Thanks for the game. Here some issues that bother me most:
Bad visuals: environment contrast / translucence / visibility
Compared to the original game this is much more difficult to distinguish what is a passable area and what is a blocking wall/object. Some factors play here:
Everything is waaaaaaaaaay too dark compared to the original. Please improve the lighting done by objects e.g. the player, torches etc.
Then the is the coloration / contrast of the environment. Many things in the environment are colored same dull, ground and walls alike. Take the caves in act one as an example. In the original game, the walls clearly form a visible outline to the passable area. Those rocks with that stairs that separate higher/lower plateau areas are clearly distinguishable. In the remaster all looks the same grey color.
Then there is the translucence of walls. First, I thought Harem was bad and then I went to Palace Cellar. It literally felt like in a mirror maze. Blocking walls in the foreground are impossible to see. Big problem is that, compared to the original game, the ground behind these blocking walls is STILL visible. That creates the impression that there is a free area.
I’m not dwelling in nostalgia here, but the 2D graphics engine 20 years ago managed much more efficiently to convey the visual information about what is going on on the screen. The remastered needs me more intensively to focus on the visuals and that is tiring my 40 years old eyes.
Bad enemy health bar contrast
The weak contrast of the enemy health bars (dark red to black) and having the enemy’s name text on top of that makes it hard to recognize the enemy’s current health. Please improve the contrast by using more vibrant colors or by other means.
Inventory sort improvements
One common reason why I want to sort is this: I want to pick up an item, but the free inventory space is fragmented. Problem with the sorting is that it does not prioritize creating adjacent free columns. However, that is the prerequisite for all bigger inventory items to fit in. It often just creates free adjacent rows and a manual sort is still needed.
I’d even go so far to say that the sorting (given if the above is fixed) should be executed automatically when trying to pick up an item to ensure that its fits in the inventory.
Potion hotkeys
For me, using a potion has no difference in using a combat skill. However, for the game the difference is that the button mapping does constantly (!!!) and arbitrarily change depending on potions you pick up or how often you use them. Let us map certain potion types to the d-pad buttons (at least optionally) and keep the belts just as additional potion space.
Mercenary message ‘I’ll put that to good use’ covers his/her stats sheet
This message text overlay is disturbing because it covers various fields of the mercenary stats sheet when his/her equipment is exchanged for comparison. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the moment one want to look up the stats there.