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Update 10: Cheese and Murder  When we last left off, we got done checking out the chapter 4 updates for the province of Ticor, and were about ready to head north from Varnasse to Korus Landing, the last town south of the Glassrock Mountains that we've yet to see.  On the way are a few combats where I test out some spells I haven't tried yet. Here I test out Armorlight on William, it's pretty much Skin of the Dragon from Krondor, gives someone total immunity for up to 20 "phases," which isn't 20 rounds, i.e. one action per character. I have no idea how it's counted in Antara, but it seems to last about five to seven rounds? Also sometimes some characters inexplicably get extra actions, usually Kaelyn. I also test out Emulsify, a new spell that has a hilarious animated icon.  It turns out to be the "lightning orb" spell that Aren got owned with several updates back in the Imazi caves(or I think so, anyway, there are apparently some re-used effects like Armorlight having the exact same effect as the blinding spell). It can technically do great damage and the stat penalties it causes are useful, too, but I've never had Aren manage to land a hit with it, so I prefer having him cast Lightning Bolt and Geyser to avoid wasting his magic.  I was also running a fever from a mild-ish case of pneumonia while recording this update so Aren ended up getting dunked on a lot as this, surprisingly, impacted my decision-making abilities.  The bridge south of Antara is still blocked, so we've got to head farther north.     Korus Landing doesn't have a lot to do, it only has one quest, but it has an awful lot of words.         This guy is desperate for cheese, he'll pay us a whole five burlas a piece(barely any more than it costs to buy), and it would require hauling our asses all the way down to Ravenne to buy any. So hell no we're not fetching his drat cheese.    The sole store in town is a general store, rations and whetstones and such, but the proprietor is chatty, unlike most stores.    Unlike the major, this nice lady will pay us fifty burlas per unit of cheese, which is a fat loving profit. I think you may only be able to trade her one stack(that's all I tried, at least), but if you can feed her more than one stack, she's an infinite money engine.  Plus her glee at loving that guy over is great.           Let's hope we didn't convince this guy to go raring off on an ill-advised adventure and get himself killed some day. In any case, that's all for chatty citizens, profits and quests in Korus Landing. Now, heading north...  Behold! The majestic pass north of Korus Landing! The way Krondor handled this was to have you approach something that looked kind of decent at a distance, then provide some cool text describing how it looked as you got closer and eventually went through. Antara, on the other hand, uh.   Losing the technology to actually have angled mountains and hills was kind of not good.   The north side of the pass otherwise looks much like the south side, but welcome to Chuno. The deep lore for Chuno is that they've got Mehrat and the Waste to their north/northwest, the Waste having been created when a pair of mages nuked each other out of existence in yonks back. Apparently it was pretty much like a nuclear explosion, complete with leaving the residents of Chuno riddled with genetic damage. We won't see many ethnically Chunese in this update, but when we do, we can see that they look a bit rougher around the edges than the rest. Mehrat, meanwhile, kind of keeps posturing at Antara, and Antara postures back, but it's worth noting that for as much as everyone fears Mehrat spies and invasions, I think that one guy down in Levosche is literally the only sign we ever see of it, which makes me wonder if the Antaran government intentionally plays up how aggressive Mehrat is for the purpose of keeping people more worried about an external threat than internal policies. I don't think it's ever elaborated on, but it would be an interesting plot point. Our current goal is Isten, which means that we're going everywhere else first. I think Friole is as far east as we can go, so the plan is to head north and then go around the region clockwise before eventually ending up in Isten. First stop: Everton!    Almost right off the bat, we trip over a chest containing some new stuff.  The Grrlf Bow is another straight upgrade on what we've got so far, but even with that, William can't shoot for poo poo. The slowness of training compared with the lack of trainers to buy training from means that it's really hard to turn William into a competent archer, Kaelyn is really your only good choice for it.  The corrosive arrows are useless, meanwhile, in part because they have an accuracy penalty which makes doubly sure William will never hit with one, but also because they damage equipment which means enemy corpses are suddenly worth less. We're not going to a fight a fight that's unprofitable.    On a whim I decide to visit Everton before Teal, which turns out to be a decent idea.   On the way, I bump into some more enemies guarding a chest, deciding to try out a bold new strategy.  Defending both William and Aren is very effective, but the downside is it's also super-expensive in Senwater since it ends up draining so much of Aren's life that only William is still really able to do anything afterwards, and most enemies up here are armored enough that Aren is our major damage dealer. I also realize I've learned another spell along the way.  At full power this does 120 damage, which is the biggest boom that Aren can generate in one go. Unfortunately, all session, I don't get any real good chances to use it since either someone's looking at Aren, preventing him from casting, or William would be in the blast radius, which would be very bad.   