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FoolyCharged posted:the outsider made you sit through that dumb animation every time you rested. It would be rude to deny you revenge. Seconding this.
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Aug 12, 2020 13:20
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Let the soldier rest.
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Aug 12, 2020 16:42
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I like how instead of arguing who deserves to live like in a good game, all our arguments on the choice are centered around who deserves to die.
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Aug 12, 2020 19:13
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Are they going to actually die or just be tormented for the rest of forever because the developers put rockets on the trolley? Either way I give no shits.
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Aug 13, 2020 00:53
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I hope this trolley ends up in the in the hemorrhoid looking area in numenara like that random space train that crashed.
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Aug 13, 2020 00:57
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Voting closed! By one vote, The Outsider gets sacrificed to feed the random, completely unforeshadowed bullshit entity we met in the Witch House! Update should be up next Monday.
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Aug 17, 2020 00:19
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Absolute Garbage I can't even dignify this. What an absolute piece of trash.
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Aug 18, 2020 03:53
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Wow, I had pretty low expectations for an ending, but they weren't that low.
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Aug 18, 2020 04:14
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I don't think a buddy road trip with The Nameless Soldier would be worth it at this point. That'd involve a sequel. *shudder* Screw the Necronomicon.
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Aug 18, 2020 04:18
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And so nothing happened and nothing was resolved. Did we ever have anything concrete for an objective? This entire game was meaningless wandering through set pieces for no reason because we must with no clear overarching goal in sight.
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Aug 18, 2020 04:19
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Better double-tap The Outsider just to make sure that idiot is dead. Also, gently caress this game.
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Aug 18, 2020 04:25
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FIN posted:...At the end of it, the publisher leaned forward in their chair and said: That's that then, we've reached the end of the road. BraveLittleToaster posted:I don't think a buddy road trip with The Nameless Soldier would be worth it at this point. That'd involve a sequel. *shudder* Ah-hah hah. hah. Funny you mention that... Don't have much to say of the update itself, honestly. It's Stygian, what more is there to say? ...Oh, right. the trivia corner. ------- So. I said I was going to offer one final trivia roundup section, didn't I? Well, the time has come. Let's get started, shall we? -I mentioned there was a rifle in a random world map encounter earlier. --That rifle was Liberty. --If that sounds vaguely familiar, remember that out of place superhero wearing the american flag mentioned earlier? Yup, it's her weapon. --It's a good rifle for what it's worth; hits hard, better crit mod, and even a character without firearms (the skill) can do alright using it. -Other notable random encounters: --One where you have a brief CYOA segment, riddled with instant deaths and, if you pick all the right options, an artifact. --It's actually nice to have slotted, especially on melee builds. The downside is a bit of a flaw, given combat characters already strenuous relations with the sanity system, but your alies don't have to worry about that so much. I think. --The corpse in the crypt. A spOOoooOOky encounter where you go in a crypt, alone, walk forward a bit... And the lights go out. Your character feels something/takes a small amount of damage, and the lights come back on. Going by the dirt, a corpse dragged itself out of its coffin to attack you. --If you don't have the spell to speak with the dead, that's pretty much the end of it. If you do, you can find out the corpse attacked you because they thought the player character was the jackass who gave them a lovely burial; namely by chopping off their legs part ways because said jackass couldn't be bothered to get them a better fitting coffin. --Either you help them out by... Putting them back in the coffin(?) or you tell them no and are damaged again for wasting their time. --Oh and there's a ring somewhere in here you can get. Oh, more things to sell. --There's a small clocktower with mob goons about. If you can speak with the dead you can go do that to a corpse hanging from the clockface, annoying the ghost and getting some ectoplasm you can sell, because upgrading spells isn't a thing anymore. --Remember the superhero? You can talk with her corpse too. (And get more ectoplasm.) --Remember the strange person dead in the street next to a symbol they drew? Weird wasn't it? If only... Oh, yes. Tongue of the dead. --Ah-hah, you thought you could get answers! In summary the fellow doesn't remember things well, at most the conversation implies they were under someone elses thrall. Who?  --Oh, and ectoplasm. This is a consistent theme with the corpses you talk to, if you haven't noticed. --In the tunnel with a breakable wall leading to infinite mobsters? --Corpse. Ectoplasm. Even a free copy of Tongue of the Dead if they haven't hammered it in by now that the most value you get out of what should be an interesting spell is ectoplasm as ghosts gripe and offer little, if any, information. I don't even remember if the corpse in this tunnel even gives anything else; which is a little bit ridiculous given why a player would even be here at all. --Oh and it's safe enough to sneak a look in the mobsters basement. It's even "safe" enough to fight as many mobsters as your heart desires since they can be cornered and subsequently ganged up on by the player character + friends, and they simply cannot be bothered to do anything about the hole in the basement after you retreat. -Heading off to the hotel, there was the ghost that terrified carrion jack. --Attentive viewers might have noticed that the one time tongue of the dead wasn't required to speak with a ghost, the ghost actually does something useful! go figure. --What makes this worth revisiting (if briefly) is that if you call up the ghost then decide to not have it do anything, it gets miffed and curses your character. Time to reload! -Now, popping back to world events for a moment: Get a gas mask. --They aren't that expensive, they double as facial covering where that matters, and they let you bypass one or two events on the world map. Something to do with spores. -Other than the gas mask, players can get a motorcycle helmet. It is useful for crafting good gear and protects against critical damage. If you can't craft, it's pretty much never coming off again. -Courtesy of browsing the wiki for neat science gear, this thing was in the headgear section. --You can see where that link leads if you want. I can't be arsed to find the specific dialogue and I doubt it's any better than the usual fare. ---It warrants a "what the gently caress stygian", has a matching suit in the apparel section, and that's all this trivia corner will dwell on the matter. -Still here? The Stygian devs did a tiny bit more Stygian content after the fact; namely a two page prologue comic for the Investigator. --Could've stood to have twice the pages and half the dialogue, imo. -To end this on a semi-amusing note; you can get the portable brain in a jar drunk. --In fact, I think if you want to talk with the brain after you've taken them you have to or they get irritable until you do. --There's no benefit to this beyond giving the brain momentary reprieve from being in this game. And that's it, I'm done. Honestly we might've seen some of this already but I've had quite enough of stygian to actually go and check. There's more odds'n'ends throughout, but it's much less hassle for anyone still curious to just go browse the wiki or a steam guide than actually play the thing themselves.
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Aug 18, 2020 04:33
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FoolyCharged posted:Did we ever have anything concrete for an objective? This entire game was meaningless wandering through set pieces for no reason because we must with no clear overarching goal in sight. Nope! Our objective was to follow the poem because the Dismal Man told us to wait for him before Arkham got sucked into the Reference Zone, and then we followed the poem despite everyone telling us not to, because, um...we got loot and XP?
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Aug 18, 2020 04:34
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Honestly I can't summon the energy to be offended by this just because the bar was set so low that I had utterly no expectations. My brain just goes 'it's crap' and moves on.
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Aug 18, 2020 05:05
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Wow, what a oet down. Why were we supposed to care about the book?
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Aug 18, 2020 05:08
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Azuth0667 posted:Wow, what a oet down. Why were we supposed to care about the book? Because Lovecraft references. Why the characters care about it? That having any answer would require having a story to tell.
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Aug 18, 2020 05:19
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Good god that entire quest was a whole lot of nothing. For all of Numenera's faults and idiocy at least things happened.
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Aug 18, 2020 05:42
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From the first non-canon ending we got out of selling the key I surmised the goal was to get out of Arkham, which would've made the ending a giant gently caress you to the player but at least with some narrative and thematic consistence. Plus I bet that'd take balls to do. But apparently not even that.
