A big thank you to the dev team for the efforts with CEE. (Obviously there are a lot of problems to be solved regarding server play, I’m not ignoring that, but this isn’t about that.)
You’ve given us back ‘persistent custom inventory sorting’ (the ability to set our inventory as we want it, temporarily switch to eg heaviest first and then go back to no sort and have all our items go back to where we want them) - a thousand thank yous, this has been the most important missing inventory QoL feature since it went missing.
Return of the mouse pointer in radial menus - another thing that has been one of my personal greatest wishes since it was taken away. Thank you for bringing it back and allowing the mouse to function as a mouse instead of trying to mimic a controller.
‘Craft many’ - this is far superior to what we had before, now we have easy control over exact crafting numbers. No more having to click ‘craft 10’ over and over to try to hit a desired number, or pre-calculate the materials needed for the number we wanted and then remove other materials so we could hit ‘craft all’. Now we can select either by slider or direct keyboard entry. Bravo.
Craft from storage/other stations - I’ll admit, this wasn’t something that particularly interested me, but I won’t deny the convenience. And you’ve given us multiple ways to use it, granting it the best possible flexibility: ‘craft many’ defaults to using all the materials within the bench, but can then be slid up to gather from additional sources - perfect solution to give us the best of both worlds. And individual benches or storages can be toggled to not allow materials to be drawn from them, so we can easily make sure we keep materials we don’t want to accidentally craft. A well considered approach to the whole system.
Graphics look good, with many re-textured items (I particularly noticed the new glowing plants from which to harvest glowing goop - I’ll be interested to see how they look in deep water or in the vaults - they seem like they should be good). The water looks very good - though it does perhaps become too invisible when shallow, but that is a minor criticism.
Lighting, I think still needs a little work - overall, I think the brightness/darkness is about right, but there are some issues: reflected shine/glare can be too extreme, as can the brief blinding when leaving a building (but at least that is only brief, the reflected shine can remain unpleasantly bright for quite some time); meanwhile the inside of buildings seems a little too dark, in particular player-placed light sources provide too little illumination. At source they are bright enough, but they illuminate too small of an area, which would require adding many more light sources inside to reach a reasonable brightness (with consequent performance issues from multiplying the numbers of required light sources). This is most noticeable of all with a player-held torch at night, which illuminates such a small radius as to be honestly quite useless. It is better to go without a torch and instead strain to see through the shadows. Appearance-wise, the lighting is good, just the levels, and especially the spread of that light seems to need a bit more attention.
Journey steps - far more convenient. Thank you for allowing unselected journeys to progress in the background when we coincidentally complete a step. That was sometimes a bit of a pain point as we did something while the wrong journey was selected and then wound up having to go back and do it again just for the journey step. Now the system is much smoother, and that is appreciated.
That’s just a few key positives I’ve noticed so far. I’m sure there are many others I’ll encounter as I continue to play. I had lost a lot of enthusiasm for the game over the past couple of years; now I am enjoying playing it again (and am contemplating Bazaar purchases as a result). Thank you.
