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Purple, I was wondering how you felt about Albion - go into as much detail as you can. I was not in the thread when it was running, but I'm nearly done reading the LP on the archive and I wanted your thoughts. I know that you hated Wizards & Warriors, loathed Antara and were fairly 'meh' on Betrayal (less favourable towards Return), but I can't really tell you how you feel about Albion in the LP because you take the piss out of games you loathe and games that you don't loathe.
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Apr 29, 2023 01:38
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Albion has a lot of nostalgia value for me, and I love the way it starts, with characters from a scientific background trying to parse a magical world without being dismissive of it, but being genuinely interested in it, wanting to try to suss out how it all works, learning the local languages, dealing with the local oddities, etc. I think where it loses me a bit is when it introduces that there are humans on Albion, too, and it all turns into some great battle between the forces of Technology and Wizardry. I think it would've been a better game if you completely removed the Illuminated and just made it a story of people trying to co-exist in spite of capitalists trying to make a profit off of making them fight each other. Just have all the natives be weirdo aliens with their own culture. Have small conflicts from island to island as the players trace the landing site of the Toronto, and then when they arrive simply have the big conflict be between people who care about their world, and PMC security/android security trying to exploit the world. In my opinion nothing in the existing story really requires the presence of the humans. Even the conflict on the third island could easily just have been between two native cultures instead. So I would say it is a game that I really want to like, but I'm aware of its flaws. I think of the games I've LP'd so far, the only ones that genuinely makes me swear and want to throw things are Wizards and Warriors and Betrayal in Antara. All of the rest have some things that I like and some things that I love. Betrayal at Krondor is a solid enough game when played casually, but when you're playing to win, it's easy to lever open the cracks in its mechanics and exploit them brutally. But at the same time for the casual player a lot of what creates the difficulty is obfuscated information that only the play-to-win player would ever likely do the grunt work of seeking out the information for in order to exploit. Still, it's also an artifact of its time, game design was comparatively in its infancy back then, they have an excuse. I have a lot less patience for modern game developers since they have decades more game design experience and tools to draw on in order to not gently caress up. Like, lmao, they were using a loving repurposed flight simulator engine for Betrayal at Krondor. Plus it's always going to have a bit of love from me in that it takes a culture that's universally just "gnar har har, evilbads, love evil, love blood, kill mans" in the Midkemia setting and tries to humanize them somewhat.
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Apr 29, 2023 09:42
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How do you feel about the game's mechanics, character progression and balance? You mentioned in the LP that it's very easy to break this game by accident, and I don't really play games for story, so I care more about gameplay than narrative.
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Apr 29, 2023 15:44
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JustJeff88 posted:How do you feel about the game's mechanics, character progression and balance? You mentioned in the LP that it's very easy to break this game by accident, and I don't really play games for story, so I care more about gameplay than narrative. Not sure exactly which one you mean by "the game." So I'll just answer for multiple games. Albion: Ice spells at maximum power will trivialize all combats until the very endgame where many enemies are immune to being frozen, but then just a bit of grinding will make your "delete the battlefield"-spell work against everything. Conversely, if you don't grind up your casters some, the game will absolutely beat your rear end without mercy. But said grinding for power is likely to happen, once again, by accident just by trying to explore all the edges of the various islands which have a lot of empty space that just exists to let you murder a bunch of animals for fun and get lost. It also conjures up a feeling of a game originally intended to have a broader scope, like the unused prison on the desert island and the occasional ruins on the third island. Mechanically I am always a sucker for an RPG that makes positioning matter even a little bit, so I have a hard time hating it, but even at its best its very swing-y. Betrayal at Krondor: Likewise, just being able to freeze enemies out of battles solves most fights in your favour, overwhelming them with ghosts will also do in a pinch. In terms of pure combat stats, going a bit out of your way to clear all optional things as soon as they appear makes the story trivial, so you'll probably gently caress up the balance just by being curious. The game's main threat is facing off against multiple mages casting save-or-die/suck spells, but most fights are just against default warriors with swords and maybe bows and many enemy mages have really bad spell selections and baffling spellcasting AI even when they do have scary spells. Not really a hard game outside of a select few fights. Gothic 2: Hell on you as a mage until you get skeleton summons and Ice Block casts, which trivialize most encounters not involving literal armies. If you're playing as a Mercenary, you're in for one hell of a time coming into the endgame unless you're stocked up on scrolls, and Paladins don't have it super easy either. While playing a Fire Mage starts you out rough it's the way to really cheat your way through the endgame. Gothic 3: Patience and a bow will solve most problems unless you're in an enclosed area or facing large enough groups of enemies. But once again, kiting is the name of the game, and you never want to engage in a fair fight if you can avoid it. They have, sadly, nerfed both freezing enemies and mobbing them with summons. In terms of breaking it by accident, well. It's more like it's easy to gently caress up the intended progression by accident. I'm absolutely running around some areas right now that the game didn't expect me to visit this early and I'm about to cause some comical damage to the game's scripting soonish.
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Apr 29, 2023 19:42
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PurpleXVI posted:words I meant just Albion; sorry for the ambiguity. I appreciate the effortpost. I have the FR/EN/GR version of the game. I've never played it even though I really like the art style, and your LP makes me wonder if it's just too Eurojank for me. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 29, 2023 23:59
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Update 10: A Nice Temple  When we last left off, I only had two Hashishin settlements left to rip off before we wiped them off the map: Barakesh and Ishtar, and I was on my way to Barakesh when I stumbled into a camp of fun folks who wanted to lend a hand with that project.    Knut, a bandit, said he'd help out if I got the nomad Ateras and his buddy Redge to agree to join to fight.   Ateras, the local nomad leader, said he'd give his OK if I could find his scout Sinikar and get a report from him on the situation.     Redge just demanded an up-front bribe of five-thousand gold, which I grudgingly agreed to because the alternative was murdering everyone(except the slaves, of course) in Barakesh by myself, which would be a huge pain in the rear end.  Barakesh is a surprisingly short walk up the coast to the northeast. I've no idea why the map seems to indicate it as covering a huge area, by painting the entire region a grayish white, because it's not particularly large.     That poorly rendered hole into the side of the cliff on the left is the mine with the fist-fighting slave back when I was liberating Ben Sala from the undead.    While heading for Barakesh, it's important to notice this little slope on the left, because it contains a well-hidden cave...        Sorry, a well-hidden hideout.  Well, we're going to need some help on the inside to succeed. Find a suicidal slave and everyone else will want to risk their lives, too, got it.Sinikar then jogs back to the nomad camp to get ready to fight.      