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B, the game is quite capable of breaking itself as it is.
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May 27, 2023 18:17
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Update 13: Return of the Orcs So we're leaving the Hashishin in an "undead" state where they both do and don't quite exist. They still think they exist, but except for like ten guys hanging out in the undead-ravaged ruins of Ben Sala, and whoever's hanging around in Myrtana, imagining they're super big and cool dudes, they do not.     I'd say I'd miss Varant, but I won't. gently caress sand.   I've got sand in places I didn't know existed.    Man it's been so long since I last saw someone who just had one sword that it's novel. Time to put some arrows into them because the magical red text tells me they're bad people.    Dum dee dum, collecting rusty swords and rifling through people's pockets.    Sirs, please, I realize you're very eager to have me steal all your stuff, but please form an orderly line!  Wow, did you get to have a name just because you have a fancy shield?  Well, you're dead now, and I feel like someone's really happy about that.     Wait, what? What the hell?I walked back and forth a couple of times here, and yeah, there is just a flat line where you go from Varant to Myrtana and it starts raining.   I was falling into a rhythm of kiting bandits and filling their dumb heads full of arrows when, suddenly, one of them displayed a new ability.       He started rising into the sky while performing all of his other animations as normal. A really strange bug. He de-aggroed while I killed his buddies, so I expected that when I got back, he would have reset to his normal position.    Nope! He's still in the sky, yet the game thinks he's also on the ground, since that's where his "name tag" is. So what happens when I get him up close for fighting?      Really don't ask me what the gently caress happened here. I enjoy that this game always has some weird new bugs to encounter, though.       Night is falling as I enter Myrtana, making the next few screenshots somewhat dark as there are no beds nearby and no "set time" console command like in Gothic 2. Gothic 3 has... something else, which I decided to experiment with in a bit.        Probably someone was expecting me to come from the other side and actually find the quest for this box of "Goods From The Desert" before I found it.      Aw man, not trolls again.Don't worry, they hosed them up this time and they're trivial.  This was a troll in Gothic 2. It was big and kind of ape-looking, it was angry, it was immune to arrows and magic forcing you to deal with their threat in melee. Or, you know, swarm it with melee summons. But it changed things up a bit when they showed!  This is a troll in Gothic 3! I feel like it's taken some influence from the trolls in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and while it looks kind of dumber and pathetic, that's also what it is. Because they took away the arrow immunity, and it's still kind of slow and lumbering.    Its main attack is this big smash that makes it stop and do its thing for a while, giving you plenty of time to keep backpedalling and shooting. At least it still contains delicious, expensive hides, though.      Farther down the hill is another enemy, this time a completely new one, the Ripperbeast.  They are essentially bulkier, bigger wolves with higher HP pools and, inscrutably, less aggression. Many of them you can pretty much run right up to before they start attacking.    And they're small enough to be affected by Ice Arrow, which solves a lot of problems. And at this point, I decide that it's way too dark for screenshots and I need to make dawn happen.   Rather than being able to "set" the time with the console, as mentioned, you have a new function. It displays some sort of "temperature" in Celsius(?) which apparently has something to do with the in-game time scale, so you can speed things up to make time go faster. However, the only way I could find to make time go NORMALLY again was to frantically mash the keys for speeding up time and activating a sort of "bullet time" mode until time was normal again. The first time I tried it I had to reload back to normalcy because I couldn't get time normalized once more. Why would you make the console LESS full-featured for a sequel?      I can't believe that I took trees for granted. I've missed this.For some reason this part of Myrtana gave me Oblivion vibes. I think something about the tree models used felt very familiar, but as bad as Gothic 3 may be at points, I would still rather play it for a hundred hours than fire up Oblivion's bland bullshit again.      Cows! Gonna pet the cows.  No, but go ahead and exposit at me and keep me from petting the cows. And what the hell is a Nemora? It's their secret headquarters.  That doesn't sound very secret. I'm starting to think that every second person I talk to around here will know where it is. Maybe. I've also got a sidequest for you to take me there. Hmmm, might do that later. I wanna go hassle some orcs first. Oh and your boss who's sitting right behind you and will probably be all kinds of salty if you leave. What's up, bossman?  I bet you're here to steal everything. Well, yes, but not specifically from you. What more do you want from me? My bones? Blood? No, some sort of fascist game designer decided I could only sell those from animals, not from people. Life is rough. Wait, though, why would the rebels be stealing from you? You're also human. They only fight the orcs and outright collaborators. Tell that to me and my bones. They stole all my poo poo and ran off to the west, no doubt to their hidden headquarters. Not that it'll matter much, though. I bet they'll steal my bones. I'm gonna go now. Good luck not having someone steal your entire skeleton.    The only thing notable about the next stretch of woods is that there's a hole in the ground full of ogres. Probably some poor gamer's managed to bungle their way into that and gotten bonked to flat.    Haaaang on, isn't that...When we arrive at the gates of Trelis, there's a familiar face acting the guard.   Thorus, my man! Look, I don't gently caress up everywhere you have a job on purpose, it's just a coincidence and also a side effect of stabbing everyone who won't give me their stuff. So what are you here for, then? I was thinking I'd look for some work. ... You know, before I decide whether to gently caress up your workplace. I knew it! Oh, and congrats on being the same ethnicity and age as less than a year ago. gently caress, I know, I saw some of those Water Mages. Well, may as well give you some jobs and hope you go get killed or get distracted by a shiny object along the way. Let's see, what's on the docket... First I didn't hear anything from one of the farms, then I sent Kapotth to check up on it, and now I'm not hearing anything from him! Go sort it out. Oh and there are some ogres in a hole that have unaccountably started coming out of that hole and smashing everyone. Come back when it's fixed. I'll try not to end the world while running your errands.     Once again, ogres are trivialized by Ice Arrow. It's kind of odd that for all the changes they made, they left this very exploitable strategy in the game for so many enemies.      It means that a lot of enemies are really just tests of whether you have enough mana to freeze them all enough times before they die.     Bad news for Thorus: the farm is hosed. Good news for Thorus: his scouts are still in one piece.  All traces of what? Crime. Oh, so you guys are totally on top of it? You've got it all investigated and you have an answer for Thorus? I was hoping to subcontract that part out. Which part? The part where I do any kind of work. So far I figure the peasants got killed by some creatures living in a nearby cave. So these "creatures" also happened to burn down the farm and steal everything? Maybe they're giant magpies. ... Giant fire magpies. Anyway, sort it out, subcontractor.        Anyway, no, the local sabertooth tigers aren't responsible for killing the peasants. They do have the interesting trait of sometimes not being frozen when hit by Ice Arrow, though. Hard to tell if bug or intentional feature.       You know that being a subcontractor implies that you pay me at some point, right? Not if you get killed by something I send you to sort out, I don't.      Off to the north we go, across this small stream with a charmingly animated waterfall.  Not a lot of frames per second.      My only clue to the location of the potential culprit is "north," and not too far north are the walls of another town, so at least I know it ought to be somewhere before that.    Hmmm. A cave. Surely bad guys love to hide in caves.     Definitely bad. A guy? Up for debate.   So stone golems are back. I didn't get smacked by this one so I can't confirm if their hits still ragdoll you into the heavens, but they're definitely lost their immunity to magic.   While ice arrows don't freeze them, they DO knock about a quarter to a third(magic seems to have a random damage factor, sometimes it one-shots one enemy and only half kills an identical enemy next to it) of its health off with each shot, so that helps trivialize them since I can throw out four Ice Arrows with a full mana bar.     Despite having a mining mechanic and perks for it, most of the game world's caves do not have mineral veins. This one's bristling with them, though, so I take the chance to pick up some coal, sulphur and gold while I'm here.       The otherwise deserted cave, which is a copypaste of the one from like ten updates earlier when a bandit had his throne in one, contains one lone Hashishin digging away "for artifacts" and threatening us with the wrath of his brother in Geldern, the town just to the north of Trelis, if we do anything to him. I leave him alone for now.     And then, figuring I overshot the ranger camp, I head back and... yeah, I just completely failed to look to my left while heading this way. Elite gamer, me.    The rangers largely just look like green Nomads.     Actually I mostly kill them on sight, but sure, I'll quiet down. Is this your ramshackle camp full of easily looted green goons? Oh hey, Adanos, I know that guy. I'm wearing his shirt and his hat. ... I'm pretty sure that makes me your boss, by the way, so you gotta answer my questions. drat straight I did, gently caress those peasants.   Oh, I see, you're the Nomads I probably won't feel bad about killing. What was that? Nothing, nothing. I'm just going to tell a green friend about a thing.     What the hell! Those peasants didn't get a choice of whether to work for the orcs or not.     He's also a huge prick. Er. No. I didn't want to steal your glory. You realize I'm going to sit here and look at you accusingly every time you pass by until you do it, right? Yeah, yeah, maybe next week.    We could cash in with Thorus now, but I prefer to do things in batches, so it's off to the east to see what's up at the excavation site. Five gold says it's skeletons.No bet.      I realize that making an aesthetically pleasing desert isn't an easy job, but man this is just a delight after the complete emptiness of Varant.    Also lmao, check that loving pop-in distance just for a few pieces of fencing. Wild.     Skeletons, what else? It's always loving skeletons with these places. How's work coming along? But on account of walking bags of bones trying to smash my head off every time I get near, that's not happening. So if I fix your skeleton problem, you're going to get back to work, and Thorus will pay me. Understood, hang tight.     I'm not sure if Temple Guards have some sort of special ability, like poisoning you with their big stinger, but I've never bothered to let one get close enough to find out. Bad monsters get put in the pear freezer.       Wait, that was it? That was like five skeletons! Just for that I'm going to steal anything not nailed down in here. Or, well, I was going to do that anyway, but now I won't even feel slightly bad about it.   I used this screenshot because Kamak peeking out from under the quick use bar was funny to me. Goddamn! I almost put a loving arrow in you! Tempeck didn't tell me there was anyone stuck down here. That useless rear end in a top hat. I've been hiding down here for a couple of days from the undead. Feel like escorting me out? May as well, this place is stripped bare now.  