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Aug 18, 2020 07:59
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Ah, the classic "actually no ending". I'm a bit surprised they ended with the necronomicon instead of the shining trapehezedron. The former is more famous but ultimately just a book albeit one that might actually contain useful information to our protagonist for their ??? goal. I guess Nyarlathotep isn't too worried about our character accomplishing anything. I'm glad I didn't buy this game when it came out. I got wind of it not having a real ending so it seemed like the clunkiness I would otherwise be willing to suffer through wouldn't be worth it.
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Aug 18, 2020 13:45
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AHAHAHAHA NOW YOU KNOW MY PAIN THE ACTUAL HORROR OF THIS GAME (-1d6 SAN) On a more serious note, as I recall the devs ran out of money making this... thing (big loving surprise there), and this wasn't an ending, but a sequel hook. If nothing else, I can appreciate the balls of these guys thinking they might have enough for a second go around 
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Aug 18, 2020 14:41
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I mean, I checked the steam reviews for this and they almost unanimously praise the story, while lamenting that there is less of the game due to it being unfinished. While after reading this thread I honestly would switch the position of those qualities, the pro as con and vice versa
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Aug 18, 2020 14:51
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The developer of this game outright admitted to refusing to finish it because if he did, he wouldn't have anything to put into the sequel. I'm not joking. https://steamcommunity.com/app/779290/discussions/0/1629664544092194792/#c1629664606983252519
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Aug 18, 2020 18:29
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Wow. I expected a shitshow, but... Wow.
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Aug 18, 2020 18:32
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It is remotely possible that the game's developer himself was trapped in 1920s Arkham and the deal he had to do to get out was to make and release Stygian. Come to think of it, that would probably make a better game ending.
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Aug 18, 2020 18:59
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See I think sacrificing the soldier was a kind of cruel mercy and would be very inline with a lovecraft proper game. I don't think you're curing his PTSD just that now it no longer matters to him. The Outsider was just lol though.
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Aug 18, 2020 20:34
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...well then. There were a few things I liked about this game. I think TGEK touched on most of these at some point, so I could be guilty of parroting- but I really do feel like there were a handful of decent parts in this mess (as experienced through the LP, I've never touched this game and never will.) -First, the theater scene. It's pretty well agreed ITT that this was one of the more effective sequences, and I think the same. -The Unknown Soldier. Not in the way you interact with him (especially that ending, blech) but this character had potential. He could have, should have been in a better game. -The concept of escaping battles being a viable path forward. It fits well in a horror-styled game. Unfortunately, it seems like they botched just about every aspect of its execution, so it's just more mess to muddle through. But it didn't have to be. -The art direction was overall solid. Not great, but consistently better than the other aspects. It alone was responsible for any atmosphere/mood the game generated. Unfortunately, it couldn't prop the game up long, compared to the writing and gameplay dragging it all down. These are, unfortunately, tiny islands in a sea of terrible. Maybe it serves best as a cautionary tale for game developers who want to do the Lovecraft thing...
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Aug 18, 2020 20:35
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Since this game is a bore start to finish you could have sacrificed a big block of cheese for all the impact it had. I want to know who the gently caress would buy the sequel, actual insane cultists?
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Aug 18, 2020 20:38
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Coolguye posted:The developer of this game outright admitted to refusing to finish it because if he did, he wouldn't have anything to put into the sequel. Strange statement, since he didn't really put anything into this game 
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Aug 18, 2020 21:06
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The very last non-canon ending is a happier ending for the characters and town than the canon ending is. Go figure.
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Aug 18, 2020 21:13
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I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned it, but the developers are working on a game called "Cats and the Other Lives" and the description sure is a thingquote:"Cats and the Other Lives” is a narrative experience that explores the reunion of a broken family from the perspective of their house cat, Aspen. Is the cat just a witness, or does this animal have a more mysterious role in our lives than we anticipate?
