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MagusofStars posted:The Mage thing seems extra weird to me because he accepted the answer instantly without question. It's not exactly one of those riddles where you hear the answer and it makes intuitive sense; for all he knows we're totally on the wrong track. Unless he's already got an inkling of the answer, in which case, why not walk to the chest yourself and brute-force it, dumbass? What annoys me the most is that we don't even get to loot his store afterwards.  We could've been rich!MagusofStars posted:Does the jewelry slot only allow one item to be equipped? It'd certainly be a lot more balanced than Krondor just counting passive boosters in inventory so you could just stack them as needed - even though it makes zero sense why Owyn would wear three pairs of Weed Walkers on his feet. I'll let you know as soon as I have more than one piece of jewelry. Magical accessories are in much shorter supply than in Krondor.Also Owyn could've been wearing a pair on his feet, a pair on his hands and a pair, uh, over his ears?
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Jan 17, 2022 15:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Also Owyn could've been wearing a pair on his feet, a pair on his hands and a pair, uh, over his ears? One at each end of his staff. I will say that it seems that we are getting somewhere, what with William wanting to prove himself to his father, which both gives a more direct reason for travel and also a reason to just gently caress around and help people, than just going back home and getting Aren some low budget magic training.
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Jan 17, 2022 16:39
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Hel posted:One at each end of his staff. ... loving "Grrrrlf" is like the one thing I remember from the manual. Definitely a very serious name for a very serious race.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:00
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Xander77 posted:One side has a knob on the end for that very purpose. There's a reason most people keep to the standard elf, dwarf, orc, sexy catgirl non-human species with minor variantion. Because they've been around enough to not be instantly embarrassing, like the Grrlf.
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Jan 18, 2022 18:07
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I personally can't hear anything other than The Dream Reamer from China IL. when the Grrlf was talking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57nfeLvE0fI
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Jan 18, 2022 19:11
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Hel posted:One at each end of his staff.  MagusofStars posted:The Mage thing seems extra weird to me because he accepted the answer instantly without question. It's not exactly one of those riddles where you hear the answer and it makes intuitive sense; for all he knows we're totally on the wrong track. Unless he's already got an inkling of the answer, in which case, why not walk to the chest yourself and brute-force it, dumbass? I think he thought that it was beneath him to brute-force. And anyone who is confident to know the answer has already brute forced it, so they already have the treasure. And he has the hubris to think he can take on the group. Let's hope our resident mage doesn't get too full of himself. Hel posted:There's a reason most people keep to the standard elf, dwarf, orc, sexy catgirl non-human species with minor variantion. Because they've been around enough to not be instantly embarrassing, like the Grrlf. who wants to go down an 84 post derail about how to identify a sexy catgirl
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Jan 18, 2022 21:59
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Psion posted:It's not helped by them trying to build a setting at the same time; I don't care about any of these people or fictional stakes or lore dumps about how that one guy only talks to people of equivalent rank, because I'm given no reason to yet. It feels like Antara tries to do three things at once (background lore, main plot, characters) and none of them have enough space to work with so none of them really work at all. I got BaK as a Christmas gift as a kid and knew nothing of the setting. The intro was interesting Eva use it seemed to start at a midpoint, like Star Wars, and there were clearly things going on. I also had the benefit of not knowing what a Gary Stu Jimmy the Hand was in the setting, since in the game he’s just another melee character like Gorath and Locklear, but with some better sneak and lock pick than they started with. Figuring out the lock boxes sucked without knowing what a lot of them referenced. I didn’t beat BaK until years later because my first time through I missed the mention that you had to kill the elementals with that one drain spell. Otoh, when I did replay it via GOG I went all east,south, west in chapter 1 and it’s great because the characters start out commenting about getting away from trackers and devolve to “well nobody will expect us to go all the way out here” levels of commentary about you not taking the intended route down the coast. It’s also easy as hell to get endless money in BaK because 0% durability bows sell and buy for nothing, and stringers are cheap, AND if you sell to certain shops it permanently adds that item to the store, so one elven crossbow and bowstring is all you need to start printing cash. Not that you need to do it. If you explore and loot a lot you can still have blessed great swords and chain armor in chapter 1-2. Not knowing the riftwar books made so much of the game confusing. Why are some people calling this guy Pug and others call him Milamber? Who’s this FF4 Edward bard/duke that James knows? Or this goddamn woodsman in the middle of nowhere? Why the gently caress do James and Locklear refer to themselves as squires and Signeurs?? Reading the series after playing the game made some things fit, but it also made others really funny due to all the bad renfaire costumes and guys like Arutha definitely not looking like they did in the books.
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Jan 19, 2022 03:14
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Evil Fluffy posted:Not knowing the riftwar books made so much of the game confusing. Why are some people calling this guy Pug and others call him Milamber? Who’s this FF4 Edward bard/duke that James knows? Or this goddamn woodsman in the middle of nowhere? Why the gently caress do James and Locklear refer to themselves as squires and Signeurs?? Yeah, this was my experience as well. Though I'll note that to 12-year-old me, none of the costumes and poo poo looked goofy, I absolutely ate that trash up and loved it. Hel posted:There's a reason most people keep to the standard elf, dwarf, orc, sexy catgirl non-human species with minor variantion. Because they've been around enough to not be instantly embarrassing, like the Grrlf. And the Grrlf are just the worst of it because of like... the game goes full-in on making them... animal-like. Like the Montari are just nice little mole fellas who live in the dirt and eat lizards and make chocolate. And the other species we'll meet later is, as I recall them, exotic enough to actually be interesting. The Grrrlf really just come across as fursuiters who get really into their Second Life roleplay.