Also lmao, the game still thought I was loving escorting Kayor despite his being now embedded in solid rock, and only deleted that objective when I got another escort objective.   So why didn't you just blast all the undead and leave on your own? I was hoping Tempeck would find his balls, I figured it'd be a good lesson for him. But so much for high hopes.    Despite being big green monsters, the orcs often feel like some of the most genuinely thankful and friendly people in the game.     It also feels like they invoke Beliar more... benevolently, than the Hashishin. If that makes sense. Asking for his protection and thanking him rather than just promising his wrath will fall on the heads of unpaying unbelievers.     Now we can pop back inside Trelis.       After collecting our pay from Thorus, of course.      I guess you can go inside. But I'm watching you.     I like how Trelis looks, it feels cozy.     Conrad here is a paladin who decided that the fighting was over when he lost his rune magic and threw in his lot with the orcs. I feel like it says something positive about the orcs that they're even willing to accept a former Paladin as an ally rather than just poking and prodding him for his secrets. He also hands over another fire chalice after I bully him a bit.         Khabir is a merchant and a blowhard, whose main point of importance is that he sells two Ancient Knowledge artifacts, bumping up my skill by +10 for a pittance. I have no idea why they're so ridiculously cheap.    And as per usual, we can't see the settlement commander until we get at least 75 Good Boy Points with the local orcs. We can actually do that while only being a prick to one human! Let's go hassle some more orcs for errands.   How about I give you one healing potion and you give me a quest? Humph, fine. Started whining about how he "couldn't take it any more" and then one day he just vanished. I'll find him for you so you can give him more wedgies or whatever drove him over the edge.   drat, are you as good at being a smith as you are at giving me sass? Maybe they were just really good warriors, I really feel like we need more data points. ...are you always this annoying? Nah, just when someone hasn't given me a quest yet. Tell me some trivia about your past. Tell me about your swords.   ...and now you want me to find it for you. Yeah, I think that dickhead Tempeck took it from my stuff. I told him not that one when he was collecting weapons for his expedition, I bet he did it just to spite me.    Let's go see if Milok is right.     Maybe I took it, maybe I didn't. What a prick. So where's the sword? You might think you have to kick Tempeck's rear end for it, but you don't.   He just jammed it into the side of this old cart and left it! What an rear end. Time to go find Avogadro.     He's up this hill behind Trelis.     Also FYI I can read your name hovering above your head. So what made you run away? It was the orcs!   Whenever they saw me brewing potions they'd all gather in a circle and yell "Go, vial boy, go!" It was so hosed up. Sorry, you big weenie, but you're worth rep points with the orcs, so you're coming with me.  This would be scary except that Trelis is like ten meters away and I already killed the two bloodflies in the area on the way up the hill.      Yeah. You big weenie.You can also bully him into making you a few free healing potions.  I brought your nerd back.   I'll grudgingly tell the boss you're alright.Anyway, there are more folks back on the farm worth talking to, so I head back there for now.     Wow, you're even more unsubtle than I am. Sure thing.Josh complains about snorting monsters in the caves under his house. He also complains about his taxes. He complains about the war. And the orcs. And the Hashishin. He complains a lot.    C'mon man, be a LITTLE bit subtle.Peer encourages me to rob the hell out of Trelis castle. I have no idea how thieves in this land survive since they basically run up to you, huffing and panting, screaming "HEY BUDDY, WANNA BUY SOME LARCENY?"  So, the caves under Josh's farm. There are two entrances, and if you pick the right one, you have a fun time.    Because it brings you out on a ledge ABOVE the snorting Ripperbeasts. To get to you, they have to path out of the other entrance, loop around the hill, and get to you, but the pathing AI loses track of you and gives up halfway there, so they just wander back in to get their asses kicked some more.   Easy peasy. I don't even think I'd have needed to bully Avogadro to get over 75 Orc Points, but whatever. It was funny.       I like Milok. He just seems like a guy who wants to smith and be left alone to smith, rather than someone who wants to conquer the world for Beliar. A bit surly, but having to supply a small army would do that to you.   But I did a bunch of errands! Before I step inside, though, I get distracted by something.    A couple of orcs are grooving away in front of the drums. I want in on that.   Ahem, now we can see the boss.        This war, the Hashishin helped us win the last one, they let us travel their deserts, they let us search their ruins for divine artifacts...   We're the ones here keeping an eye on them. If they decide to come from the desert in force, we'll be the first obstacle they encounter. And that's hardly all.  Did someone say divine artifact? Hold your horses, I'm not done complaining yet. I've been having trouble coming up with the usual payment for the Hashishin.       At this point I have about seventy-five grand, after unloading all the weapons of the Hashishin I've murdered in the desert and a bit besides, so I may as well just pay up, the orcs in Trelis don't really feel like they deserve a murdering, after all. Fifty thousand for a potentially divine artifact? Seems easier on my conscience than murdering an entire city for the key to one. I'm in.    Yeah, yeah. Settle down.   So the Amulet of Adanos only boosts magical resistances, but is still pretty nice. However, it seems to boost those resistances by twice as much as listed... this isn't some sort of Adanos set bonus, instead it seems like the perk that I got from Saturas that doubles the defense boost from robes ALSO doubles the defense boost from the Crown of Adanos and the Amulet of Adanos. Sweet.    Well, how's that for a decent day's work? I didn't even have to kill anyone who didn't deserve it and I can be 50% more annoying to the next druid I meet.I figure the next step will be to visit Nemora, to see if the rebels really have been terrorizing the locals, and then to either Geldern or Montera as the two nearest towns, unless the rebels are so bad everyone clamors for an immediate genocide.
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Jun 7, 2023 22:11
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I like that Thorus had a line at the end of the night of the raven questline in Gothic 2 saying that he'd find some gate to guard on the mainland and of course, here he is. Sick of the hero's poo poo, yet still handing out quests.
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Jun 8, 2023 01:11
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This game is a mess, but a charming mess. I like details like being able to jam out on the drums. I also like the levitating bandit who was fine until he looked down, a la Wile E Coyote.
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Jun 8, 2023 08:44
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For anyone who likes bugs, the next update is going to have a couple more of them, including one that's unreasonably funny to me.
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Jun 8, 2023 17:23
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Black Robe posted:This game is a mess, but a charming mess. I like details like being able to jam out on the drums. It's only charming cause Purple is cutting out all the boring dead and copy & paste NPCs with their Cookie cutter dialogue. Actually playing this was a chore to me, especially on release when the game wasn't even playable.
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Jun 8, 2023 17:31
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Jack-Off Lantern posted:It's only charming cause Purple is cutting out all the boring dead and copy & paste NPCs with their Cookie cutter dialogue. Actually playing this was a chore to me, especially on release when the game wasn't even playable. I don't think you're meant to talk to most NPCs, they just say the usual videogame variations on "gently caress off", if you can talk to them at all. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure there's not much cut out, but please correct me Purple, it's been a while.
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Jun 8, 2023 17:36
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Private Speech posted:I don't think you're meant to talk to most NPCs, they just say the usual videogame variations on "gently caress off", if you can talk to them at all. I cut out some of the dialogue, but mostly when an NPC is particularly boring or when the dialogue is outright bugged/badly translated. Like when you ask a guy the exact same thing twice, and the second time he gives you a response that doesn't seem to jel with what you asked him, and then that opens up another dialogue option that has no connection to what you just said. In other cases I rewrite the dialogue some so everyone doesn't have to read crunchy screenshot text constantly(I mostly keep the screenshots so folks can see the characters talking and know that some of the more goofy-rear end dialogue I absolutely did not invent myself) and I don't have to transcribe things word for word. There's also a lot of travelling/shopping/training dead air that gets cut out, dozens of caves that just contain a pack of angry wildlife, omnipresent Snappers and Wolves and Lurkers and other such things. It's also really hard to convey how tedious some combat areas like the temples are. Like, full disclosure, I can beat them(I did so for the very first temple and none of the later ones are really harder), they're not even particularly challenging if you're patient, but due to how time consuming they are I generally just switched on god mode and walked into the rattling hordes with constant power attacks to get it over with, same when the game expects me to spend my time killing twenty loving minecrawlers in one go. Gothic 2 had its flaws, but it had a much better understanding of how many enemies were appropriate/fun to fight at once. I respect that they wanted to scale up things and have big factional battles, but that also really struggles with the basic, lock-on heavy combat system that doesn't even have such niceties as primarily prioritizing hostiles rather than neutrals/allies when locking on. They really needed to reinvent the game mechanics from the bottom up for the things they wanted, especially with many of them already creaking at the seams in Gothic 2. With Gothic 3 being released four years after Gothic 2, there was absolutely time for it.
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Jun 8, 2023 17:52
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Piranha Bytes actually started Development of Gothic 3 while "The Night of the Raven" wasn't even out and totally overestimated the effort, costs and scope. This happened with Gothic 1 and 2 as well but was far less noticeable. It gets even worse if you look at the post-launch support Gothic 3 got and let's not even talk about Götterdämmerung I'm glad y'all think this is charming,but that's 90% Purple. The game just invokes repressed bad memories and feelings of loss.
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Jun 8, 2023 18:09
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If memory serves the temple guards do indeed poison you if they land a hit with their stinger. But I don't remember if it's worse than a bloodfly, other than the initial damage of course.
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Jun 8, 2023 21:44
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Jack-Off Lantern posted:let's not even talk about Götterdämmerung Well now I want to talk about Götterdämmerung Edit: I assume this is the same thing quote:Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods received "generally unfavorable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.[3] It was largely the result of excessive bugs in release which to date has not been entirely resolved by patching.
