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goatface posted:It turns out the whole thing was a sewer level. Let's Play Tower of Time: it turns out the whole thing was a sewer level I stand by my snipe. 
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Jun 28, 2023 21:35
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I brought my Drake posted:Let's Play Tower of Time: it turns out the whole thing was a sewer level A Sewer Runs Through It: Let’s Play Tower of Time
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Jun 28, 2023 22:09
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Bonus Update: Can We Fix Tower of Time? No. Bye. TGEK!!! You can't DO that! You promised us a postmortem, you fat unlovable rear end in a top hat! Ok, fine. Look, Tower of Time can't be salvaged, because it's shoddily made, unimaginative, repetitive, and dull. We are halfway through the game and we're repeating the same dull fetch quests for the same dull statues as the characters get into the same arguments that aren't even internally consistent with their paper thin characterization.  I could write a scathing denunciation of this game, but why? I've done that enough in this LP and without the rest of the thin gruel that is this game's metaplot I can't really comment too deeply on the writing, because we are halfway through the game and don't know a whole lot. I could point and laugh at the writing, but the game can barely follow the basic rules of grammar and spelling, so why bother?  Just... why? Everything reeks of amateurism and laziness if not outright incompetence. It's really easy to find things to mock in this game, but it's very difficult to find anything interesting to talk about because it's all dull garbage. So let's talk about the one thing the writers are convinced is interesting enough to keep you playing for the story: the metaplot. Aliens and Avatars and Wizards, Oh My!  The one thing that could possibly save this game is the metaplot. I'll try to head off the objections at the pass - yes, it's incompetently executed. No, the pacing is abominable as the game doles out too little, too late to keep the player's interest. Yes, there is an extremely idiotic twist at the end that inspired this LP, and no, I won't talk about it. No, I can't talk about You, he's part of that stupid twist but rest assured, he plays his incredibly idiotic part. The core idea of the plot is actually not bad! In fact, if executed competently it would be a great setup for a tragedy. A party of the greatest heroes Artara has ever assembled descends into the last bastion of the ancient civilization, following the visions of a weird prophet (you) who was actually cursed by a wizard with mysterious motives. The wizard is the guy who hosed up the old world through his fascist tendencies trying to fight the evil aliens or demons that tricked the civilization first into destroying itself with magic, then declared war on the remains. You are following this man's visions because Artara is dying and you have no other idea of how to save it. The leaders of the other races abandon their segregation to join you because the wizard lured them there, and you all go into the unknown for your own reasons. Some are desperate. Some look for something greater. Still others seek power.  You are opposed by the Tower Avatar, an AI created by the greatest civilization Artara has ever known, tasked with stopping the wizard by the ancients terrified of his power and his willingness to sacrifice anyone and anything to achieve his own ends. Earlier in the game posted:
A rather telling exchange posted:The wizard is indeed dangerous, having faced the ancient enemy for so long and using their tools against them, but you have no other choice, because your world is dying. Proteus posted:Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Robert Browning posted:MY first thought was, he lied in every word, This is not a bad idea for a story! You can do a lot with this premise. You could do a character study of the characters as they try to figure out what the right thing to do is - abandon the tower? Serve Proteus to save the world and pay whatever price he demands? Loot the tower so you can at least enjoy the end? You could make Proteus the main character, as several thread posters have suggested, and have the game be about his internal struggles as he lures the characters in, unsure whether or not he can actually save the world. You could even make the story about hubris, but competently - Proteus is prideful because he believes he alone can defeat the Organthe, the Organthe are prideful because they assume they can become gods with no downside, the Tower Avatar is prideful because she assumes she can best the party whenever she wants so lets them grow stronger, and You - and the player characters - are prideful because you think you hold any leverage over Proteus. You could make it a case study in desperation, as the characters know they have no other option but to go on, and they know that something horrible awaits them but believe what's outside is worse. The greatest sin of this game is that it had one good idea executed thoroughly incompetently. It's like the writers were terrified people weren't going to like this story, so they hid it behind as much pointless filler bullshit and mystery box crap as possible. This is not a story that benefits from everything being hidden, this is a tragedy where you can see the end for these characters as they wander through the ruins of their once-great ancestors and marvel at all they lost and how poorer their world is. It's not that the idea for the story is bad, it's that the authors are incompetent and execute everything badly and try to make up for it by stuffing a well-trodden tale of hubris into a mystery box.   