*** This post will be further revised for the next few days as I try to add to the list.
First of all, I am loving the game. I am a huge BW fan, Mass Effect is the Star Wars of my generation, and I regard BioWare the same way I regarded Squaresoft back in the golden generation of console gaming, with trust and admiration. I loved DA:O and I even enjoyed DA2. The second installment definitely felt a bit rushed, but overall I really enjoyed the concept of a new story that takes place mostly in one big city. The characters were all great and my only gripe was that the game ended a bit prematurely; I was expecting a fourth Act.
Fast forward to present day. My first impression of the interface was mostly negative. The scale was unusually large. It reminded me of vanilla Oblivion, and to an extent, vanilla Skyrim. Definite symptoms of consolitis here. The inventory menu is terrible, and is far worse than both of its predecessors. I hate not being able to see which items in the inventory have been equipped without scrolling down and highlighting it. I hate how i can only see a couple lines of my 30+ armor pieces that I've looted.
- The tooltips are bugged. Want to see how much damage a skill/spell does, or how much mana it consumes? The hotbar tooltips only show the skill name. Even in the character menu, on the right hand side where you arrange your hotbar, the tooltips only show the name. If you want to know the details of your skill, you MUST do the following:
1.) press P to enter character menu
2.) find (or guess) the correct skill tree
3.) browse around the skill tree until you find said skill/spell
4.) click on the skill and read the description on the right
- If your active hero has Mana Surge active, ALL tooltip mana costs will show up as 0 even if you're looking at your companions' skill trees. I have no idea how QA let this slip..
- Why is the hotbar limited to 8 skills?!?!? One of the things I loved about DA2 was how you could put as many skills as you want, you just couldn't put it on a hotkey. Maybe it is in accordance to the skill point limit/cap but if you ever run into a situation where you need to sacrifice a skill because there isn't enough space, then there's a problem.
- The inventory system needs a revamp. Unfortunately I'm not sure if BW can make any major changes, so our best bet is probably mods, at least for PC. I really love how we can customize our companions' armors now, unlike in DA2, but unfortunately the menus are such a pain in the backside that most of the time I dont' even bother. The main issue is that the item list is not big enough and we have to constantly scroll to see what we have.
- I'm not certain how to re-create this issue but I've had numerous occasions where I try to talk to someone, but the conversation UI does not come up, I cannot see the answer options, and I can just walk away from the NPC. Conversation is not initiated correctly.
- Dialogue history. Unless I'm blind, and I kind of hope I am, I can't find this feature anywhere. Sometimes I might miss a line of banter, or want to re-read the conversation after a quest cutscene.
- Where do I check next XP to level? I know I can see total XP points in the character screen, although it looks really raw and is just a number. I think there should be an XP bar either in the main menu when you press Esc, or on the bottom of the character screen visible at all times.
- Vendor menu system, there are lots of filters and I'm sure they're useful, but there needs to be an "ALL ITEMS" filter so we don't have to check each one all the time. Also useful for selling as I have to go through each filter to sell stuff. Yes i know there is a feature to send equipment to the junk filter, but unless I can shift click to select multiple items in one go, there's no way i'm going to right click on all of my 30+ pieces of weapons and armor individually to mark them as junk.
Though it's probably too late for Patch 3, I will be continuing to update this post for the next few days as I try to remember all the issues I've experienced so far. I've only played up to Redcliffe so it's still pretty early for me to talk about story or game balance, but I think interface issues are fair grounds as they are unlikely to change later in the game. The tooltips for example bother me the most as they are pretty much useless at the moment.
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