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Jun 9, 2023 09:13
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Gort posted:Well now I want to talk about Götterdämmerung Yes. Also Piranha Bytes wasn't the developer.JoWood, the publisher farmed it out to a different studio that had even less QA Also that above bit is very favourable. There was an almost public German outrage about how Gothic 3 released and the expansion made it even worse. Gamestar and PC Games,the big German Gaming Magazines did Development interviews and what happened style interviews as to who hosed up Jack-Off Lantern fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 9, 2023 09:48
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Update 14: Errand Cleanup I find it interesting that it's entirely possible to become great friends with everyone in Trelis without actually going to fight the rebels or killing anyone. They just want you to solve a few of their interpersonal problems, pay the bills and make sure that the local medicine mixer still does his job. So let's visit Nemora and see if they're really as dastardly as Farmon the farmer says they are.         Nemora is probably one of the most out-of-the-way Myrtanan rebel strongholds, and you probably wouldn't stumble across it unless you asked Cole to show you where it was or were just VERY completionist about checking every corner of the countryside.       It would be a bit better hidden if someone hadn't goofed up and still had it represented on one of the in-game journal pages, but still, no roads lead there, for one thing.     But the trip there also feels kind of weird and empty because there's hardly anything to slow you down. You don't need to protect Cole or yourself or anything of that sort.    Except for these two wolves, but I can't imagine anyone getting here in a state where two wolves are anything but a very short and mildly profitable speedbump.    I'm pretty sure the rebels would let a three-legged dog join.        So Nemora's "gimmick" is that no one wants to tell you who the leader is unless they like you enough(the usual 75 out of 100 points of reputation for doing people's chores), and you can ask almost everyone if they're the leader, which they'll deny, even if it's insanely obvious who it is. So who's in charge here? Is it you? You know, just in case I need to kill your boss or get employed by him. Wow, I can't believe I'm going to have to actually put some marginal effort into this. My life is tough.   Tyler next to Finley doesn't have a lot to say or any missions, but he DOES make the first NPC I've encountered in a long time that actually sells new smithing recipes. I didn't encounter a single NPC for them in all of Varant, even the smiths I did meet just sold finished goods, which is probably a more reliable business model than letting every passing idiot become your competitor.  As a reminder, the reason we want to self-craft weapons rather than buying them is that it gives them a base +10 to damage. Considering that weapons at the moment have around 80 base damage, it's still a decent nudge.     Are you, uh, okay? I'm just dandy, good buddy. Oh, we've got most of what we need here in our lovely dirt hole. Bring me oh, say, ten of those unlabelled bundles the orcs leave around everywhere and we'll be fine.Look at this poor guy's neck.       Nemora also has an upper gallery and a lower tunnel section, up top...   ...is Russel, who's obviously the leader of Nemora since only the leader of a given settlement will complain that someone's been killing their buddies, and in this case he's reacting to the destruction of Reddock.    You're not going to get me to admit it. Feel like doing a few chores around the place, though? May as well, I love me a good, treasureful sidequest. Alright, well first, we need more guards. Or to be exact, one more guard. We also wanted to steal some stuff from some Hashishin on the way here, but Snappers ate them all and while that would seem to be a great time to go grab their stuff, we're just too lazy and also Snappers are scary. By fortuitous coincidence I already stole those.     The only other thing in the "upper gallery" is an exit to a mountain meadow sort of place with a few ripperbeasts and reptiles.      Kipler downstairs is another merchant, he sells me a bow upgrade, he has no real relevant dialogue.       I guess you could call me that. What's happening here, wizard man?  Or, rather, I'm looking for the ingredients of the potion, and now I'm just missing one, five patches of Herbaceous Lobelia. Sure, I'll stab your badguys and pick your flowers.      Meet Hengley. Farmon named him as the guy who raided his farm and stole his gold. However, Hengley never tells us his name. This is important.  Because we never got a description of him either, yet we can accuse him of having raided Farmon's farm. The only logical explanation is that the protagonist CAN, in fact, read the names hovering over people's heads.  That's a loving scary power, man.   Anyway, after a bit of bitching Hengley hands over the gold... which we can't return to Farmon, all we can do is keep it. Eh, works for me. I'm happy to have some extra spending money.He also begs us not to rat him out to the boss of Nemora but... you know what? gently caress this guy. As soon as we formally find out who the boss actually is, we're letting them know immediately.  Meanwhile, Treslott's monsters and herbs are just outside of Nemora's upper entrance.     There are a few Ripperbeasts and Snappers that are no threat at this point, and then a couple of supersized Snappers.     Taking down one of them eats my entire supply of mana and a couple of arrows to boot, so groups of them are tough but singlehandedly they're not a huge deal. I'm pretty sure you could either sneak or run past them to grab the herbs, but that'd be passing up XP.     Grabbing Treslott's big stalk of thyme.      After handing in the quest I also decide to grab a couple of Treslott's training options, in particular he can teach me how to make permanent potions. Permanent potions are both better and worse than in Gothic 2. They're better because there's less of a skill point investment, just the one to learn how to make them(technically also some to level up Alchemy enough for it, but with Alchemy-boosting lecterns, this should be minimal) and then you buy the recipes for money which is largely trivial to acquire, and also because there's no scaling training so you can chug them at any time. Worse because like in Gothic 2 they all require King's Sorrel to brew. In Gothic 2, you could reliably find King's Sorrel by seeking out old ruins and sometimes graveyards, in Gothic 3 I've found all of ONE stalk of King's Sorrel after 42 hours of gameplay and picking up every plant I come across.      Now, time to go to the orcs and steal ten or so packs of assorted weapons for the rebels.     I bet the orcs are going to be real angry when I steal these right in front of them.    Nope! The orcs don't give a gently caress for some inscrutable reason! The biggest challenge is that most of the sword packs are brown packs on brown ground. There's nothing exciting about grabbing them, so I'm skipping on to the next objective which is finding a spare goon to help out with the defense of Nemora. There are absolutely zero clues as to who this could be and the single guy that can be recruited for the purpose is pretty well out of the way.  Start south of Nemora and head, well, more south.      This guy is technically visible from the road, BUT, the thing is that the road he's next to is one of two parallel roads that unit north and south of here, and the branch that he's next to is going to be the longer of the two for most purposes. So he's very easy to miss.    Wrong timeline, I made the virtuous choice of not being a cop and instead just having undefined extralegal powers to gently caress up people's lives. Oh, you're that guy, yeah, I heard of you. Just for the record if you try to bully me I'm going to whomp you right in the dick. Noted.  Looking at this campfire until someone completes an errand for me. I told you, I've got an errand! Yeah, we get to ask him what he's doing here, and then what he's up to, in rapid succession before he actually gets in on what's happening. It feels like this bit had two rewrites and they forgot to remove the fist one.   What, really? I wanted to tell you how sad it was that he became a bandit and ask you to kill him. Well, fine. I guess now I can't really waste your time any longer, sure. There are no enemies between Karlen and Nemora, so he doesn't need escorting, and if you run over there ahead of him they just take your word for it that he's absolutely on his way and they should trust you now.      Thanks for giving me the runaround, but whatever, I need to snitch on someone.  I'm moderately surprised you aren't all assholes like Torn's crew.With that, we can actually set the rebels of Nemora off to attack Trelis but... that's the sort of thing the thread gets to decide if we do. I don't really feel like the orcs in Trelis are all that bad.    So instead, I'm headed off to Geldern, north along the road from Trelis and Nemora.       I generally like the orc-controlled settlements in Myrtana in terms of looks and layout, they feel more natural than the ones in Varant and generally give a feeling of being actually inhabited places rather than ruins where someone just threw down a rug.     Geldern's also reasonably big!      And has an arena. Let's harass some of the locals.     Arena wins here don't get you gold, just ancient tablets with scribbles on them. Like the kind that give me cool magical powers when I read them? Hot drat.Gembak's dialogue feels kind of bugged, with his comment about wanting to leave resulting in us asking how we can restore his honour, a conversation that just dead-ends since he's never mentioned his honour before and what we can actually do won't be an option until after we've become arena champion.     So let's do that, let's fight in the arena. It's a small one with just three individual enemies, none of whom have any particular gimmicks. The only trick to this arena is one that I play on myself by trying to cheat.   Not that I need it for Dimitar, he goes down pretty easily.     Agenak's gone inside to sit on his throne in the corner of a rickety shack, and I thought it was funny I could talk to him through this window and make things look a bit weird.    I also handle Gembak pretty easily, but he gives me a bit more trouble than Dimitar so I worry about the third one and prepare to get my cheating ready.       I'm kind of surprised no one doing any of the, presumably extant, Eastern European translations of the game pointed this out as an odd name. Kulak was used to describe a class of land-owning peasants by the Soviets and, I think, I'd translate to something like "class traitor." I.e. someone who's a peasant but is still on the bourgeois side of the conflict because being land-owners gave them bourgeois interests. Of course I'm sure it's a total coincidence that it was an insult/accusation usually levelled at people who disagreed on the details of the Soviet revolution and the society to be built afterwards... Anyway, since it worked against Angar in Mora Sul and the Temple Guards in Barakesh, I decide to just freeze this guy with an ice arrow. No harm, right?   