Came to post some impressions too. I only played for ~5 hours so far.
Area design:
1. The city of BG feels more alive. Guards patrol, people walk around and talk to each other, doors open and close, things like that. It's surprising even, Vanilla was like a static image in comparison. The refugees flooding the city feels exactly like that, people fucking everywhere, walking, getting in your way, sounds of footsteps everywhere. Feels crowded and alive. Mages casting some simple spells on rats. Everyone's doing something. I often stopped just to see if a cutscene was going on or if people were just doing their usual shit. That was refreshingly good.
Combat:
2. Battles are actually challenging on "Core" already. Some encounters in the tutorial, I had to retry 4-5 times with full prebuff. Basically SOD recognizes that there are "cheesy tactics" and accounts for them by making encounters more difficult.
Writing:
3. New books. 50% of them are less boring than Vanilla's, but other 50% are bad, like "oh wow, I wish I hadn't read that" bad.
4. There was a dream sequences akin to the ones you get in BG2, but it was... like someone decided to make one, but didn't know quite what to put in it. Felt forced and there was no reason for it. But then there was familiar voice acting and that part was good. Mixed feelings.
5. I like that random NPCs would sometimes inform you of something and then it'd turn out to be false information. I complained before that PoE never did that, but Beamdog did.
6. Edwin lines are horrible, cringe-worthy. Whoever wrote the new Edwin must be castrated or punished physically somehow. Here's his new "lines":
(there are no spoilers, it's just one-liners)
^ Whoever wrote that is literally
fucking retarded.
Probably the same person who wrote this:
(no spoilers)
This Edwin horrible writing is beyond good and evil. How hard is it to get that he's got delusions of grandeur bordering on slight symptoms of schizophrenia, and he's not just an infantile idiot like this writer seems to think. This writer thinks Edwin is evil Minsc basically. What the fuck.
Engine:
6. I don't know how they managed it, but they somehow fucked up the opengl rendering. It gave me choppy experience with FPS jumping 20 to 30 all the time. Switched over to DX and it was fine after that. But gave me quite a scare before I found the fix.
7. The webm movies inserted into game in place of particles look horrible when playing at locked zoom, lol. Just as I predicted they would.
TLDR:
- one of the writers suffers from trisomy 21, but others are okay (I have some strong suspicions of who that might be, obviously, in light of recent events...)
- combat is more challenging
- the world feels more alive