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Jan 19, 2022 06:17
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Update 7: A Peaceful Land   In this update we'll be cleaning up most of the southwestern province, Ticor, before actually heading to Ticoro and completing the chapter. The exceptions are Antara itself and Korus Landing which we won't have access to for a while yet. It'll also be a relatively chill little trip, mostly containing dialogue and lore, since the roads here are relatively clean of enemies, being as it is in the heart of the Antaran Empire, comparable to the southeast of the Kingdom in Krondor, and due to there being few reasons to actually go off the road. I believe literally every town in this region also has updated content once we're a few chapters ahead, but in addition to that they also have unique chapter 2 content.   First up is Levosche.    Nothing unique at either the armorer's or the inn, but around this point I start noticing how many drat axes and crossbows are in the art and start wondering if they were originally intended to be part of the gameplay, too. In fact I'm pretty sure we see far more crossbows in the art than we do bows.       Unlike most trainers, who help out the entire party, this guy for some reason only trains Aren. I'm not sure if it's hardcoded to be Aren or if it just picks the character with the lowest Defense, though(which is likely to be Aren in anything but an edited savefile in any case), providing a +5 boost to his Defense stat.   Across from the defense trainer live the nice Ampersands which is... an odd choice for a fantasy name.    This guy has a somewhat complicated and mostly rewardless quest which I hosed up. I accidentally talked to the two NPC's later on, getting two-thirds of the info pieces he wanted, without even realizing I was getting them because this game is an excellent argument for the existence of quest logs, and the third chunk of information is apparently gained if you find an out-of-the-way code chest somewhere in Ticoro which I also missed. The reward for completing the quest is that in chapter 3, the joyman's song would be sung at one of the inns. So, eh, not something I'm terribly heartbroken over missing.   Ormede is next on the itinerary, and along the way I'm reminded not to keep casting Blazing Barricade all the time.  Here I'm about to tell William to attack the nearest rogue, there are two equally distant nearest hexes from which he can attack the rogue, except that one of them is currently shared with a bunch of fire.  So of course he walks into the fire. I'm kind of annoyed that the game doesn't in any way let you pick which hex characters attack from when there are multiple options or which direction they end up facing when making a move that doesn't terminate in an attack.    Ormede is one of those places where the game's presentation is at odds with what's actually being told, in that Ormede is mentioned repeatedly in connection with the Imperial Fleet and there's not so much as a pier here, or even a single ship.jpeg moored off the coast or anything. Also there's a bunch of bandits out of town menacing(?) a travelling trader.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf3lj8PgSwY Considering that he has nothing to say about it, it feels like I might've just killed a bunch of his customers or something. He's selling no new interesting items, but he does have both armorers' hammers and whetstones, the latter of which the party goes through at high speed trying to prevent their swords from crumbling like rotten wood.   For not being a large town, Ormede does have a number of folks to chat with.    Don't take this woman at her word, she doesn't just make your perishable food laster longer, she makes it last indefinitely by turning it into the non-perishable ration type of food instead. I think that with the right food types, or if you happen to roll a bunch of bandits or whatever carrying loads of perishable food, you could save a decent amount of money here, but food isn't exactly super expensive in any case, so it's a minor thing.     On the other side of the street are some racist kids that Kaelyn almost strangles for playing Ethnic Cleansing with their buddies.       This one is just flat-out a scam, and if you've been mostly trying to follow the objectives in a reasonable way without going out of your way to scour the land for resources and quests, 150 Burlas could be a decent-sized loss, especially considering some of the less obvious scams the game is planning to throw our way soon.   The only store in town is this jeweler where some random person looks about to help themselves to the ol' five-finger discount. The prices for our gems are worse here than in Aliero, but I'm desperate to free up some inventory space. Also they sell nothing but non-magical gems and jewelry here, so there's nothing that's relevant for us to buy.   At the inn there's someone waiting for us with a quite long-winded lead-up to trying to take our money in a game of cards...          I turn down the offer because some scams, at least, are pretty obvious.  Lastly, on the far side of town, past the inn, there's a house we definitely want to hit up.       I choose "Area" since I'm hoping it might bump me over the edge needed to access some AoE destructive spells, though sadly it doesn't. Magic-training Aren is mostly relevant as a time-saving measure or when it can bump him over a chapter limit, every other skill needs actual practice, but magic can apparently be learned purely by Aren sitting around a campfire and theorizing a lot(with the exception of learning access to new types of magic, of course).     Next along the line is Ravenne on the western side of the Ticoro fish-hook.     I feel like the writing in Antara that works are often these encounters with people completely unrelated to the story or any kind of adventuring-related thing. Like just some dude having a good time making some stained-glass windows and being a happy fella.    Ravenne has a generic inn with no talkable NPC's or songs, and a general store which, oddly enough, actually has a gear upgrade for Kaelyn and William.  A shield upgrade! I find it odd that these shields that are literally just a carved slab of wood are superior to banded or metal shields. I suppose that, yeah, it would be pretty hard to hack through a goddamn slab of wood with a sword, but at the same time it also feels like it would most likely also be heavier to carry around than a conventional shield. But maybe someone who knows more about historical shields can tell me what actual shields were like and which ones are actually most useful! Now, on the far side of the store...   Is the only museum in Antara! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox5Jr_hdBN8 I think what's actually a shame about the museum is having the museum manager be the only person expositing about all of the objects. I think what could've been interesting would've been the PC's taking a poke at some of the objects, maybe Aren goes: "gee whiz folks what's this?" and then Kaelyn or William could reveal some of their personality and interests by revealing that they're actually deeply interested in the art of the Chungus region or that they were once stalked by a Killdog like the stuffed one on display, and maybe Aren could even surprise the other two by showing that he actually knows about one of them and isn't purely ignorant farmboy. So! While we're here, we can also make use of that emerald. Note that the bust is of an Emperor, and has only a blue eye. We had a puzzle chest waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back where the answer was that an ancient Emperor had both a blue and a green eye. So what if we... complete the bust?    The Circlet of Senaedrin is a jewelry-slot item that vaguely boosts the wearer's rate of healing. I slap it on Aren since he's the one guaranteed to be "injured" in almost every fight(i.e. his spellcasting drains his health and stamina to work at all) and... I gotta be honest? I literally can't tell what difference it makes. Over like an hour of gameplay I can't tell if it notably makes him heal faster. It's possible that the improvement is very light, it's also possible that it's bugged and just doesn't work. Then behind the museum we have one of the things that jukes my balls the most about fantasy settings.        Like, Kaelyn. Please, please. You know this is a setting where magic exists, you know that the temples are real and their magic works, you've been loving blessed this month, you've been nurtured back from the brink of death by the holy water of Senaedrin's sect, so how the gently caress are you acting like you're an atheist now? Fantasy atheists are always weird to me. Like I can perfectly accept poo poo like the Athar from Planescape who just want to kill or defy the gods, but they at least agree that the gods are real and their powers exist. With that rant out of the way, this is also where we can actually get the answer to the Glass riddle from Cardone!     Turns out there is no logic! It's just a children's rhyme!   The last thing that's of interest for Ravenne in this chapter is that behind the house of the Henne-worshipper Kaelyn got angry with, there's a buried pile of Dervish Discs. As someone mentioned earlier, they are indeed pretty powerful defense boosters, which is nice. Now I just need to remember to actually use them.    Our next port of call is Melay, the only thing along the way that's interesting is something I notice at the river.   