The only notable thing in the chest is the fire arrows which are like a good version of the acid arrows, except still useless to William because his ranged accuracy sucks.   Everton is an unusual town because it's actually got like... more than just a straight road running through town with buildings on either side. People's houses are actually split off into two little side roads set slightly off the main road.     What hasn't really changed since Krondor is that some of the writers were pretty hungry while writing their bits, it feels like every second NPC encounter is about the party getting invited in for food.   Around the corner, a name to remember for in like ten minutes' time.     Another person who's eager for us to get to Isten, good thing for her time only advances when we change chapters, because we aren't getting to Isten within like a month of in-game time. Possibly a month of real-time, too, depending on when I stop having this fever.   Unusually, this merchant has some dialogue when we first talk to him.  And slightly different dialogue if we visit him again afterwards.  I don't think we can ever find his aunt.  He's a nice source of Senwater at this point, but his equipment has the usual issue that most stores in Antara seem to have, which is that by the time you reach them, there's no reasonable way you won't already have gear equal to or better than what they're offering.     We're slightly outnumbered here and Shepherds tend to have decent gear, so I bust out all the stops in part because otherwise I always forget to.  Aren casts Armorlight on himself, while William cracks a Dervish Disc(defense boost) and chug's a Kor's Blood(attack boost), then rushes in to tie everyone up.  The really amazing thing is that the Dervish Disc is actually efficient enough that William doesn't take a single hit during this fight.   Up ahead, a group of loving Trerangs is blocking the way to Teal, so I cast my eyes around looking to see whether I can sneak around them and spot something on the east side of the road.    The area encircled by Everton, Teal, Elona and Burlen is riddled with valleys, containing enemies, rock piles and a few chests. However, I will not be finding all of the contents because...    This place is a miserable loving maze, compounded by the fact that sometimes the map's pencil-narrow crevices are passable canyons, and vice versa sometimes the broad passages on the map turn out to be impassable or simply non-existent in the 3D world. From a quick dive in, in any case, it seems like it mostly just contains low-tier equipment and consumables, nothing I want or need, so I'm just going to head back to Teal and mainly stay on the road.   Teal has something we haven't seen since Krondor, an actual graveyard! Sadly, we're not in the golden age of videogames where every single gravestone would contain a hint, bad pun or reference to a developer, only one of these gravestones can be interacted with.   I absolutely have no idea how or why Aren makes this conclusion. Do popular people have messy gravestones? Maybe whoever lives in the building next door will have something to say about it. They're probably like... a mortuary or something, they'd know about burying people.     Turns out it's actually a school instead. Great location for it, also note the party commenting on "recent events in Teal" that we haven't learned about yet, which is yet another example of Antara not having as many small variations on character dialogue depending on flags as Krondor had.      Ah, there we go, now we kind of know what's going on, apparently the local weapons smuggler trading with the Mehrat got himself killed in a horse-related accident.    Teal also has the first non-dogshit bow store we've found so far. I pick up a stack of Enchanted Arrows because I figure this is the only way William will ever hit a drat thing and on rare occasions I have some need of him firing a bow at stuff. Spoiler: He will still never hit a loving thing I aim him at.   The local inn has a few folks to talk to, first there's a guy on the left.      That totally wasn't shady in any way, now for someone on the right.   This leaves us with three houses to visit, first up is the dead guy's.     On closer reading this conversation is so weird. Why are they referring to him being thrown from his horse as a "despicable deed" when it just sounds like a riding accident? Why are they talking about "bad ka," which as far as I'm aware is something related to the ancient Egyptian religions and which never seems to occur anywhere before or after? And then at the end they mention a break-in which as far as I can tell the priest never brings up. It's like there are several pages cut out of this, or like it was pasted together from several versions or something. Anyway, time for the town bakery.    And then the last house in town.      Okay! Now, without any warning, having talked to everyone in town has Set A Flag and altered something in the game world, allowing us to get farther in the mystery of Brian Castere's murder!    Now this incredibly lovely jpeg is pasted on top of Brian's grave. It's not even loving aligned, what the gently caress. Let's poke it.    So someone already dug this coffin up to loot it... and then completely missed the one thing to loot, which we then looted? Whatever, let's follow the map to a vague bump in the ground.    A key! If you're perceptive you already know what it's for, since we've already had a locked door described as "reddish" not long ago in Everton, but before we head to it, we should head back to Castere's house.     Our second hint at where the key fits is that "GF" also matches the initials on the locked door in Everton and it's super-obvious now that this guy killed Castere for shady smuggler reasons. Let's go break into his house.    Couple new items in here! Also less than 500 gold. Note this, less than 500 gold.  