Benito here guards the entrance to Bakaresh. It's pretty easy to get in if you aren't an idiot.  Like, really, just don't tell him you're here to kill and rob everyone and he'll let you in.      drat, that's one hell of a tower. I bet it contains something super valuable. Time to get access before I kill everyone.  It's kind of weird that there are monsters AFTER the guarded gate, you'd figure that you'd put the gate so that everything's safe on the "inside" side.    Silvio here is the local guard captain, he tells us not to start any trouble and tells us to go hassle his guards to turn in their reports. Benito is simple enough, he provides the report as we go through, but the guy on the north gate is apparently troublesome.    Aldo here is yet another generic fat merchant, he complains about his slaves being useless while also asking us to find stuff for him. A trio of "jewelled caskets" that he's convinced will make everyone respect him, they're somewhere in the ruins near Barakesh but his slaves have been unable to find them.   Jaffar is the local weapons merchant and involved in no quests.     Did you hear the news about the idiots over in Braga? They all gave their temple tributes to one guy and he managed to lose them! Yeah, I was there for that, it was completely stupid. No chance of any shenanigans here when we're delivering our tribute. Hmmmm. Well, you seem trustworthy. Why not? Convince the others to go along with it and I'll let you.It's not that hard to accomplish. Aldo wants us to say nice things about him if we get allowed inside the temple, Aschnu is already on board with us and that only leaves Carlos.  He's complaining that Aldo isn't buying more slaves from him because angry animals are eating the slaves when they try to dig deeper into the ruins. Sure, we can kill a few animals, right?      In the town square is also Amul, the worst thing about Barakesh. Back in Gothic 2, Vatras was preaching in Khorinis, he had a decent amount of dialogue and you'd only hear him when you were pretty close. Amul is audible in essentially ALL of Barakesh and he only has two lines. "YOU SHALL PAY IN GOLD, OR YOU SHALL PAY WITH YOUR BLOOD" and another one that my brain immediately deleted and refused to remember. Something about how the Hashishin are the chosen of Beliar and how everyone is going to pay up or get stabbed.   Barakesh also has an arena, as is about standard for every city and minor settlement in Gothic 3 by this point.     On the far side are the small ruins next to Barakesh, full of jackals and lions.      Despite my armor upgrade, they're both still reasonably scary if they actually manage to get close and dig their teeth into me.  Here's the first casket, too. Once again, note that we're hunting small brown objects in a sandy and brown desert. I hate this. I hate it!   The next enemies are lions, and it was requested that folks get to see some spell effects, so...  First off is the spell that I forget the name of which makes nearby wild animals attack the target, even if the target is also a wild animal. Afterwards, I take a crack at freezing them up with Ice Arrow.   As mentioned, it's great for splitting up groups of enemies, but it's no longer an instant win button like Ice Block was in Gothic 2 because after one hit, the frost effect ends. If there are multiple enemies you're generally better off freezing the ones you don't plan to immediately engage and then fighting the remainder "fair" unless you want to freeze them for a single free Power Attack or such. It also does decent damage when fully charged.     Once the lions and jackals are done, I go back to hunting for the caskets.     One of them I find relatively easily, but the third eludes me. I simply can't find the loving thing.    Thinking I might be searching in the wrong place, I check the ruin over by the side of the arena, but no dice. There is a cave here, though, which is unrelated, but I check it out of desperation thinking maybe it's like the fifth key in Al-Shedim and there's just no hint that it's been moved.    Instead it's just full of a shitload of Sandcrawlers, which Silvio is going to ask me to kill later, so doing it now is cutting ahead slightly. Also important for the rep gain since I need 75 Barakesh rep to get into the temple.       Next to the Sandcrawler lair is the north entrance to Barakesh, which is really just a road where a single guy is standing around all day and night and afraid to report to his boss because he's failed to singlehandedly defeat an entire cave's worth of bandits. He refuses to hand over the report until we help. And by "help" I mean "do his work for him" since he refuses to lend a hand. He's a prick.     At this point I'm getting strong enough that generic raider bandits aren't a huge threat unless I'm a moron.      Once I clear out the leader, I've technically succeeded so I leave Akrabor to clean up.  Yeah, do some work you goddamn bum.   I still haven't found the final casket, though, so I end up having to look up where the hell it's hiding. The answer might shock you!   It's right next to the loving slaves! I guess Aldo was right when he called you guys useless dorks.   Now we've got the gold from Aldo which we just need to hand over to Amul. I'm really not sure why he wants us to walk the five steps over to do it. Now you could technically just abscond with it, which you might be tempted to do if you're siding with the nomads, but the slave we need to talk to in order to do a proper assault on Barakesh is inside the temple, so we need a lot of Barakesh rep to get to and talk to him. It's also only 3000 gold, which isn't THAT much in the grand scheme of things.      Really? Were they too lazy to just walk over here? Well, I suppose it reflects well on you that you didn't just leave town with it while laughing loudly at how stupid they are. It really is, isn't it? It'd be a shame if someone curried favour with us to infiltrate and rob it, and perhaps bring down our entire society. No matter how much you stare at me, I'm not going to admit it. And I'm not letting you in until you entertain me some more.Even completing every quest in Barakesh, we also need to do at least a few tiers of the arena to get the 75+% rep needed to get access to the temple.     The first four tiers are pretty normal, comparatively unchallenging, even.      Three dual-wielders who are somewhat negated by just hitting them with Ice Arrows and a power attack to start the fight, as well as any time you can get enough distance from them for a fully charged Ice Arrow in general. But the fourth fight...  ...is against two opponents, which the AI seems to have a hard time dealing with.  My guess is that there's a single coordinate that AI arena combatants are meant to walk to in order to start the fight, and because they both arrived simultaneously, neither of them can fully get "on" the coordinate because they can't shove each other out of the way. So I decide to start the fight by blasting them with a couple of Ice Arrows, you know, to get them in the mood.    And because Gothic 3 is a janky piece of poo poo at times, the game's targeting decides that what I want to actually hit is someone in the loving stands, despite being locked on to the combatants in front of me.  Then when I decide to chug a mana potion for a second try, they finally decide they want to wrassle, they were just waiting for me to lower my guard!   It starts easy when I manage to freeze them, but then it goes downhill quick.   These fuckers have poisoned swords, like almost any dual-wielding hashishin has, but thankfully I can break up their pathing a bit by standing behind a piece of wood, I guess their object permanence is a bit wonky, giving me a second to chug a potion and get back to the fight.    The fight drags on long enough that between dropping the first and the second, the first has the time to get up and walk away, nursing his wounds.  Eventually I cinch the win, though, patience more or less wins you most fights against single opponents. All this arena fighting has also ended up being worth close to one and a half level-ups' worth of strength increases, so it's paid off.     Sure, I can't imagine anyone that would give me money and stab a bunch of people in the arena without having good intentions.      Oddly enough the temple doesn't really have a front door, it just has this mine-looking tunnel through the cliff heading up to the top floor.    