I played a bit more through Sword Coast Legends campaign story, finally reached Luskan. There is things I really like in this game and others I find annoying. I decided to make a melee-Ranger after trying all the classes through the prologue (less or more).
Annoying:
Why does setting a character in search mode means it needs to walk at half speed? There are proficiency to remove the speed reduction, but that just make the start of the game slow and force you to control the character with the highest search value for a few hours. PoE had a similar design, but at least there everyone was put at the same speed so you didn't need to control that character.
My ranger has to re-summon her wolf after zoning each and every time. I also think it disappear after some conversation/cutscene. PoE had a similar problem where the dev at some point made it so the ranger companion was re-summoned at zoning because of some issues with Unity.
Pathfinding is sometimes very good, sometimes very awful and on top of it Hommet is very slow to follow the party all the time. Yeah, that means you can get screwed in a fight because one of you party showed up late because is name is Hommet or she/he got stuck somewhere.
The AI can be a pain to work with. The Cleric doesn't always heal almost dead party members, I have to tell her to do it (this seems distance related though, she does it better when close to the melees). Also, I saw one case of Hommet casting his sleep one another enemy than the one I told him to…but Hommet is a Harpell from the look of it so it might be normal.
The abilities/talents/spells or the lack of it. I don't mind the cooldowns or that you have to buy stuff with proficiency points, but I don't like the lack of variety and "layout". For example, Rangers can use two-handed weapons, but they don't have access to the two-handed "skill tree" so that means they don't get access to cleave which doesn't even require a two-handed weapon. Mage and Clerics have very few spells to select from too. The good news is that modders are already working to fix this, changing classes seems to be relatively easy as is making new abilities. Actually, modders are hard at work making the game more in line with 5e, the real question is if this will work with the main campaign or not.
The fun part:
Half-randomized dungeons. In story mode, the dungeon maps have similar rooms, but they aren't necessarily organized the same way each time you replay it. Also, some of them are large with inter-connected rooms which I really like after playing lots of dungeon-corridors RPGs in the last few years.
Hidden stuff: doors, loot, traps, etc. I love finding hidden stuff. There is also hand-placed and randomized one.
Scouting is fun. Having a rogue or ranger using stealth to scout is great, just be careful if you get spotted in a room full of enemies and the rest of the party is far behind (because you know periodic DC checks…)
Game difficulty, I'm playing on normal and I gets into bind once in a while. Apparently, that evaporate once you get lots of cooldown reduction gear and gets a few more ability. We will see.
Also, I like the companions and the storyline so far. It's a bit over the top in a way, but I think it just make it more PnP-like because of it. In the prologue, there is a few quests with different ways of resolving them as well. Also, stats check in conversations, but unlike PoE you won't know in advance if you pass or fail them.
Finally, WTF is an abyssal rat, this game need a bestiary like PoE does.