This river ford was funny to me because the little stepping stones are set so far apart that you're just sort of floating over the water half of the time. Minor entertainment, but I'll take what I can get, back to Melay!    Melay has the distinction that it's the only place in the entire game where we use a bucket. So I guess that's notable! Now let's interrogate the locals to find out where and how and why we should make use of the bucket.          God drat that's a lot of dialogue. That bucket's gonna lead to something amazing, like a unique weapon or piece of jewelry or armor or something. Anyway, now we know it's related to some missing art!        And now we know that it's a missing malachite cat with gem eyes. Hm. Not much of a clue to the location. Maybe the last NPC in this little part of town will have the advice we need?    So there are two ways you could reason this one out. Either A) you could know about malachite, that it's water-soluble, consider that the well is "scummy" and decide to dunk the bucket into the well. or B) you could simply latch on to the keyword "WELL" and reason that BUCKET goes in WELL and use the bucket on the well. I'm not sure which the developers expected.   This yields up no malachite cat, but does yield up the torchite gem! Since that part isn't water-soluble. I wonder what the gem mage will do with it?     A loving shieldstone for all those loving words-words-words. Goddrat. I can't even sell shieldstones. Maybe the store and the inn will redeem this town.   Aside from Carlith Mating Rituals, the gambling-boosting book we've already had our hands on, this store has a couple of super-expensive books. But you know what? I like boosters. Let's see what's up with these two. Maybe... Halder's Tale first?               Good God! So, that's a lot of text, and 450 Burlas down and that gave us... loving nothing. loving nothing. The most expensive item I've bought so far, aside from chainmail for the gang, is just a loving fluff book, and nothing prior to purchasing it indicates this, when every other book in the game so far has been a stat booster. Man I feel robbed. At the very least the other book is actually a stat booster, but it costs the exact same price!  Ponaka's Last Stand is a +5 Defense book which, as with the other books, all party members can read and get the boost from.  And there's nothing at the inn. I will be so glad to never see this loving town again.   Let's just head up to Varnasse and get this drat chapter out of the way.     Nice enough place, there's not a lot of chatter here, but there is some.      Surprisingly, they're actually talking about a place that's in the game and which can eventually be visited.     I love labour disputes in my games.    Varnasse has the obscenely expensive Rapier as a weapon upgrade, except for having a non-functional Hack attack, it's better at both Thrusting and Swinging than the Longsword. An odd thing about it is that the Betrayal in Antara wiki has different stats for it than the game does, which makes me wonder if it's a version difference or if displayed stats aren't quite the real ones. Thanks to the loving book down in Melay, I can only afford one, so William gets it(off-screen I also hoof it back to Aspreza and pay 200 gold to get the Montari Chain repaired and slap it on him as well).     I really wish they had more outdoors terrain like this. Toss off some walls or palisades around small towns, have the occasional shrine or whatever.     The last thing in Varnasse is on the far side of it, where the bridge towards Antara is coincidentally down. I'm not sure why they bother to block off the road in this direction with that, though, since they're often happy to just have the party complain and refuse to go in different directions, for instance we can't go north to Korus Landing, or into an area north of Ticoro(in the latter case, Aren complains about not wanting to leave Pianda until Finch has trained him, which seems like a bug). With that sorted, in any case, it's time to head to Ticoro and continue the plot. We've got a hanging thread about the Imperial Consort dangling all the way from the intro, after all.    It's worth noting that entering Ticoro happens just by approaching the gate, so if you're just passing by in order to get to, say, Varnasse, you'll want to give the gate a wide berth until you're actually ready to head in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_m6jrQZNI8 Once again thanks to whatever brave souls found a way to record these videos at a non-postage-stamp resolution without the game crashing 2/3rds of the way through them every time. Next time: we poke around Ticoro and probably get into some trouble along the way.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:13
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PurpleXVI posted:Turns out there is no logic! It's just a children's rhyme! hahaha ohhhhhhhhh this game
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Jan 20, 2022 20:18
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Each update just makes me more and more grateful that I never bought this game. As much as I liked BaK as a kid, this would've probably killed my interest in these kinds of games in general. OTOH, I played Dungeon Lords to completion (with friends) so maybe I'd have willingly suffered through BaA too.
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Jan 20, 2022 20:55
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If memory serves, the diamond shieldstone is the only good one, because unlike the others it blocks all damage instead of just one rare damage type.
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Jan 21, 2022 02:51
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Evil Fluffy posted:Each update just makes me more and more grateful that I never bought this game. As much as I liked BaK as a kid, this would've probably killed my interest in these kinds of games in general. Sometimes it suffers strongly from feeling like you've just walked into an encounter that had a chunk of intro dialogue missing or expected you to have encountered some previous situation that got edited out of the game at a late stage.
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Jan 21, 2022 20:58
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I still have no idea what our goal is.
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Jan 21, 2022 22:00
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Oh thank god I thought it was just me
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Jan 21, 2022 23:38
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I still have no idea what our goal is. You will essentially never know.
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Jan 21, 2022 23:45
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I still have no idea what our goal is. So a dying man mumbled something about the Consort, who's the intended husband of the Antaran Empire's princess, being in trouble, and handed us a gaudy amulet alongside it. After spending like two months incinerating every bandit in Pianda and hacking up every monkey and crab in Ticor, we finally bothered to go where the Consort is supposed to be, Ticoro, to try and maybe warn him that he's in danger.
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Jan 22, 2022 05:02
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I found it funny that the Museum curator used the phrase "face of the Earth" because I figure that they would have a replacement name for their world.
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Jan 23, 2022 09:39
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sb hermit posted:I found it funny that the Museum curator used the phrase "face of the Earth" because I figure that they would have a replacement name for their world. Oh, they do, the world as a whole is called "Ramar."
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Jan 23, 2022 10:25
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, they do, the world as a whole is called "Ramar." "Off the face of Ramar" would indeed give the interaction that extra bit of Antara charm. But I guess someone didn't check the script carefully enough.
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Jan 23, 2022 10:34
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sb hermit posted:"Off the face of Ramar" would indeed give the interaction that extra bit of Antara charm. But I guess someone didn't check the script carefully enough. (Though stuff like "spartan" does annoy me in fantasy settings, so who am I to argue)
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Jan 23, 2022 21:13
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Xander77 posted:We don't say "off the face of Terra", to the extent that that's our shared name for our world. To an extent I feel like it can be defended because, logically, it being a fantasy setting, they (probably) aren't really speaking, say, English, it's just translated for our convenience. In their own language they almost certainly have a word that roughly means the same thing as "spartan" in terms of describing something, and thus it's actually that term we're hearing translated. Authors who invent a neologism for every culturally grounded term we have just need to be beaten around the face and neck with a pineapple or something. Also she could've just said "face of the world" which would've been nice and neutral.