Again, let's go back to what we know of the plot. TGEK distills the plot posted:Long ago, there was a mighty technological civilization that could achieve miracles through the power of science and hard work. One day, the devil tempted them with unearned power that could grant them anything they wished for, for a price to be named later. The people threw away what they built with their own hands to seize these unearned luxuries, and paid the price. They realized the error of their ways, but continued to use the devil's gifts under the pretense of studying it to learn more about the devil. One wizard figured out the price demanded by the devil, and used his devil-granted powers to make a hard choice that killed a lot of his own people and delayed the apocalypse. Now you and the best warriors of this doomed world answer this wizard's call to see if you can use his power to, perhaps, save your doomed world. This is a perfectly serviceable plot and the only good idea in this game. There was no way it was going to survive its vicious mutilation at the hands of these idiots, and that's what I hate the most about it. This could have been a good game. This could have been very interesting and we could have had a lot to talk about with this game's story, but the developers just aren't very good! They had one good idea and a whole lot of bad ones, and it's the bad ones that take over the narrative with crap like worldbuilding, meaningless moral "choices" that have no impact beyond what stat buffs or debuffs you'll have for the next five minutes. Kaela is an excellent idea for a character - she's an ancient master engineer who's also the sister of our main antagonist. You could do a lot with her, but instead of even just taking the obvious cliche and have her be a spy for her brother they waste her time and ours with amnesia bullshit.  Even from this little blurb I can see a ton of things a competent writer could have done with this. Is the character You attracted to Kaela herself, and her inner strength and resilience, or is he attracted to what she represents - the technological knowledge that would save their world, the lost and glorious past, or even more cynically leverage against her brother? Does he envy her freedom as presented by her resilience against mind control? Is he attracted to her because they're both lonely weirdos, him cursed with foreknowledge and she literally woken into the wrong time? How does he feel about sending this beautiful woman into danger while he sits on the Crystal Throne like a coward? There is so much a competent author could do with these characters, but they're not allowed to develop in any interesting ways because the writers have seemingly no idea how actual humans think and feel.  I keep coming back to this because these characters just get boiled down to RPG classes, and not even in a meaningful way. Aeric is a druid. Druids historically were priests who had actual religious significance and were important figures in their communities, but Aeric is just a dude who does magic that's vaguely nature themed. Kane isn't a knight, he's a "shieldguard", which lets him do all the stuff a knight does but without all the mythic resonance attached to the word. Maeve is a "marksman" despite being a woman. The rest of the classes are just as generic. Runes are associated with the god Odin, who sacrificed an eye and hung himself to gain power and wisdom, but Rakhem is just a generic fire mage who likes robots and has vaguely hammer themed spells. Boron is a berserker, but without the mythical connotations of turning into a bear or becoming more animalistic. Whisper is a "mystic" who does no mysticism. It's amazing that in this "story-rich" RPG they can't even make their supposedly mythic heroes actually larger than life and flawed, but just a bunch of whiny idiots with no characterization who bicker like children.  What a joke.
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Jun 29, 2023 02:48
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You know what this game could actually benefit from, if written halfway competent? Support Conversations. There’s only, what, 8 important characters (Youspock, 7 playable characters) and the big problem is that all their nattering, meandering nonsense dialogue is wrapped up in the lovely main plot. It would have been good to see them actually interact like people rather than a party with no fanfare thrown into a 10x10 square full of orcs. The thing that dragged down Dark Deity so goddamn much could work in a cast this small, especially if they offlosded some dialogue and art to that rather than having the characters blather endlessly about every vaguely shaped rock they encounter. I’m not saying this should have been FE Engage/Awakening style wacky hijinx supports, but come on, convince me these people have thoughts in their heads unrelated to ‘there is a tower, i must delve it.’
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Jun 29, 2023 03:23
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It's funny seeing people talk about missing Dark Deity in the face of this. On my end, it's kind of hard to figure out which one is 'better' overall. Because Dark Deity being funny with its oddly evil and ruthless party was NOT intentional.... but it was still more interesting than this? Does it deserve the credit for being more interesting by doing something completely unintentionally? The negative factors keep facing off directly with each other too. Supreme programming incompetence vs severe inconsistency in the writing, support conversation bloat padding vs hideous copy-paste padding quest padding, mutual complete plotting incoherence, mutual incompetent mechanical design. It's hard for me to decide overall. All I can say is that this one is a significantly worse slog to go through, if only because nothing is being even accidentally interesting.
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Jun 29, 2023 06:10
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This is Dark Deity if the whole game had taken place on the road between the first two locations. At least DD had a plot the player was part of. It was a really stupid one and the characters never reacted plausibly, but they went to places and things happened. And the bad guys showed up to demonstrate the story occasionally instead of just handing out notes explaining why you're supposed to care and what's been happening offscreen. DD's main issue was that the devs cared so much about all their precious OCs that everything else was neglected for that. I don't know what the devs' focus was here - the story, the setting, the characters, the enemies and the level designs all seem equally barebones and underdeveloped. The crafting mechanics, maybe? For all the sense that makes in a world that ought to have been completely stripped of resources by now?
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Jun 29, 2023 08:38
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Honestly, they were probably really stoked about the combat and figured that'd carry the game. Especially when you consider how the characters are so frequently referred to by class, the itemization and upgrades are a big focus, etc. etc. It's just that, well, the combat isn't great, and if the combat's not great, then you have to carry the game off of everything else.
