Here's the feedback I posted on their forums. Yeah, BT4 ( when it was in ALPHA ) was in a x10 better state than this game is a MONTH AWAY FROM RELEASE.
Allright, my turn after 3 hours of playing.
First of all, I have criticized the game for various design decisions I do not agree with. Teleporters being on the top of my list. Not being a true Ultima Underworld is the same.
I'll put all of that aside and speak purely on technical terms, what state the game is in, a month prior to its release.
It is a fudgeing disaster. There is NO WAY everything will be fixed by the release. No way in hell. This isn't even being at alpha level in terms of polish / robustness.
Let's see:
1. This is the elephant in the room: junkiness. Collisions are unsmooth and you'll get stuck into absolutely everything; Forget about enemies, rooms and corridors are your main enemies in this game. Absolutely everything was made to cause frustration and glitch your movements. The only case where it's behaving okay is when you're walking in a huge, perfectly flat room. Otherwise, everything WILL get in your way and cause random movements you did not task. The worst being stairs ( even very small one, with one step ) which will frequently force you to jump around to pass.
Is this real ? it's like nothing has changed since the alpha backer 3 months ago..
As before, physical objects seem extremely fragile or have incorrect weight. Worse, I've often seen objects floating above other objects. Example: a barrel floating 30 cm in the air, above another barrel. Same for smaller items like candles, on top of a table. You've probably made your physics engine too relaxed on the condition of disabling bodies from the physics sim when they're at rest.
2. Rendering issues. The list is enormous. Absolutely everything is glitching. Frustum culling issues ( with walls disappearing in the corner of your screen ). Popping of colors on materials ( like some stone wall assets have colored stones ? they'll often switch back to a neutral color ). Holes between assets showing the hollow part of the level (it's litterally everywhere if you look carefully). Assets not properly joined together, causing heavy Z-fighting. Look at Marcaul ground stones. Again, I'm not judging design decisions like the cartoon look which I hate. Just on pure technical terms, you cannot walk 2 meters without seeing something that reminds you it's a game, with technical issues.
So much for immersion.
3. Audio issues. NPCs all talking at the same time. And often with some loud ambient noises/background. Worse in Marcaul, where I often did not understand what was said. Some NPCs will sometimes speak in French (my locale), ignoring that I've set the game to English in the menu. Most often they do speak english though. No sub-titles, at least not most of the time.. it's all over the place. A big mess.
On a bright note, on pure technical terms the audio quality seems to be top notch.
4. Immersion
All these tutorial stones / graffitis conventiently placed on your path kill immersion and remind you that you're in a video game at every step.
If you're making a physics-based simulation, rules better be coherent. Like, if something is made out of wood, it should be burnable. I've encountered multiple wood walls made of planks ( like in the first room of Upper Erebus ) that did not take fire, no matter how close I had a burning box. Maybe it was a bug, but more likely, you've flagged some wooden assets as "unburnable". Big no-no.
5. AI / NPCs
AI sucks. Not much to say about it, cause it'll often glitch and ignore you, even when you're a meter away.
Undead archers are deadly accurate, even when you run around them quickly. Shouldn't they miss more when somebody is close and moving quickly ?
Some undeads did not have heads. Seemed like a bug, like they had a hole up their shoulders.
Floating lizards in Marcaul look.. stupid. Like a console kid game. There are no interactive dialogues, NPCs just say a voiced line or two when you get close to them and that's it.
THE POSITIVE
The runes system was one of the few things that was more or less preserved from the original Ultima Underworld. That's an excellent thing, cause it rocks. Finding new runes scattered all over the place is a hook. Finding new spell combinations is cool and fun. The UI for the spellbook needs work, visually.
There are hints of bright level design here and there. The entrance to Marcaul is by far the most visually interesting and well designed part of the game I've seen so far. I was impressed by it.
MISC
- there's some delay when entering a portal ( I guess while it's fading out ) where you've walk past the portal. Looks weird.
- auto mapping needs major adjustments. Even walking face to wall, it often does not properly fill the wall lines on the map. The range it fills is all over the place. Sometimes you're walking in a corridor or a room and when you open the auto map, it hasn't filled anything that's clearly visible in front of you, a few meters away..
- some spells are often duplicated on the spellbook, especially when you click on an already-memorize formula
- I haven't seen any way to remove a memorize formula in the spellbook. Please add a remove function
- some rune icons do not seem to match between the "big icon" ( the one displayed on the spellbook wheel ) and the "small icon" ( the one used in UI, or on graffitis on walls ). I got my healing spell wrong due to not recognizing the right rune ( despite having the good formula ! ). Was frustrating.
- UI needs to show items stats, like how effective an armor is or weapons damage. Being able to quickly compare two items is a 2018 expected feature. Overall the UI is in a very very rough state.
- some graffitis do not seem to mean anything, I just see a bunch of squares ( nothing readable ) on various walls ?
- my spellbook formulas seem to have reset after I reached Marcaul for the first time ? the spellbook suddenly became empty..
- throwing axes seemed bugged visually, and did not seem to do any damage to undeads
- sometimes chests open up into walls ( half the chest is behind the wall ). Some items spawn in vertical position and would have been too tall to fit into the chest as is ( ex.: a chest spawns a leather armor which is twice as tall as the chest's height ).
- sometimes interacting with objects ( like chests ) is glitchy. The "interaction" visual effect does not appear even when the object is right in front of you. I've seen a chest, forgot where, where you had to be very precise and aim at a specific few-pixels location in order to open the chest, despite the chest being huge on screen.
- ruins of Gwern seems to have major framerate issues ( I did not go further in the beta, because of it ). Like 10 fps on a 1070 GTX + i7 6700K + 32GB ram
- the entire UI needs to be improved. At the moment it looks like it was made by a 12 years old kid in Paint. Also, please give different icons to different items. A rusty dagger, a short sowrd and a long sword should not all have the same "sword" icon.
