an I7-4770 with 16 GB RAM, Win 8.1 on SSD, but the game on Hdd and GTX 760 with 2 GB VRAM.
Npcs don't catch up to recent standards. Or standards from 10 years ahead. The caracters from The Bard's Tale action rpg with the hd graphics look better. No, I'm not kidding. Some monsters look good though and the dungeon scenery is ok.
Overall the presentation of npcs reminds of RoA Star Trail. But it's still better, really. Quality is very uneven overall.
Now to the rpg part:
The char creation sucks not being able to start right away with your own "hero". Or even better - you own god damn party!
The professions and abilities are... ok I guess. Nothing special and could work. Would have liked to have more portraits / models available (Char models look actually good here with some decent animations)
Exploration seems to be not bad and seems to have potential. Can't really give an opinion here because it's too early, but like I said, it has potential.
So far my biggest problem lies in the combat mechanics. The pooled action point system isn't really my cup of tea but it's not as bad as you might think. Because abilities have cooldowns (standard attack is an ability), you can't just use one guy to do all the work. Abilities are limited to 5 slots per char (with standard attack and moving already taking away 2 slots) basically reducing your combat abilities to that amount in combat. I don't like that. Would have prefered to have access to all abilities and separate action points.
Overall I think the general idea with positioning and the various actions is good. Channeling your magic is a nice idea, too.
But - ofc there's a but - the fixed amount of damage you always do combined with the 100% hit "chance" is retarded. Really retarded. It kills every ambition of taking chances (because there are no chances) and excitement. Combat gets just too predictable. Maybe some accountants may like that. I'm only a half one at best though I don't know.
My take on the char/combat system would be to give weapons a short damage range between 1-3 as a base at least and don't give a 100% hit chance. Armor should mostly provide Armor class and not just give hitpoints as a stat bonus. You regenerate hitpoints by eating a meal btw or drinking a potion. At least there it should have been obvious how retarded the current armor mechanic is then. Giving weapons a damage range would prevent to make armor too powerful if it gets added to armor class btw
Another dumb decision is to let groups all attack at once! It's either your party strikes first or the enemy. Without a system of chances in effect it should be obvious how such a full strike mentality is a bad idea...
Overall an agility stat would have worked wonders. It could reduce the 100% hit chance of attacks by an % amount depending on how high the stat is. And it could regulate who attacks first in which order depending on the agility stat. Stormattacks could provide a bonus on the stat in the first round of combat. Agility could even influence the movement similar to the boots.
And if we're talking about randomness; they better get some respawning monsters in. The game has a high danger of falling completely into the determined trap which will kill every rpg in my book.
For loot it's too early to say anything about it but it has potential. There doesn't seem to be too much loot but there's always something new to leave you motivated or give you something useful it seems.
The save system is ok I guess. I like the idea of not using a savepoint and instead get some XP reward. But I would have liked to have a save anywhere feature (which could cost a small amount of XP or use a special item that falls to dust after use or is only usable with a long cooldown). I'm just too old by now to not being able to instantly quit the gaming session when I want.