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Jun 29, 2023 08:54
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I still can't work out why they went for procgen loot/rewards.
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Jun 29, 2023 11:12
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Because it's lazy.
anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Jun 29, 2023 |
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Jun 29, 2023 12:29
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I'm sure there are other, better comparisons but this vaguely reminds me of Wildermyth, a game that shows that procgen combat and progression can be pulled off well if the designers are competent.
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Jun 29, 2023 18:25
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Cycles Welcome back! Last time on Tower of Time the Avatar hit us with an inevitable yet inconsequential betrayal that accomplished nothing except to move Kane further down the stages of inceldom. Unfortunately for the thead and my sanity, we are now on floor six of ten, and we're not even that deep into floor 6. Despite being in an industrial facility we're - you know what, judge for yourself.  More procgen loot.    Wow.  : Busy? Doing what exactly? Amazing. We are on the sixth level of this game and it decides the best way to proceed is to lampoon its own lack of originality. Do you know what this tells me?  : The low-born is right, haven't we already met? Are you not... It tells me that someone on the team knew just how amazingly repetitive and dull this crap all was, but instead of doing anything about it they just lazily lampshaded it and left in all this filler.   : I'm Faradas, refinery overseer, version 6.4 : Did ah miss something? Dinnae we just ask em if he was Faradus?  : I knew something was wrong here. The amount of mana here, without the presence of new crystal mana nodes... is impossible.: Impossible indeed... Unless some alien interloper changed the facility process to actually add mana instead of simply refining it. : The Daeva?: Who else? : One cannot draw water from a stone, no matter how hard one tries.  I include these two screenshots to see the disjointedness between the racism and the realization.  It's still going! We just got a bunch of made up engineering about how the tower is going to be blown up by the mana refinery, so here, have some more!  I'm leaving this line because we're going to refer back to it later. : Are your ears not working? This system was designed for one purpose and one purpose alone. To destroy this tower. I've had to appropriate a dozen other systems to avoid disaster. I'm not ashamed to say... I've reached my limit. It's only a matter of time now. I'm with Kane here.  : Realizing the dire nature of the circumstances, your other champions give no argument to Kane. They simply turn and follow the shieldguard out of the chamber, but before they get far an angry voice grabs their attention one final time.: The bottom of the tower! Impossible. There is only one way to descend any further in this tower and that's through the mana globe itself. And the only way to breach its barrier at this point, is to completely shut down the power to each sector.: (softly to Kane and the others) These statues all seem a little off. Perhaps we would be best exploring this level on our own.: Go on and try. I'm not as old and deaf as they sculpted me you know. If you feel like shutting down the power, you know where to find me.: Apologies, Faradas, for those hasty words. My companions are not familiar with the nature of the administrative statues. Can you tell us how to stop this system?: Cannot figure it out on your own? Ahh, what a disappointment. Here is what you need to do.: There are four refinery parts and each one requires a different method to shut its power source down. Tell me which part you'd like to shut down and I'll explain how. It's all some variation on fetch a thing or flip a switch.  : Crystal Storage and Liquefaction.: This is probably the quickest one for a group of gung-ho, sword wielding nitwits like you. It's simple... Those Daeva connected some infernal machine to my systems here. An energy barrier keeps it safe from everything I've thrown at it.: And don't ask me what it is, or how to take down the barrier. I don't have a clue. But if you want to get to the seventh level of the tower, this blasted machine has to go!TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 We can go back for instructions. This character gets old because he's enforcing tedium but is also rude about it.  More crystals!  Wow.  Tubular!  We're saving this for Tier 4 equipment.  This starts another fetchquest for an obsidian hammer or something. I'm cutting the dialog. You're welcome.  We go a little too far and wander into the Vapor Treatment sector. Let's go find that forcefield so we can grind this out and go home.  This should let us get Kaela's turbo robot buddy.  : Move back, let the Queen of Shadows try. We will see how strong the magic of this barrier is against my power.: A fruitless pursuit, Mystic... can you not see, that this barrier is not magical?Oh no. Remember way back when when we had a pointless argument about whether or not to use magic or a sword to destroy the orc totem? Inanity made manifest posted:: Of course I am aware of that, you witless elf. I know well the limits of my power... Do you know the limits of this technological marvel, Forest Mage? That first sentence hurts to read.  Plot twist! I don't know why this character is named Whisper when she's basically the equivalent of a stupid thug bashing people with magic instead of physical might, but the game wants us to know that Tower Avatar's betrayal has made Kane more reckless and angry. : Laddie, the Avatar's betrayal hurt all of us, but ye cannae let it cloud yer judgement.: Now is not the time for lectures, Master Smith. Do you know how to disable the barrier, your Grace?: I'm sorry, I don't. But I don't think this has anything to do with my memory... The energy of this field seems very unfamiliar to me. Any attempt to magically disrupt it, Scholar Whisper, may put you in great jeopardy.  Vote on this crap I guess!
