UI Problems:

* The pleasant addition of the (N)ew Order command is a bit clunky. If you accidentally press N, there is no way to get out. Escape, etc do not cancel the action, so you are forced to type 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
* As a small quibble, in the original game, the new order action did not require the player to select the last character, since there is no reason to do so.

* In the journal, if you view a level of the dungeon you are not on, and then click on Scry Sight, the view is updated to show the level of the dungeon that you are on. That's fine. However, the buttons for changing the dungeon level to view are not updated. This means, for example if you are on catacombs 3, and then view catacombs 1, the navigation buttons are updated so that "view lower" is active, but "view higher" is not active, which is appropriate for viewing catacombs 1. However when you cast Scry Sight, you are shown Catacombs 3, and only "view lower" is active, which can't work, and "view higher" which you may need, also doesn't work.

* At least when typing spell codes, the game will drop keystrokes. This might be true more broadly but it's harder to tell. I can, over and over, type things like "LERE" and get "LR" in the entry prompt. It's definitely not true that the E key is not pressed, and it's not that the computer is overburdened. While running the game, I can type LERE in a browser here and never have keys dropped. To be fair, the original game, especially on the C64 and Apple IIe also was prone to dropping keys, requiring a fairly deliberate typing method of one finger at a time when entering strings like "PASSION", but I'm pretty sure this wasn't intentionally modeled.

* When leaving the review board, it's possible to have the bard song silenced. I'm not sure the exact sequence, but I had just levelled up and left directly and checked my hunter's stats immediately and the bard song, while still active, did not play and continued to not play for many minutes until I re-visited the review-board.

* The way items are added to the merged party inventory is bizarre. Found items typically (or at least sometimes) are added to the end of the list. I fought the 3 and 3 berserkers at Harkyns 1 and received Robes at the end of the shared inventory list. Then I bought six robes at Garth's and they were added to the top of the inventory. Wearing the robes on my various characters (swapping with their existing equipment) placed the unequipped items where the robes were, six at the top and one at the bottom. More consistency please.

* Sorceror Sight and Second Sight are permitted to overlap. I doubt there's a play benefit for doing so, but it is confusing. I would suggest that casting Sorceror Sight should replace Second Sight, while casting Second Sight while Sorceror Sight is active should do nothing or replace it. Replacing it would be more accurate. Doing nothing might want some player feedback: "You already have a more powerful spell active." Also there are so many light spells that are arguably side-grades, just-replace seems like it will be simpler for players.

* Possibly present in the original game... but the "Darkness" message is effectively blocked by "Something special is near". That is, if you move to a new square that is facing "something special" then you will not know that your current square is in darkness, even if you turn to face other directions where no special is detectable. Casting a light spell (which is then turned off again) will enable the Darkness message. It would be superior if Darkness would appear when turning in place on a Darkness square, or even beter if Darkness appeared in concert with the notification about something special being near.

* When entering the description for a save file, various characters re not accepted, such as ? , . - + = _ / \ : or ; While some of these are not legal for the windows filesystem, many are. Meanwhile, characters like & # ! and so on are accepted. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to this behavior. There is also no information about what can be used provided or any feedback when input is silently discarded.

Bugs:

* Compounding the previously mentioned problems of: 1 - (design error) light spells show the wrong distances, 2 - (automap misbehavior) doors used by parties in the dark are not mapped. We have: The automap does not map the distances that the spells can officially see. If I use Lesser Revela tion which should show three squares, and in this game was changed bizarrely to show two squares, the automap only maps one square away. At first blush this seems innocuous, and I didn't care much about this change for the entirty of the sewers or catacombs. However, as you get further in the game and the dungeon design becomes more intensely anti-mapping, this becomes all the more out-of-step with the actual game it's in. There are areas where the darkness zones are set up so that you must map things that are some distance from where you're standing, but the game chooses not to do so. There are also one-way doors in darkness where getting them onto the map involves going back to the other side of the one-way-door and then casting a light spell to get a glimpse of the layout, which may confusingly fail because of the weird distance limitations on the mapping. The current behavior could be acceptable in a different set of dungeons which didn't make the behavior dumb, but in this case it's simply incorrect for tor the content it's in.

* To further this, there are one-square rooms with antimagic in Kylerean's Tower which prevent you from casting a light spell. They border on Darkness zones, so you can't ever get the doors correctly onto the map.

* The mechanics of Advance have changed and do not work reasonably. It's possible for the party to choose to Advance, and then have that fail because one of the foes summons an enemy. Having a summon block the ability to advance might be reasonable in another game, but in this game you must sacrifice the turn of every member of your party in order to advance, which is then cancelled. This makes even less sense than the base game (Bard's Tale 2 or 3). Further balance changes could be made to make this not so broken, but it would be better to simply return to the behavior in the games you are remastering and cause party advance to simply happen first in the round.

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An aside: Intentionality is not a guarantee of non-bug. In my day job, I have fixed hundreds of bugs which were introduced to systems intentionally, because the person choosing to make the system work that way did not think through the results of their actions. If I provide a complete rationale for why something is broken, it's pretty uninteresting to say "but they meant it to be like that". It doesn't matter. Commenting further on the design might be interesting.

The original game (at least the 2gs version) has this same issue (aside from only needing to type 5 numbers). It can be quite annoying if you pressed 'N', then a digit other than '1', and then need to re-order your party back afterwords (I hope you remember your party order).

When handling this, one will eventually need to consider how Batchspell should behave. For example, what should happen if Batchspell is cast when Cat Eyes is active (Batchspell casts Greater Revelation, which is better in some respects but doesn't last as long), or if it's cast when Shadow Shield (from BT3) is active (Shadow Shield is better than YMCA which is cast by Batchspell).

