Played in KR for a good hour today - my longest stretch of actual playing (and not just running around looking at stuff) so far.

I had some high points and some low points.

High:

* Auto-loot an item from a corpse by right-clicking it. Love it.

* Auto-drop an item from the ground (or bandaids from the cu sidhes' packs that drop when they are killed) by picking up the item and pressing i on the keyboard (or whatever your backpack/inventory keystroke is). Love it.

* New brightness - you can really see fine lines and definition better with the new brightness, but.... (See Low section below).

* I'm finally getting the hotbars set up the way I like them. Still working on macros, but I've got enough set up that I can play my tamer and be pretty much fully functional.

* Regs in a hotbar - love it. The auto item count is great.

* I read that a "last target" option was added, but maybe it's only on TC. I didn't see it when trying to adjust my taming macro to use tame animal - last target. I was, however, getting the hang of the new current target system after a while.

* Pet hotbar - love it, now that it is working!!! Can command pet right through the hotbar - no more trying desperately to single click a pet at just the right moment to grab its command menu. I hear that the claim list at the stable is working now too, though I didn't stable anything to try it.

* Chat - now, instead of just getting a cursor when you hit the Enter key to speak, you get a cursor with the word SAY: in front of it. For some reason, just that little visual cue made remembering to hit enter infinitely easier. I had no problems with chat - maybe because my brain knew it had to see the SAY: prompt before I could start typing, which triggered me to remember to press enter first. I don't know, but I love that little SAY: prompt.




Low:

* New brightness - it's just a little TOO bright. The whites (for example, my polar bear) are near retina-burning levels - almost as bad as staring into a flash bulb! Even the roof of my sandstone house was so bright that I had to get out of there as it bothered my eyes.

* Had trouble with speaking macros. In 2D, you can whisper a command to your pet, then say something clever (such as, whisper "all follow me" but say for all to see, "Come hither!") In KR, the pets don't respond to whisper commands, so my verbal command macros didn't work.

* I remade my verbal command macros to only use Say commands (in lower case, as advised on the signin screen). However, I set them to two-key hotkeys (such as, ALT-1). The game seems very touchy about recognizing 2-key hotkeys. My macro only worked about a third of the time (by which I mean - 2 out of 3 times I wouldn't say anything when I invoked my "say all follow me" macro - not that the pets didn't listen. I didn't even speak).

* It's a little harder to lead tame a cu the way I'm used to, which is by holding down my "Tame animal - last target" macro key. In KR, holding a key down only results in one keystroke. It doesn't repeat the way 2D does, so you have to keep pressing your macro key repeatedly. After a handful of tames, I was getting the hang of it, but it still introduces a new margin for error, whereas just holding down a key is simpler.

* Crashing. Oy. I crash a lot at Twisted Weald. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to what I'm doing when it happens, though I report each crash with any details I can think of that were going on when it happened. I crashed a good 5 or 6 times today, once while fighting a changeling (or shall I say, fleeing from a changeling) which resulted in my death.

[side note - does anyone know if you still need to be in war mode for others to see your ghost in KR?]

Unfortunately, the last time I crashed, it caused a series of crashes that now occur every time I try to log in - so I can't log into KR. I went back to 2D and moved my character out of the Weald, so hopefully something there was causing the crash and I'll be able to get back into KR again next time I try to log in. I really don't want to reinstall KR, as I think I deleted the original install files.

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Overall, I'm happy with the customization options, the new look of most graphics, and the new user interface.

I really can't stand the crashing. I hope more crash bugs get ironed out, because I really can't do anything "dangerous" in came for fear of the client crapping out at an inopportune time.

I have not downloaded the KR for regular play yet.... Not even sure I want to.