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Jul 4, 2023 03:18
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: I'm getting deja vu!
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Blasting seems like the most exciting (ish) option.
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Jul 4, 2023 03:46
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Blast the forcefield, if we're lucky, it will kill her.
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Jul 4, 2023 04:22
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We should get friend robot to turn it off. Blast it.
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Jul 4, 2023 08:53
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Blast it all.
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Jul 4, 2023 11:14
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Let's hope blasting it will explode dramatically and kill the party.
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Jul 4, 2023 14:05
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Boom.
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Jul 4, 2023 20:06
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Never not blast. With any luck, we'll bring the whole structure, er, up.
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Jul 4, 2023 20:12
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on this day of all days it seems only appropriate to vote for the max fireworks option
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Jul 4, 2023 20:13
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Have at it Whisper. Blast away.
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Jul 5, 2023 03:47
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I'd just like to remind any prospective game designers and creative writers in general that it's absolutely fine to write lovely content that does not even fit, it's even a necessary part of the creative process . Only it's understood that you'll edit out any content that sucks and doesn't work instead of tying an ugly bowtie on it and going "Hay guys have you noticed how lovely this is?"
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Jul 5, 2023 08:42
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Either that, or a game that is explicitly a parody of the genre and is openly making fun of genre staples. Crappy writing in parts of a game like Breath of Death VII? Sure, it's probably part of a joke. Crappy writing in this game? No idea if they mean for it to be a joke or just unintentionally terrible.
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Jul 5, 2023 13:10
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Randalor posted:Either that, or a game that is explicitly a parody of the genre and is openly making fun of genre staples. Crappy writing in parts of a game like Breath of Death VII? Sure, it's probably part of a joke. Crappy writing in this game? No idea if they mean for it to be a joke or just unintentionally terrible. Exactly, though even then you don't want to lampshade that horrid escort quests are a thing in a genre, for instance, and then follow it through with a full-length horrible escort quest. Starting it, lampshading it, then cutting it very short with a joke though is fantastic.
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Jul 5, 2023 20:07
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Randalor posted:Either that, or a game that is explicitly a parody of the genre and is openly making fun of genre staples. Crappy writing in parts of a game like Breath of Death VII? Sure, it's probably part of a joke. Crappy writing in this game? No idea if they mean for it to be a joke or just unintentionally terrible. That's not the case here; the rest of the game does not seem strong enough to survive crummy writing, regardless of whether it's a joke or unintentionally bad.
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Jul 6, 2023 02:22
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That's what I mean, even if something in a game like Breath of Death wasn't funny in the slightest, you didn't notice as much because it's probably just a joke that fell flat because at pretty much no point does the game take itself seriously. In this, I'm assuming they're trying to be serious, but then they'll make a fourth-wall leaning-if-not-breaking joke that just feels very out of place tonally.
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Jul 6, 2023 03:50
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I guess we are blasting!
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Jul 9, 2023 02:51
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I'm Totally Going To Destroy You! I Mean It This Time! Welcome back! Last time on Tower of Time, we got another loving fetch quest from a statue to fix the water - uh, I mean, mana refinery - and the game basically pissed in the player's face by revealing the developers knew it was tedious bullshit and that you had to do it anyway. Today we had another vote on whether to use magic to destroy a plot thing and blowing it the hell up won.  This is the face I make every time I boot this game.  : Let Whisper take the risk and blast the forcefield with her power. I think you guys have 100% ruined Your chances of making out with Kaela. : Something in the back of your mind warns that time is more precious than you realize. These party arguments must end. You focus your will on the entire party at once. They all grow silent. After a moment they quietly agree to let Whisper take the risk and attempt to dispel the barrier. Oh. This is new. Just as the narration indicates Youspock is getting more comfortable throwing mind control around, it appears we have a wrinkle. : We agreed how to proceed. Is it not to your liking?: Only a second ago you were ready to exchange blows. Now, a heartbeat later, you are all in complete agreement...: Reason surprises an Ancient? This is most curious, Patron.I have given up trying to understand the titles in this game. : I guess you're right... Forget I said anything.: Whisper releases a burst of destructive magic against the forcefield. The barrier sparkles with concentrated bursts of red energy, before disappearing with a loud sizzling sound.: And you doubted the power of the Queen of Shadows? Nothing can stand against the forces I bring to bear. Magicum Supremus! The forcefield collapses in a way completely at odds with the description. Hooray! TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 This ends one of the four sector fetchquests. Would that the others were this "involved".  