I'll say it again: This game is a freaking disaster.
Your character growth is limited by an arbitrary mechanic called mastery slots (think about how Diablo 3 limits you to 5 skills, except you have even less than that here). Just levelled up and got a cool new skill? Sorry, you have to swap out another cool skill to use it. And that includes spells! So out of your massive pool of 12(!) spells (eventually...you start with like 3), you can only have 1-2 spells available to use at any one time. It's comical how there's a final spell for being an 'Archmage', after you've selected all the other final mage spells, when I see no point in having so many spells if I can't use them.
And you start each battle with 0 spell points and have to build them up each round, which makes using your mage painfully slow and frustrating. I levelled up enough to get some spells that cost 4 SP to cast, and I'm just thinking, WTF is the point??
Oh, and spell damage is based on Strength, which means that your high-STR mage does more melee damage than your high-CON fighter. And since your opportunity points (ie, action points) for each round are spread among your entire party, your mage and rogue use all your action points to do damage, while your fighter LITERALLY just stands there as a meat shield and takes damage.
All damage and defense values are constant, so there is no variance in action results. This makes combat feel more like a puzzle, where you're trying to calculate the most efficient way of doing damage to get a 35-HP mob down to 0. And what happens over time is, you soon find the optimal sequence of actions for your characters to take to systematically take down mobs, and pretty soon you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again every combat.
There are NO stat-increases on level-ups. There are a few minor stat increases available in the skill tree, but all substantial stat increases are obtained through item bonuses (picture finding some armor that provides +6 strength, +5 Armor Class, +2 spell points, and +3 Intelligence, and figuring out whether to swap it with your armor that gives +8 strength, +4 Armor Class, +3 spell points, and +2 Intelligence). With itemization so important, I found myself constantly perusing all of the shops for better items, which of course are spread out everywhere (including some down in the dungeon beneath the city). Oh, and I could only afford to buy one really good item with decent stats, because gold is sparse and there are no random encounters available anywhere to farm.
There's a lot of consternation on the official forums that this isn't a "real Bard's Tale" game because of all the different mechanics (which is obvious and goes without saying), but I'll go a step further: This is not a real CRPG, at least not in the classic sense that we all know and love. This is some kind of hybrid puzzle-game/card-game experimental mish-mash of a disaster. The game reeks of millennial game designers (the project lead was too young to play BT when it was released) who are trying to be edgy and unique, and in the process they've put a really dark stain on one of the classic CRPG series of all time.
I played the beta until I gathered all the pre-made characters and was able to make my own, but I completely lost interest and have had no urge to fire it up again to play. The release date will be a giant thud for me. If I could get my Kickstarter pledge money back, I would...