Necklace items use a separate slot from ring items, but they're super rare and, in the case of this one, also super useless. All the Lucky Charm does is boost your gambling skill which means it might trick you into thinking that it's anything more than a way to lose money at taverns.  Brian's journal boosts spell training in the "Movement" type by 5, which is nice but not huge. And then there's a letter. As I pick it up, though, I accidentally read the wrong document in my inventory.       I feel like this accurately encapsulates what feels like several different directions Antara is being dragged in. On the one hand you have people who just want to do Krondor MkII, then you've got people who want to do a wacky high-magic setting("insurance doesn't pay out if you get resurrected!") and then you have what feels like some folks wanting to do something like an Italian peninsula filled with inter-province/town feuds, politics and mercenary companies going up against each other.  The actual letter is a bit less interesting. Let's stick our heads outside and...   Get ourselves ambushed by Fayle.  Mechanically Fayle is just a generic swordyman, but since we can't just freeze him or Five Finger Death Punch him like Navon in Krondor, he's actually marginally dangerous since he has an absurdly high defense stat of 75 or so.  Which means that William would at baseline have barely a 50% chance to hit him starting off, thus I have Aren load Fayle down with Tortoise Bind and Unseeing Eye.  Even so, William barely lands a single hit and the fight is instead sorted by Aren running up and dropping Fayle with multiple Static Discharge casts(it would've been smarter to hit him with lightning bolts, so not sure why I did that), and eventually he goes down.   As an odd thing, his corpse drops across the street in front of someone else's house. Not that it stops me from looting his body and heading over to the blacksmith to sell his stuff, triggering some new dialogue.      We didn't find 500 Burlas in Fayle's house! I also have no idea why this dialogue is triggered by killing Fayle rather than just... always being an option of some sort as soon as you hear the shopkeeper got ripped off. What's more interesting is that he gives us a suit of 100% Montari Chain as a reward for it(and does not, in fact, restock his store in any way), which means that he gave us a 1500-gold suit of armor for 500 gold, to restock his store with, rather than just selling the 1500-gold suit of armor and using three times as much money. I sure wonder why this guy has trouble in business. Anyway, now we can consider Teal to be done and sorted and continue on the way to Elona, another town about which I'm going to have complaints.    Along the way to Elona, Aren also researches a new spell, Storm. For 30 Stamina, it summons, well, a storm, which strikes a random target for 25 damage every turn for the rest of the battle, targeting only metal-wielders like lightning bolt does. In most battles it ends up doing a decent amount of damage over the duration of the first fight, and is what I'll be starting practically every fight with from here on out unless I need to Armorlight someone at the start of the fight or I'm fighting purely animals or wizards.   I think they tried to have Elona sort of crammed in between trees, give it a sort of "elfy tree-town" feel, but it doesn't really work well for me. Also note that the only shop in town is a jewelry store.      But before we talk to the locals, we have to save some plants! I'll have to remember to visit Korus Landing for our reward before the chapter ends. I'll go poke at the remaining citizens before we leave, though. Also there's an abandoned house here containing another academy pass in case you missed the one in Ticoro.          So the reason I find the jeweler thing so interesting is that these guys are trying real hard to make it feel like Elona is a poorly-attended, slightly, well, poor backwater of the Empire out near the Mehrat border but... maybe then they should've had a fletcher, or a general store or something, not a loving jeweler, which is about as bougie as it gets. It's also a good thing we bought the chest location from this guy, because we'd never have found it on our own.   Never. Ever. Ever.  It takes a slight amount of effort to get the colours here, but some of the symbols still have some faint tinge to them. Red potions, yellow skulls, green tomes, blue orbs. This chest actually challenged me a good deal until I "got" it. Solution: Yellow, Blue Red, Blue Green. I think I spent like 20 minutes on it.   A bit of misc. loot and a new type of shield which, like most other new shields we've found so far, start out so beat up that they're in no way as good as our much lower-tier, but better-maintained shields.    Now we're on the road towards Burlen, the south side of which is lined with canyons and crevices, some of which lead into the same maze network as east of Teal.    Aren gets owned by some bandits a couple of ways along the road, mostly because I'm running low on Senwater and too lazy to loop all the way back to Everton. The cube up ahead is Burlen.   Burlen feels a bit odd since it's supposed to be a rich town, known for being opulent, in fact, but it's also in Chuno, the province that's supposed to be full of poor, irradiated survivors of a magical apocalypse who sit around worshipping trees and are kind of alien to the rest of the Antaran Empire.     The inn has a guy that acknowledges stuff is happening even in places where we aren't.  There's an armor store which sells 100% versions of the tortoiseshell shield we found earlier, I think over this entire game so far I've had shield parries proc maybe five times, so I'm not super eager to pay almost 1000 burlas just to up that to maybe 6 times.  