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Jan 23, 2022 21:28
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Update 8: Need For Sleep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_m6jrQZNI8  Welcome to chapter 3! It starts off a bit oddly, as we enter Ticoro from the north at the end of chapter 2(the only side we can enter it from) yet spawn at the south end of the city when the chapter starts proper, after a cutscene of the party briefly forgetting they're here to prevent some sort of plot involving a threat to the Emperor or at least his family. We won't be seeing the world map at all this chapter, as it occurs entirely within the walls of Ticoro which comes with some... issues. First, though, we've got yet another Grrrlf here to make us all cringe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un2BwG6etkg Yes, thank you, the character building we needed for Kaelyn was that she enjoys participating in horny furry rituals. Now, moving on and absolutely forgetting that encounter for as long as possible, the party feels pretty unhurried about needing or wanting to find the Consort and warning him of impending danger, so let's start by having a look around first off.  We conveniently start off facing an inn, so let's drop by there.    Visiting the inn, we're promptly treated to the incredibly lovely gimmick of this chapter. Being that it's a city, we can't just light a campfire on a street corner and take a nap there like we could... anywhere else in the game. Instead we need to use an inn. And there's only one inn in the entire city we can actually rest at, all the rest are booked full. This becomes a problem both because the combat is supremely balanced around being able to take a nap after every fight, otherwise Aren is pretty loving useless, and secondly we can hardly walk from one side of the city to the other without these lazy assholes complaining about being tired, and then fatigued(which, of course, comes with stat penalties). We can undo the injuries with a sufficient supply of Senwater, but the fatigue penalties are only banished by actually getting some sleep, so finding an inn is priority numero uno. The map of the city thankfully starts off explored... but of course unmarked, so it's up to us to guess which of the city's many vaguely rectangular polyhedrons are inns and which ones we can actually rest at.   While I complain about that, I stumble across one of the city's several stores, and one of the few that're actually useful in any way.   Aside from letting us unload armor to fund our stay(because of course the city is going to be crawling with as many heavily-armed random encounters as the roads are), he also sells Montari Chain. Getting that suit we found repaired for 200 burlas saved us almost 1200 burlas, which is pretty huge considering that the party's constrained to carrying about 3000 burlas at once, if they don't want to completely forego also carrying food.    Reasoning that there has to be a useable inn somewhere near the gates, that the game wouldn't be so cruel as to hide it away too far from where I start, I poke around the southwestern corner of Ticoro when I get ambushed.   A couple of things are worth noting about the encounters in Ticoro. Firstly they've stepped up their equipment game, wielding exclusively Rapiers and almost all wearing Chainmail. Aside from being able to hit us harder, which sucks, it also means it suddenly takes an extra hit or two to bring them down, often resulting in more enemies escaping than getting killed. In several fights I only managed to bring down one enemy before they scarpered, which is worsened by the more cramped battlefields meaning enemies can often escape in a single round of movement from just about anywhere on the battle grid.  With this first group sorted, I decide to harass the random person living behind them.   How strange, the amulet seems to scare people. I wonder if it is, perhaps, associated with some sort of violent extremist group that by all rights and logic, at least two members of the party should be well-acquainted with and which the third could reasonably have heard of, too? Impossible.    With that being a bust, I head up to the big central plaza, along the way running into what looks suspiciously like an open grave. Who the hell is digging graves on the curb here if we're not even allowed to sleep there? And more importantly, will they give a gently caress if we loot the chest they left behind?   Amazingly, it contains a magic ring that Aren gets instantly, a Ring of Welcoming which boosts his Lockpick skill. I pass the Circlet of Senaedrin to Kaelyn since I can't tell if it actually works or not(it turns out one jewelry item per character is the cap. sad!).   At the other side of the entrance to the central plaza is an NPC who'll talk at us, or, rather, at William. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7iMgh0ouN0 I'm really starting to miss the Ren Faire hats and costumes of Krondor, why is everyone dressed so brownly?! Anyway, meet William's father in law. This encounter is kind of irrelevant except that it tells us which inn we can find another irrelevant NPC at. Well, irrelevant to completing the game or giving us any gameplay advantages, at least, not irrelevant to telling us about the rich and colourful world of Ramar.     The big church of Henne in Ticoro has no unusual services or conversations, just their standard vague blessing option. Looks rather nice, though. The square outside feels like a missed opportunity for a "festival" town, though. Toss in a few street trader stalls, etc. and maybe some NPC's in colourful costume and such. If that would grind the game's engine to a halt, make it a sort of enterable "scene" like the market in Midova. As it is, it makes the city feel deserted more than anything.    At this point night has started to fall in Ticoro, and the party is starting to complain about being Tired, but not quite Fatigued yet. This, of course, is when I run into another gang of Ticoro's omnipresent thieves.     Four of them, and of course all but one of the assholes escapes. This is starting to get annoying. Maybe I should just start out every fight by covering the entire battlefield in Web and then taking it from there.   It doesn't help that the crusty-rear end implementation of darkness in Antara contributes to it being impossible to spot shop signs at more than arm's length, even the overhead map is darkened by it being night, so I accidentally stumble into someone's house while looking for an inn.   It's slightly odd that private home interactions are only occasionally blocked by the time of day, most of the time people will be up for their scripted interactions whether it's mid-morning or mid-night.  Some time behind midnight, the party stumbles into yet another inn, desperate for a bed.    They, too, are all up, but... notice that NPC in the back of the common room view? The lady in the red dress almost completely blocked from view by the server who has the same interaction icon(for buying food only) as the lady in red has? Yeah, she's someone we can talk to! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUD4RnhA2A And she's actually... actually I'm not sure if she ever pops up again, but she's William's fiancee, and thus, theoretically, an important person. And also a huge dickhead, a walking, talking argument for viciously beheading as many nobles as possible. Let's get out of this joint.    Around when the horizon starts to lighten, the party practically trips over a coded chest in a deserted alleyway.  J-A-E-GE-R  The contents of the chest are a bad shield and... Attractors. What Attractors are supposed to do is that they're supposed to increase the benefit shields give against enemy archers. On the one hand, enemy archers are rarer than enemy mages even, and on the other hand shields already do not provide any benefit against arrows(it's purely a roll vs the Defense stat of the target). I've seen multiple comments stating that Attractors actually do not work at all. Considering the rarity of enemy archers, I'm not sure I'll ever get the chance to clear up whether they do or not.    Bumbling into some enemies in the dark, the party accidentally stabs them seven times and then loots their pockets, hoping they were actually thieves and not just drunks from the festival out late.  One of them was carrying this very nice bow upgrade, though, which goes a long way towards taking care of any issues I have with feeling bad about killing them, also being the first bow upgrade we've found or had access to, not popping up until now in chapter 3.  Compared to the starter bow, it's 4% more accurate and also has a +4 damage modifier where the starter bow has none at all. Considering that Grrlf Arrows fired from the starter bow do about 25 damage, that's close to a 20% boost, which is great.    It's literally dawn and the party has yet to find that goddamn inn that's supposed to be on the "eastern side" of Ticoro. We did find a store, though. What kind of store? A useful store?  Ha ha, of course not. That would be ridiculous.  I loop back to the armor trader to offload some bloodsoaked chainmail for a nice reward and then, now that it's day and thus actually visible, pull up the map to ponder which building I must've missed entering during the night, reasoning that it must be the large one to the southeast that's being hugged by another building shaped like a Tetris piece.   If you see the chest there, so did I, and after ten attempts it blew up the party every time because the fatigue was completely tanking Aren's lockpicking score, so I give it a pass for now.   But gently caress me, it's an inn! It's an inn! Here's hoping it has rooms!   Let's see what Scott has to say, maybe he can put us down gently and without pain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwoQffwdf0M It's weird that for once there's no intro dialogue to him. Anyway, Scott claims he can help us... can he really?  He can! We now have a place to rest! Of course, as mentioned, we can barely cross to the opposite corner of the city before night falls, so we'll be back here a lot since there's no non-rest way to pass time other than literally running in circles. The party promptly drops unconscious for close to two full days. First thing I do when they wake up is dip out, turn the corner and take a shot at that trapped chest again.     