There's a single named slave in Bakaresh, Murat, and you'd expect from this that he's the one you need to talk to in order to organize a slave rebellion. But the first time you talk to him, he just tells you he can't talk to you and breaks off the convo immediately, which can leave you very confused since few if any other characters refuse to talk to you once, and will then talk to you if you try again. I certainly thought so at first. But it turns out you have to talk to him twice, thankfully I remembered to do so on the way out.   Lining the right side of the corridor are a number of decently luxurious rooms.     And a staircase. Upstairs are just yet more rooms, but downstairs...    Holy poo poo, THAT'S what all those temple taxes are for? And this is just Barakesh! Ishtar must be MADE of gold!   A golden loving statue, sweet merciful gods.  There's also a stone tablet in the basement, I'm not quite sure how they work. Some of them give you +Ancient Knowledge, and others say you just already know what they contain. It's unclear to me whether this is because each of them only teaches you if you're under a certain limit, or if some of them are "paired" so that if you've used any one of the ones keyed together, you can't use the others. This one, sadly, rebuffs me without a boost.  So for now the only score down here is the Barakesh teleporter stone. But we'll be back, oh my God will we ever be back.        The first temple building leads to a flat-topped building that's home to the giant monolith we saw on entering Barakesh. Must be something cool in there, right?      Why are you here? Why are you bothering me? Begone from my sight, filthy subcreature. Oh, alright then. How do you do? I'm doing pretty good, thanks for asking. Also have you ever heard of Aldo? Really? That seems hard to believe. What's your honest opinion? Fat, lazy, sack of poo poo, can't wait to stab him in the brain. This is almost word for word how the exchange actually goes. Sigmor is a bit of an rear end in a top hat. Cool. Wanna teach me some magic I can kill him with? gently caress off. What if I paid you a bunch of gold? You think that I can be bribed? You think that I would stoop so low as to sell my arcane arts for filthy lucre? Yeah pretty much. Once again, basically word for word. I grab a couple of Ancient Knowledge updates.     ...this place is just a hollow spiral? I feel so loving cheated. What's even so important about it?     The second bridge off of the Cube Island hosts this... thing. This creepily wet-looking, glistening thing. I do not like looking at it.  It seems to be a supersized Beliar shrine. I can't interact with it currently and don't think I'd have the option unless I felt full-in on allying with the orcs and hashishin. The guy on the left is Tizgar, and the dancers are nameless. Approaching Tizgar triggers an event.    An event where he's less of an idiot than everyone else in town and starts summoning demons and telling them to rip my face off. Let's hold off on visiting him for now.     On the way back, I bump into Murak again and decide to try and talk to him another time since he's the only named slave I've seen in town so far.   And THIS time he gives me the time of day and agrees to organize a rebellion. Thankfully at some point I ended up with three extra weapon bundles, I think it was when I was kicking things over and preparing for the rebellion over near Braga. The lack of any sort of inventory space limit makes everything I grab feel like kind of a blur where I just hoover everything up and I have no idea where it came from if it isn't explicitly labelled.       Downstairs I stop by a normal Beliar shrine to learn Summon Skeleton, a classic, and decide that since Barakesh didn't take too long to sort out, I'd take the trip out to Ishtar and check if there's anything to do there or if I'm just barred from entry.    I teleport to Braga first, as the nearest location.       The trip is largely uneventful.    Spotting a couple of wandering bandits, I decide to bring out the Bone Team.      He rushes in to distract the enemy while I freeze one and hack down another.   In the time it takes to do that, he's managed to take one frail bandit down to half health and gotten himself reduced by about 25%. It's clearly going to take more than one summon to make a notable difference here. Still, between the skeleton and an Ice Arrow, that now means encounters of up to three enemies can be whittled down to a one-on-one pretty quickly.       The deserts of Varant often don't have "real" paths of roads, instead there's a vague suggestion of a trail, but even that sometimes vanishes, and only the huge banners continue to suggest which direction you should be taking.      Eventually, after fighting dozens of generic bandits in the sand, the spires of Ishtar loom out of the haze in the distance.       I sure hope I didn't haul rear end all the way out here for nothing. That would super suck.     Well, that's just rude. I can't abide rudeness.   Well, if they won't let me in I'll just have to set their whole civilization on fire. Next time: We set the entire Hashishin civilization on fire because they're dickheads. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 09:02 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 4, 2023 18:58
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Purple posted:Next time: We set the entire Hashishin civilization on fire because they're dickheads. If that's the justification, you're going to have to depopulate the entire game
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May 5, 2023 14:56
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PurpleXVI posted:It seems to be a supersized Beliar shrine. I can't interact with it currently and don't think I'd have the option unless I felt full-in on allying with the orcs and hashishin. The guy on the left is Tizgar, and the dancers are nameless. Approaching Tizgar triggers an event. At a risk of minor spoilers should this option be chosen, but I feel that the thread should know - Beliar doesn't care about anyone, he's just a dickhead god of chaos and murder. Anyway great update! Your writing is honestly great, really brings the world to life and conveys the atmosphere of the game. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 17:08 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 5, 2023 16:48
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Private Speech posted:At a risk of minor spoilers should this option be chosen, but I feel that the thread should know - Beliar doesn't care about anyone, he's just a dickhead god of chaos and murder. Thank you! It's nice to hear a message of encouragement. It helps prevent me getting distracted by playing Troubleshooter.
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May 5, 2023 18:27
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If anyone is curious, because I jolly well was, this is Purple's 14th LP in total. He has thirteen previous, completed LPs of which three are archived. For some reason, this one does not show up under 'In Progress'. This concludes the broadcast of the 'I was reading this update and thought "Purple is awfully prolific - I wonder how many LPs he has done?" network'. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 22:37 on May 6, 2023 |
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May 6, 2023 22:35
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JustJeff88 posted:If anyone is curious, because I jolly well was, this is Purple's 14th LP in total. He has thirteen previous, completed LPs of which three are archived. For some reason, this one does not show up under 'In Progress'. Well, it's been added now, and jeez, I've done that many? Hardly feels it. I'll hassle Baldurk about archiving some of the remainder once Wizardry 8 has been archived.
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May 6, 2023 22:43
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PurpleXVI posted:Well, it's been added now, and jeez, I've done that many? Hardly feels it. I'll hassle Baldurk about archiving some of the remainder once Wizardry 8 has been archived. In alphabetical order: Albion Betrayal at Krondor Betrayal in Antara Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance Dominions 5 Gothic 2 Might & Magic VII: For Blood and Honor Might & Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer Might and Magic 6 Return to Krondor Tales of Maj'Eyal(ToME4) Wizardry 8 Wizards & Warriors Wizardry 8 is definitely the first priority because that game is brilliant, but I would want to archive the latter M&M trilogy next. I get the idea that Baldurk is hideously overworked, but eventually you want to get them all in. Too many good LPs have been lost due to lack of archiving. There's another complete LP of Wizardry 8, in fact. I've been reading it the last few days and about 2/5 of the screenshots are missing. Granted, it was done in 2010, but the point remains.
