The game looks really interesting and it has definitely caught my attention. Honestly the only thing that stands out as off-putting are the animations/visuals in combat. Seeing the characters stacked directly on top of each other makes the combat look messy and it seems like enemies/allies clump up on top of each other when initating combat which looks pretty bad. The animations themselves are also not ideal as they seem weirdly fluid but also disjointed? Any input on whether or not this is something that could be addressed or alleviated?
Sorry you are irritated by the combat animations. I don't know how to fix somethig that is at the same time both fluid and disjointed. Can you take another stab at explaining what you mean by that? Clumping is an issue in almost all iso based combat in fantasy RPG's. We are still tinkering with this issue and trying to minimized this effect. What you can't see in the prmo materials is that we allow the player to zoom in fairly far while conducting combat which alleviates this clumping issue a fair amount since the clumping phenomenon is to some extent a function of Zoom level.
Disjointed isn't exactly the right word, maybe jerky might fit better. Just to give a general example about animations that I find a bit bothersome is the fight in the video from 0:23.5 to 0:25.5 roughly.
The attacks from both the player character and the enemy seem to phase right through each other. There is no heft to anything, and then the way they reset to deliver the exact same animation is jarring. An idea of how to alleviate this might be to have a transitory animation, or make the character do two-three seperate attacks before resetting the sequence over again to repeat so that combat doesn't look repetitive/simplistic. From 0:22 to 0:23.5 we see a bit of that too as it just looks like a bunch of enemies swinging at nothing almost, and since they're all pretty much the same animation from a first glance, it just feels a bit clusterfucky. The backswing after an attack to reset the animation is I think the bit that I'd consider to be "disjointed" or "jerky", though I might be using the wrong adjectives.
The fight is admittedly taking place at a door frame but still.
In Baldur's Gate the game is generally played more zoomed out, with sprites being smaller than in your game, so you didn't really notice the animations repeating and/or the clumping nearly as much as you do here, which is why I feel like it does detract a bit from the visual clarity and overall appeal which is what you're alluding to with your post. Perhaps when the game is more zoomed out it isn't as bad or even noticeable, but I am just going by what I can see in the trailer.
As a side note, I will also say that while I think the art itself is actually pretty good, a minor thing is the saturation or contrast in some of the images seems weird? Some of the surfaces seem to blend together due to similar colors and/or undefined lines between objects, though I really only noticed this in the areas where there are bright/light colors being used such as shown below.
Other parts of the trailer that are darker looked quite good such as these screenshots.
Although in the bottom screenshot the way the light looks on the shopkeeper does again look a bit weird, although it's a nonissue in that screenshot. The background of the fight against the Kobald where I was talking about the animations above also looks good as another example.
And do note that while my first post in the thread is criticism and some others in the thread have done the same, both constructively as well as in a cringe, edgy manner, I am still excited to see the game! If it is good, rest assured it will receive its laurels and I'm sure many others will be happy to buy and play it. That being said whenever we get a chance to critique something that we see wrong in the game especially to an active dev, it is an opportunity that we shall take in hope that the game is either improved or our concerns are alleviated. So keep up the good work!
