5 Things that'd be nice to get:

[Bolt]

In case anyone cares:

1) Camera:
The current camera uses an angle instead of straight top-down view. Each time some high object blocks something I've to rotate the camera and that's what I do a lot in this game: Rotate the camera. It's annoying.
It's annoying when I have to do this to be able to click an area because objects like roof hooks block my intended click, it's annoying to run along somewhere and to realize that what I thought was cover from my isometric view has spots in it that allow view cones to see through it, it's annoying whenever walls and corners come into play, forcing me to turn and turn just to be able to get into that corner or work efficiently with corners and objects behind walls.
So a straight top-down view for the camera would be a major improvement even while not looking so pretty it'd benefit the gameplay. Could be an option menu setting for the camera's angle.

2) A "select all" button:
Currently the game has the mouse or the "add character to / remove character from selection" button + the charcter as option to add characters to the selection. A "select all characters" button would be faster and simpler to use.

3) View cone watcher:
The placeable view cone watcher, revealing when enemies look at it doesn't differ between the view cone sections of of enemies that either allow or don't allow crouching while that'd be relevant and helpful to the player.

4) Enemy spotted = view cone reselection:
It's good that an enemy spotting a character has it's view cone selected. That selection, however, should only persist while it matters and then reselect the actual, player-selected target or it should be an extra view cone, only visible while it matters (while line of sight persists to one of the characters).
Otherwise it'd be helpful to be able to select and deselect as many view cones as desired, or, if that would make things too easy, 3 to 5 only.

5) Hooks (usable world object to get onto roofs):
Please redesign their clickable area. It's too huge and far too often just in the way, blocking actually intended clicks and leading to characters using them without ever having any intend to do that just because their click area is so damn huge: The whole distance the hook covers is a huge, invisible, click-blocking, control loss and undesired actions causing mess.

Other:
I noticed that the timer on speedruns doesn't reset when loading an earlier save unless reloading the level and then the save state again. I don't know what of both is intended but one is definately wrong.

[Bolt]

An idea:
To avoid running into an out of screen view cone (basically an unexpected view cone that comes from nowhere) the mouse cursor could get a color indicator. So if the point the mouse cursor is actually at has no enemy view cone it's a generic green, if it's a crouch area still it's yellow and if any enemy view cone would be a close range one that can't be avoided it could be a red cursor.

[Bolt]

Issue with mission#5 (kill Lord Yabu):
-making him unconscious
-throwing his body into a well

Issue:
-doesn't count as kill
-can't get his body back
-can't kill the body in the well

Edit: Throwing an explosive grenade kills him and everybody else in the well, I suppose.

Another issue with mission#5 considering Takuma's grenades:
The objective menu's tutorial section should get an entry explaining that these can be toggled between the even Samurai killing, loud, explosive version and the +1 extra range, silent, putting enemies to sleep version by right-clicking on them.

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Considering ropes (the one's that some characters can walk on):
They sometimes block an area to click on simply by being in the way (on top of where I want to click in 3D). Pathfinding should consider that I am referring to the character's current groundlevel at that position, not the multiple levels higher rope that's just in the way and munched my click. Currently these ropes sometimes are just in the way, causing my character to give me a "can't do that"-like error response, stopping instead of going there where I clicked just because the rope was in the way.

Using fists:
Would be nice if fists would be listed somewhere in the character section for those that can use them to compare their animation duration between characters and with other actions. Minor issue but I think as it's a character action it just belong somewhere along with an informative tooltip to it.

[coru]

Those are some very good points :) Some of them are allready known, others are interessting thoughts.
I will put them down for our next project, i can't say if we can currently change any of this in the current game. So i cant make promises.

[Demon of Razgriz]

The only thing I disagree with would be the top down camera thing. If it is an option, like he said, I would be ok with it, but I would not want a forced top down camera with no option for a camera like we have now.

[coru]

Originally posted by -SG1-Shadowscall:

The only thing I disagree with would be the top down camera thing. If it is an option, like he said, I would be ok with it, but I would not want a forced top down camera with no option for a camera like we have now.

That will never happen, don't worry ;) The game would look very bad, many shaders would break etc. This is not something we are aiming for.
The goal to fix the problem has to be making it so you either dont have to turn the camera so much, or making readability / clickability in these situations better.

[Bolt]

Just adding after further playthrough (I know none of this will cause any change of the current but perhaps the next game of that kind).

The pistol for Takuma was kind of pointless. He already has a rifle. A pistol is just more of the same. You know what: This is a Ninja game and yet no one ever uses a smoke bomb ! Make Takuma have them.
The pistol slot could become a smoke bomb slot with 2 kinds of them as toggle option:
Toggle#1 = smoke bomb -> thrown; medium range; covers large area; lasts long enough to get even through snow area without leaving visible footprints (running); intended to locally cover up some area to skip enemies or deal with others unseen; acts as vision blocking object that characters can also move into; enemies have 0 sight range within the effect but so do our characters and so enemies inside the smoke become unattackable to us
Toggle#2 = smoke grenade -> rolled on the ground from Takuma to target location (medium-long line of range that is increased or reduced, depending on whether it rolls up- or downhill on it's path); creates a short-lasting smoke effect periodically while the grenade rolls on the ground that blocks enemy lines of sight through it and that characters can move into to become unseen while inside the effect and it lasts; intended as wall of smoke, allowing characters to move from A to B unseen, fast and once

Considering Takuma's grenades: There are poison grendes (larger area than regular grenades, making no noise) and regular grenades (leathal, making noise, smaller area covered). Actually the regular grenades should have the larger blast radius while the poison grenades should have the smaller radius to justify the noise the regular ones are making. Otherwise they're just made too bad as they already share their ammo counter with poison grenades.