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May 7, 2023 03:43
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Update 11: I Am Experiencing Regret So, before we get started, I want to point out that this update killed me, and I hope everyone appreciates the years it sliced off my lifespan as I fumed over the baffling decisions the developers had made. I had this idea that I'd pick up Diego, Angar and Lester and bring them all along as I liberated Braga, Barakesh and Mora Sul... except it turns out that you can, first off, only have one companion at once, so having already dragged Lester over to Mora Sul, I dismissed him and felt that I'd bring each for the town that was nearest them. Angar for Mora Sul, Diego for Braga and then Lester for Barakesh. When it comes around to be Lester's turn... he's nowhere. I have been completely unable to find him, he wasn't where I dismissed him, not at the point he went to last time I dismissed him(back to digging in Al-Shedim) and nowhere in between. Well, good luck, Lester, whereever you are. In any case, this update resumes after I pick up Diego and haul him uneventfully out to the nomad cave near Braga...   I can't believe you managed to lose Lester. I can't believe one of you actually wised up and hit the bricks before I dragged you into a dangerous situation.  Well, it looks like you did all our busywork, so we can't really put it off any longer. And I don't mean to say we'll blunder into trouble and get killed if you don't come along, but... Fine, I'll babysit you.  The sharp-eyed reader may notice that all the nomads except for one are getting up. This puzzled me, too, and it turns out to be because he's somehow gotten stuck in the "roasting meat" animation. Apparently his lunch is way more important than liberating his homeland.    The way they walk in a perfectly straight line and following each others' footsteps(except for the one guy) reminds me of the Lemmings.     This is also around the point where I realized something was up. See, I cleared out the route that I was brought here by the water mage I met near Braga, assuming the nomads would take the same route in reverse. But no, they beeline it through the scrub outback instead because they're assholes.    Even when they're reduced to old-man-shuffling their way up hillsides they technically shouldn't be climbing.  Yep, Lemmings. Really makes me want to turn one of them into a Blocker and watch them all go back home.     So the problem with them not taking my cleared path is that they run into some wildlife that they could happily spend the next half hour fighting and losing half their members to. We should probably save them. I guess, I just really wanted to watch one of them get their rear end kicked first.      I hope folks are noticing all the arrows, because desert dinosaurs do not tend to use arrows, which is to say that everyone with an arrow sticking out of them either got plugged by a nomad or by Diego. That one poor guy is a loving porcupine now.    Probably one of the more amazing parts is also that I spent like an HOUR killing jackals and bandits to sufficiently pacify the ruins to make the nomads happy, and then the only part of them that they cross through is like, a couple of bricks on the outskirts. I could just have ignored all of those monsters and nothing would have changed. gently caress!  I'm ready to attack something, alright. Either you get a move on towards Braga or we'll see what else gets attacked.   Violence and funny ragdolls ensue.    Things get somewhat spicy when Braga's local black mage walks out and starts throwing fireballs. Considering how effectively mages kill NPC's, I think that spells may not be affected by the NPC vs NPC damage reduction modifier.      For instance, here I am getting the XP reward for hunting down the leader of the nomads I'm currently helping, because the mage blew him up with a fireball. I could probably have avoided this by looping around and hacking down the mage from behind but ehhhhh, effort and personal risk. I'm letting the nomads do the heavy lifting.  Appropriately, they finish "liberating" Braga while I'm hiding behind a rock. As for the quotes, well...      Pre-liberation, Braga had maybe a population of 20 people, including slaves. Post-liberation it has a population of three. One slave and two nomads who survived the assault and are now busy grilling. I do the customary looting...  ...and say goodbye to Diego before heading out to Barakesh, because I'm not walking all that way and companions don't teleport with you when you teleport. There is some serious cruelty in this game "design."        As per usual, with their chores done, the nomads at the oasis near Barakesh are willing to risk their lives alongside me. Maybe if they'd compared notes with the nomads near Braga they'd have known what a bad idea that would turn out to be.       I just went this way and there was NOTHING. Where did these things come from? Once again, these guys also manage to blunder into some enemies that I apparently missed by the simple expedient of "following the road" while going the exact same route. I actually redo this because the first time, this fight actually manages to kill a Nomad or two since I'm slow about getting in there.       At first I try to conserve my health and healing resources by sniping with my bow, but this turns out to be impossible when all these dumb dickheads keep getting in the way of my arrows. Pretty sure I do more damage to the nomads than the guards in the end.     Past the entrance, Silvio has, for some reason, jogged over from the town while no one else has. He turns out to be an unholy terror in a fight, and he could easily kill most of the nomads by himself if I didn't run in and stab him in the spine while he's doing a cool, flashy spinny move against the yokels.   Look at all those loving arrows in him, Jesus. I love it when these games have persistent projectiles stuck in character models.      A couple of luckless guards come running around the back of the temple and get cut to ribbons, which prompts the murder brigade to fatefully pick that same direction for their attack.     In addition to Amul in the central square, Tizgar, Sigmor and a nameless black mage from somewhere both show up very quickly, throwing around fireballs and ice arrows(hey, that's a water mage spell! they're not supposed to use that!), forcing several reloads because just one of them can almost kill me from full health. I think either high Ancient Knowledge boosts spell damage or fire/ice/magic resistance is bugged kind of like it was in Gothic 2 and defenses don't work properly against it. Either way, it's rough.    While a good number of defenders get hacked down, it soon rolls around to me being the only living attacker(or so I think) and I decide it's time for a strategic retreat.   It counts as a strategic retreat because we're shooting arrows while running away.    The fun lasts until one of the black mages catches up, at which point it's time to haul rear end at high speed again.       Leading to this odd tableau where Aldo, who for some reason isn't hostile to me like everyone else(I think he's a different subfaction so you can kill him for Sigmor without aggroing the entire town), is watching a couple of slaves beat Jaffar's head flat with shovels. I stop to watch for a couple of moments before my pursuers catch up. Wait, wait, wait, hang the gently caress on.What's up? Why the gently caress did we give Murak three packs of assorted weapons if the slaves just end up using shovels anyway?Hey! Yeah, what the gently caress? loving Gothic 3.    It's pretty clear that my situation here isn't tenable, but at the same time I refuse to give up, as clearly the only options are to either go do a whole bunch of pointless grinding until I can one-shot everything in town or to find some cheaty way of dealing with this.    It's while leading some guards out of the town's other gate that I stumble upon the cheaty solution I was looking for.         Lurkers and sandlurkers aren't really a threat as such, but they don't need to be. All they need to do is to split up the guards and mages so I can engage them "one on one" without any arrows, fireballs or swords ripping my spine apart from behind. These sandlurkers don't quite do it, though, I need more... thankfully as long as I keep firing arrows, there seems to be no maximum aggro range for Barakesh's defenders, and as long as I'm engaging one, EVERYONE in town will try to home in on my position.     Thankfully the shoreline north of Barakesh is practically crawling with Lurkers Classic Edition.     Slowly but surely it's working, but I need more lurkers.    Hey Lurkers! C'mon out, I got some friends for you to play with!     Yes, my minions, attack!I could probably have used Summon Animal but... that would make them all home in on ONE target and also they seem to be doing what I want them to anyway except when one of them wants to gnaw on my fibula.     Sadly, all good things must come to an end once loving wizards get involved, as Tizgar starts doing unfun poo poo like summoning demons that rapidly clears out the Lurkers. How drat many defenders do I need to kill to turn this around, anyway?       I dodge around the mages and decide to blitz down as many fighters as possible, and then...    No! Not again! All the loot! Not all the loot! Noooooooo!The weirdest loving thing is that I googled this issue, to see if anyone else had commented on it and not a single person who's played Gothic 3 has ever mentioned it, it seems. This leads me to four possibilities: #1: I am the only one who cares about this. #2: It was introduced by the community patches, well after most Gothic 3 conversation died down. #3: It's some sort of weird bug inherent to my install of Gothic 3 and no one else's. #4: It happens when the final defenders are killed way too far from town, like what happened with Reddock, as part of some sort of "cleanup" routine the game runs when a settlement is liberated/destroyed and the player is far enough away from it. I think #4 is the most likely and I'm just the only one who plays this unfairly, but at the same time, what the gently caress else was supposed to happen with Reddock? Did they just expect that the player would solo every single person in that pit if they decided to take it on? Man I have no idea. This loving game. Whatever, at least we still have a town to loot, right?      The only thing that can soothe my feeling of loss over not getting all that other loot, is getting all of this loot right here in town.  Strangely, some nameless nomads appear to have teleported into town already. Odd, but shouldn't really change anything.   Mmmm. Loot.   