The last thing of note in Burlen is the Pernath Academy. To interact with anything in here other than getting told off by the lady at the counter, we need a ticket either from Elona or Ticoro, at which point she lets us inside. You might think this is a place where we might be able to, say, increase our skills, or learn more magic... but no, the entire place just holds deep lore for the gameworld and naff else.   There are two rooms deeper in the building, first we'll take the door under the stairs.  Every shelf in here is clickable, and each one has multiple books on each... with no clear separation of where each one's click position starts and another ends. So I might well have missed one or two, but here's the big drop of all of them.                    I had no luck finding the ones I missed, sadly. Anyway, backing out of the library, we can also head into the office at the top of the stairs.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUoeJxkgjVI I think this is the biggest piece of info we ever get about the Vell, and also more or less the last point they're really mentioned. They feel like they play into yet another partial Antara theme, the idea of the world being partially post-apocalyptic, but outside of Chuno and the Waste, and the odd mention of the Vell, that never really feels like it's made a big deal of either. The Vell feel more like they're suited for a game like Age of Decadence or something. With that, I don't think we ever have a reason to visit Burlen again. At this point I am boned for resources and decide to loop down to Everton.    On the way down, the one interesting thing that happens is that I run into some actual Chunese for once.  You can see they look kind of messy compared to normal enemies, and oddly enough they're also the only group that has any female members as enemy combatants.  Here I also decide to test out Quicksilver on William and it DOES make him a lot more powerful, but note once again the drain-per-phase, which ends up like 3 or 4 phases per actual action, so it drains him dry relatively quickly if you power it up to the amount where it's notable. During my first try at this, I also discovered something odd(due to my eating poo poo).  As you can see I lose while William is still on his feet, which is because if Quicksilver kills him from health drain, he doesn't actually keel over like a genuine corpse. The fight also illustrates this odd issue where the only real danger in Antara is your own impatience, for the most part. As long as I have the patience, I can always go pick up enough Senwater to be functionally immortal. Like, if the game was more linear, and had no options to loop back to towns, so it suddenly became a lot more about resource/inventory management, that could've done a lot to make things more interesting. Anyway, this is not that more interesting game, sadly, so I'm just talking the walk towards Grandeur. Along the way, I stumble on another Church of Kor.        Since I'm stacked on cash, I decide to bless William's sword since he has trouble hitting enemies and... I have no idea what the blessing actually does. I assume it's a +attack bonus or something, but nothing in the game indicates what it does. It's entirely possible that it does not a drat thing.  Further up the road are some Shepherds which have a couple of notable things about them.  Firstly it's the first time we see a Shepherd mage, I didn't actually think there were any.   And secondly it's the first time we see Shepherd armor, which is apparently unrepairable(? why???) and also not particularly good. I wonder if armor was originally meant to be generally unrepairable and you were supposed to be switching up regularly or whether there was originally going to be some sort of disguise mechanic so you could skip, say, Shepherd fights by wearing their colours.    I kind of wish we saw a port at some point in this game, considering the amount of coastline we get to visit at various points. Just a single pier. Also you might note that the skybox has changed! It's not due to the time of day, or a weather system(Antara doesn't have one), but the eastern part of Chuno just has a different, slightly more ominous and brooding, skybox. I kind of like it.     Grandeur is one of the odder towns in the game. It has no NPC's to talk to, no quests connected to it... nothing unique.  It has a generic Temple of Senaedrin.  A neat-looking tavern.  And a store full of a bunch of new poo poo we haven't seen before.   Necklace of Communion When worn, increases Assessment. The silver loops, each intertwined with its neighbors, were elegant in their simplicity. [Character] traced his/her fingers along one of them and got a brief sense of those around him/her -- as if he/she was inside of them, with a better understanding of their abilities than they likely had themselves. [Character] let his/her finger slide away from the silver and the feeling faded. Carluda's Chain Whoever's wearing it splits the damage they take equally with all members of the party. Kinetic Staff When you hit someone with a "Thrust" attack it hits them with a cast of Emulsify, when wielded also increases Electricity magic by 10 points. Malkere's Serum Increases the wielder's Attack and Defense skills but drains 2 hit points from them per "phase," which once again rounds out to almost 10 per actual action. Of these, I guess the Necklace of Communion might occasionally be useful since if you get lucky(it randomly picks which stats you get to see), you can sometimes tell which target is closest to death and thus worth finishing off, since Assessment is a free action now. The rest... ehhhhhh. I'll pass. I'd rather Aren have a staff he can actually beat people to death with on occasion than once with a niche special function.   With that, we've completed about half the circuit of Chuno and, as I recall it, it's the second half of the circuit that actually has the more interesting stuff. So join me next time as we see whether I remember right and whether not having a fever makes me gently caress up less while playing videogames.