Some business left their ledgers lying around, and just staring at the numbers makes the party better at trading so they can get better prices in shops. I guess that's how learning works.  In the southeasternmost corner of Ticoro are these little square shacks and... let me just go on a tangent about the layout of this city and how much I loving hate it. It feels almost randomly generated because there are few like... actual thoroughfares and streets. Everything just feels randomly rotated and placed, which means half the time there's no obvious "front" to a building where you'd expect the door to be. For the instance, the only inn we can get a room at has its front door facing the city walls, as out-of-the-way as possible. Anyway, these little shacks all have the same bit of dialogue attached to them.  This seems completely irrelevant at the moment, but it's actually part of the somewhat dumb way we're going to complete this chapter.   Poking around near the southern gate where we entered finds me another trapped chest that Aren this time disarms with only five failed attempts.  It contains another Shadow Ring, which goes on Kaelyn, guaranteeing that the party will now only gently caress up four out of five ambush attempts, rather than nineteen out of twenty.  The Academy Pass I think we don't get to use until like... chapter 6 or something. Still, it might be interesting once we get to do so.    The large structure near the southern gate is the Corner Store, which is a godsend as it means I have a source of Senwater and thus don't need to bail back to the inn to recover after every fight.   Heading back to the western side of town, I also noticed that I missed this building last time I was in the area.    I don't think that doing this has any kind of payoff(though I do love learning that the trades unions on Ramar are extremely powerful, hell yeah), but I'll drip back by Varnasse next time I get a chance to see if it updated anything there.  Dominating the western side of Ticoro is this large structure which I think is supposed to look mansionlike and... it has... a resident. Let's meet that resident. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N34_t6s7p5c You know, maybe if the game had lead with a blatant, moustache-twirling rear end in a top hat like this guy, dressed like he's loving Dracula or some poo poo, it might have drawn people in more easily. What a titanic prick! Imagine that, just standing around bragging openly to William that he's going to bankrupt his in-laws. You absolutely get an urge to give him a swirlie or toss some rocks through his windows or something.   Across from his mansion, a group of thugs kill Aren. This happens quite a few times in Ticoro, I think like three times or so, because the narrower battlefields means they can often close with him instantly and their rapiers mean they can do more damage to him, which our armor upgrades don't wholly negate. On top of that, as far as I can tell, health and stamina never upgrade like they did in Krondor(basically being boosted by longer playtime/more resting and one or two events).   What's somewhat more interesting is what I find next to his mansion. It's a chest... with a new kind of puzzle lock!  The objective is to have the bead colours and amounts, and only those, shown at the top, be represented in the chutes below. Between them are "exchange rates" which function in both directions. For instance, if I exchange the Blue and Yellow beads I start with...  I get two reds and a white, and it also works in reverse. That's actually also the first step in solving the chest, but I'll spoiler the remainder of the solution. Exchange the white bead for a yellow and a green, then exchange the two reds and the yellow for a blue, leaving you with a blue and a green bead, the solution.  The reward is a minor gemstone and some Shadowmilk, a temporary stealth booster potion. It's not big, but I do like these bead lock chests. They don't rely on setting knowledge or obscure clues, but at the same time they're also surprisingly hard to brute force since you end up with a lot of permutations, you pretty much need to either get lucky or to sit down and think through what combinations will give you what you want.   Continuing up the west side I find those other general store which is interesting only for the fact that I'm certain we've seen that exact same blue-robed woman helping herself to some gems from a store in... was it Ravenne? Ormede? Somewhere out there getting the five-finger discount. I wonder if that's intentional or if the artists were just a bit uninspired on character design.   In the far northwest of Ticoro we find yet another mage trainer for Aren.         Annoyingly, but appropriately, time in the gameworld passes while Aren gets his lessons, so it ends up being night again by the time we're free to move on. So it's another slog back to the inn before I can explore the northeast of the city. I'll note at this point I have explored the northwest, the southwest and the southeast, and the party has yet to accrue any kind of clue with regards to reaching the Consort.   While coming up the east side, I find this store that doesn't sell anything... anything, that is, except for conversation! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCyhvdDp_Xg We should keep him in mind.    Pushing into the northwest of Ticoro, I get ambushed by a new enemy type.  Mechanically they're no different than thieves, bandits or pirates, but story-wise these are Shepherds. They've popped up in mention a few times before now, and are also mentioned in the background lore in the manual. To recap, they were a core part of the original effort to not get humanity eradiated by the Grrrlf back when the Grrrlf as a culture were more warlike, and in the wake of the war remained as watchdogs keeping an eye out for any future Grrrlf incursions. Now, with war with the Grrrlf being a thing of the past, the Shepherds have instead turned into a chuddy alt-right movement arguing that Antara should take this moment to strike and genocide the Grrrlf once and for all. Because they're huge assholes. Tiring of enemies being damage sponges in this chapter, I also start oiling William and Kaelyn's swords to see what sort of a difference it'll make, remembering that Naphtha in Krondor was an insane damage boost and hoping it'll be something of the same caliber.  It's... not quite. In Krondor, boosters added a flat damage percentage(either 50% or 100%) on top. In Antara, oiled swords just gain another d10 of damage on top, which means it'll be at best about 30% extra damage per swing, but may also roll out to be practically no extra damage at all. I'm not really a fan of it, I feel like limited-use consumables should at least have a reliable utility.  Oh and the Junior Fascism League of Antara also kills Aren again. He's really not having a good chapter of it. Past them...   I think this is meant to be a huge well or something? I'm not entirely sure. Not that it serves any gameplay purpose. We've now searched almost all of Ticoro, there's only the central northern section to check out, which contains something wonderful besides how it might help me progress the plot.   Finally a store that'll buy all these loving rapiers I've been having Kaelyn haul around. In fact, selling all the armor and swords in this chapter presents a new problem...   Remember how gold and food had their own, shared, sub-inventory? That inventory can actually fill up! Thankfully I have a few perishable foods looted from enemies that I can toss. Figuring I might as well, I then clear out my inventory issues by buying up a suit of Montari Chain Mail for Aren.  While the model is largely the same, it feels like a nice detail that due to the taller and lankier builds of the Montari, it ends up as more of a chain robe practically past Aren's knees. Fingers crossed this helps him not eat poo poo from being repeatedly stabbed every five minutes.   In the far northwest corner of Ticoro, I find something that looks a bit... off.  With most other things featuring a somewhat better fidelity, this "gate" really looks weird as poo poo and stands out for how low-resolution it is. Like it's not even a gate, it's just metal rods shooting out of the ground, the spaces between them are about as wide as doorways. It feels like a placeholder graphic. In any case, this just leads on to the walls, by the looks of it, and while there's a keyhole next to it, we can't interact with either.  The only thing remaining is the northern gate.        Once again, a dead end... or so I thought. See, I walked away from the gatehouse, ready to sweep the city for any homes I might've missed(there's almost certainly at least one or two), but couldn't find anything. I then looped back to the gatehouse and it turned out there was a dialogue trigger outside, a mandatory dialogue trigger, so poorly placed that the elite strategy of "just walk straight south from the gatehouse" somehow allowed me to miss it.   So now we finally have something vaguely approximating a lead! Possibly! God, I can easily see how this chapter could dead-man-walking people if they came into it with insufficient Senwater and explored in the wrong direction from the only inn that works, since there are two or three mandatory fights required to reach its door. You could easily end up painting yourself into a corner by being too wounded and/or fatigued from lack of sleep to actually be able to reach the only place in the game where you'd be able to recuperate.  Since it already took me close to two hours, what with all the slogging back to the inn constantly, I call it a break here. If I find the consort quickly, I guess I'll just have to record the end of chapter 3 and the start of chapter 4 for next time. Next time: Progress? Maybe?? Possibly???
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Jan 27, 2022 11:26
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PurpleXVI posted:How strange, the amulet seems to scare people. I wonder if it is, perhaps, associated with some sort of violent extremist group that by all rights and logic, at least two members of the party should be well-acquainted with and which the third could reasonably have heard of, too? Impossible. the Nighthawks made it into this game too?