Kane gets a pick me up.  I think I would find this character a lot less hateful if the game wasn't so loving tedious. I think he's supposed to be an entertaining crotchety old man, but he just comes off as the developers rubbing in how banal everything is. You can't go interact with the main plot, you need to go grind a bunch of tangentially related garbage that reveals nothing.  Even the characters are sick of this poo poo. It's not funny and it's not endearing.  Fortunately Kaela has cut the entire party's move speed partially because we didn't let her murder a robot to wear its guts as a necklace. What a hero.  I thought I grabbed this earlier.  Anyway, this puzzle. This puzzle requires you to hit this "central processor" with four lasers so it overheats and explodes. What do you mean, Kaela said there was enough energy in this system to crack the planet in half? What does she know, she's only a "master-level" robotics engineer and a talking statue told us to do this.  That means a lot of swiveling these loving things again.  There's also a fountain.  You know the drill by now. Whisper drinks it and gets 20 HP. I decide to leave it because it will keep her alive a bit longer.  Some of the beams have this red underlay to them and I legitimately don't know why or what it represents.  You might be tempted to go directly for... whatever the gently caress this is with the beams. Unfortunately this puzzle sucks and requires a bunch of steps to jump through arbitrary bullshit.  This thoroughly baffles me. Nothing will happen now and the game has hinted messing with this causes a meltdown of horrific proportions.  These are the only two beams you can connect at the start. You'd think 50% above threshold would set off an alarm or something, but all you get is a mild warning.  There is of course a battle. It is dull and they explode to Team Shooty. Next!  You can also direct 3 beams here to open a portal. Naturally the game is trolling you by offering something marginally interesting.  This is a "cooler". We'll need to mess with it in a bit.  I think this is bugged. Ignore it. It's not part of the solution to the puzzle.  This probably gets used.  I can barely contain my excitement.  Anyway, what you need to do is send both beams to this pylon.  (also grab this, you'll need it later).  That lets the pylon shoot a red laser indefinitely without the two blue beams powering it up. Logic!  This needs to be powered up as well.  Quality! Someone hosed up the markup and they just... left it.  A bunch of trial and error turns this thing on. If you direct all three free beams at the portal, it opens.  Much like everything else potentially interesting in this game, it drops you into a boring, grindy combat.  They don't even have the courtesy to drop a unique. Assholes.  Anyway, by retargeting the three free beams on the "cooler" the cooler shoots another laser beam that hits the processor. Look, I don't understand it either, ok?  This one is green and swirly. I don't know.  There's so much wrong here. Is this supposed to be a critical overload where the reactor goes nuts with energy, in a system throwing around enough energy to literally crack the planet?  Shooting all the lasers at the thing causes a cutscene where it explodes.  The Very Beginning of This Floor posted:
  I don't loving know man. Let's go to the next area.  Oh, look, it's the Avatar. Are we fighting yet?  Yawn.   This just doesn't work! By now we've seen enough to know that the Tower Avatar is never coming after Youspock personally, even though it would be the perfect move to force all these guys out of the tower. Hell, "defend the Crystal Throne from the Tower Avatar" would be a considerably more interesting boss fight than anything else the game has tried, but knowing these guys they'd probably give the Avatar an AoE stun blast or some poo poo.  I don't know. We got a whole lecture on how Tower Avatar doesn't care about right and wrong and she has only her duty and Blah Blah Blah Yakety Smackety, but this sounds a lot like rationalizing the bad thing she's going to do. Of course, she's also been sending robots and poo poo to attack the heroes with thinly veiled lies about how she can't control the tower, and she's been very reticent to actually explain who Proteus is or why he's so dangerous, because the developers want it to be a mystery box that they promptly ruin by revealing the guy in the intro cutscene.  : Such blind obedience will be your undoing. And it begins now! She does some kind of phase out nonsense.  I don't know if my computer can store enough yawning emojis.  Cool. Are we going to fight and get it over with?  : Wait, Avatar. These are good people. They have no desire to harm the tower. : Your word holds no weight with me drone...: It is my sworn duty to stop you and your group before you can do further damage, before you endanger all of us with your reckless actions.I don't understand. Why did you let out Kaela if you were just planning to flip into Red Mode and kill everyone? For that matter, this group is currently working on preventing the energy stored in the tower from exploding and cracking it. Is that not actually a threat? Are Kaela and Faradas somehow in cahoots? Does the Avatar not know this, despite being able to talk with the tower statues? So far all the party has done has been fetch quests to ensure the tower is still working.  I guess Proteus is God now. More importantly, this is the first that "Him" has been mentioned to these characters - Proteus is talking with Youspock on the crystal throne, and Avatar has mentioned he's a liar in conversation with the player - but this is the first time that he's been mentioned to the party in the context of still being around the tower.  Naturally, having declared the party the Mostest Dangerousest Threat ever Tower Avatar promptly fucks off instead of destroying them personally.  