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Aug 19, 2020 03:39
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In hindsight, should've added a TLDR to the  trivia corner. So to do that now:-The only ghost players don't need talk to dead to speak with is the only useful one.  -Richters Special Mask, for characters with an addiction that proceed to talk to Richter about it. -The portable brain in a jar can get drunk. That last bit of Stygian! out of the way, I've one more thought for the road: Why did we go through all this nonsense to get into miskatonic, again? Namely, was there something going on that meant a ladder and some rope wouldn't have worked that I forgot?
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Aug 19, 2020 06:23
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So our entire reason for getting into Miskatonic was because we "needed" the Necronomicon because it was the "book that should not be read" in the Dismal Man's poem. Literally every character told us this was a bad idea, but Isidore said there was a shortcut to the University in the Blasted Street. We couldn't get through it without the Night Walk spell or the science suit, both of which required us to go into the theater and either talk to Amelia to learn about her love for Chad or talk to the sales guy who invented the suit. We then went into the Witch House because...I guess we thought that was the shortcut? It doesn't make sense. So yes, the entire endgame could have been avoided by just getting a grappling hook and some rope or even just climbing the rubble. This was considered good enough to convince people to buy a sequel. syzpid posted:I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned it, but the developers are working on a game called "Cats and the Other Lives" and the description sure is a thing I mentioned it in a few posts, but the standard disclaimer of "do not give these idiots money" applies. The postmortem goes up tomorrow and then I prepare the thread for archiving. Next up is Tyranny, as that has actually decent things in it because I need a break from true garbage. Sorry goons!
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Aug 19, 2020 08:12
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The funny thing about that Cat game quote is that it really does showcase the developer's problem succintly. The first sentence about being the Cat's point of view is actually a vaguely interesting idea. The second sentence showcases that the developers won't leave anything to inference at all and highlights an utter lack of subtlety on the writing.... Given that from the 3 LPs I've seen from you, there had been a considerable quality dip with each, I don't think I would've wanted to see the natural progression to that trend anyways.... Ash of Gods wasn't even a high starting point.
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Aug 19, 2020 08:50
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:[....] Frankly, after Numenera and this, I suppose, you've earned, TGEK. You've really, reaaaaallly earned it.
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Aug 19, 2020 09:23
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Yeah, I've said it before, but I consider Tyranny to be the best RPG Obsidian's made thus far. It'd seem especially so after this pile of garbage, to be sure.
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Aug 19, 2020 11:20
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I found that Tyranny did enough interesting things for me to overlook the less good parts. A 6 out of 10 that attempts something interesting gets way more forgiveness from me than an 8 out of ten that's competently made but leaves no lasting impression. This game, of course, attempted nothing new or interesting, and still screwed it up, so... I'm not going to ask you to, like. Replay the entire game again, just so we can see the 'sacrifice Sonia' ending, because I don't think anyone deserves that, but... I can't help but wonder if the devs even let you do that? Given how pointlessly angsty the other two 'endings' were, and what happens if you attempt to flirt with her when you first meet, I wouldn't put it past this game to have that lead to a "bad end". The designers had a very specific vision of how the game was meant to be engaged with, and don't seem to be shy about punishing the player arbitrarily for stepping out of that arena.
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Aug 19, 2020 19:02
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I liked Tyranny and I'm looking forward to the LP.