Frozen orc pops, my favourite treat.   Wait, what's this? Turns out that after he dethawed, while he's still in the duel, attacking him suddenly pisses off a bunch of wall guards that see me fighting him.   I manage to dodge them long enough to make Kulak eat dirt...    ...and then they beat my rear end. Though, nicely enough, they just leave it at that and don't take my gold or my weapon like they would have if I'd stolen or challenged from one of them. Which is also a relief because that happening is more or less an immediate reload. Even though my weapon is a self-forged Bastard Sword, I don't actually have the resources to forge a second one, and even after buying Vak's artifact I've still got about thirty-thousand gold which... while getting gold in Gothic 3 is relatively trivial, it isn't THAT trivial.     How would you like to do some more fighting?  He's been dumping his trash outside of my house, even! Go beat his rear end and tell him who it was from. Sure, if I can empty his pockets after he's down. Something I find interesting is that it feels like the orcs have more facial variety than the humans. Different skin colours, large and small eyes, varied facial tattoos, etc. while almost every human is a white male that's mostly bald. Aside from Aila back in Braga, I don't think we've encountered any named human women at all, nor any long-haired men, and aside from Thorus and Gorn, most of the humans just look like tanned white people. Like there don't seem to be any real ethnic differences either. It contributes a lot to the only way to differentiate humans being what they're wearing and where they're standing. With the arena sorted, we can now also go beat someone up with Gembak, but I want to clear up what I can inside the town's walls before I go on any expeditions.      Hamil here is an artifact trader that more or less directly admits to stealing them to sell. Now... something interesting about artifacts is that, yes, there are a lot of stone tablets among them. It's worth checking every merchant in Geldern since about half of them will have a tablet(+5 Ancient Knowledge) or weathered tablet(+10 Ancient Knowledge) to sell, and you can easily come out of Geldern with about +50 AK which is big. But the other thing everyone else has is artifact jewelry, which is kind of purposeless since it's the same generic booster rings and amulets we've found before(and the Adanos amulet is way better than THAT niche). But didn't the ancients leave behind anything else? Weapons? Armor? Art pieces? Or were they just obsessed with being utterly blinged out and nothing else?       Next up is beating Mirzo's rear end. I, of course, check out his shop inventory before slapping him around.    And then loot his pockets. Most if not all named locations seem to have a teleporter stone, but the larger the location is, the harder it often is to find. Like Barakesh's stone was in the temple treasury, Trelis' was in a chest out in the woods outside the town, Cape Dun's was in an orc's storeroom, etc., but being on the person of a merchant(not his store inventory, mind you, you only get access to these pockets if you kick his rear end) is a new step up in obtuseness. Agenak doesn't have anything interesting to say about our well-applied violence, so I just collect my money and move on up through the center of Geldern.    The local headquarters we're not allowed in yet is this large temple structure at the center. Let's ask someone what demeaning work we have to do to be let in.   And we both know I'm here to run a spread of petty errands in about 24 hours which will somehow convince you that I'm entirely on your side and allow me to go annoy your superiors.  Alright, make sure your mines are producing whatever blobs they're meant to produce. Also, just to steal a march on making you approve of me, I've got some more snitching to do.  Oh boy, I get to double snitch.     Hmmmm... your vibe tells me you're going to spontaneously start ranting about crime while within earshot of the city's top orc. How about it?   Eh, not really, I just subcontract to thieves. Do you think you could tell him that I'm really cool and I want him to steal a bunch of things for me? Since it sounds like it's going to result in a bunch of XP just for a single line of dialogue? Sure, why not.   This guy wants us to walk out of town and stab Torn the druid in the head, a pretty tempting assignment.          ...what? I mean that's what you're going to ask, right? Whether I want to join you so I can do some work for you? I mean, yes. I was going to ask you to head up to a cave a bit north of here. Kill everything inside and such, you know, the usual.     Lares has... changed. Aside from the extra polygons he's lost most of his hair and also his prominent scar that he's had since Gothic 1(the one cutting right through his right eye socket, forehead and upper cheek.). He's more or less completely unrecognizable. Well, someone got a makeover. It seemed the smart thing to do, after all the crime someone did on Khorinis, I didn't want to get associated with them. Do you have any idea how many stolen goods we had on that ship? I thought it was the cops. You were carrying almost two-hundred stolen swords! Yes, and do you know why? In case cops showed up. If the cops show up now? I barely have a couple dozen swords on me. ...anyway, for old times sake, I've got a tip for you in case you want to do a bit of recreational robbing. I heard this one through the grapevine, from one of my contacts. Worth keeping in mind. Don't be a stranger, Lares.So, let's say you want to do a bit of stealing in and around Geldern.       What will greet you is sadness.   See this amulet? It's one of a number of things that someone(in this case Jared) will pay you to collect. But look! The UI insists on interacting with the lectern instead. How am I supposed to pick it up?  As far as I can tell the only way to pick it up is to literally clamber on top of the lectern. While I'm not going to chronicle all of it, or even most of it, Geldern feels like the settlement that has the most of these issues. Anyway there's also a guy in here and I pay attention to him once I'm done explaining how to steal his stuff.  Peratur is pretty uninteresting except that he's Hamil's employer(he admits this after roughly two seconds of questioning because he's an idiot). Interestingly enough, snitching him out to local orc boss doesn't actually result in any consequences for him(Peratur knows this, he considers himself too important to get dunked on for his crimes if he gets caught). So you can do it without any sense of guilt. It's also interesting that Nemrok actually just goes for the minimal-force approach of shutting down the artifact stealing rather than, I don't know, having them both hung or something. Smart orc.      I think you're talking about another subset of idiots than the one I'm in.  Eh, cooking potions or cooking dinner, can't be all that different. What's shaking around here? Frying pork chops, fomenting rebellion, complaining about life. You want any of those? I'll pass for now, but I'll keep the rebellion thing, and the pork chops, in mind for later.Marius is the start of liberating Geldern. If you take him up on getting the populace whipped into a frenzy, you can also get Torn the Druid in on that, which I guess just goes to prove that even huge dickheads have their uses. This leaves us with only one last named NPC in town to visit for the time being.      Grimboll, who won't give us the time of day unless we do his errand. He rants about not wanting "unrefined" sulphur, but there's no such thing as refined sulphur, so the stuff you just yank out of mine walls is perfectly fine, or you can go buy a bit of it from some of the alchemists around town.  However, there's another character in this room. Do you see him? No scrolling down until you give the prior screenshot a good, close look!   He apparently phased into the floor instead of standing at the lectern, which is good, because the lectern grants +5 Alchemy. Not that it's very necessary since I think you need like... 40 alchemy to learn every alchemy skill, there are no greater returns for more alchemy(no greater potion efficiency or brewing returns or anything), and I already have 50+, but it's the principle of the matter.   Knowing this game, he's stuck there for good.    So, not a lot of action this update, but there are a couple of important choices I'd like a vote on. Please pick one option with a number and one option with a letter. A: Help the rebels liberate Trelis. B: Help the orcs destroy Nemora. C: Leave the two towns alone for now. 1: Kill Torn the Druid now that we have TWO people who want us to do so and we know that he murdered a bunch of peasants just for farming with the wrong landlord. 2: Don't kill Torn, in case we need him for liberating Geldern later or because we think he has a point.
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Jun 15, 2023 01:42
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B, 1. Time to stab a druid.
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Jun 15, 2023 02:58
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As for the vote, I'm always in favour of a glorious people's revolution.quote:Grabbing Treslott's big stalk of thyme. Mildly ashamed that I laughed out loud a bit at this, you Scandinavian perv. Naughty herb use aside, what you said about three-legged dogs was very unkind.
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Jun 15, 2023 04:33
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C.1 Torn is a dick but the Nemorans seem okay.
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Jun 15, 2023 05:02
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C2- can't blame a guy for killing peasants that have the wrong landlord. Being killed by landlords angry at each other is what peasants are for!
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Jun 15, 2023 07:29
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JustJeff88 posted:As for the vote, I'm always in favour of a glorious people's revolution. I'm sorry to report it, but reading this line as lewd is entirely on you. I just thought that for a RARE SPECIAL HERB the Herbacious Lobelia looked kind of unimpressive and normal, albeit supersized.
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Jun 15, 2023 10:37
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C 1, I'm sure we can find another dickhead if we want to riot later but right now every faction seems pretty chill and I'm sure there's more looting to do. also there's like 400 species of lobelia and none of them have any particular uses that I know of, they're not herbs, just small flowering plants. Black Robe fucked around with this message at 10:44 on Jun 15, 2023 |
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Jun 15, 2023 10:42
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A 1
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Jun 15, 2023 21:25
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Well, seems like Torn is definitely getting pushed off a ledge for his crimes against peasants.
