Dawntide Beta: Various Thoughts

The Dawntide beta client has finally reached a point of stability for me where I can actually play the game! Below are a few thoughts cobbled together from notes I jotted down over the past few days (some I may have mentioned previously).

• You eat bread and water for some reason, though I see no visible change to my stats or messages telling me that I'm fatigued due to hunger/thirst


• Food is eaten automatically if you have some in your pack. Water is only consumed when you do it manually.


• You gain stats randomly as you use skills. Much like Ultima Online


• Inventory is weight-based rather than slot-based. You still have slots in your pack for organization, but if you start running out, extra slots appear as long as you can carry the load. Nice feature!


• There are issues selecting inventory slots when they overlap with the action bar at the bottom of the screen. Fortunately, you can move the windows around.


• You get no information at all about what a recipe requires or what exactly it makes (besides the name of the item) until the recipe is purchased and learned. Considering how expensive recipes can be, it would be nice to be able to get a little more info before I purchase it.


• The search feature doesn't work on the vendor menu.


• Crafting skills up very slowly


• Corpses have no visible indicator that they have been skinned. There should either be a visual clue, or when selected, the corpse should say something like (skinned) after the name if it has already been skinned. Doesn't make much sense that I couldn't tell just by looking at it.


• Cooking basic meat requires no tools or even a campfire. Apparently you just lay raw meat out in the sun for a while and call it a day.


• You use 'guts' to make bowstrings in-game. This is inaccurate. Sinew is used to make bowstrings. Guts are used to make sausage! Perhaps they were thinking of strings for musical instruments, which do use 'catgut' (not made from cats).


• Five minute spell buffs are a micro-management pain. The more skilled you are at the spell school for the buff, the longer it should last.


• There are no player-made campfires! This is a travesty! I'm starting a campfire petition!