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Jan 27, 2022 17:57
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Psion posted:the Nighthawks made it into this game too? Look it's... it's loving dumber. Spoiler: From chapter 4 onwards everyone loving knows about the Shepherds, they're not a loving secret or anything. William is the son of a nobleman, he should be aware of a major destabilizing extremist group. Kaelyn is friends with Grrrlf, she should be well aware of the Shepherds and all their bullshit. Aren... could conceivably be excused but it would also be perfectly believable that Shepherds had attempted to recruit in Briala at some point so he's at least aware of their existence even if he hes doesn't know a lot about their goals.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:35
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Psion posted:the Nighthawks made it into this game too? Well they had to go somewhere Pug and the others couldn't find them.
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Jan 28, 2022 01:23
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PurpleXVI posted:Amazingly, it contains a magic ring that Aren gets instantly, a Ring of Welcoming which boosts his Lockpick skill. I pass the Circlet of Senaedrin to Kaelyn since I can't tell if it actually works or not(it turns out one jewelry item per character is the cap. sad!). quote:It doesn't help that the crusty-rear end implementation of darkness in Antara contributes to it being impossible to spot shop signs at more than arm's length, even the overhead map is darkened by it being night, so I accidentally stumble into someone's house while looking for an inn. quote:Mechanically they're no different than thieves, bandits or pirates, but story-wise these are Shepherds. They've popped up in mention a few times before now, and are also mentioned in the background lore in the manual. To recap, they were a core part of the original effort to not get humanity eradiated by the Grrrlf back when the Grrrlf as a culture were more warlike, and in the wake of the war remained as watchdogs keeping an eye out for any future Grrrlf incursions. Now, with war with the Grrrlf being a thing of the past, the Shepherds have instead turned into a chuddy alt-right movement arguing that Antara should take this moment to strike and genocide the Grrrlf once and for all.
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Jan 28, 2022 01:58
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Faux-nighthawks aside, I think they overreached with the (theoretically cool) idea of 'let's set an entire chapter inside a big city' because reading that update I could just feel the pain. then again this game really feels like it overreached with a lot of theoretically cool ideas so it's consistent?
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Jan 28, 2022 02:47
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Selana seems to have a bit of southern belle twang. Or maybe it's just me. which is either an easy way to denote class or it's a pretty apt choice
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Jan 28, 2022 06:04
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sb hermit posted:Selana seems to have a bit of southern belle twang. Or maybe it's just me. I'm going to say that anything stylistic about this game is accidental because we've got French-Italian town names, German names for some monsters and a noble class(Jaegers) and very British names for people(Caverton, Sheffield, etc.) so it feels a lot like someone just yanked out whatever was in their mind at the moment with these things. But you never know, maybe there's like one person in the making of this game who considered their options or something and actually made an effort to pick the right one.
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Jan 28, 2022 07:12
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It just really bugs me that they had to gave the party members the most featureless clothing possible to show off that bad posture. They look downright worse than nearly every single other people they run into.
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Jan 28, 2022 09:57
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Update 9: The Update With the Pope Buckle up, because this episode there's going to be a hell of a lot of talking, including some that's slightly baffling.  We start out where we left off, by Ticoro's northern gate, and I decide to start by heading over to the locked Ramparts gate to see if the PC's want to chime up about the solution, just to avoid having an unset flag screw up anything. They don't, however, so I beeline for the solution.  We're headed back to the locksmith who couldn't do anything for us earlier, just in case he happens to want to make a criminal of himself to help us, some random fuckos he's never met before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFB_fsgD78 Surprisingly enough, he's on board if we can find whoever's making him look bad. Now, you could waste a hell of a lot of time figuring this part out, but remember that we found a couple of little square shacks with their locks popped last update? Now, if we head back there...   There's a new NPC standing around, admiring his handiwork. Let's shake him down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJrr8iZeZww Now it's just a matter of heading back to the locksmith... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDOC9YZZTYc And now we have our key! However, we actually want to head back to the apprentice again. Not just because letting him know he's back in the warm is good manners, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsdQuJPDCjM Instead it's because this guy represents one of the extremely rare chances to up Aren's lockpicking skill(a not-insignificant +10, too). Considering the RNG it's not so important for normal locks since it's just a matter of mashing picks into them until they're busted open, but since every failed attempt at a trapped lock requires a reload, having a high lockpicking skill is very good for my blood pressure. Off to the ramparts with us!   Along the way I stumble into a couple of chests I'd missed earlier, one is simply locked.  It contains this grounding wire which, if I remember right, is very handy for some areas that have enemies that have pure lightning attacks that'll gently caress you up proper without this stuff. It gets to hang around my inventory.   I also find one of the game's easier bead chests. Red bead becomes green and yellow, the yellow bead then becomes a green and blue, solving the chest. It feels like this might've been the one the party was meant to find as their first bead chest.  It contains poison for swords and arrows which sadly has the same issue as poison in Krondor. It's nasty for us because a poisoned weapon adds 100% poison to the victim(not just the 5% per hit like the Maslith's spit), which requires Fidali Paste or a shitload of Senwater to cure, but in the battle itself it's only 1 damage per round which fights aren't long enough to allow to seriously add up, and enemies don't need to worry about post-battle care like we do. The game's even gotten stingier about poison cures than Krondor, too. Unlike in Krondor where one unit of Silverthornw Anti-Venom cured 100% poisoning, one unit of Fidali Paste only cures 50% poisoning at a go, so sufficient dickheads getting their war crime practice on can drain our supplies right quick.   I just can not get over this loving gate. loving Albion would've been ashamed of it.   So they actually made the ramparts run all the way around the town, as appropriate, but unless I'm extremely blind, there's literally nothing up here but our quest objective which is five steps away from the stairs.      Turns out the Consort was, in fact, staying at the very first inn we tried to rent a room at just as we came into town. We could've saved a hell of a lot of time just by being more insistent with that innkeeper, I guess.   Since our last visit, a new NPC has been added, the fella with the moustache on the left. Let's annoy him.     So that was a total bust. Now what? I'll leave it up to the reader to consider what a logical next course of action might be. Waiting till night and then sneaking into the inn? Busting back in, swords drawn, and forcing our way past the guards to the Consort? Maybe visiting Lord Caverton or Lord Sheffield or some other NPC and telling them that since we know where the Consort is, they might as well let us in to see him?    Nope! Nothing tells us, though I suppose eventually repeated "you're getting fatigued!"-complaints would drive us there, but we're actually supposed to head back and take a nap to advance the plot. And when we do... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L--Rpy7NXOg It's cutscene time! For those who don't want to watch the crusty video, what happens is that we're rudely awakened in the middle of the night, accused of having kidnapped the Consort, tossed into a prison caravan, rolled out of town and then Kaelyn's Grrrlf friend, whose name I keep forgetting because all of the Grrrlf names sound like onomatopeia for rude bodily functions to me, saves everyone by popping the guards with horse tranquilizers while they're camping on the way to Antara. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWitnWQ46pY Chapter 4 then starts with a quick discussion of our objectives. Kaelyn, and her friend, will go look for her dad because weird stuff is happening. Aren and William, meanwhile, we'll stay in charge of as they go looking for the Shepherds and the Consort(again). We're given a quick chance to shuffle items between the three PC's we've had so far, and then Kaelyn vanishes, and we're left about a half hour's journey along the road between Ticoro and Varnasse, at night. So the first thing we do is stop by the roadside and camp until dawn.   Oh hey, it's this guy again. Let's ask him what's going on, I'm sure he's got a lot to tell us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYD0ZRFeWXc Revelations: The racist cult is, in fact, real bad. Also we can find one of the racist cult members if we travel to Isten!  I believe the only way there is through Korus Landing, sooooo... let's go down the Melay-Waterfork road first. There are actually some updated encounters down here we'll want to check out. Plus a good bunch more dialogue.    As usual, the chapter change has seen some repopulation of the map with new enemies, which generally have armor and weapons comparable to enemies in Ticoro. The main difference, though, as you might notice from the number of corpses, is that unlike the enemies inside Ticoro, enemies out here actually stand their ground and let me cut them to ribbons rather than running away and denying me valuable loot.   Shortly before reaching Melay, I also stumble into an ambush.  More shepherds! And a group of four despite us only having two characters to maneuver around. On top of that, shepherds feel like they usually have the better gear of the enemy types we fight.    Not that it helps them much  , being able to rest anywhere and not having every enemy start in range of Aren also does a lot to defuse how dangerous they are.  The two things of note here are that 1) we've got a new type of armor! and 2) enemies are now starting to field poisoned swords and arrows which suuuuuuuucks, it super suuuuuuuucks and I hate it and I want it to go away.  The breastplate is a slight armor upgrade over our Montari Chain Mail, but also falls apart slightly faster. Not that it's a great issue since, while weapons in Antara fall apart like they're made of rotten wood, I've never had a suit of armor go below 80% durability no matter how much I got the idiot squad beaten up. It also has one other important thing about it...   Which is that while it looks okay on William, it looks downright silly on Aren. The Montari mail kinda worked for his stance because of the way it hung on him, but the breastplate just... with the super un-dynamic stance it just cracks me up. Maybe I'm the only one.    Melay has received no updates since we were last here, so the party breezes through.   Halfway to Ravenne, a kindly band of robbers decides to drop a new sword for William.   In addition to looking weird with his paperdoll, it's arguably an upgrade over the rapier, doing more damage but being less accurate. The wiki insists that a store in Ticoro carried it as well, but I apparently never found that store. I absolutely hate the Ticoro map.     First thing of note in Ravenne is that it's where Scott's hiding out in chapter 4. I do kind of like the idea of a consistent NPC that pops up in all chapters with quest hooks, world state updates, little lore tidbits, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVx5DB2VN0 In this chapter he's mostly good for a bit more information about the Shepherds. I'll note, again, that loving everyone seems to know about them except for our goons. Aside from Scott, there are two new NPC interactions in the town outside.         This one falls a bit flat for me, personally. As for the other one...     Aw, a kitty. Mind, that last paragraph is a heavy-handed hint that we should try entering the house again...       Aside from a little story(and frankly I have no idea if Stuart's comments are just babble, if they're meant to be profound or if they're supposed to be some sort of deep clue for something later on), the main outcome of this is a stat boost to Aren's generic "spellcasting" stat which, I think just governs accuracy for spells that can miss. Mind you, we now have a 70 cap on all the magic "types" and I expect to unlock a few more spells during this chapter. Aren's already gotten two, Gift of Sen(which is literally just Gift of Sung from Krondor, gives health from the caster to the recipient) and Imperious Passage(which allows the target to ignore the game's already very generous Zone of Control rules). The former's rendered less important by Senwater use not taking a turn, and the latter is less important because... honestly it's just so rarely relevant.    Stepping over a few corpses, we continue down the road to Ormede and... it occurs to me that I actually don't like this. Like, Krondor had a few quests that popped up in specific chapters, but by and large, in any chapter where you could reach a location, you could do all of the sidequests there. There was also relatively rarely updated dialogue for areas as things advanced, excepting the rare actual NPC's with keywords like Brother Marc. The downside was that it didn't feel like the world "reacted" to what you were doing, but the upside was that you didn't need to re-travel a quarter of the gameworld every chapter if you wanted to make sure you weren't missing anything. And for Krondor it was an option, that game had only a few serious shitwrecker fights, like the six-mage battle and, well, any time you were bringing Gorath and Owyn up against the (optional) all-Pantathian fights down near Malac's Cross in the late chapters. Even if you skipped all the optional stuff, sure, you'd have a rougher time, but the game was perfectly beatable that way and you'd still mostly get geared up in time for what you were facing. In Antara, it feels like it's a requirement to do the optional stuff, to re-clear the roads every chapter for training and such. I'm not commenting a lot on the fights, because most of them are mechanically uninteresting, but if the party didn't have all the gear and training they had, they'd be taking a lot more hits, and if they were taking a lot more hits, they'd need money for a lot more Senwater... money they wouldn't have because they hadn't been doing a bunch more grinding against randos on the road. In any case... Ormede!        This lady wants us to find a puzzle chest somewhere in the area for her to add to her exhibit and, try as I might, I had no drat luck finding any. I imagine there's one crammed into a nook in the forest north of Ormede, but finding it probably also requires smashing through eight tiresome Trerang encounters or something.        They also decided to add a racist school to complement the racist kids from chapter 2. Lovely town, I hope someone invades it and burns it down. Twice.    Next up is Levosche, notable for being the first place I arrive at this chapter that buys and sells swords and armor. I promptly start heading up and down the road, hauling everything not leather armor and short swords back to the smith, and end up with an absurd 5500 gold by the time I'm done. Rapiers and chainmail are worth about a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty each to this guy. Aren's college fund secured, I then go around to harass the locals.     This local worthy tells us that the nice people we met in chapter 2 were actually spies! Or possibly might be, anyway.     Chatting up this guy and paying his pittance allows us to sleep in his barn for free as much as we like afterwards which is... I mean I guess it could come in handy rarely? Not like we'll be visiting this part of the world a lot in the future, but it's cheap and...   Someone left behind their stuff inside.   The note seems ominous but is, for now, nothing we can do anything with, while the staff is another one of those "mediocre weapon, but has a special effect on Thrust attacks"-staves which will more or less always roll out to being less effective than just having Aren cast a spell, you know, like the wizard he is. Maybe we should go back and talk to that guy who accused the nice people of being spies before we leave Levosche.      Now, I read helping the Ampersands as the right choice because we get paid for it, they pass us a low-value diamond and our Assessment gets boosted. If, on the other hand, we help out the magistrate, he tosses them in jail and we get no reward(we can then break them out of the town's jail if we feel bad about it, but we still get no reward).  I also feel like this description of the diamond is a reference to something or a common turn-of-phrase somewhere, but neither ring a bell to me.    I skip past Cardone since nothing new's there either, aiming for Waterfork which is probably one of the last few places you'd have expected would be updated for chapter 4 considering that it's also one of the farthest away(if you follow the road). So let's get started interrogating the locals.       The way Shepherds suddenly pop up in every situation when they didn't before, I'm wondering if there was originally intended to be a longer timeskip between chapters 3 and 4, or something of the sort which would explain the change in atmosphere, or whether their participation in the plot was supposed to be more of a slow boil, with the shepherds appearing in chapter 3 and then ramping up to being an important threat later on.   