Some liberated slaves have also spawned ex nihili. Good afternoon gentlemen, what a lootsome day we're having.  And then when I open this chest, something strange happens. Someone yells at me and the chest-opening is aborted.   Because this former slave apparently decided it's his now, and that I'm stealing. Look, bozo, I killed everyone in this town (mostly) fair and (kind of) square, so this loot is mine. Just be glad I'm not stealing the rugs and the furniture.   For gently caress's sake, what now?  So, if you get "caught" stealing, you have three options. You can bribe the person who caught you, which requires a thief skill(you can try it even without the skill, which just makes your bribe disappear, you can't even loot it off the guard you bribe), you can try to argue your way out of it, which requires a thief skill and can, I think, only be done once per settlement. Or you can just skip right to fighting.   Is a little gratitude too much to ask?I'd also like to note that the freed slaves have spears NOW, not when I was trying to free the drat town!        Are you all quite done? Anyone else need to get their rear end kicked? Note the guy's buddies in the background clapping to celebrate their friend getting knocked out. Thankfully none of these fights are to the death, just till someone is KO'd at which point I steal their wallet.        Are you guys into this? Is this some sort of kink thing? Everyone seems so eager to get their rear end kicked today just to prevent me from stealing five gold coins and a rusty dagger. Which, I'll note, gets nowhere near refunding the five thousand gold I paid Redge's buddy. Five thousand gold that are no longer on his corpse. Where the gently caress are they? Did he invest them in stocks or something? Turn them into crypto? Where's my loving gold, Piranha Bytes?!   Anyway, time for that vault. I need that vault. It's the only thing that'll fix my day.  Huh, guess he was right that he shouldn't have talked to me.      It's a shame that I arbitrarily can't steal most of this.Since we can only gank the loose coinage, this AMAZING VAULT contains barely fifteen-hundred gold. There's a chest out behind the temple with another two-thousand, but it requires a key that Sigmor was carrying. Sigmor who has been vaporized into the void by the game mechanics. Imagine if this happened to someone carrying an actually important quest item? Hell, it probably already has. I'd be surprised if Tizgar wasn't carrying something of some importance.       Whatever, I'm taking it all. I'm going to recoup those five thousand gold somehow. And then some. I will buy this loving kingdom.     And then whenever someone offers me a quest or tells me the world needs saving, I'm going to hand them a thousand gold and tell them to gently caress off.     Time to go back to Tizgar's Big Glistening Obelisk. Gross.    The female slaves thank me for saving them, but still spend their entire day here, gyrating. I guess that's what they want to do with their lives, then.     Just two more towns, and I'm done with these slaving pricks.    I stop off at Al-Shedim on the way to Mora Sul and get some more stuff from Saturas.    Light Armor proficiency doubles the protection from robes, and considering I'm earing an artifact robe right now, that kicks rear end. I also get Ice Wave, which essentially hits everything around me with an Ice Arrow, it feels like it'd be good for dealing with mobs coming my way so I can freeze them all and then pick one that needs to die at a time.       So, Mora Sul. Mora Sul presents me with a problem. See, like any liberatable(liberabel? is there even an adjective for that?) town in Varant, it has a way to get some help, and proper help, even, not like the one guy and the couple of starving slaves up in the gold mining town. The problem is that to unlock said help, you need all five of the keys for the local evil temple. One of said keys, is in the possession of the town ruler. The town ruler that will attack me on sight and can no longer be bribed for his key. Similarly, for Ishtar, you need to get inside the town, which requires a lot of Hashishin friendship(not even sure you can get enough without genociding a few Nomads) to start the liberation from within. I ponder these questions as I look at this poor sucker sitting at the edge of Mora Sul.      Oddly enough, as I test out Frost Wave on him and then stab him through the brain, no one in the town seems to react. Maybe it's actually easier to one-by-one purge these towns WITHOUT all the idiots along? VOTE A1: Charge into Mora Sul with only Angar for support and suffer as much as it takes to bring the town down. A2: Find some way to get the key off of the town's ruler. There's gotta be some way to steal it or get him alone, right? B1: Charge into Ishtar alone like a cool badass hero and slay everyone evil inside. B2: Try to find some way to glitch through or over the walls to start the slave rebellion from within if at all possible.
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May 17, 2023 21:34
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Yay, an update!  And sorry for your pain  I remember running into that disappearing bodies issue once, but I mostly did liberations in the endgame when it's a lot easier. I think it's option four that's causing it, but not completely certain about that, it's been a while. At least I don't think you missed out on anything too important. Not sure which is the best option here, to be honest. I'd say try A2 and e: Changing my vote to B1 for consensus. This will close up some options and the chaos ending but they probably weren't a good fit for the thread either. Unless you're using a community patch I don't think there is another way. CP lets you get in by paying a princely sum of gold, which gives you access to about a dozen more quests or so and lets you join Beliar. He does not mind about the other liberations but you do need to get in legitimately. Just make sure to keep that one famous smug meddlesome wizard alive and you shouldn't screw the main ending up by killing people. He's not killable during a liberation either, of anywhere. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 01:33 on May 18, 2023 |
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May 18, 2023 00:23
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I'm gonna go with A1 and B1, not because it's optimal or whatever, just because I want to see it happen. Or at least be tried.
LJN92 fucked around with this message at 01:40 on May 18, 2023 |
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May 18, 2023 00:27
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As someone who failed miserably at B1, I vote B1.
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May 18, 2023 00:50
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Private Speech posted:Yay, an update! Oh, sorry, I should've probably made it clearer: I meant that I'd want one B vote and one A vote from everyone. Also I'm going to be honest and say one of the reasons for slower updates is that I have been grievously addicted to Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children, for the last few weeks. It's really gotten its hooks into me. Good storytelling, great art, fun gameplay, excellent music, tons of quality of life features. I find it hard to think of anything not to love about it. Anyone who likes themselves a good turn-based strategy RPG along the lines of X-COM or FF:Tactics should give it a go.
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May 18, 2023 01:35
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Amazing how white your fur coat stays despite tromping through deserts and all the killing and whatnot.
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May 18, 2023 01:40
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It's a divine artifact coat, to be fair. Not that the other ones get dirty.
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May 18, 2023 01:42
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JustJeff88 posted:Amazing how white your fur coat stays despite tromping through deserts and all the killing and whatnot. That's the power of a divine artifact. Immortality? Invincibility? Epic power? Pshaw. It's all about convenience. Next we're going to find the Nokia of Adanos which is indestructible and has five bars of signal everywhere.
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May 18, 2023 01:43
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I'm starting to think LPing this game was a terrible mistake on your part OP
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May 18, 2023 02:11
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As funny as it is to watch, I can see why Gothic 3 was not all that popular. This level of jank in every update is more fun to watch, then play, really.
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May 18, 2023 02:14
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Keldulas posted:As funny as it is to watch, I can see why Gothic 3 was not all that popular. This level of jank in every update is more fun to watch, then play, really. How do you feel about Gothic 2 versus this one, Purple? I have to admit that I am not enjoying this LP and Goth2's as much as the other ones, and I think that it's the games themselves. I don't know why, but I was thinking about the Phantasy Star series while reading this last update. The original 1 and 2 definitely do not hold up today, but there are Japanese remakes (with English fan patches) of them that are quite solid. 3 was dreadful from day 1 and has definitely not improved with time while 4 holds up today as a solid, turn-based, classic 16-bit RPG. Where Goth2 and Goth3 fit on this spectrum are up to you. Keldulas posted:As funny as it is to watch, I can see why Gothic 3 was not all that popular. This level of jank in every update is more fun to watch, then play, really. After Antara, Goth2 and now this, I'm starting to fear that we are violating the Geneva Convention by torturing a Scandinavian, and I have enough on my conscience. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 02:43 on May 18, 2023 |
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May 18, 2023 02:35
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Keldulas posted:As funny as it is to watch, I can see why Gothic 3 was not all that popular. This level of jank in every update is more fun to watch, then play, really. And yet, it is still somehow better than Gothic 4.
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May 18, 2023 03:57
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A2 and B2. Half the fun of Purple's LPs is finding ways to cheese the gently caress out of these janky broken messy games.
