Posted September 15, 2023
Played for about 40 minutes over lunch today, and I have some feedback:
First, I'm having a lot of fun. The graphics are nice and the music and portraits are well done. In general, I think the graphics and music do a great job of capturing that whimsical/terrifying feel of the original games.
Also, I like that we can see our saving throws now. It's nice to see some of the more obscure (but important!) attributes being exposed.
The animations are very fast, and don't seem to be slowing down combat much, if at all. So that's excellent.
The only place where I'm kind of not liking the delay from the animations is when you first start a fight. The monsters do this little pose thing when they first appear. It's possible that's covering up some loading time as we transition into combat. If so, I strongly encourage you guys to look into finding a way to speed that up to keep the game flowing. If it isn't, then an option to skip or speed up the pose animation would be nice.
It's a little bit awkward that we can't seem to inspect our characters in the tavern. In the (DOS version) of the original game, the tavern was where I did most of my party and inventory management. It'd be nice to be able to equip any new gear we buy/identify, pass gear around, that sort of thing before heading into the maze.
Something to consider would be to find a way to communicate to the players when (and what) bonuses they're getting from stats. I think it would be useful for players to be able to see that large ranges of the stats in the middle do nothing, and you only get bonuses/penalties at the high/low ends. This can help assuage people who decide to play with random stat gain/losses, and help players using stat allocation intelligently plan and allocate their stats.
Also, it would be *really* nice if we had a way of organizing characters into parties (maybe in the tavern?). The game encourages the player to have multiple parties going at once, and those memberships will change as people die. If we can easily create and modify multiple parties, then it would be easy to switch between parties, change membership, that sort of thing. As it is, this version of the game is going to have the same problem the original does: as characters die, "date created" is going to be a less and less useful organizational metric, and putting one of your parties together is going to have more and more friction.
First, I'm having a lot of fun. The graphics are nice and the music and portraits are well done. In general, I think the graphics and music do a great job of capturing that whimsical/terrifying feel of the original games.
Also, I like that we can see our saving throws now. It's nice to see some of the more obscure (but important!) attributes being exposed.
The animations are very fast, and don't seem to be slowing down combat much, if at all. So that's excellent.
The only place where I'm kind of not liking the delay from the animations is when you first start a fight. The monsters do this little pose thing when they first appear. It's possible that's covering up some loading time as we transition into combat. If so, I strongly encourage you guys to look into finding a way to speed that up to keep the game flowing. If it isn't, then an option to skip or speed up the pose animation would be nice.
It's a little bit awkward that we can't seem to inspect our characters in the tavern. In the (DOS version) of the original game, the tavern was where I did most of my party and inventory management. It'd be nice to be able to equip any new gear we buy/identify, pass gear around, that sort of thing before heading into the maze.
Something to consider would be to find a way to communicate to the players when (and what) bonuses they're getting from stats. I think it would be useful for players to be able to see that large ranges of the stats in the middle do nothing, and you only get bonuses/penalties at the high/low ends. This can help assuage people who decide to play with random stat gain/losses, and help players using stat allocation intelligently plan and allocate their stats.
Also, it would be *really* nice if we had a way of organizing characters into parties (maybe in the tavern?). The game encourages the player to have multiple parties going at once, and those memberships will change as people die. If we can easily create and modify multiple parties, then it would be easy to switch between parties, change membership, that sort of thing. As it is, this version of the game is going to have the same problem the original does: as characters die, "date created" is going to be a less and less useful organizational metric, and putting one of your parties together is going to have more and more friction.
