Well then. Let me finally tell you my ICBT story. Took some time, but i had the sniffels, so… (now that im writing this, i notice that i still have it a little.)
First of all, this was my first Betatesting. Ever. Pretty nice feeling, i gotta say.
Second, the actual game. Originally, i wanted to make an dievdirbys, followed up by druid. The first few hours went pretty smooth, besides the problems with steam and the server being overloaded in the beginning. Connection from Germany was good and my Computer with an AMD A8-6600K APU 3,9GHz , together with 7,42 GB was doing pretty fine, i was afraid that i had to low RAM, i guess that’s why characters are often doing weird things with their heads? Anyway, i had rather smooth 30hz, and that’s all i wanted. Sometimes there were lagspikes and slight slowdowns, but nothing major. Im using keyboard as my favorite type of control, which never caused any problems for me.
As for the starting area, it was kinda generic, but non the less made effectivly with some neat story and it had some secrets stashed away, which i very approve of. There is an option to skip it, which is a plus, but that meant i would have atleast missed out of an statpoint from that goddess statue, so i would never do it out of practicability. Of course, i would also never skip it out of principle, and may it only be because of the BGM. Which is top-notch, btw. Oh, and the graphical assets of course aswell. Im a sucker for the 2D-like art. As for the first boss, the mushroom guy near the statue, it is a good designed first boss - from the originality perspective especially. A Tophat wearing mushroom riding on a Turtle? Yes, please! Sadly, i can’t think of another boss being similar artistically interesting. But i always liked fighting the bosses. Anyway, the mushroom guy’s difficulty is spot on. I missed the rock turtle on my cleric.
The main town followed, and the tutorial showed me the most basic NPC’s, but i had to find out about the others… which in retrospective i find good instead of being spoonfed every single detail. However, i would recommend to give the player an option for an advanced tutorial. Some people want to see all their options avaiable from the get go. Also, other games trained our minds with that certain functions are unlocked later down the line, so we wouldn’t know that all functions are unlocked from the get-go and quickly forget about them.
Next, cleric. It was quite nice to see a healer that could actualy stand his own, and it is nice for tutorial reasons that they don’t have to worry about flying mobs until the mines. But then they can quickly get into trouble. Most of the time, i only invested only in INT, so i just ran past all the flying mobs. Thankfully, no bosses do actually “fly”. The Specter boss was much easier for my cleric because of his armor type “ghost”. Later, on my other chars, i found out about his lightning rod summon, which could quickly get out of hand, especially on swordman, because of his short range - archer could circle around the lighning rod without getting hit. After the mines - and after switching to cleric 2 - i soon found out that the exp rates were different then in KCBT. I had an decision between trying to get as far as i could with cleric or trying out other characters. That decision was made easier because the only enemy that i was able kill effectivly were those green running nuts. I would find out later that i could have switched between sword and mace.
Next up, swordsman. I had a lot of fun with him, and i will take him the next time. And may it only be because of berserkers sweet raven feather cape. I really liked his efficency. Gung-ho and concentrate were more then enough to deal with everything. (Besides specter guy mentioned above) Finally knowing about weapon upgrades also helped. I went for highlander and then barbarian. He became my highest leveled character, but i regret putting only str on him. Oh well. I noticed that Cartar stroke was my only effective ability in the underground chapel, killing 6 mobs every now and then, but certainly not in the powerlevels everyone thinks barbarian is in.
On Saturday - before i got the cold - i tried out archer. I created one archer a few day earlier, but he was a fail. The other one was much more useable thanks to scouring the forums about archer info. Knowing about some bows from the database also helped immensely. I put dex into him, but even at level 18 or so i only hit crits every third hit or so. He was still able to hold his own, thankfully. While a little squishy, i never died because of his ability to move while shoot, which is also something i very much approve, i guess i get a little feel from twin stick shooters that way, ha.
And i think that’s enough Textwall. I hope i only extracted somewhat relevant info. Overall, continue your good work. Now i only need to know the underground chapels BGM.
Oh, and ask away if you want to know my opinion about something.