My Beta Experience so far
Elemental Forums
Tutorial
Full marks for this. I like the format of video followed by gameplay to try out the mechanic yourself. Honestly, this is the most polished section of the game at this point! My only issue is that it didn't seem to cover some quite important stuff (diplomacy in particular). Maybe this will be covered in the campaign though?
Character/Faction creation
Generally good, although I have a couple of minor gripes, and one big one. Minor gripes are:
- Text entry for character/faction back stories. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the text does not wrap very well- it overlaps with the scroll bar in a way that just looks sloppy (WoM did this as well, I'd really expected this to be fixed by now, it doesn't seem as if it should be that hard). The other problem is that there's no way to select the text (as far as I can tell), so my only option is to delete it one character at a time. This is annoying. If you can't implement text selection for some reason, can we at least get a button to clear the existing text?
- There are a few panels for selecting stuff like character portrait backgrounds and so on, with left and right arrows to switch between pages. However instead of moving left/right, they seem to shift the lines up/down, which just seems a little odd to me. Also, if you select something, the highlight appears on top of the button. Not a big problem, but again, sloppy.
My major gripe is that, after spending a while setting up my character, I went to create a new faction for him to belong to. This turned out to be a mistake, because once I returned to the character selection screen, everything had been reset to defaults. Very annoying.
The actual game
Definitely a lot more playable than WoM already. I did run into a few issues though.
- It can be unclear where exactly a turn ends, and the next begins. This is possibly my fault for not fiddling with the options to turn off auto-turn though. Also, if there is a way to select the next unit with moves left this turn, I couldn't find it.
- At one point I had a mana upkeep of greater than my mana generation. As a result, I went into negative mana. Is this intentional? I'd have thought that if you were going negative, you should just have the magic effects cancel themselves automatically. On that note, if there's a way to cancel magic effects manually, I don't know where to find it.
- It's being said elsewhere, but champions are OP. They level way too fast (from adventuring). My personal suggestion is to add level caps, which can be increased via the tech tree. This would also stop the situation where the techs for recruiting level 3/5 heroes is a little underwhelming, since your own heroes will be way higher than that by the time you unlock the techs. Constructed units just basically seem to die in one hit, so are practically worthless. That said, the actual process of leveling is quite fun.
- The AI is pretty poor at the moment. Admittedly I've only played on normal so far, but they just seem a little passive and disinterested in me. Several of them died to monsters in the first few turns.
- I have a bug in the tactical battles where there is a massive lag between clicking the 'Defend' command, and the actual spell being cast (several seconds). This is very annoying. It also happened for the ogre (or was it troll?) shaman spell, however all the other spells are fine. This wasn't a problem at first, but got worse later on in the game. I also had problems with the sound effects cutting out sometimes.
- This may just be a combination of the lack of AI challenge and OPness of champions, but I found myself skimming over the town/empire building sections as a bit dreary, and just ran around splatting enemies with my champions. At the moment, this part of the game is not particularly compelling.
- Throwing daggers simply do not work.
- I had a bugged quest: I was asked to kill some slavers, and given the option to recruit or kill the slaver commander. I chose to kill him, and did so, but the quest did not complete. I tried going back to where the quest started, but to no avail.
- I did eventually get a CTD, but this was after several hours of play. I sent the debug.err via email.