There's no reward for checking up with the guy whose kid we helped, but I always like a follow-up that tells the player that their actions mattered.     This guy is absolutely for real. I just toss him a spare rapier and get about 100 burlas over the base selling price, but if you really wanted to min/max you'd scrounge around for one of the encounters with a really cheap shield or short sword. Still, you should in no way be missing money in this chapter.  It's nice to make people happy. There's one more person to talk to in town.     The Mehrat are the other thing that feel a bit odd. Once again, everyone's talking about them but... aside from that one weirdo spy in Levosche, it doesn't feel like they've actually mattered in the plot so far. Like, I feel they wanted to focus more on it, and have some anti-Mehrat feelings targeting random citizens and stuff, but the anti-Grrrlf stuff ends up basically drowning it out. At least so far. Anyway, after this, I choose to look up past the east side of the central forest, roll west past Ticoro and get to Varnesse.     It's a bit odd that there have been no new spawns here, but I'm fine without fighting any more crabs for the rest of the game.    So just north of Ticoro, we run into this guy. Seen him before? Nope. According to the wiki he should've been in Ticoro, in the Tabernacle of Henne, but I went back and checked the screenshots and he wasn't(maybe he'd have popped up after some later flag was set?). Brightly coloured clothes... some sort of entertainer? Perhaps a clown? Ha ha, no, he's the pope. Or one of the popes, anyway. Each of the three Triune deities have a Hand, the one of Kor is, I think, named at some point, and we never hear of Senaedrin's. This guy? Fellich Marr, the Hand of Henne, who seems to be involved in a lot of stuff. Why the gently caress he's hanging out here, I have no idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEqru3Vg7Ho What baffles me most feels like the intro, because it sounds a lot like the party agreed to meet Fellich Marr here previously. And also just the general reverence when the party doesn't feel... particularly religious previously. I guess they might just be starstruck. I'm also not sure if getting his blessing does anything... since I still have no idea what Henne's blessing actually does. That out of the way... we're continuing to Varnesse.    In chapter 2 it only had some people telling us about a play they saw in... Isten I think it was. In chapter 4, notably more homes are populated.    This one's a handy little boost to repair skill, considering how hard it is to keep swords fixed, I'd have paid ten times that for it. Across from the forge is...    Far as I can tell there's nothing missing here, neither the wiki or the FAQ have anything here. It's just an odd bug.       We'll plant this lady's... plants, after we talk to the last person in town, as the conservatory is finally accessible.   I rag a good deal on Antara, but I do like these interior screens for the most part. There are, amazingly enough, no recycled ones as far as I can tell. Every single store and inn are distinct, and then you get more unique ones like these. Now let's talk to this lady. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JqzFmYn3gU I appreciate her for dunking on Aren good-naturedly. I also really wish Aren had a different speaking sprite, it just looks so wonky, with that cocked head and all. Anyway, plants!  You'd be surprised how long it took me to plant these. For one thing, all the drat botanist tells us is "in the woods!" Which woods? The woods south of Varnesse? North of Varnesse? East of Varnesse? It turns out to be east.    And then, in one of these three screenshots, the planting location is visible. Once again, I only saw it this early when reviewing footage, in actuality I ran in circles for another five minutes before spotting it.    Find three of these holes, pop nudberries into them(which makes the holes disappear), then return to the botanist.    The reward is a five-use Dervish Disc which might actually see some important use now that I have less guys on the field and they have an easier time getting mobbed, since as far as I can tell Antara has none of the summon spells that help break lower-tier Krondor in half.   Next time: We tread new ground in the northwestern province of Antara and maybe advance the plot a little.
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Jan 31, 2022 06:27
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I definitely remember talking to Fellich Marr in chapter 3. Maybe it's another issue with the GOG version?
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Jan 31, 2022 07:23
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Thank you so much for this!!! I haven’t read past the op but this thread already made my day. I have rather fond memories of this game, even purchased (well begged my parents incessantly for) 2 copies of it, one in a Sierra boxed bundle with birthright, rama and outpost. It was a few years before I had any sort of access to internet, barely knew what rpgs where and my English comprehension was lacking, to say the least. This and birthright became some of my favourites of all time, never mind all their flaws, i actually thought the bugs and crashes were due to our pcs being crappy at the time. I look forward to finally (hopefully) seeing the end.
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Feb 3, 2022 14:17
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:Thank you so much for this!!! Oh man, Birthright and Outpost. Birthright was absolutely a wild experience, super ambitious and completely busted in ten different idiotic ways. I think that one was just buggy and crashy on principle. Outpost... similarly wildly ambitious, launched with half its core features not functioning and never got the expansion that would've made it a genuine classic... man, I dream of us somehow getting that outpost decades later, still.
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Feb 3, 2022 16:10
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Everything about this game screams that they wanted to make a bigger, better BaK and ended up with something half-finished at best.
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Feb 3, 2022 16:48
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I actually think Outpost was a spectacular game, complete in its own right, without the need for an expansion. But this is my teenage brain talking, looking at it with rose colored glasses. Felt like a sci-fi version of Civ except it's just you vs the elements. I quite like how the Panic button did nothing, which is very apt. I got a copy of Outpost II quite recently but I never got around to playing it.
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Feb 3, 2022 19:32
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sb hermit posted:I actually think Outpost was a spectacular game, complete in its own right, without the need for an expansion. But this is my teenage brain talking, looking at it with rose colored glasses. Felt like a sci-fi version of Civ except it's just you vs the elements. I quite like how the Panic button did nothing, which is very apt. Oh, yeah, it was a very interesting game(bugs and issues like the rebel colony not actually having a functioning AI aside), but the expansion would've packed it full of more hard-ish sci-fi goodness. More types of plants, native alien life, etc... it would've been more of something I already liked! Which owuld have ruled. I remember playing a cracked copy of Outpost II some years after it came out and remember it as just being a very odd and confused RTS with some good writing.
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Feb 3, 2022 22:15
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sb hermit posted:I actually think Outpost was a spectacular game, complete in its own right, without the need for an expansion. But this is my teenage brain talking, looking at it with rose colored glasses. Felt like a sci-fi version of Civ except it's just you vs the elements. I quite like how the Panic button did nothing, which is very apt. It was playable enough, but obviously unfinished. Leaving a big red panic button that does nothing on the main UI at all times was just the most obvious sign (full disclosure: I was at the right age to think that was hilarious). A lot of the systems described in the manual just didn't exist, like building roads for your mine trucks, and forming additional colonies. I actually played long enough to terraform the world once, and the only thing that happened was it played a short video clip of robots driving around on the surface of a Mars-like, obviously un-terraformed planet.
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Feb 4, 2022 01:28
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I actually played Outpost II before I played Outpost, and "a very odd and confused RTS with some good writing" is very apt. It was from that era when they'd put whole stories in. I can't recall how much was in the manual but the game itself had some novellas that unlocked as you played through which was amazing. Outpost itself was kind of a disappointment after that, but still pretty enjoyable. And sadly nothing else has come as close as it did to scratching a very particular itch.
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Feb 6, 2022 08:33
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