Now I'm confused again. Did Mech somehow manage to tap into the communication between the Avatar and Youspock? How did she reply to Mech without a word? Oh, wait, it's a Nick Macari story. Nick Macari on plotlines posted:If what you want to say at each POINT, is frivolous and carries little narrative drive, your story isn’t going to engage readers, but if you know solid story structure and make an effort to get the right messages in the right places, you put yourself on the path of crafting a genuine story. It's a loving goldmine, folks! : Ye donna need to say much when ye shroud yourself in a blood red glimmer. So she said nothing to the characters at all but somehow Mech could tap into - you know what, gently caress it. : This snake finally shows her fangs. Your dear "friend" has finally decided to get rid of us, once and for all.She just DID this! She showed up, whined about how the party had to be stopped, and then poo poo a bunch of generic robots everywhere.  You people literally commented on how she was screwing your quest this entire time! This very same floor posted: Goddammit. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 I would prefer your game remain tedious instead of aggravating, thank you very much.  The biggest danger of these fights is turning on fast forward and having someone explode before you can micro healing. What a joke.  Naturally none of the peanut gallery have anything to say.  This section's puzzle sucks.  : Go ahead. See if you can salvage some parts here. We get a cutscene of Mech running over to the dead robot and looting it. : This model is much newer version[sic]. It is an experimental construction. It has a much better computing processor. I will perform an upgrade.: Wait! We don't...: Mech doesn't wait and inserts the new chip into the slot at the back of his head. His eyes flash red and blue in rapid succession for few seconds. [sic] That... that happened I guess. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
  Crap for the crap god!  This is for... something. The game doesn't label it as a secret area or a sidequest. I will label it as tedium. You'll see why in a few minutes.  I guess we're destroying more of this irreplaceable machinery because this game is incompetently written. Whatever.  This raises... more questions. I thought we could only talk directly to the champions when they were near the teleporter. Are we just mind controlling them now?  You might be asking yourself "TGEK, did you pick this up offscreen?" The answer is no. How will the game handle this?  We get this for ALL THREE of the materials, despite the game telling us we picked up some contaminated materials from somewhere. I go around the area looking for materials and don't find them. gently caress it.  Waste of time!  Slap this on Whisper because she has the mana pool to not care and also 10% cooldown reduction with her 246% skill power means she one-shots entire groups of Grind Buddies with that meteor of hers.  We level up Kaela again. Apparently her Void Grenade can be upgraded to an AoE stun so we do that. She also has the ability to summon a mini version of that Titan boss that has a zillion hit points and is basically party member number five. Let's do that.   We'll need this later.  So, this puzzle. Diana said you should care about the number 3 because it's their third anniversary. Now, personally, I would dump any woman who turned our anniversary into a lovely RPG puzzle, but the Twitter morons will whine at me for kinkshaming. The actual answer is "3456" because the shutdown codes are all ascending sequences. We're going to come back here next update. The achievement, incidentally, is for putting "0666" into any of these typing devices.  Alright gang. It's been too long. Who's ready for some DAYS OF OLD????   The revelation was that the magic was evil and came from evil devils - uh, aliens! I mean, aliens! The aliens wanted people to use magic because it would open a gate to their galaxy and let them eat everyone, which they do because it's fun I guess. Look, what do you want from me? The more of these we watch the more we leave coherence's light. : How can you fight an enemy that is all-powerful and does not have physical form?There has been a surprising amount of ink spilled on this. My personal favorite for sheer stupidity is Brent Weeks having a character test God with a Magic: The Gathering game, but you can see it in good literature like Jack London's the Sea-Wolf.  Now, the game has kind of implied golems are made using mana. In fact, the tower was built to poo poo out golems via mana arrays. The Ancients had the technology to build all these robots without magic. Keep that in mind for the next few slides. : Hoping that there was not yet enough mixed energy for the Organthe to be able to open a bridge. Ow posted:Thousands of crystal golems were created and positioned across the land to immediately absorb any new node before it could be used.  I think we are to believe that the golem killed the guy for trying to use magic. : Everyone was hoping that it would be enough, that it was not too late...: The Organthe waiting on the other side of the portal soon realized that people had uncovered their deception. Come back, coherence! Come back! If you'll remember, the Organthe became beings of pure thought way back when. Earlier in the game posted:So they're literally made of thought. They can send thought across the "barrier". I don't understand why they can't go through now? I know someone is going to bring up Brandon Sanderson and how you need a magic "system" so you can magically repel potential sexual partners to the other side of the building. Hold that thought. : They abandoned all pretense and took a direct approach.: They began to create inanimate constructs across the land, whose only purpose was to destroy. So they can't cross over. They want to cross over because they need to eat energy. If they don't eat energy they won't die, because they are immortal. Their galaxy is dead and has not even an electron of loose energy. This allows them to expend energy to create death robots because the bridge allows for thoughts to cross over. They cannot cross over because they are made of thought. I'm so confused. : People tried to fight them with technology, building mechanized golems of their own.: But they did not have enough time or resources to protect the whole land.: Destruction spread across... I was going to question why no one built