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Jun 15, 2023 22:17
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Update 15: Monsters and Mines Apologies for the slowing updates, but this summer heat is absolutely mauling me and I'm mostly rendered into a boneless pile of melt from dawn till dusk. In any case, the vote was for stabbing Torn for being a murdering rear end in a top hat, so let's get on board with that.   However, before we go, both Gunock and Kapoth wanted us to end Torn's reign of terror. Kapoth seems pretty satisfied sitting around his fire and not risking his life, who can blame him, but maybe we can awaken Gunock's orcish fury and make him prove himself!     Okay! Slight misstep, but I'm sure that after we beat his rear end, he'll respect us and come along!    Nope. Even after beating his rear end, he doesn't have anything to say to us. Also place your bets now, how many times will we slap Gunock around this update?   The orcs had better appreciate me doing all their hard work while they take naps and laze about.    So Torn is in the camp, of course, and throws fireballs, and has about eight Rangers, all of them archers, keeping him safe. During the first attack run, I manage to pull about half of them out while Torn himself went back to take a nap.      This area's also somewhat buggy. It may be hard to see the trail in the last two screenshots, but one of those assholes just fired an arrow RIGHT THROUGH THE HUGE TREE in front of me!     I also had a lot of inexplicable misses, but when I went back to loot corpses, it all made sense. One of these pieces of decorative wood apparently had a huge, square hitbox that were catching half my arrows in mid-air despite there being no apparent model there to intercept them.     The second run brings Torn himself out, and in a battle of fire versus ice, ice absolutely wins because it tends to steal actions from Torn when I freeze him and the damage seems about equal.   Torn, and I think every other named Druid, drops a magic stone. The Druid Stone of the Snapper, in his case. I make a circle of his camp and then decide to give it a try.         I can't wait to see what epic and amazing powers this little rock that I'm somehow unable to properly hold in my hand does.Seriously it kind of hovers above the hero's palm. Shoddy!     Yes! I can feel it flowing through me! The power! The power of-A monster you've been effortlessly killing for three games in a row now? -son of a bitch, this isn't epic cosmic power, it's just a ripoff.So the problem with transformation stuff in Gothic 3 is the same as it was in Gothic 2: the ultimate form is some dude with a sword, or a bow, or magic, not being a large dog or lizard. If animals had special powers, or could be used for some kind of infiltration? Swell! But it turns out that orcs, rebels and hashishin alike don't take well to large, aggressive carnivores wandering around their town and will skin you for arts and crafts rather than letting you hang out.        I bet Gunock will be happy to hear we did his work for him, though.      Oh whoops I pissed off Gunock again and now he wants to try to fight me a second time. I wonder how that will go for him.     Not well! Also if you KO an NPC non-fatally and steal their weapon, they instantly "grow" a fresh one, which means if you beat them up TWICE you can steal their weapons twice and sell them twice. Environmentally sustainable loot farming!   With that done, I'm going to go sort out Gembak's side quest now that I've looked around the city and also beat his rear end in the arena.   Hey Gembak! Want to pretend your dialogue isn't bugged all to poo poo and actually makes some kind of sense? Yeah, alright. Ahem. Darn! That Ivan sure is a bad guy! If only someone would help me beat up this bad guy! Wow I totally understand how important this is to you. Let us go beat him. I'm in.   And with that, Gembak takes off to lead us to Ivan.      He leads the way out of the north gate and is EXTREMELY target-focused, he'll even ignore these goblins that come rushing after him for a fight.     His end goal is his bandit camp, and if you ever needed proof that we were intended to clear areas like this in Myrtana BEFORE Varant...      Everyone here gets loving one-shot by the usual ice blast.      As we climb the hill towards the top, suddenly Ivan, the only bandit wearing reasonably heavy armor, comes rushing at me. I expect that he might be trouble...    ...but no, once again, ice magic knocks him rear end over teakettle and ends his reign of terror. A lot of NPC's refer to Ivan explicitly as an "Unholy" mercenary, which made me imagine some sort of evil dark paladin, but I'm starting to suspect it's just a mistranslation from German.   With only one enemy left, I decide to sit back and watch Gembak fight while I heal the few scrapes I've taken.  Aaaaaand he loving dies, which sets me back like 15 minutes of gameplay because I didn't think to save. Never trust Eurojank games, folks, always save like your life depends on it.   Second time around, the bandit harassing Gembak gets banished to the outer reaches of the solar system. Begone, time thief.      This finish to Gembak's little storyline is even more baffling since his janky dialogue early on implies he DOESN'T want to keep fighting in the arena and going off to kill Ivan is supposed to be part of freeing him from that, but now he's just casually going back to it, so what was the point of this little excursion other than getting the player some XP? I have no idea, blame the translation team for this one.  In any case, we've still got a number of errands to run before we can talk to Grok, leader of Geldern. Our assorted errands are: Clear out a mine full of wolves Get some idiots to go work in the mine that was full of wolves Clear out another, unrelated mine Acquire 30 lumps of sulfur Acquire 50 nuggets of gold    Our only hints where ANYTHING related to these missions is, is that it's all "north of Geldern." Which would encompass about a third of the entire world map.    Descending from the bandit camp, there's this open meadow with a cave on the far side that's practically right next to Geldern, it's as little "north" of Geldern as its possible to be while still being technically "north" of Geldern.        The meadow is also filled with Threatening Snappers which, considering their special names, are obviously intended to be mangled for a quest, so I freeze dry them all before heading to the cave.     I need you to- Clear out the Threatening Snappers? Done. Reward please. I want to sarcastically say it's just what I wanted, but... it's actually just what I wanted. Actually I need... like twenty more. Can I just walk into the mine and grab some? Sure, suit yourself. The less sulphur stinking the place up, the happier I am.  The sulphur for Nemrock's quest is NOT the same sulphur as you mine from the walls, and as far as I can tell it only exists on the floor of this one mine... and scattered around a bit just outside it, and you need to grab every single chunk to have enough for the quest, so it's a fiddly task involving picking up yellow-brown lumps from a brown floor. I don't think Sulphock cares if you take the sulphur from the mine even without his permission, but since you need EVERY chunk, you also need the ones he gives you for killing the Snappers.       With that done, I head back to Geldern's gate and take the road north, figuring that it would make sense for the remaining mines(gold and wolves) to be on the road north. I'm PARTIALLY right, as I bump into one of them about ten seconds' walk right out of the gates.    The mine that Samuel wanted us to clear out is full of Minecrawlers and gold veins.   Unlike sulphur lumps, the gold nuggets that Nemrock wants are just harvested from gold veins. You could even have enough just from mines in Varant, especially if you, like me, got the perk from a slave teaching you how to get double output from mining ore veins, and even aside from that, gold nuggets are worth a good bit of money, so may as well get some extra.   One noteworthy thing about this place, though, is that once you step over a certain line the place is just PITCH. BLACK.    Which means that if you want to use magic or a bow and have any idea what you're doing, you need to use the weak light spell, since a torch eats up one of your hand slots and only permits you to use one-handed weapons as a result.   ...or if you use magic you can just rely on the auto-lockon. It's also viable to lure the minecrawlers out into the better-lit parts of the cave, if you want to.        After a narrow pass, the road splits in two at the shores of a large, lovely-looking lake. It makes me miss being able to dive. Gothic 2 never really had anything useful underwater, but I always want to check out what's in big lakes. You could hide anything down there! Dinosaurs! Castles! Dinosaur kings reigning from their underwater castles!      The left path loops around back through a tunnel, then on the far side we're actually right next to Silden, the next town to the north. I don't want to start on a new town before I clean up Geldern, though, so I turn back south instead. I still need to find the Wolf Mine and some more gold nuggets. Where the hell could they be?       Lets ask these random rebels cutting wood in the woods. I don't wear black and I don't constantly ramble about gold and slaves. Or at least not the slave part. So no. Oh. Well, what's up? You guys seen any mines around here? I'm looking for one full of wolves. Script says not to tell you, but I'd feel bad leaving you wander the woods for hours. It's just a bit to the west-southwest. I owe you one. Any favours you need doing? Well, if you had some sort of infinitely large inventory, you could pick up this crate of dried berries for someone in Geldern? Say no more. He'll get it in a few days or weeks, whenever I get around to it.    The woods around here also have a couple of T-rexes.     They're really just non-orange versions of the super-Snappers above Nemora that we killed so a wizard could get his oregano on.        Past them is the Wolf Mine, or the Wolf Hole In The Ground, so named because it's full of wolves.    What baffles me is that they decided to fill it with Wolves(renamed, but statistically the same) and not, say, Wargs or some other wolf-like but tougher enemy, despite how much later this is in the game. Even if you came here as soon as possible, you would've almost certainly dealt with Cape Dun/Reddock, Trelis and Montera(the town I skipped. I think we're about twenty days out from the deadline we were given to get there, so it's going to be somewhat funny once we actually turn up) and wolves, even in these numbers, would be no kind of threat to you.  It also hosts a few more gold veins. You should mine these before restarting the mine, not because you're not allowed or able to do so afterwards, but because when other miners are hacking away at them, you need to wait for them to stop before you can slip in.      On the way back to Geldern, a bunch of Boars and Ripperbeasts are fighting, and I decide to get involved since I need to clear the way back anyway and, for the first time ever, a Ripperbeast actually hits me.  It turns out they disease you, turning your stamina bar gray and making it recover insanely slowly. Since you can't block, run, jump or attack effectively at zero stamina, and drinking potions in close combat is extremely likely to get you killed, it results in a situation where you have your remaining stamina bar to either get clear and recover or win the fight, which can get a bit tense and is one of the things that can complicate matters if you rely heavily on archery/magic hit-and-run strategies. Thankfully disease-causing enemies are somewhat rare and usually not very scary(both giant lizards and ripperbeasts are kind of pushovers) and disease-curing potions are in almost every random loot table so I'm carrying around close to a hundred of the drat things at this point.     Easily missed, but up against the cliff wall that forms the border of the gameworld, there's this guy sitting next to some gold veins. He's part of what I find to be a somewhat interesting interaction.   Not because of what actually happens here, mind you. Dawson just tells you that Ivan killed everyone(except him) and ran away with the gold(except that still waiting to be mined at the back of the camp), which is kind of odd because you'd almost certainly have already heard about Ivan from Gembak in Geldern or, if you were somehow coming down from the north, there's a good chance you'd have explored your way up into his little camp and exploded him casually. It's going to be interesting in a few moments when we get back to Geldern, instead.   After mining a bunch of the locally available gold, of course.       It's also reasonably important to clear a clean path between the Wolf Mine and Geldern when returning. In addition to big piles of boars and ripperbeasts, there are also a few goblins and some rhinos hanging around, as well as a couple of shadowbeasts decently off the straightest line that you probably won't meet, but no reason to take any risks.   Samuel wanted us to take a look at the mine full of minecrawlers, we report on it being now empty of minecrawlers and he's happy.    