Thursday, September 25, 2014

BB 301 - Reactions to character creation and options

So it's been a while since I've updated my blog. Here are the reactions to the character creation and options for BB 301.

Options:
Starting off from the top, I looked through the options menu: everything looks great there. I'm loving that they continue to add the options in as more features are added. Great job.

Issues with Options:
The one issue I continue to have is the font scaling option. It really throws off a lot of the description texts at the lowest and highest settings. At 130%, for example, I can't read the description of Trial of Iron when creating a new game. Furthermore, at least in character creation, the font size adjustment doesn't necessarily adjust font sizes globally. There may be other locations where this is also the case.

Character Creation:
Heavily improved. Still need to consider changing the order of categories during creation: perhaps sex, race, culture, class, attributes, appearance, and voice is a better order? I also really like the new icons that pop up for each race, sex, class. One thing I haven't talked about before is the sub-race advantages. They are extremely cool and are mechanically interesting. Great job for putting that in. Attributes have changed dramatically, and I believe for the better. I'm sure there will be other larger discussions about attributes so I will hold off on commenting too much, but suffice it to say that I like both the shift to negative effects (I caught myself wanting to make less drastic changes to my min/maxing) and the new changes to what the attributes effect. It was much harder to make proper choices and both resolve and perception has good reasons for picking them.

My favorite icons


Issues with Character Creation:
1- Starting abilities are still not well-aligned and difficult to read through because of the mess of words. I am thinking indentations might help; perhaps placing the icons in front of each ability might also be useful?
2- The description box sizes also continue to be too small and increasing their sizes might be helpful.
3- Along the same lines as above, the spells with extremely long names continue to print in indecipherably small font sizes. Chanter spell names have more of a tendency to do this. Font size adjustments don't fix this problem.
4- The cultures also continue to only adjust a small subset of the attributes, foregoing constitution and perception. Both Old vailia and Rautai correspond to intellect while the White that Wends and Deadfire Archipelago correspond to dexterity.
5- A few bugs that were described in the forums already.

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