Takuma's sniper rifle: If used for shadow mode it'll show a green "line of sight" line even while the affected target is out of range. It should rather switch to a dotted red (no line of sight) or green (with line of sight) line to indicate not just whether line of sight exists but also whether the target is actually in range for shadow mode. Similarly other characters using pistols should have the same indicator, opposed to the current status of no indicators at all despite similar functionality.

For abilities in general noise indicators are missing from time to time. Some abilities (Shuriken) have them for affected enemies, other abilities (any melee attack) lack them.
Also range indicators sometimes are off. I've had it a number of times that enemies that were close by an effect but clearly shown outside the effect's range would still react to the effect without being grouped up with the affected target (often on height differences).

Wanting to throw bodies off some cliff / bridge or into some house etc. or wanting to make a character jump from a roof or from roof to roof sometimes becomes a pain as the option to do is very clunky as to use that interaction there's no clear indicator or button but instead the cursor needs to be moved across all potential areas that could cover up such an action in the hope of finding a usable spot. It's pretty clunky at times and characters tend to use their special areas rather than anything close by.

Objectives-wise it'd be nice if I could just select some objective(s) I want to do and then the characters would adapt to that. Example: Objective says "don't put out any fires and don't extinguish any torches" / "don't kill anybody" / "don't use ladders, hooks etc." -> if I'd select all of these characters shouldn't auto-extinguish any torches, fires should become click-through and no interaction objects, even if explicitely ordered to do so; all of the characters' lethal abilties would be disabled and melee attack turned into fists only, the same would be the case for objective-breaking interaction with lethal objects in a level; characters would just ignored ladders, hooks etc. and just not interact with them anymore while the matching objectives were tracked
=> that way accidental clicks due to the camera angle wouldn't cause objective breaking anymore; annoying auto-actions of characters would have an option to be turned off instead of forcing a reload; it'd be a whole lot less stressful without having to watch out for unintended stuff and with just being able to play

The button for tracking vision cones is also used as "cancel current action" button for characters. This causes 3 issues:
1) 3D objects may block a click on an enemy while it at first didn't seem like that would happen -> player is forced to re-assign the already given order of the character and also potentially missed a chance due to the character stopping & having to invest some time again with fixing that unintended stop of action
2) while wanting to actually cancel an action the player has to watch out to not accidently click on an enemy because otherwise that enemie's vision cone is selected rather than the character action being canceled
3) tracking vision cones becomes a *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* effort
-> it'd be far better if the vision cone had it's own button that players cold hold and while holding move over multiple enemies, making it auto-select the cone of whatever enemy is currently on the cursor

For the speedruns, required as an objective of each mission, I'd rather have a strict top-down view of the camera as this offers multiple advantages over the default camera using an angle. The most urgent issue this strict top-down view would fix would be that I could finally order my characters to get arounc corners and behind objects without having to turn the camera x times per corner just to be capable to do so. Also characters would stop using hooks all the time just because of the camera angle forcing them to be in the way of actually intended clicks all the time.

The speedrun timer on quicksaves is still broken: It still doesn't reset to it's proper value when loading quicksaves but rather just continues counting.

Edit:
Key config-wise it'd be great if key combinations were a thing.
Example: Currently shadow mode requires +1 button per character to cancel while with modifier key it could just be 1 button for all.
So instead of the buttons 7 / 8 / 9 to start or buttons J / K / L to cancel character 1 / 2 / 3's shadow mode action we could have SHIFT + 1 / 2 / 3 to start and CTRL + 1 / 2 / 3 to cancel character 1 / 2 / 3's action. Easier to memorize, less buttons to use.

[Bolt]

Some more things after playing again:
1) range indicator on jumps onto enemies:
If enemies walk below and it's possible to use a (non-)leathal jump action on them a range indicator would be nice so if a group of let's say 3 guardsmen walk along I know exactly when everyone is in range.

2) jumps in general:
They sometimes seem to be possible only from certain spots instead of using a general higher to lower = always possible as long as the angle and range allow it rule. That makes it sometimes strange how characters act or where they have to go.

3) distinct actions:
I'd like to have distinct buttons for distinct actions to avoid accidental wrong commands.
Example: I've bound a seperate key for "run" actions so I'd like to disable the mouse's double click that also causes the characters to run to avoid accidental orders.
Likewise I'd like to get a seperate button for using objects (doors etc.) and interacting with enemy bodies instead of using the same button for both, resulting in characters sometimes doing the wrong thing when both kinds are close together and overlapping.
This has already been done for the lethal and non-lethal melee options and works well.

4) jump attacks not available:
Guards that can be jump-attacked have to walk past my characters without being able to attack them at least once because the jump attacks aren't selectable unless an enemy is in range for such a jump attack. These attacks should either be available like any other order at all times or the game should get a pause mode in which it's possible to order my characters to do stuff so that I can order each one to do the jump attack without having the guards walking past the characters which are above at least once (but usually more than once due to having to make sure all are in range to be able to attack at the same time). I'd prefer the pause mode which would also allow additional view cone checking as multiple ones can't be tracked and they often come from outside or the corner of a screen.

[coru]

Thanks for all the suggestions!
Some of them of course are more likely to make it into our next game than others, but its always important to get all that feedback, otherwise its hard to improve.
Thanks!