But we can also tell him about Dawson, which makes Samuel take himself and two stronger mercenaries(named Samuel's Left Hand and Samuel's Right Hand, respectively) off to hang out with Dawson and secure the area. The reason this is interesting, is because if you were planning to liberate Geldern with an uprising from within, you'd just have removed three reasonably strong hostile NPC's from the game board... without killing them. The cities could have used more of this, ways to clear opposition out of the way or set them against each other without killing them. Maybe arena fighters would respect you enough to stay neutral, or you could have the option of killing or sparing them on victory. Kill them and they can't resist an uprising, spare them and maybe you could bring them along for muscle if you wanted to do stuff(...and then get them killed) or for a counterstrike against the local rebellion(whether Myrtanan loyalists or Nomads in the desert). Maybe more quests that had kill, pay or task as a result. Like maybe when you had to get that amulet for the guy back in Mora Sul, you could've had the option of killing the merchant, paying for it or doing a task for the merchant. Once again, much the same end result, but one of them weakens the city for a potential future attack, that sort of thing. It just stands out to me as something that reveals the game designers could occasionally stumble on to good ideas, and it makes me wonder whether they ran out of time to implement it across the whole game or whether the occasional flashes of good design were accidents.  Anyway, the next step is to get the Wolf Mine staffed again. We've been told to find some slaves to set to the job. Some eager slaves, in particular.    Most of the town's slaves are concentrated around the mine in the eastern part of town, path the arena. The ones just named Slave won't give you the time of day.     The ones named EAGER Slave you can talk to... but there are no dialogue options. You'll probably feel baffled, and it doesn't help that the slaves move around a good bit during the day, so it can be hard to tell who you already checked. Eventually, though, you'll bump into ONE slave with a different name.      This one guy has actual dialogue.     The reason to clear the path to the Wolf Mine is that you need to escort this guy there, and leave him there... and then afterwards you can inexplicably talk to the just plain Eager slaves and send them off to the mine. They, unlike the first one, will just run there themselves. I have no idea why you couldn't just bring all three at the first go.  That done, there's finally a reason to report back to Nemrok.     Where the hell were you keeping all this? Where am I going to keep it? Not telling and not my problem. Just pony up the XP.    In fact, how about staying here permanently? You seem to be the only one who gets anything done. I've already taken everything in the area not nailed down, so no. But you could answer a question or two before I head in. I technically think I was supposed to be looking for him, but I got distracted by all these valuable items people don't properly secure.  So you don't know anything worthwhile. I'll go annoy Grok about it next.     One thing that puzzles me about the central fort in Geldern is that it doesn't seem entirely like other pieces of Myrtanan architecture. The shape of the windows and the doorways feel like they have more of a Middle Eastern influence as opposed to the very European, square shapes of other Myrtanan structures. I suppose its possible that the orcs got some Hashishin architects in to give the place a do-over, but it seems a bit implausible. Another thing that strikes me is that of the occupied Myrtanan cities we've seen so far. Ardea, Cape Dun, Trelis and Geldern, none of them seem to have any sort of battle damage. Either the orcs are very serious about maintenance and clean-up, or these places were taken without any kind of force. No sieges to break down the walls, no buildings burnt down in the heat of the fighting. The most likely thing is that the developers just didn't consider it, but if you assume its intentional, it opens up the possibility that either the Paladins and human armies all ran away the moment they saw the orcs, leaving the civilians to fend for themselves OR the locals were so piss-tired of their king that most of them welcomed the orcs as probably not much worse than the original rulers.     Unrelatedly, but I really like the new art direction they went with for the shamans rather than the pseudo-Native American look they had back in Gothic 2. I'm just sad that, as far as I know, we can't score one of their swag-rear end outfits. Sounds like someone's got a case of the mondays. ... You alright there, buddy? Just imagining tearing off your head with the spine still attached like a Mortal Kombat fatality. But go on.     drat, not a single one? Not the robe, not the crown, not the amulet nor any of the rings. ... ... Want to wipe away your tears on the sleeve of my big fancy outfit? The threadcount is just divine. You're lucky that I'm not scripted to actually recognize what you're wearing. You leader types usually have something you want stabbed or collected or looked at or maybe you just want me to pay your bills.       Oh, I can tell you all about that. Their special ability is to turn into a variety of frail, ordinary animals that any orc or human could squish. Which is why they never do it in a fight and just throw fireballs instead. That seems completely stupid and implausible, I'm going to need something better than that. I'm going to need to get my hands on some actual druids. Gunock to the south and Ballock to the north.  That maggot is going to be scrubbing latrines for a month! Oh and I already stabbed Torn the druid to the south, so please praise me and pay me. ...that doesn't exactly teach me a lot about druids, but whatever. Ballock hasn't reported back in a while, go find him and see what's going on out there, and this time try to get some actual information before you kill everyone. No promises!      I follow up this nice conversation by rifling through all of Grok's stuff and reading his books, which gets me another Ancient Knowledge boost. Since I'm getting over the 200 limit, I'm getting access to a number of new spells. None of them are likely to be very useful compared to what I already know, but I'd like to be able to summon golems just so I can see how disappointing they are in this game.      On the way out to the north gate for a nice screenshot to end the update on, I also come across a new and interesting idle animation.  Sorry for the crustiness on this one, I had one hell of a time getting the size under 2mb with this particular .webp, even when cutting all the extraneous frames I could. If you have 200+ Strength, you can actually lift these millstones yourself, for another +5 Strength each, at least in the base game, not sure if the AB mod changes this as part of its non-optional alterations. Most Orc-occupied settlements should have one, but since interaction with them is gated so deep into the game, you're pretty liable to completely miss it unless you use a guide of some sort.     Oh, yeah, and Gunock is pissed because I told Grok he was a lazy sack of poo poo. I respect that he still holds out hope even after getting pounded into the dirt twice.   So, for whoever guessed that I'd dunk on Gunock three times this update, congratulations, you win the prize of being correct.    Well, I guess we're hunting druids next. I'm sure that'll go swell and they won't be another pack of war-criming weirdos.VOTE Also aside from finding Runak, which hopefully won't take too long, we'll need a new destination. From here we can either... A: Head North into Silden and then onwards to Nordmar or B: Loop back to Montera, barely a month delayed, then visit Gotha and Faring and see why Gotha has such a spooky black skull icon on the map.
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Jun 27, 2023 20:30
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B I want to hear about this spooky black skull
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Jun 27, 2023 22:01
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quote:Apologies for the slowing updates, but this summer heat is absolutely mauling me and I'm mostly rendered into a boneless pile of melt from dawn till dusk. It's only supposed to be 23 tomorrow, you wuss. Jokes aside, where I live now most everything is climatised. I didn't have that when I was a lad, but then again we really didn't need it back then.
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Jun 27, 2023 23:15
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Two days of heavy rains really helped bringing things down here for a while. Thankfully we were also spared from crushing humidity.
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Jun 27, 2023 23:42
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B, let's head to Gotha in Gothic. Maybe there'll be skeletons!
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Jun 27, 2023 23:54
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JustJeff88 posted:It's only supposed to be 23 tomorrow, you wuss. I am essentially a corpse at anything about 20C. I can treat -5C like T-shirt weather, but this "heat" and "summer" bullshit can go to hell.
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Jun 28, 2023 00:02
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PurpleXVI posted:I am essentially a corpse at anything about 20C. I can treat -5C like T-shirt weather, but this "heat" and "summer" bullshit can go to hell.   People around here constantly tell me how nice it is outside, meanwhile I'm kinda warm inside in a T-shirt while some of my co-workers wear hoodies because they find it too cold. Sucks to be someone who can't deal with heat.
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Jun 28, 2023 01:20
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Summer is a crime and we are its victims. Nothing like somebody telling you the weather is great while the sidewalks get tacky with melting tar.
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Jun 28, 2023 01:24
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SIGSEGV posted:Summer is a crime and we are its victims. Nothing like somebody telling you the weather is great while the sidewalks get tacky with melting tar. I'm a fat, pasty Euro-Canadian, but telling me that 23C is murder is a bit thick. Last year's horrible 40C heat waves in northern europe are deadly, but that's a far cry from 23.
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Jun 28, 2023 02:15
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23 is perfectly livable, last summer's 45 was another matter, but I spent most of the weekend out on concrete and tarmac, and the heat was real.
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Jun 28, 2023 02:17
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Anything below 30 is loving cold, sorry to say
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Jun 28, 2023 04:44
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At least in the UK the indoor temperature in my house made out of bricks is anywhere between +2C and +6C compared to outside. Still okay at 23C but it's been 28C-32C here lately and that makes for a nice oven. Also I'm not allowed to have air conditioning because it's a historic building or something. e: 86F to 100F indoors for americans Private Speech fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 28, 2023 |
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Jun 28, 2023 09:55
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PurpleXVI posted:
You're missing the point. Turning into a dinosaur is loving awesome no matter how squishy you are.  Also yes, the heat sucks rear end, especially in countries where the buildings were all designed to deal with cold and trap the heat forever. As for the vote, go see what the spooooooky skullllll is.
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Jun 28, 2023 12:06
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Black Robe posted:You're missing the point. If I could turn into one of the big T-Rex'y Snappers, I might get excited. And yeah, if you can believe it, climate change has absolutely hosed up things in a country that was once used to being pretty cold except at the very height of summer.
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Jun 28, 2023 12:34
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Private Speech posted:At least in the UK the indoor temperature in my house made out of bricks is anywhere between +2C and +6C compared to outside. Still okay at 23C but it's been 28C-32C here lately and that makes for a nice oven. Also I'm not allowed to have air conditioning because it's a historic building or something. gently caress Americans. First of all, gently caress their Cold-war paranoia which is why they never adopted the metric system, and gently caress the people who laughed at Europeans dying in the 44C heat which is due to global warming which is largely the fault of the US yet many pretend that it's some kind of liberal attempt to deprive them of their right to be arseholes. Another thing that they don't realise is that most wiring in Europe is in old buildings that can't take the strain. AC uses a lot more energy than heating and puts a lot more strain on power infrastructure. Slaan posted:Anything below 30 is loving cold, sorry to say Not my fault that you live in Australia, which is 1/4 km from the surface of the sun.
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Jun 29, 2023 00:26
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I'm a loving American living in Georgia. Your post is 100% correct though 
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Jun 29, 2023 00:39
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Slaan posted:I'm a loving American living in Georgia. Your post is 100% correct though I've been there, actually. Everything that they say about it is true.
