Man, there's quite a lot of well-done programming in this game that constantly impresses me:
- Very seamless terrain streaming: The performance is still being optimized, but I've never seen terrain popping in except for the northern part of Cyseal. If there's multiple LOD levels I can't really tell, all I've seen so far is just it loading the higher quality textures.
- Pathfinding: Can walk from one edge of the map to the other while avoiding already-detected traps and hazards without ever getting stuck in a wall so far. This is kinda expected since the older games had to implement quite a few hacky workarounds to pathfinding AI so the performance was good in older systems, but I'm still really surprised at how good it works here. Navigating an area like Black Cove completely unharmed after the whole place was secured is just really impressive to me.
- I have no idea how huge these save-files must be, because they save literally
everything. I haven't been able to break the game at all yet by reloading while doing anything, and all the corpses and items scattered across the world are all still in their spots. I heard some people broke NPCs scripting, but I've tried saving/reloading during lots of scripted sequences and I couldn't get them to break either. It puts it into perspective quite a bit when lots of AAA games lately are afraid of giving you anything else than Autosaves or checkpoint-based systems.
- A vector-based combat system with AI that works well with it and with terrain as complex as this is no small feat.
These aren't really anything ground-breaking, but the polish and attention to detail on these aspects help the game shine a lot.
TL;DR; I'm surprised a cRPG actually works as intended for more than 90% of the time.