Beta/Demo Feedback

[Jade Tyrant]

Having just played through the entire demo, I took notes on various things that I noticed throughout. I'll try to group them by type, since some are more opinion than others.

Mechanical Bugs/Issues:
- Minor issue where text in Chapter 1 didn't seem to match exact wording of the voice acting. (Only noticed this once; I believe it was on one of Gwyn's lines.)
- Controller did not seem to get recognized naturally, and Steam Input was required.
- On controller, the B button (Circle on a PS5 controller, but I was using Steam Input as mentioned above) does not seem to consistently work to speed things; my best guess from what I noticed is that it only works if held at the start of an enemy's movement/at the start of combat, and can't be started in the middle?
- "Call the Storm" has a blue icon but apparently didn't count as a "Blue Skill" in chapter 2
- tile in top right of map in chapter 2 has appearance of bush but shows as floor
- Combat prediction UI can go off the bottom/top of the screen when the selected unit is toward the edge of the screen
- Text boxes (non-dialogue, the center of the screen ones) overflow occasionally (on max resolution, 3840x2160)
- Scrolling down to a second or third ability on one character in the Abilities window, then switching to another character without that number of abilities, will have an empty box show up on the second character. You can move back up to a skill that character does have, but it's not intuitive to do so since you can't see the invisible ability that the cursor is on.
- Unit Info ability icons seem messed up upon promotion. From my observations, it takes the 2 promoted ability icons and shifts them up by 1; so the base ability has the second ability icon, the second ability has the third ability's icon, and the third ability keeps its icon properly.
- Weapon icons in Weapon section of shop are incorrect.
- Arthur's sprite disappeared when he used Starsurge through Alden and leveled up by doing so
- Enemy range seems to think they can move through ally units
- Game occasionally acts as if I do not have enough MP for abilities despite having it; occasionally it works the other way around and lets me select an ability I do not have the MP for (gets to "choose a target" part), though it doesn't let me cast it
- (Unsure of what happened exactly) Valerie somehow did an ability that granted people block on Chapter 3 despite still being a Nightblade; I'd selected and then backed out of using Riordan's "Call the Pride" just beforehand, which may have caused Valerie to cast it? At first she seemed to still have max MP, but her MP was not max next turn; unfortunately I'm writing this after the fact, but I am fairly certain I did not use any ability that costs MP with Valerie.
- (Unsure of what happened exactly) "Call the Pride" does not seem to stay limited to 3 tiles; saw it apply to allies 4+ tiles away multiple times, though unclear if I just somehow missed a different ability that also caused Block stacks to apply to those other units?
- (Unsure if bug or misunderstanding of functionality) "Call the Storm", when used in Chapter 2, seemed to miss a unit 2 south of the user and only hit 1 enemy that was diagonally NW of the user. Based on skill description, there should have been enough damage to do the damage cap to both enemies. Other uses did not seem to have this issue.
- (Unsure if bug or design decision) Numbers at bottom of screen change when a critical activates or when Block stacks are active, which gets a little confusing when the numbers change mid-combat.
- (Unsure if bug or design decision) Elixirs menu seems to hit A on both the character and the list of elixirs at the same time when on controller; though the confirmation of "Do you want to use the elixir?" does prevent accidental use.
- (Unsure if bug or design decision) I can select units in "View Units" menu but it doesn't seem to do anything but lock me onto that unit; no menu or anything, or further ability to inspect the unit info window.

Opinions and QoL Suggestions:
- Show visually which enemies have their attack range toggled on. It's a very helpful feature, and means I don't have to go try and toggle enemies to see if their range is on, or if other enemy ranges that are showing are just overlapping with that enemy's range already.
- Being able to see how much movement a tile takes would be nice.
- At the start of chapter 2, I had a slight moment of confusion at "wait who are my enemies?" before I properly made the connection that it was in fact the red healthbar enemies. Potentially, having enemies facing the opposite way as players/allies could help distinguish them at a glance more easily.
- Having a way to inspect enemies, even just to see what the icons mean. A tutorial talks about the skull icon at the start of chapter 3, but those icons show up in Chapter 2. There's also the potion icon which I don't remember ever getting explained.
- Movement should probably be listed somewhere on a unit's stats?
- This one is completely opinion, but there should probably be a name difference between Speed the stat and Speed as 'effective Speed' (speed - weight) on the unit info window. Currently, they're only separate by virtue of where they're listed.
- A way to see what debuffs listed on skills do; it wasn't clear to me what "poison stacks" did outside of just testing on an enemy and then looking at the new debuff. A way to inspect skills in general for more detail would be nice.
- Adding an option for cycling through units to only cycle through units who can still take action. Currently it just cycles through all of your units, even if they have already moved.
- There seems to be no way to inspect what the shop items (especially weapons, since the others do become more obvious once you look at other menus) are before buying them that I can figure out. When money is a limited resource and we seem meant to make strategic decisions about how to spend it, being able to know exactly what we're buying seems important.
- Put End Phase at bottom of the pop-up menu and not the top; I never did so myself, but it feels too easy to accidentally double tap and end your turn early.
- Choosing between two targets diagonal from each other doesn't work well using D-pad on controller; have to press both down *and* left at the same time, for example, rather than the game accepting either left *or* down, while pressing right seems to work just fine for diagonally up and right. I'm not sure if this is a mechanical issue/bug per se, which is why I listed it in this section, but it was a bit odd.

Despite the long list of stuff above, I did enjoy the demo! The gameplay was fun, I like the ability system and how non-attack abilities let you use the ability and attack in the same turn (though it makes some of the combat abilities feel a bit weak; the ones that were just "more damage" felt fine, but some of the fixed damage ones felt a bit weaker). I intend to go back and see how things play out on the two choices I didn't take the first time through, and I like that - at least from the first run through - none of the choices exactly felt great (in the narrative). It felt like a proper choice - and while personally I'm not too attached to the reward differences between the choices, I do appreciate that for less narratively-driven players, it gives reasons to take different paths beyond just different maps.

[Demonic Duck]

also, can't seem to equip the rings and being able to compare weapons in the shop or equip screen would be nice