Also, in BT3, there's a bard song that gives you a compass (even in anti-magic zones). How should that song interact with the spell? (How does the light song interact with light spells, anyway?)

The move character freeze bug is pretty bad actually. Only completely restarting the game allows you to select the character again.

I noticed another thing: Flame Column's tooltip shows it deals 22-88 damage, but it really is 22-28. Pretty weak considering it costs 14 SP.

Can you describe this? I'm not sure I've seen it described or encountered it. Hmm, when testing this over a few hundred attacks, the highest damage I get is 27. Did you get a 28?
Okay, another 40 or so and a 28. I hope it's a data entry typo.

Because I feel like it, here are the implications of this spell on game balance (assuming everything else works as in the original, and ignoring range differences):
* If it does 22-28 damage, what you have is a single group Mind Blade spell; this spell, however, costs more than MIBL and has worse targeting, making it only useful for casters who skipped Sorcerer or left Sorcerer before getting level 5 spells (but why would you do that?). This most resembles its usefulness in BT2 and BT3 (though, in BT3 there's also the mechanic of elemental resistance/weakness which muddies the waters a little).
* If it does 22-88 damage (same as in BT2 and BT3), it's actually quite powerful by BT1 standards. This puts it as slightly stronger than the BT1 Dragonwand (and therefore stronger than any general purpose multi-target attack previously available to spellcasters), but slightly weaker than the Dragonshield or Frost Horn. Then again, BT1 *does* have the Flame Horn (40-160 damage to a group) and some monsters (Soul Sucker, powerful demons) have even stronger breath attacks, so this spell isn't the most powerful one in the game. It does increase the usefulness of spellcasters endgame.

By the way, does anyone have a list of all the spells that were added in the remaster? I'm curious. (Also, does REST still make FLAN obsolete as soon as it's available, or have those healing spells been tweaked like they were in BT3?) Hearing about FOFO and FLCO in the BT1 remaser makes me wonder about Storal's Soul Whip and Wacum's Wizard War, both powerful spells by BT1 standards (though SOWH at least only hits one enemy, so it can't be more powerful than STTO in the original, which could hit back row enemies due to the lack of the range mechanic).

If I switch order of characters by drag&drop and drop it not exactly then the status bar I moved gets "stuck" where I let go of the mouse button. When reloading the stuck status bar is actually even visible on the loading screen. And reloading also does not fix it. Restarting the full game fixed it, though.

I've recently switched to "big 3D" mode but I'm not sure if the bug happened before or after that.

Bugs:

* As reported by others, Crystal Golem re-spawns even if you are using the crystal sword at the time, even if you have hit him with the Crystal Sword. Killing it with the sword does work. This change is not very defensible, because it is incorrect for players who know the game, and it is not very discover-able for players who are new to the game. Using the Sword does nothing, and fighting with the sword will usually not result in a success. There isn't even a message suggesting that it is effective particularly, you just fail and may have no idea why. Additionally, the combat is mis-scaled so that over-levelled characters using the Crystal Sword will still miss a majority of the time until various buffs are applied to them. This is intended as a puzzle not a harder-to-hit opponent than any other in the game.

* Similar to the "statis chamber" in the catacombs, the "sting" in Kylerean's tower does nothing.

UI problems:

* Similar to other items "There is an onyx key lying on the floor" and the silver square etc. Nothing about picking them up is mentioned.

* While the party is in town, in the journal the Apport Arcane button is active, and if clicked will request a choice of spellcaster. No successful teleportation is possible, however. The inevitable failure provides no feedback as well. At least the spell points are not spent. Ideally the button would not be active in this situation and clicking on it would message that Apport Arcane is not active within Skara Brae. Some flavor text might be nice.

* The use of BT3-style ability numbers is pretty dumb. In BT3, the numbers were percentages so had external meaning. If you went from 80 to 90, you would fail half as often. In this game, they are just random values that go up which have no external meaning. What's the point of showing them then? The game doesn't let you discover by any means other than laborious testing or reverse engineering what these numbers are tested against.

Actually tried the remaster on another computer (just briefly), and, from this, a few things:

1. In the temple of the Mad God, once you give the correct answer, you are not prompted again. This means that it is impossible to challenge the "burger" fights with an endgame party.

2. If your front line is wiped out, and the battle round hasn't ended, enemies will attack characters in the back; this is not how the original games worked. (Tested via the "burger" fight.)

3. There's no way (sort of using something like Task Manager or (if running via WINE) the Linux kill command) of quitting the game during battle, and there really should be. (Also, this should be possible in the middle of a combat round in case of an intra-party combat softlock (crazy/possessed hostile character can't kill themself, or two can't kill each other); this would also allow a "terminate party" option (available from the pause menu, would instantly wipe out your entire party) to be usable in this situation.)

Yeah, would have nice to have burger battle available at any point.

I'm glad the easter egg is there at all, though it interacts very obnoxiously with... It was super irritating to wonder if the easter egg was there and then be stuck waiting for the party to die before I was permitted to reload. (And then discovered that autosave my party as dead. Which is in the spirit of the original, but conflicts awkwardly with expectations set by autosave in general.)

If the game includes instant-save and instant-load, loading should be a way to get out of combat.

You can actually load during combat. The ESC button is blocked but you can still click on the "Pause" symbol in the top-left corner to open the menu.

Great news, I have a personal workaround, and we can reclassify this under "UI problems".

Thanks for the hint! Esc shouldn't be blocked really. But may be saving should be simply disabled during combat, if that was the intention.