Quick impressions from last night:
1. The inventory especially, but really the entire UI. It look's like crap, non functional and has an unacceptable amount of unnecessary/unintuitive over design added;
2. The World map, same as above, horrible mess from top to bottom, the entire design should be scraped in favor of a 2D map;
3. The performance, so far Unity games have made their best efforts to melt down my computer (which is plenty powerful to play most games released these days at high settings), the optimization is non existent, and should be one of the biggest focuses during this beta;
4. C&C and overall reactivity, it's apparently non-existent for the most part. The claim that this would be their focus, where all the effort was going into, is backfiring here, even at this stage (beta), and having everything planned down from the start, we should be seeing more of the writing, choices and consequences of our actions at a basic level;
5. Combat is fun, not as deep as ToEE or JA2 but enough for a challenge (although it needs much work balance wise, everything from ammo management to armor values need to be tweaked);
6. Health regen...
8. Overall game aesthetic, graphics and art design, it's passable, not something i usually take much notice of, in terms of consistency its not as "polished" as AoD for example, but it's good enough not to brake immersion;
9. I like the dialog system, i really do. Nice implementation of a keyword system, reminds me of Morrowind;
10. I want to see skill checks at every other dialog, AoD really spoiled me on this regard;
In terms of suggestions, apart from the need to greatly improve C&C and reactivity, i would say the biggest area in need to adjustment (in terms of balance) is player survivability and economy, specifically:
1. Removal of the health regen mechanic;
2. Make healing resources more valuable, i.e more expensive at stores and mainly available trough crafting. Also make the inventory management a more important factor for healing items;
3. Make ammo more scarce, more valuable, more expensive at stores and something that should be managed very carefully.
4. Rebalance encounters to translate that ammo scarcity, by focusing on melee for low level encounters and having only high level/important enemy characters have access to plenty of ammo to justify the use of guns. Also make the enemy run out of ammo a factor to take into consideration;
5. Add options for the player to use this ammo rarity factor into his/her interaction with enemies and the world. Enemies should not know you dont have ammo on the big gun you are walking around with, the threat of the gun alone should add something to encounters. So for example you can bluff your way through melee guards, or add a penalty to morale for melee characters who start an engagement with heavily armed rangers;
Well, thats enough for initial impressions.
(P:E, AoD, D:OS, DS, etc.) rather than the typical AAA
