suibhne said:
Any RPG fans here with experience in the preview weekends? The game sounds like a mess right now - I've read numerous reflections that it's a terrible adaptation of 5E, and videos make it look like it's really unsuitable for any DM'ing that involves narrative and/or non-combat gameplay (vs. straight-up dungeoneering).
I pre-ordered for the (minor) discount, but I'm on the fence about cancelling.
I'm guessing SirJames had access to it, and I'm surprised we haven't heard his feedback yet.
I played a Human Fighter to level 18. I also made a module with a bit of everything to check out the tools. Clocked about 20 hours playing all weekend.
I'm not really sure how to write this post since it has the potential to be a very lengthy preview.
To answer your questions, suibhne, I think the 5E adaptation is decent. The combat plays out properly with all the standard D&D attack rolls, AC and features like disadvantage. The races are pretty close to 5E and the classes, while missing a fair amount of cool 5E stuff, end up very solid and fun to play and build.
I played a few games with a very enthusiastic DM who went all out doing crazy goblin voices and really trying to give some background behind what was happening in the dungeon (over VOIP). He's still very optimistic about the future of the game. However, most people seemed to be afraid of potential troll DM games or just wanted to work on their main characters so very few games were DM.
As for my feedback, It's not too good. My issues are mostly technical. The game is extremely buggy, poorly optimized and laggy. It will always run at 100% of GPU use on any settings and can really overheat your system. The network lag is awful and the game would desync frequently. However, no character related data was ever lost, no rollbacks or forgetting to save type loss, so none of that fear was around to ruin the game.
The tools are very limiting and don't provide even the basics of what I need to make a good campaign, but I know these are very much in development.
Also worth mentioning, since pre-orders were mentioned, the Tome of Knowledge won't give you an unfair advantage. You get a lot of extra ability score points leveling up and can only raise a score to 20. (items can go beyond this).
If anyone has any questions I'd be happy to try to answer them.