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Aug 19, 2020 19:30
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Postmortem: Dunning-Kruger One of the features of my past LPs is having some kind of pointlessly overanalytical essay, either about what it would take to fix the game, and I haven't really written anything for this game because it's so hard to come up with something insightful to say. The game is so transparently and obviously terrible that pointing out its sins is both easy and pointless. It's pretty clear that nothing works and the game demonstrates this by cursory inspection. The question "what is this game supposed to be about", on the other hand, has no clear answer. The main plot thread is dropped halfway through when the game decides that we don't need to complete the poem to win. So what's left to talk about? Well, thanks to Coolguye posting that the devs wanted to leave room for a sequel in this place, and my own research into how this game got made, I think it's worth a bit of an examination into how we got here. A Failed Kickstarter The kickstarter for Stygian can be found here. It's kind of a fascinating read to see just what the hell was going on. First, the game was always supposed to be a mashup of Lovecraft references and the 1920s - the example given is using the viol of Erich Zann, which appears in a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. Said story doesn't really tie into the Mythos in any way except thematically, but it's spooky enough that as a one-off reference it's fine. The other is that the developers intended to create an "anti-Utopia" of mashing Lovecraft together with the 1920s which reveals...a lot. First, the term would be "dystopia" which does not give me faith in the developers' command of the English language, and second, that the 1920s were going to be shoehorned in because "Call of Cthulhu RPG does it". They even throw in the Voice of Madness in a screenshot confirming that all along it was supposed to be "hilarious" wacky dialogue. The other thing is that in the developer interview I linked earlier, the developers stated that they didn't have enough money to finish the game. This is interesting because if you look at the kickstarter, they're actually way above their goal. Now, looking at the money they raised it seems they didn't really have enough money to deliver on all their promises. Their goal was 55000 euro - that's not enough money to pay an experienced software developer for a year, yet they promised stretch goals like a whole new area, prologues for every character, and so forth. The impression one gets from reading any kind of interview with these people is that they've never made any kind of game before. The developers describe their influences posted:Stygian is being crafted by designers who grew up reading Lovecraft and playing Planescape: Torment, the early Fallout titles, Heroes of Might and Magic and the like. We want to create the best possible experience with your feedback. Your interest and support will be invaluable. Now, I don't know what "and the like" means, because that's a huge mismash. Torment is an infinity engine RPG (we don't talk about the spiritual successor) about finding yourself, and Heroes of Might and Magic is a strategy game. This is supposed to be a game inspired by literature, and yet they don't bother reading anything like the rest of the Mythos authors or Lovecraft's referenced inspirations. The end result is a confusing mishmash of incoherence in which the developers throw in the Chicago mob (because 1920s), Lovecraft references (because they don't understand his themes or how his stories work), and juvenile humor that would be right at home in Beavis and Butthead. Now I've been going through some reviews of this thing trying to discern what this game is supposed to be about. Despite what RPS is telling you, it's not about coping, as literally every person and the player character is some kind of escapist addict. There is, unfortunately, one theme that recurs throughout the game and it's a mess. That theme is that the 1920s were really racist and nativist, that bled into Lovecraft's works, and we should condemn it. The problem is that the game literally impales itself trying to stab racism instead.  The terrible secret is that this is an ironic punishment handled badly. Also, come on, you all knew I was going to reference this loving character The game handles it poorly, but they seem to want to condemn this guy with the use of "vulgar" and having the hobo helpfully explain that he thinks making fun of black people is wrong. Now, this game has all of two, maybe three black characters - the jazz trumpeter we can't talk to, and some generic Arkham townsfolk who are very sad that Cthulhu killed their racist mayor and have the exact same dialogue as the white sobbing townsfolk. Now, who does the game use as its mouthpiece to explain that the racism is bad?  The hobo is the only guy who speaks up against it and points out that everyone abandoned Willie because they thought he was creepy, but he still hangs around! It's weird! I've seen a few reviews where people talk about how this game tries to grapple with Lovecraft's history of racism, and it certainly...touches on it. The problem is that every time the game tries to present antiracism, it comes off as creepy, weird and racist.  