artillery or aircraft (even though they apparently had enough guns for everybody) and built mechs, but then realized that everyone apparently just abandoned technology to use magic and frolic. I don't know. But wait, there's more! We talked to someone who fought in this war, remember? Kaela gives us war stories posted:So which is it? The guns turned back the enemy, or the enemy smashed everything? We fought one of those constructs and we were able to knock it out with swords. Why are these people using swords and spears when they have repeater firearms? We know they had very advanced technology because we've seen robots and AI. It's not even like they didn't have industrialization, we literally just saw a robot factory and ran into mass produced silicon chips! You can run a lot of factories on a war economy, so I do not understand why there's an entire army of swordsmen in this capital city instead of just blowing up all these assholes with helicopters. Then again, the Organthe construct is fighting with a sword and those guys had a galactic empire with FTL starships, so who knows whether helicopters would have done poo poo anyway. : People of all races gathered in heavily fortified locations, not knowing the time and place of the next attack.: Then one day a heavy attack came upon the Elven capital city.: The defenders were overrun and a terrible slaughter began.: Desperate and maddened with anger, the council of Elven magi broke the treaty and lashed out at the attackers with the power: which had been prohibited and was exactly what the Organthe were hoping for.: In a few moments all the attackers were shattered by the terrible destructive force of the magic. Naturally, the peanut gallery has absolutely nothing to say. TheGreatEvilKing desperately tries to make sense of this crap posted:
We're going to talk about this, because the more we delve into these "Days of Old" cutscenes the less sense it makes. If we go back to our extremely simplified version of the plot, we can distill this element down to one meaningful idea. What The Authors Are Trying To Do posted:The devils engineered circumstances so the people would give into temptation. That's it. This isn't hard. You don't need to poo poo it up with all these weird magical bullshit things like aliens creating robots with thought projection or barriers that thought beings can't cross but thoughts can. The biggest problem with this game's overarching plot is that it's making GBS threads up something coherent by hiding it behind bizarre magic bullshit. Now, I acknowledge freely that the basic plot of the deal with the devil story is supernatural, but it doesn't have to be. The core of the story is that the main character makes a deal with someone or something malicious that demands its due - it could just as easily be an evil dictator or megacorporation as much as the literal devil, and the supernatural trappings of that story should serve to reinforce that. It's like how the titular One Ring can command and enslave others because Sauron is the archetypical tyrant who seeks to command and enslave others. Now, I want to head something off at the pass. Someone is probably going to come into this thread and quote Brandon Sanderson about how if the magic solves problems it needs to have rules and how the real sin of this wacky flashback is that the magic is a wibbly wobbly plot device that makes no sense and it could be fixed if we wrote a whole RPG book about how thought beings interact with barriers. The second part is correct, but they miss the fact that the supernatural works best when it's augmenting an actual theme or characterization. The tyrant isn't just cruel and charismatic, he can literally reach into your brain and make you kneel. Most myths of sorcerers and whatnot don't necessarily make the plots dependent on feats of magic and wonder, they just let you do things at a greater scale. Even when you do get into magic bullshit most of it flows from some kind of theme - no one questions how much mana the incestuous characters in 100 Years of Solitude had to spend to create a baby with a pig's tail or what magic words the goddesses said to get Paris over there to make him judge the world's most stressful beauty contest. The seemingly unintended themes of our story are hubris and the temptation of power, so the mages being able to build a huge tower to the heavens and the Organthe having a bunch of magic to tempt people with make perfect sense. The problem is that in order to make the plot "work" the game wants to get into the nitty-gritty of magical nonsense, and I'm not sure this even had to happen. They didn't need an apocalyptic war with a bunch of robots the authors pulled out of their rear end, they literally could have had greedy people agree to let the Organthe in for power which is a plot point they even use later! The great war would make a lot more sense if instead of evil robots from another dimension the enemies were members of the five races who went over to the Organthe because they believed in power and arrogantly believed the Organthe would spare them or they could control the Organthe. If you really wanted the Organthe sword bots the traitors could let them in and that would instantly make more sense than this thought projection poo poo. That said, I am very curious as to how much of this was actually synchronized. Despite learning that magic was literally a tool of the Organthe that brings the world closer to destruction every time it's used, Whisper has absolutely no qualms about throwing it around, Tower Avatar doesn't comment on it, none of the expedition mages seem to have any problems with using it, Kaela doesn't react with any kind of concern that Aeric and Whisper are drawing the mana into their bodies to make Organthe friendly energy, and the things from the visions just don't match up with the rest of the game. Kaela tells us the soldiers in the Organthe war used mass-produced pistols, the cutscene shows us swords. The Organthe introduced mana to the world except for that lore blurb that tells us about how mana was always here and some people could use magic, but there were also godlike elemental lords and shadow people. Whatever. The more time I spend thinking about this game the more my brain hurts. Next Time: Ruining an anniversary with grinding.
