Water is very available. Personally I wish it were a bit more rare, and that merchants carried less of it around, but oh well.
It used to be an issue that merchants sometimes didn't have enough water to pay you, but now they seem to have an infinite amount. You can basically sell your ultra-advanced artifacts to random shmucks to get hundreds of drams in pocket. It may be a development hack, and if so I can see why they put it in, and it's probably better than having to micro manage stash houses and the like, but it does take away from the feeling of a world where water is extremely scarce. I personally also find that lead slugs may be a bit too cheap (ie. easy to come by) in the new version. I liked being wary about using the carbine because I was running out of ammo, for instance.
Regarding the other massive changes the team has been making, I'm generally very pleased and impressed. For traditionalists, some takes a bit getting used to. But I think they've done well with stuff like factions and sultan cults, and even the utterly crazy stuff like extradimensional esper-hunters and weird mushrooms fits well with the game by making it even more sprawling. it seems to be the design philosophy of these people, not to balance by reining in power curves and such, but just ramping up the world in general to 11. Regarding food, I can only chime in with Skeletor's general analysis. It's reminiscent something I've been thinking about for a long time for my own game, actually, so I've been interested in seeing how they solve it here. In a way, I still like the unambiguous kind of corpse eating you have in Nethack et al., where eating a certain corpse grants a certain intrinsic, and it's certainly not trivial to strike the balance between survivalism mechanics and grind-avoiding design, but CoQ's new system feels both more modern and more organically connected to the rest of the game world.
As always,
Minotauros