The game tries to portray that the white oppressors were really mean to the Abenaki, but then they turn around and portray the Abenaki as being led by an animalistic hunter of men. Where have we heard that kind of language before? The Declaration of Independence posted:He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. Right. The only sympathetic Abenaki who talks to us is Chad, who is characterized as wanting to go back to living among white people and preferring his European name of Chad to the Abenaki name Wjatal gave him. It's not a great look! In reality white people were running off to join the Native Americans and I presume the Abenaki culture was not defined by living in the woods waiting to attack whitey, but you'd never know it from this game! Later the same quest reveals itself to be based on the Terrible Old Man, which is just such a weird choice for a horror game. The Terrible Old Man isn't a horror story, it's Lovecraft fantasizing about a bunch of evil thug immigrants getting murdered by a cool wizard guy who later shows up in another story as a friendly helpful wizard. The game writers are smart enough to realize that maybe just tossing the story in wholesale isn't a great idea, so we get this scene with Keelan:  You see, the immigrants didn't rob the old man because they liked robbing, but because they needed it to survive! Julian was even going to take care of some poor woman named Maria! They're not thu - The Game, earlier posted:
Now, the four of them are staying in the same hotel room. Salvador and Abel join the Mob, and it's not really clear if Julian and Keelan assisted them in Mafia activities but weren't members because they weren't Italian, but it's hard to believe they were innocent. The Mob in this game is characterized as a bunch of brutal killers.  The above is our first introduction to the Mafia - the man in white kills the guy on the street because he can, and as we play through the game we get more reference to Wax Face's atrocities like mutilating Wilkins and murdering Violet. Every interaction with the Mob comes with the threat of violence. Thus the game completely undermines the idea that the immigrants were just desperate men trying to survive by...lumping them with Wax Face's murderous thugs. Now, our last interaction with this games desire to tell us that racism is bad is with the theater flashback. Remember this? Amelia is forced to dump Chad because otherwise the mayor will send Chad to a eugenics facility and have him sterilized. It's pretty freaky!  Now, unlike the other examples, the game is actually able to convey that this is wrong without loving it up for a whole thirty minutes, until...  Yup! We heroically kill the Nameless Soldier instead of helping him with his PTSD and in death he's sane again! The game doesn't even give us the moral lecture we got from the Outsider about how betraying our friends is bad, the Soldier explicitly kills himself to stop his mental condition! That's literally what the eugenics movement did! It's truly amazing to me that every time the game tries to talk about racism is bad, it immediately puts its foot in its mouth. One may ask, why does this game feel that it needs to tackle 1920s racism? The answer is that it's so closely chained to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Instead of just running off with Cthulhu and making a game about him, the developers felt that to really make a Lovecraft game, they needed to rip off each and every one of Lovecraft's stories and mash them into an incoherent whole. This runs into the problem that Lovecraft's works are saturated with racism, to cats named racist names to black Cthulhu cultists to the unfortunate African American man Herbert West reanimates that Lovecraft writes some pretty despicable poo poo about. Hell, the Terrible Old Man is literally about how awesome killing immigrant criminals is, and at least one story is about the scary reveal of an unexpected black person. Because this game is so tightly fettered to Lovecraft's corpse, it's easy for the developers to conclude that they need to address it and this leads them down this rabbit hole. The other half of this is that these developers are incompetent and don't know it. Their budget is unrealistic, they clearly have no grasp of basic programming, they are unable to catch obvious bugs and typos despite having an entire team of QA people and a proofreader credited, and their plan to release this to the world was to cut out half the game because they apparently honestly thought this was good enough to convince people to buy a sequel. Anyway, that's enough. I'm done. I uninstalled Stygian forever and I plan to never buy anything from Cultic Games again. The game was offensive and incompetent. Thanks to all the goons who joined me on this journey, and especially Arcanuse for throwing in enough Stygian trivia hour so we could realize just how deep the rabbit hole of bad went. I'm free! Thank God!
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Aug 20, 2020 03:24
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: With the victims. What were there names? (He clumsily pulls out an old notebook and finds a torn page inside) Salvador and Abel, no one important. Clueless, fresh recruits for the Mob, that's all.
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Farewell Stygian, you were so stupid it made my head go WHOOOOP. Thanks for the LP, GEK!
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Aug 20, 2020 05:32
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| # ? Jun 10, 2024 07:25 |
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gently caress this game. gently caress it angrily. That is all.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:48
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