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May 18, 2023 08:22
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A2 and B2
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May 18, 2023 08:27
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JustJeff88 posted:How do you feel about Gothic 2 versus this one, Purple? I have to admit that I am not enjoying this LP and Goth2's as much as the other ones, and I think that it's the games themselves. Gothic 2 is definitely a more enjoyable and tighter designed game. The world can feel a bit small, but even so there's always something to do or find in it, and few locations, except maybe a couple of goblin caves, ever feel "generic," every area has its own vibe and I'd say that something like 50% of the game's NPC's are named, unlike in Gothic 3 where it's maybe 20% and the rest are just generic Man, Merchant, Guard, etc. More quests in Gothic 2 also had multiple resolutions, like betraying the quest giver, deciding not to kill someone, etc. while so far in Gothic 3 I can remember... one of those? The slaver in Cape Dun where we could just lead his slave twenty steps away instead of handing him back. Generally the only "choice" in Gothic 3 quests is to not do them instead of doing them, or sometimes to pay some money instead of punching someone in the head. Which is a fair option to have, but usually never one that leads to anything interesting. Gothic 2 also, sure, had some many-on-one battles, but usually small groups, two or three versus your one(excepting the very endgame and animal packs), while in Gothic 3 it's regularly ten or twenty versus the player alone. It's something that can be handled, but it either requires a lot of grinding so you can outright one-shot the enemies or super-cheesy strategies like I've been using so far. As for enjoying the LP's less... Gothic 3 in particular has notably less to talk about and a lot of looking at the same environments, though I'd say Varant is probably the worst area about it since there's so much repetition. All of the towns look copy-pasted, they even all have the same generic "ruin field" nearby, and the terrain is just "lots of sand dunes" in the area at any given point. They even have the same loving copy-pasted "ancient temples" in several locations. I can guarantee you that the one outside of Mora Sul is going to be the exact same as the one in Al-Shedim and the one outside Ben Sala. Compare this to Myrtana where, even if they share a style, the three settlements we've seen so far(Cape Dun, Reddock and Ardea) they all have something different going for them visually if nothing else. I think it might get interesting once we're done in the giant litterbox and can return to more temperate climes where, it feels like, dev time and budget were less stretched. But in general I think that one problem with them is that many of the encounters get very same-ish from a descriptive standpoint. "I saw some dudes, I Ice Blocked them and hacked them apart. I saw some other dudes, I drowned them in skeletons." because most enemies in the game play the same and are vulnerable to the same "solutions," and the combat is most of the mechanics. In a game like Wizards & Warriors, despite all its jank enemies have a lot of varied tricks and most areas do require slightly different approaches. Wizardry 8, likewise, has gameplay that evolves a lot as you go along and get more tricks and enemies bring out more bullshit that need countering. Gothic's gameplay is comparatively stagnant. And so on. I think that if I was going to do a Gothic and Gothic 2 remake, I think I'd keep 90% of the game the same, but focus on deepening the combat mechanics. Maybe even straight up borrow some of Dark Souls' homework in terms of adding dodge rolls, ripostes and backstabs, do a bit of area redesign to make it more viable, then spend the leftover dev budget on filling out alternate solutions and approaches to more quests. But I feel like what we're going to get instead, if we ever see a remake(one was teased for Gothic 1 some years back and, I recall, universally panned for looking and sounding dogshit), is we're going to get the same tepid mechanics while at the same time they're going to completely spoil the atmosphere by investing in graphical fidelity and in "updating" the dialogue, which in my mind just means it's going to end up as vapid Marvel Snark like Forspoken's trailer.
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May 18, 2023 09:53
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Well, I thought those votes had given me an impossible task. Instead it turns out that (unintended) glitches save the day.
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May 20, 2023 15:48
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Like I said, Black Robe posted:Half the fun of Purple's LPs is finding ways to cheese the gently caress out of these janky broken messy games.
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May 20, 2023 16:41
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Update 12: I Hate Sand Well, I guess there's no way around it. Time to see if I can pry that key away from Gonzales without starting a fight with all of Mora Sul.I'd previously mulled about all of the Hispanic-sounding names in Gothic 2, mixed in with German-ish names and very few fantasy-esque names. By sheer coincidence, I heard earlier this week, that a lot of what we think of as "Hispanic" names apparently have German roots, so I suppose that may explain some of it.      There he is, sitting on his throne... no way I'm getting to him there. He's got bodyguards and a mage sitting right next to him. But he can't be there all day, can he? ...yes, yes he can. I don't think he even owns a bed.This left me a bit at a loss since I'd hoped to use bedtime to isolate him, but instead I decided to see if I could lure him out. I figured it would PROBABLY aggro more people than him but it was worth a try.    Yeah, no, everyone else just seems to be watching. Looks like everyone's happy to see him get his rear end kicked, but I'd rather not take any chances.   Just a bit farther.    An interesting attribute of Gonzalez' is that he dies no matter what you do to him. Unlike most named, non-permahostile NPC's that just go unconscious when beat with a sword, it'll kill him. Arrows also kill him, even headknock arrows.   Aaaaand it turns out that killing Gonzalez aggros all of Mora Sul who are now sallying forth to hunt me, which I discover while checking over his loot.     What follows is a long, cartoonish flight from Mora Sul where I'm convinced that at any moment now, these idiots will give up and stop chasing me. They even leap off the walls to get after me faster.     I consistently head west, though, for a reason.     Far west of Mora Sul, set in the mountain range that separates it from Ishtar, is an anonymous-looking cave.   A cave containing the local slacker nomads and an old friend from Night of the Raven, Merdarion. They currently refuse to attack Mora Sul because I don't have the local artifact of Adanos, but, say, if the war comes to them...      Then they'll fight. Though the first time they ended up tanking ALL of Mora Sul coming for a visit, which somehow crashed the game. On a reload, only half of the locals showed up to wrassle, and the rest just hung around in the desert, despondently, leaving the city un-liberated for now.     Thanks for the assist, I'll be back with your knick-knack in a bit.    Now that we have four out of five keys, it's time to head back to the excavation camp south of Mora Sul, where no one gives a poo poo about the assassination we just pulled off.      Unlike Gonzales, Kalesch actually does something other than loiter around the temple all day.  Possibly because he can't find his way out of his tent at the moment. Let's let him know we've found all the other keys while he sat out here in the dirt doing nothing.    Good, now give them to me, while I give you nothing. Well then how about I give you a sword upside the head? That's not a very good pay- oh, you mean you're going to try to kill me. Bring it, bozo. If I fight back against Kalesch in sight of the other orcs, they all team up to beat my rear end, which is, as they say, sub-optimal.      But if I lure their boss out into the ruins and put arrows into his head, then return covered in his blood and carrying his wallet, no one will give a gently caress.      Time for more skeletons, I guess.  ...I mean I was expecting them down here, but okay.As I open the vault, it turns out a bunch of undead spawn outside, too, and start fighting the orcs. Not my problem, though.        There's nothing to say about the interior, it's literally the same as the previous two temples, but somewhat less numerous in terms of enemies.     So what does this make me the king of?   Maybe the sea? God of water and all that.   Or... maybe I rule the nomads and they have to do what I tell them?      I'm wearing your stupid magic hat now, so you have to do what I say. Real respectful of you to wear our priceless cultural artifact. Dick. If you didn't want me to wear it, you shouldn't have given it good stat boosts and also made it the only item for the head slot. Now are we doing this? I mean it about the head slot. As far as I can tell the game has no hats, tiaras, helmets or hoods. It just has the Crown of Adanos and nothing else, so of course I'm wearing that thing.     In any case, the proud guards of Mora Sul are still stumbling around the desert, lost, and we bump into them on the way there.   