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Jun 29, 2023 01:12
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JustJeff88 posted:gently caress Americans. First of all, gently caress their Cold-war paranoia which is why they never adopted the metric system, and gently caress the people who laughed at Europeans dying in the 44C heat which is due to global warming which is largely the fault of the US yet many pretend that it's some kind of liberal attempt to deprive them of their right to be arseholes. Another thing that they don't realise is that most wiring in Europe is in old buildings that can't take the strain. AC uses a lot more energy than heating and puts a lot more strain on power infrastructure. The wiring isn't the issue at least in Mainland Europe. It's that we live mostly as renters in Apartments we can barely modify and wall mounting an outside AC unit is forbidden by my apartment company and even if it wasn't,is close to 6k Euro since mounting the unit needs a bracket which needs a scaffold that has to go up 4 Floors. Newer buildings here in Germany start to pop up more and more with AC build in tho. Oh and I also pay 40 cents per Kilowatt hour so using the AC would cost me a significant bit each year
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Jun 29, 2023 07:35
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Update 16: The Decider This update features something exciting: it's going to be the first time in the entire game we're formally introduced to the metaplot and told that we have a place in it! So far our motivation for doing things will have just been "bigger numbers gooder" and perhaps "orcs bad, much stabbing required," but that's all about to change! ...slightly. We're still mostly going to be motivated by making our numbers bigger.    Before we leave Geldern for Montera, we're heading north (again) to find Runak, the leader of the druids, who can maybe tell us what they're all about, whether they're all murdering dickheads and so forth. It promises to be enlightening.     Once again our only clue is that he's "north" of Geldern, but because I don't want to spend ten hours bungling around the trackless wilderness exploring copypasted caves and murdering the wildlife, I looked up the exact location to speed things up. For anyone who wants to also find him, the first landmark to head for is the big river south of Silden. Find that, and head west. You'll know you're about the right course when you run into a pile of trolls.    As mentioned before, trolls are trivial to archers because they stop to attack, letting you gain range while backing off, and flinch reliably when hit in their big dumb faces by a fully powered shot, interrupting their attacks. They've got a slow overhead smash, and two swipes(one backhanded) that are fast enough that you need to be quick on the trigger(or release, as it goes) to interrupt them. Getting bopped just causes a flinch and doesn't send you flying like in Gothic 2, but it also diseases you like getting bitten by a Ripperbeast or a giant Lizard.    This little overhang is also noteworthy because you can get trolls stuck here and whittle them down from range at your leisure.      Further along, past an abandoned camp with the fire still lit, we catch sight of the great falls that feed the river. Despite the relative low fidelity of the graphics, I think its a cool view.        Then once we're at the foot of the falls, we loop back south. We've been travelling upwards enough that we're now climbing the back side of the cliffs overlooking the Wolf Mine and Dawson's raided camp. Runak is down to the right, at the very southernmost extent of the falls, but I'm heading left and up instead, to the rise in the ground, because good game developers always leave neat things at geographical extremes like high points and low points or the edges of the game world. Considering that this is a JoWood game, this probably means I'm going to be disappointed by this exploration, but you never know!     The game devs also loving loooooooooooved Shadowbeasts in this area. Gothic 2 had 16 Shadowbeasts in total, even with the expansion. If you clear out this section of the map entirely, I think you're already near the 15 mark. This little chunk of ruin has FOUR by itself.    The usual barrage solves them, but considering I can only fling out four ice shots per full mana bar, enough of them rushing me could be trouble. I also think the apparently "random" damage on the ice shots is due to headshots, which land almost every time they come at me from the front, but if I surprise them from the side, I don't get them. A headshot and an arrow puts them down, but otherwise the arrow just thaws them out and I have to plunk another arrow or two in them to settle the fight, which can get dangerous.     Despite the fancy name, as far as I understand it the only purpose of the Shadow Scepter is to hand it to Nemrok in Geldern who'll reward you for it, and then also let you keep it. I see one guide on the internet claiming it lets you cast the Fog spell, but I didn't test that out so I'm unsure whether thats rumour or the result of one of the game's many balance or content patches.     Further up the hill are some trolls, including one that looks a bit different from the others.      It's the Black Troll again! In my opinion he looks a lot less fearsome in Gothic 3, just kind of sad. Its unclear whether its part of a quest this time around, but it doesn't appear to be, so its more of an easter egg than anything.  With trolls having lost their resistances to magic and arrows, its also trivialized by the same strategies that work against normal trolls: walking away slowly while firing arrows at them. I think it's kind of telling that the developers apparently didn't understand what purpose these resistances served in Gothic 2, which was to make large, single enemies a viable threat to mages and archers(even if some of them were then re-trivialized by summons, in the case of mages). Whenever I fought a troll in Gothic 2, even the summons were generally only distractions, rather than the ones who cinched the kill, which I usually had to do with my own two hands. And its clearly not an engine issue, because skeletons, for instance, still have their arrow immunity(unless you're using burning or explosive arrows, anyway). Either way, lets continue down into the woods for our regular serving of metaplot.      How's the hunting going?  He could be anywhere! He could be turned into an ant, watching us right now! He could have turned into the air itself! He could have turned into a typhoid virus and be infecting us! ... ... So he's not just going to be over that ridge, about fifty feet away, with you and your goons too lazy to go kill him? Shut up and go away.    There are about another nine Shadowbeasts here, so between that and the Shadowbeasts we've met before, we've already gotten more of them than in all of G2 and Night of the Raven.      The reason I complained about copypasted caves earlier is that this cave, on the way down to Runak, is one that we've now seen three times. Different interior decoration, sure. Different people inside, sure. But the exact same layout. Gothic 2, for all its flaws, had more or less no copypasted content, at least not so you'd notice it.    In this case its a swarm of the undead, guarding some mysterious glowy object that I worry might spawn a Skeleton Mage or some similar bastardry.       But no, all this effort just for another generic +5 stat ring, which, considering that Gothic 3 has a higher stat and total learning point total than Gothic 2, and we're already approaching or surpassing 200 with some of them, is thoroughly unimpressive. It reminds me of playing Elden Ring a bit, having all these caves and mini-"dungeons" to explore just to get some sort of completely trivial or useless reward at the end. At least this is shorter than Elden Ring's side content.    Here's Runak's camp. The great leader of the druids is only guarded by two Rangers, which is very dangerous for them because Rangers are about one of the most valuable targets of opportunity in the game. Even with the modifier for being looted weapons, Ranger bows are worth 5500 gold a piece, so if you're a greedy bastard you will absolutely murder and loot every Ranger you come across in the game. Just Torn's Rangers by themselves more or less recouped all the money we paid to get the artifact from Trelis peacefully.      ...the swampweed down here must be pretty good, huh? My son, it is the wildest poo poo you've ever smoked. I can't even remember what I just said to you. You mumbled something about me being "The Decider," whatever that is.   Divine warfare doesn't sound very profitable. Lots of corpses to loot, but not a lot of merchants to sell to.   ...you mean...? Yes, I'm afraid so. And here I was hoping to just blame it all on Innos and Beliar at the eventual war crimes tribunal. But now I actually have to take responsibility for my actions? This is such bullshit. Deal with it. Also please don't sell me out to the orcs.  Pffft. No, not those stones, the magic ones! You mean the ones that give you deeply underwhelming powers, inferior to just throwing a fireball? Yes, those. I really have no idea why they want them, myself, but mine has sentimental value and I'm not handing it over unless someone does some sidequests for me and my friends, then it might be on the table. Yeah, well, my moral and ethical decisions are up to a council of otherworldly shitposters, so we'll have to get back to you on that one.After this, I warp back down to Trelis to head to Montera. We'll have a vote on whether to do anything about Runak at the end of the post.       Taking the northeast road out of Montera, we pass by the temple and then by a small farm. The farm isn't very interesting at this point.    We can poo poo on this poor guy for no obvious reason if we really want to roleplay an rear end in a top hat, and if we talk to the farm owner, goblins attack, and after fending off the attack we can go to their cave and stab the remainder. Its interesting that across Gothic 2 and Gothic 3, having events directly triggered by dialogue like this are rare. Generally if a conversation results in a fight, its because someone asks you to go somewhere else and murder someone, instead.    What I'm really here for, though, is this shrine to Innos. We've now got enough Ancient Knowledge to learn Fire Rain, and in Gothic 2, Fire Rain, Storm and the other centered-on-self AoE spells had niche but very handy applications in those niches, in part because they functioned through all terrain, including caves. Considering Gothic 3's current jank tier, I'm expecting it to be much the same. Now we just need a test subject.   A snapper on the way to Montera? That should do nicely.    Fire Rain certainly looks nicer than in Gothic 2 but the results are... somewhat underwhelming. Its still a damage-over-time effect, delivering its damage in three large chunks, and it takes all those chunks to bring down the Snappers, enemies I can kill in two arrows or sword swipes, or one ice blast from the front(or an ice blast and an arrow). So its absolutely going to be dogshit useless against single targets, barring very unique situations, and it also eats up 75% of my mana. It's not the room-clearing monstrosity it was in G2 any longer.       Aside from a few animals, though, the Trelis-Montera road is peaceful and not noteworthy until I find a pack of rebels taking their ease at the crossroads. It seems to be a common thread that the rebels feel able to just hang around in the open, there were a bunch of them between Cape Dun and Montera, too. This is also where I realize that even with multiple coastal communities in the game(Barakesh, Cape Dun, Ardea), none of them have had docks, ships or boats. Even the ones on rivers, we've seen so far, like Trelis, haven't had anything. It feels like a strange thing to miss and it was only now that my brain twigged to it.     You're standing around at a crossroads wearing rebel uniforms? Any passing orc could see you and decide it was time to throw down. And when was the last time you saw an orc out on patrol, hm? Well, obviously I saw one... hmmm... now that you mention it? Just about never. Its weird how just moments before you showed up, all travel magically stopped. But at least it means we can take a load off and relax. Go on. When one of them came past here we kicked his rear end, took all his stuff and sent him running to Montera in terror. Great stuff. And before you think about robbing us, because I see that glint in your eye, we already sent the loot off to our headquarters, Okara. drat, you got me there. Surely I will never visit Okara and rob it.This is actually worth noting and remembering.     