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Jul 10, 2023 06:41
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I think you guys have 100% ruined Your chances of making out with Kaela. GOOD. I want no one involved with this game to ever get close to reproducing.
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Jul 10, 2023 12:12
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I'm pretty sure this plot has been written by a big group who all got a very brief three- or four-bullet-point story outline and have been taking it in turns to write a paragraph each without ever seeing what the previous people wrote. There's no such thing as a perfect consistent story with no mistakes, not on this scale, but this game is contradicting itself every few sentences. Not minor nitpicky details either, pretty broad plot points are directly opposing things we've literally just been told within the past couple updates.
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Jul 10, 2023 13:06
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This is by the man who wrote Black Geyser, after all.
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Jul 10, 2023 13:51
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Honestly, why didn't they just say "The evil space aliens couldn't get through, so they manipulated the people into a global war backed with the new levels of magic" instead of this brain-melting plot?
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Jul 10, 2023 16:55
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The evil aliens were unable to affect the world through magic due to the actions of the magi, so they transmitted through knowledge of technology to their agents who could then wage war on them and remove the blockade.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:05
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The evil aliens, unable to invade the world directly, sat on their crystal thrones and projected their thoughts, mind-controlling people in the world to do their bidding.
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Jul 10, 2023 18:07
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I have no idea how precisely the evil aliens are supposed to get anything from a ruined world. What the gently caress was this plan supposed to be?
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Jul 10, 2023 23:32
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kw0134 posted:I have no idea how precisely the evil aliens are supposed to get anything from a ruined world. What the gently caress was this plan supposed to be? To be fair, they're gonna shred it all down for energy anyway, and I think the idea is that once they get into this dimension, they can then spread out and consume everything in a fresh new galaxy/universe. One ruined planet is peanuts compared to the energy stored in the local star, let alone everything else.
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Jul 11, 2023 03:09
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I mean, wasn't part of the whole thing that kicked off the game that the sun was gone? It IS a big ol' ball of energy, after all (yes I know that the sun is not just "pure energy" but I'm assuming that they would consume the energy and leave the matter).
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Jul 11, 2023 04:03
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There's plenty of light outside the tower in the prologue cutscenes. There's also clearly some agriculture and food going on, it's just really lovely quality and barely enough to subsist on.
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Jul 11, 2023 04:11
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At least we have villains that do stuff in this game? Even if most of that stuff is crammed into the lore files, or stuff we’re doing (or totally-not-us is doing) or bland bit and arc villains… On second thought, maybe this isn’t a compliment.
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Jul 11, 2023 06:12
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Alas Poor Yorick, You Were In This Game Welcome back! Last time on Tower of Time we learned about the surprisingly stupid war with the evil power mas - I mean, Organthe. Today we're going to continue loving around Floor 6 to accomplish... stuff.  Thanks, rear end in a top hat. We'll do your four worthless fetch quests to do boring maintenance poo poo.   Perish in flame.  There's a lot of aimless wandering around to find the right contaminants to shut down the machines in a totally safe manner.  Remember this?  If you enter "3456" into the text device it unlocks another teleport lamp thing.   The POWAH.  It's a Hamlet reference!   Now I thought Yorick was a dude, seeing as the line is "I knew him, Horatio", but hey, who am I to deny Disney style gay representation?  So I guess Yorick was waiting to do a block puzzle to get into Diana's pants on this featureless platform in the void, and was greatly disappointed that we brought a whole bunch of dudes. This fight also sucks.  You might be thinking that we are kind of safe because it's just a boss health bar, right? We can kill the boss and the fight will be over. The game even had a tutorial to that effect. The Second Boss posted: The ghost gets chunked faster than Rise of Skywalker got panned by critics.  So, remember how the screen also showed a bunch of pointless adds?  The game keeps making GBS threads them out after Yorick dies. I think they only playtested it with people focusing the adds first.  There are a LOT of the adds and they all have miniboss level health bars. They still die because Team Shooty will gently caress you up, and they die surprisingly quickly, but the game has determined we must slaughter every last generic grim reaper wraith (which are also  MYSTERIOUS! because there are no orcs) until we die of boredom or number go down. The wraiths are vulnerable to CC like Kaela's chain lightning or stun grenade. The grind continues.  I guess this is better than being punched in the nuts.   So, we continue our boring, boring trek.  Skip!  We can turn off two of these "processors" with the codes we found.  Reload!  At the prospect of more combat we conclude the update.
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Jul 12, 2023 23:20
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Tower of Time is an innovative cure for insomnia.
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Jul 13, 2023 01:20
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