It goes pretty well in our favour until...  ...Gonzales' pet mage shows up and starts blasting us. Thankfully he focuses on the nomads first, giving me a chance to deal with him.    The thing that makes surprising mages and archers so effective is that switching weapons is an interruptible animation(or it can at least be slowed by damage), and they always switch to melee when you get up close. While not wielding a melee weapon and before they've got it fully drawn they can't block, so you can just burn your entire stamina pool on hacking them apart before they get a chance to respond.   With the mage out of play, it's only a few more kills before the Mora Sul guards give up and vanish into the aether like the guards from Reddock and Barakesh.    So what are you going to do now? Become King of Mora Sul? Take a holiday? No, I must go, my planet needs me. ...what?   Something is seriously wrong with this place. I should've stayed on Khorinis.And yes, that was Kayor just deciding to phase into the world geometry and vanish from existence.    Up top, the nomads have already taken over Mora Sul, though even the ones in places that were formerly taken up by "service" NPC's like Ishmael the smith don't provide services.    Next up, I do a bit of looting...      ...beat up some self-appointed cops...    ...and then learn that interestingly enough the gladiators are their own faction that don't aggro when I dunk on the town. It's not just an abstraction for the sake of not having everyone jump in to help them in the arena, either, because the arena warriors in Barakesh absolutely wanted to kick my rear end with everyone else, so I wonder if at some point you were supposed to be able to get the respect of some of the arena combatants so they'd help you out in the town liberation(s).   I've already stolen a lot of poo poo around Mora Sul before it got liberated, though, so the main prize remaining is Gonzales' throne room.   "Dear Diary, I sure hope a hero doesn't show up and kick my rear end and take all my stuff and kill all my toadies."    The chests here hold a unique crossbow and also a scroll of demon summoning! Hot dog, summons have dogshit damage output, but a demon should live long enough to be a worthwhile distraction, at least.    Hmmm... it's almost right, but something's missing. There's also an Old Chest hiding behind the throne behind one of the pillars. The Old Chests are odd because you need to find at least half of them before they start yielding anything other than generic scrolls and magic jewelry, while the Heavy Chests tend to have decent equipment even if it's often behind the curve, power-wise and can at least catch you up a bit if you're playing more casually.     With Mora Sul sorted, it's time to head to Ishtar. Ishtar is the southwesternmost point of interest on the map(unless there's a cave or something just past it, it's possible, it'll probably contain three skeletons and some spare change), but I don't have a teleport stone for it, so the nearest location(if I don't want to go mountaineering) is to head to Braga and then walk.       There's a lot of seemingly empty map space north of Ishtar, though, in the northwestern "corner" of Varant, so I decide to strike out and see if there's anything of interest there on the way.       And just as I'm about to give up, I actually stumble across a camp!      Oh, it's you. I still can't believe you aren't a villain with that name.  Like most of the water mages, Nefarius doesn't really look like himself in Gothic 3, but at least he's gotten older rather than having de-aged.   Haran who? Ancient dead warrior of great virtue and power, I'm looking for his tomb. The implication is that it'll be full of extremely cool old stuff. Oh, yes, but you know the deal: horrible guardians and such and I need someone to do the tedious, bloody legwork. Just don't bitch when I start looting ancient treasures and we've got a deal. Then let's mosey.     It's not hard to find your way to where Nefarius wants you to go, as it's literally around the corner from his little camp, uphill through this little valley-ish place full of dead trees.     The first obstacle is a gargoyle, as mentioned they aren't any particularly great sort of threat.     To us, anyway, seems like it killed a good few people first. Also sadly we can't loot this giant sword. The world is cruel.     A few minecrawlers guard the cave and a katana. It's tempting, but sadly just a bit weaker than my current bog-standard longsword I crafted... something like nine updates ago now.  From your excitement I assume it's the cave you were looking for. Most certainly, but... I think I hear something inside. That's what you brought me along for, after all. It's probably just more minecrawlers, it's always minecrawlers.     This time they've got a Minecrawler Warrior along with them, though. It's that green one in front. Once again, I feel, a step down in terms of art direction. Sure, it has a few more pokey parts, but the difference was more marked in Gothic 2, where standard Minecrawlers looked kind of pale and unarmoured, and the warriors had what looked like great big growths of dark plate all over them. They were also notably more dangerous in Gothic 2, here they go down about as easily as the rest.       ...this feels less like a tomb and more like a cave with some advanced graffiti.   drat, I'm starting to feel like maybe Innos isn't the be-all and end-all of good and just behavior.  Way ahead of you.    This bit feels a bit out of nowhere since at no point earlier in the conversation, either here or at the camp, does Nefarius mention "the ancient magic" and instead it sounds more like it's going to be a tomb-robbing trip. Considering that Haran Ho is described as a "warrior" I'm extremely disappointed there's no cool sword lying around. Whatever, I learned Frost Wave's loser brother. Ice Explosion does more damage but doesn't freeze enemies, which means that if it doesn't outright kill them, you're still surrounded by a lot of upset people with swords. Have fun hanging out here, I've got a nation to destroy.      Rather than heading straight west back to the road, I head south first, leading me to this ridge overlooking another little palm "forest" with a well-disguised green tent in the middle.           These lion hunters are a bit odd, despite all the lions in the area, some even being named as "Rotten Beasts" rather than just normal lions, they don't seem to have any quests for me. Since Zarkos seems able to train me in practically all types of Hunting Skill, I pick up Game Hunter, Big Game Hunter and Bow Training. These should, respectively, give me boosts against small animals, big and dangerous animals, and with bows in general. Though I think the joke is on me since I shoot at some lions later and I appear to be doing the exact same amount of damage, meaning that Zarkos bilked me for six grand.   His little fluff bits that go with the training are also hilariously bad. "Shoot the animal until it dies" and "pro-tip: shoot at bigger animals more until they die." I hate him.    Then it's on to Ishtar. This little village prior to Ishtar itself has no purpose unless you get quests from inside, but I wanted to show how easy it would be to get around the wall without permission. I'm not sure if the guards inside would instantly twig on to you not being permitted, but it might, for instance, be enough time to let you talk to the rebel slave leader inside if you play it cool.      If you follow the curve of the hill up past the village, you can get higher than the walls.      And then you can literally look down on everyone inside. The next step would be to either hop down to a high rooftop or to use the acrobatics skill to take a non-lethal fall down and then heal. But we're not doing that, since people voted for VIOLENCE.   Comically you can also walk on to this ridge from right in front of the gates.    So, first things first... clearing out the gate guards. I take this as a chance to test Ice Explosion.    It does respectable damage but if I'd just Frost Wave'd them instead I could almost certainly have killed at least one of them before the rest defrosted. I'm not sold on it. In any case, I lure them away from town and...     Liberate them from having to guard the gate.    Of course there are more goons inside, though, a lot more. Time to get to work properly.      Predictably enough, once I lure a couple out, the rest of the anthill start swarming after them. I have a brief but terrifying vision of needing to run backwards all the way to Braga to take care of them.      I run for some high ground and then realize... they aren't following me. They're just standing at the other side of that little gulley. I've found another place the pathing is broken.     Next step is summoning the demon and getting to work. Not quite the situation I expected to need him for, but I'm worried one of them might realize they CAN actually reach me if they don't have a distraction.       Eventually even some of the mages, presumably from the inner keep of Ishtar, start showing up. I'm feeling pretty good when, all of a sudden-    ONE of them apparently figured out how to path to me. What the gently caress? He's the only one who ever figures it out, for some reason. The next... five minutes or so are represented by the following .webp  I genuinely start worrying that my fingers will cramp up and I end up expending almost 250 arrows before the encounter is at an end. But then...  He shows up, the big boy, Zuben McFancypants.   