Not far ahead is Montera, but more importantly...  ...across the road from Montera is a farm! We can go pet the cows.      And can I pet the cows? I already did, but I figured I'd get your permission in case I wanted to pet them more.   If you hang around for a bit, I'll complain about how dumb my men are and that there are some wolves for you to kill. Sounds trivial, you mind if I nip off and do that off-screen? As long as it stops them eating my cows, go right ahead.  With the cows saved, we can go check out the town proper.        Montera's decently sized! Like Geldern, it crosses some arbitrary limit in my brain that allows me to regard it as a real settlement, even though its clearly not particularly big and has maybe 60 or 70 residents in all, not counting the ones in the stockyard or outlying farms. There are also a number of people to talk to here, more or less all of them orcs or orc mercenaries.     Depends, did anything really funny happen to you? I was beset by rebels! They stole everything I had! Oh, you must be the one those dorks outside knocked over. What'd they steal from you? You know, in case I want to steal it back.   I am now suddenly sympathetic enough to go avenge you... or do the rebels' chores until they hand it over, one of the two. Thanks for the heads up.So unless Basir lied to us, and anyone who lies in this game only does so for about five minutes so they can stab you, they don't formulate long-term plans to exploit the protagonist, one of the divine artifacts is in Okara. Probably we can find some rebels outside of town and gain their trust OR we can just wander around aimlessly until we stumble across yet another literal rebel pit in the ground. But first, chores in Montera.    To the right of the gates is the part of town where the slaves are working.    And unlike other towns we've seen so far, Montera shows some actual battle damage. Either that or maintenance was very shoddy prior to the war, this wall got hosed up.     The only person to talk to on this side of town is Bradley, the local slave overseer who, as per usual, is too lazy to do his literal job and offloads it on us.     Its interesting to note that the slavekeepers in Montera adhere to some idea of not literally working the slaves to death(even though Bradley also takes bribes to shuffle some of them to the top of the exchange list... which makes you wonder why he's letting us decide and ignoring the list). We have two options for who to exchange, here.       We can squeeze both of them before picking them. Bengerd will give us money, and Osko will tell us about incriminating documents Bradley has that his boss Marik would love to see.  Afterwards, he wants us to head out to the stockyard outside of town and find slaves to head back to do backbreaking digging work in town.   Once again, Dennis displays some actual concern for the slaves, and once again we can take bribes from two of them not to send them in to do hard work.    Unfortunately for Leon and Kelvin, sending them into town is worth Montera reputation to me, which I need to be able to talk to the local head honcho to find out if he's got divine artifacts or plot-related stuff for me. Relaying Dennis' message to not overwork the slaves also provides a bit of Montera rep, mind you, even if Bradley is salty about hearing it.      Sanford handles Montera's supplies and generally feels very put-upon and unappreciated. He wants us to head out to the local farms to collect milk and wheat for his stores, despite one of the two, the stockyard, being literally ten steps outside of the main gates.   Thorek the blacksmith forces us to pay a cover charge before he'll teach us anything or sell us anything. Now, as an interesting point, smithing recipes generally only pop up in the inventories of smiths, I've never seen them as loot. However! All shop inventories are randomly generated, which means that high-level smithing recipes may completely fail to generate with any smiths and thus whatever smithing investment you've made may end up being pointless! Just more Gothic 3 Stuff for everyone to get excited about.     No, I just like wandering aimlessly until I find a stranger with a name above their head I can hassle, what's up?  Oh, yeah, some dork named Domenik told me to report to you, uhhhhh... twenty days ago, I think, maybe thirty? You lost track of time in the desert. Going to punish me horribly for being late or anything? Turns out that Marik absolutely doesn't give a poo poo that we're late.  But actually, I could use you. How do you feel about snitching on people? If I'm paid? Marvellously. Perfect. Go do my troops' chores until they trust you, ask them what they think about me, and then tell me about it. I won't react to any of it, but I like to know what's going on.Alright, lets get to something that makes everyone love us.     Beating their asses in the arena!   Sure, for the opportunity to beat that moustache off your face, I'll pay that. So, as per usual, rear end beatings occur. We've got four contestants before we can pound Ashton into the dirt.       Goose and Dan go down easy.   As usual no one ever holds a grudge for you beating them up, which is strange.       Fedor and Ugo are next. Beating up Ugo also unlocks him as a thievery trainer if you need any of that.   Which only leaves Ashton.    Everyone REALLY loves us for kicking his rear end. One thing I feel is missing from getting rep in the various cities and settlements is that you can almost never leave anything but one or two small errands out. This prevents you from really picking your own playstyle. Obviously making things that detailed would also require fewer, larger settlements with more detail, but I also think that would have benefited the game in general.   The ceremonial mocking of the loser, and then we're off to the farms to collect lunch for everyone.      First, the milk.  Just find the five brown milk barrels on the brown ground...   Farther down the road are the wheat fields, but I take a loop off the road to meet someone out in the tall grass first...     Meet Mason. He's a weirdo.   Totally not working for any mercenaries, go ahead and tell me all your secrets.   Ah, planning to kill all the mercenaries in preparation for a siege? What? No! We're just going to kill all the cows. You know, deny them the milk, so their bones become weak and brittle... I... am going to sidle the hell away from you.       Yes, no one's paying me at all. You should give me some money. Solve some of my problems around here and I just might. We've got undead in Gotha to the east, grain thieves stealing our wheat in the night and none of my idiot men seem able to do anything about either! Well, castles full of undead I'm lukewarm on, but stabbing some dorks who steal wheat I can handle. But sure, whatever. Either you succeed or I don't have to pay you. Go get 'em, champ.   We need 15 sacks of wheat and only 10 are at the farm, the remaining 5 are with the grain thieves, so we can't avoid them.        Thankfully they're just across the road and along the cliffside, but if you don't know that or don't make a lucky guess, it's easy to stumble around for a while looking for them.    Note in the background, one of the grain thieves getting distracted and running off for some reason.     He's busy getting his rear end kicked by three Snappers. I try to wade in there and cut them down but I literally can't hit them because Snappers have suuuuuper busted hitboxes. With anything short of magic, they're almost impossible to hit from any angle but directly from the front.     The snappers were closer to killing me than the bandits, who get shot, I grab their wheat and head back to Elber.    In general the mercenaries of Montera are pretty good about expressing that they like your help, none of them screw you over and about the only one who gets salty as part of the missions is Ashton who doesn't like that I snapped his moustache in half.       Time to hand in Sanford's stuff...       No one's been quite as withering about Marik before. Now we've really got some juicy stuff to report, lets head over and get to snitching.   You know, all of ten feet away where Marik probably head the entire exchange anyway.   There are a couple of odd absences on the list, people we can't report to Marik about, or even ask their opinions of him, like Dennis, the guy in the stock yard. Most of his responses are unimpressed, but what if we tell him about Sanford?     It's interesting that Marik is more concerned with who's good at their job than who toes the line and sucks up to him. Aside from spying on his guys, this actually makes him sound like a pretty decent dude. This also gives us enough rep to visit the orcish big-shot in Montera.      No other orcish stronghold we've seen so far has had such a sharp separation between the orc part of the city and the human part of the city. There are hardly any orcs outside the keep except for the gate guards, and no humans inside the keep.   I don't know, where will you pay me to go? Oh, a smart guy. Well, smart guy, you're going to do some work for me.  He's found some place to hide in the keep and nap instead of training. Find him and get him down here. Oh, and his name is Folleck. Seems simple enough. I'm on it.Well, time to go poking around, now we've been TOLD to do it, even.    He's not in any of the little rooms on the ground floor.      Though one of them contains another orc who doesn't seem to sell anything better than what Thorek outside has.       Maybe he's on the walls?   Nothing, just orcs being messy.       Huff... puff... he had better be at the top of this goddamn tower...  And indeed, here he is, at the top of the keep's tallest tower.  Wow, a real tough guy. Already did, and kicked their asses. Now I'm going to beat you up because it seems like fun. What the hell is wrong with you humans?Folleck isn't particularly hard as combat encounters go. If you came here early, along the intended progression route, he'd probably be scary, but he doesn't give me much trouble.       Time to rob him and then enjoy the view while he recovers.  Montera actually looks pretty decent by night.  I mean, it proves I can kick your rear end. Mosey on down and do your job before I turn my proof into a peer-reviewed paper. Mmmm, the delicious taste of bullying.      Turns out your champion is more of a chumpion.  Like most orcs, Kor-Shach is absolutely ready to respect a human that proves not to be a whiny weenie. Now let's go annoy his boss, too.     Hey! I bathe! Sometimes. Once a month... I got caught out in the rain the other day if that counts?    Not getting their asses kicked just sounds smart to me, but do go off. Ah, I see, you're not listening to me and you're going to keep ranting.  Varek is a bit interesting because rather than simply considering orcs to be naturally on top of the pyramid of things, he actually despises the humans who surrender rather than fighting the orcish occupation to the bitter end. But yeah, you want me to bust up the rebels, right? That seems to be how it usually goes. Or maybe you just want a lot of money? I'd love to see the rebels of Okara crushed, and I'm sure that as a wimpy, spineless human you're going to be eager to betray your own kind for my approval. Not if they just hand over their treasures peacefully, no. I don't do "work" unless I'm forced to. ...I want to despise you but I can't decide for what reason, there are so many options. Just get out of here until you want to actually do my dirty work.         I love the smell of gear with big numbers in the morning. Time to see what the rebels of Okara have for me.VOTE Looks like Runak is the first person to appreciate us for being a protagonist, but unfortunately for him, he's also worth money if he's dead. A: Let Runak keep his stones, ice the orcs hunting him. B: Make the orcs happy, gives them Runak's stones. C: Don't kill Runak, don't kill the orcs.
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Jul 8, 2023 22:58
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