Even when I kill enough of the Ishtar regulars that the place counts as liberated(and they don't vaporize! holy poo poo!), he doesn't go away, though he does briefly sheathe his weapons and prepare to head home. But nuh-uh, gently caress that, y'all don't get to run away from this.      I freeze him with Ice Arrow to keep him in place and turn him into a porcupine, and then it's time to get a-lootin'.   Look at all these loving corpses, Jesus.   We've yet to be informed, in-game, of what this staff is for. It's a completely dogshit weapon and worth tons of gold... and apparently it's the item we need to chat up Beliar from the shrine in Barakesh. So now I suppose we have that option open to us.     And more importantly, now we can take the tour of Ishtar! It's the one town in Varant that I actually really like the look of.    The way it's built feels kind of believable as a shelter from the harsh desert winds and sandstorms, it feels like a shelter from the elements, not just a bunch of cubes tossed into the sand, nor does it feel like just five houses, like Braga, in an unbelievable way.       It also has a surprisingly large number of underground storage chambers. Once again, the sort of thing you'd expect from a city in the desert, a place to keep things cool and well away from the elements.    Though I probably would not, during the day in the desert, choose to have burning braziers everywhere.        There's another Heavy and Old chest pair down here, once again the Old chest has nothing of interest, while the Heavy chest has a shield... and I still haven't learned how to use shields.           The storage cellars are mostly linear except for a few side rooms, having only one entrance and exit. The exit, from the end we entered is...     Inside this little garden inside the keep. I'll head inside the keep in just the moment but want to show off one last thing.       For some reason Ishtar's smith Sven is both still around, despite the liberation, is hostile despite still being around, and doesn't default to someone I kill in combat, instead just being knocked out... then getting up two minutes later and coming after me with his bare hands like a moron. I just have to leave him alone, I suppose. Enough stalling, it's time to loot Zuben's pad.    Are those... lions? drat, having tame lions hanging around your throne room is what I suppose you'd call a power move.    Okay! They're not tame! What the gently caress, Zuben?Also note the lion clipping into the pillar and almost hanging out on the ceiling.  And what's with all the braziers? I'm starting to think that Innos didn't curse this place with heat, it's just the Hashishin being too stupid to douse some of the flames.    Past the throne room is this large leisure room containing a number of female slaves and a pool. Having a pool is pretty cool.       They even bothered to model and animate this little spout in the corner pouring water into it. The look of the pool also contributes to a feeling of it being deep and icy, it almost looks a bit spooky.      Zuben also has a pretty big and elaborate bedroom, complete with multiple solid gold statues.    And this book in the corner which chronicles Beliar's reaction to Innos being about to enter material reality. I love, though, "And some other great beings arose as well." Something about it just feels like such a goofy delivery. Still, like every other lore book or lore slab, it's another +5 Ancient Knowledge.   In the corner is Zuben's private treasure room which is pretty well packed with gold. I think there are actually more big gold pickups here than the treasure chamber under Barakesh which is even bigger and filled with more solid gold items.   Another Old Chest holds one of the first decent Old Chest items, a permanent health upgrade. +4 isn't very big considering that my total health is in the mid 200's, but it's still a free upgrade.     A Heavy Chest contains a bow that's as good as the one I already have, which is also something I got about nine updates ago. Eventually I expect these chests will catch up, but we're a while away still.    This bow on the back wall is a lot more interesting. I'm about 100 points of Hunting Skill, so another ten level-ups or so, away from being able to use it, but it'd definitely be an upgrade. It looks like roughly every ten points of skill gets you access to another 5 points of base bow damage, and considering that according to people who've datamined the game, each point of skill gives you half a point of damage, that would mean that if you keep up your equipment upgrades, every ten points of skill gets you ten points of damage in the end.      You know, that wasn't bad at all, especially once I find someone to unload all these swords and bows on, I think this trip actually represented quite the nice little profit.   This throne... this throne feels about right. I almost want to stop here and let the rest of the world handle itself... but I know if I do that, someone's going to come along and gently caress things up.VOTE So, it turns out I actually missed one liberation in Varant to make it official: Ben Sala, the little town under attack by the undead. If I destroy that, the Hashishin will stop existing as a faction and it will have a consequence, that consequence being that since the Hashishin have no faction, they will be set as hostile to all other factions, so the surviving Hashishin in, say, Myrtana, will turn around and attack orcs, slaves, etc. whoever they're near instantly. It's kind of funny that the game handles it that way, but it would probably also gently caress up a good bit of content. A: Finish the job, gently caress this game, destroy Ben Sala now. B: Hold off, destroy Ben Sala when we near the endgame. Either way, the next stop will be heading back to Braga and then Myrtana, heading up the coast to Trelis, the nearest orc town. The orcs, being a separate faction from the Hashishin, should still be cool with us despite all this damage we've done.
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May 27, 2023 00:22
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B, Ben Sala will be just fine with us not destroying it for a bit.
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May 27, 2023 01:05
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PurpleXVI posted:
While I think A is hysterical, I'd rather your deliberate game breaking occur while doing things that won't make the experience more incoherent and miserable. So B.
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May 27, 2023 01:05
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Oh hey I thought you couldn't talk to Beliar if you kill Zuben before he tells you to! Maybe it is from one of the patches. I guess the Beliar ending is still open then, but it's not a very good one anyway. Anyway I vote for B
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May 27, 2023 01:35
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Note: Kayor died on the way back to his home planet. Guess I'll vote for B.
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May 27, 2023 01:38
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B, but, uh, is there a plot or anything resembling a purpose for your hobomurdering across the desert?
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May 27, 2023 05:17
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PB games mostly don't have that much of a detailed plot, but there is the whole conflict between nomads and hashishin and the bigger overarching conflict between the gods. Going into the desert right away is not the intended progression but there's nothing preventing you from doing it, either. e: You'd eventually get sent there through whichever god you choose to follow. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 05:36 on May 27, 2023 |
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May 27, 2023 05:30
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Your avatar now looks like a bloke in a white fur coat who recently went to Burger King. Also, I laughed when you killed Gonzales and he dropped wine. Not sure why. By the way, Purple... no matter how many bodies you may have seen in the desert, there were not nearly so many as that one dungeon in MM6. You know the one.
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May 27, 2023 05:51
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kw0134 posted:B, but, uh, is there a plot or anything resembling a purpose for your hobomurdering across the desert? Gothic 3 is somewhat more "free-form" than Gothic 1 and Gothic 2, in this case I went to the desert because the thread wanted me to jump the rails, but eventually someone would've pointed us down here anyway as part of finding the artifacts of Adanos, which do actually have more purpose than keeping me safe from swords and arrows, if you can believe it. Stabbing all of the Hashishin is largely optional, but they are staggeringly huge dickheads.
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May 27, 2023 11:16
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Yeah, B, let's not lock off any content until we have to.
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May 27, 2023 11:54
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 06:30 |
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Popping in here to vote B and also recommend that Archolos mod campaign for Gothic 2 to anyone bored. It is so detailed and well made, I've sunk so many hours into it.
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May 27, 2023 17:56
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