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Feb 8, 2022 19:25
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I seem to recall the strategy guide saying that the lucky charm gives you some sort of luck bonus in combat. No idea if it actually works, though. Carluda's chain is actually a consumable, not something you equip, and it affects the entire party. Curiously, the item's image changes when it's partially used; it has one link for every remaining use. As for the blessing, did you check the sword's stats before and after? I'm pretty sure the stats visibly increase. (Or maybe only for armor?) Spell accuracy is kind of a bitch; so many of the good spells can't miss that it's easy to just not train it, and then you just keep missing when you actually want it. In fact, the only use for hotfoot I ever found was throwing tiny 1-cost fireballs at the end of fights to train spell accuracy.
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Feb 9, 2022 02:24
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Given that Antara's population feels pretty minimal, a culling of humans in the thousands really feels like an outright attempted genocide So, in that vein, I can understand (but not condone) the latent anger against the griffs
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Feb 9, 2022 02:29
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"Disrespecting the Grrlf? What are you, a Grrlf hater?" "No way! I've got a Grrlf-friend! I have two!" "What, are they here? I'd like to meet them." "No. You can't. They don't live here. They live in ... Pianda". "Oh. I keep census records for the Emperor, and Pianda hasn't reported any sightings of the Grrlf, much less any residents. The Escobars must be lying! The gears of bureaucracy grind slow, but I'll make sure they grind fine! I have an unnatural hatred of the Escobars since one of their scions insulted my mom!" "I was just kidding." "Oh. So you are racist. Well, so am I. C'mon, we'll be late for the Shepherds' meeting."
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Feb 9, 2022 06:14
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Am I overthinking things, or are "the Wastes were for sure the result of mages frying each other and therefore justify any persecution (not that you see any onscreen)" and "oh yeah, we can totally see that you're the good guys and should be better at murdering" shady af?
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Feb 10, 2022 16:27
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Xander77 posted:Am I overthinking things, or are "the Wastes were for sure the result of mages frying each other and therefore justify any persecution (not that you see any onscreen)" and "oh yeah, we can totally see that you're the good guys and should be better at murdering" shady af? In any other game, you might be on to something, but, uh. This is Betrayal at Antara, it doesn't do subtext(much).
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Feb 10, 2022 21:36
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So are the Vell just Anatara's store brand imitation Valheru?
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Feb 11, 2022 19:03
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Evil Fluffy posted:So are the Vell just Anatara's store brand imitation Valheru? Yes but also no. In the sense that they're a progenitor civilization: yes. Are they very magical? No. Are they evil? No. Well possibly. I don't think we ever learn anything about their ethics. Do their leftover junk and war crimes fuel roughly 99% of the plot in some sense? No.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:26
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Update 11: Fallout New Antara We pick up heading south from Grandeur towards Eastbank. Despite ostensibly being just southwest of the Waste, this is one of the more verdant parts of Antara.    I'm still trying to unpick in my mind why I feel like Antara looks uglier than Krondor despite obviously having more colours and more space and power to play with, graphically. I'm not sure if it's entirely an art design thing, but I can't really place it. It feels like it's often so very close to looking really good.    Eastbank is another one of those little towns where the actual living space is set back somewhat from the main road, which I like. There are even a few people here worth talking to.    drat shame Antara doesn't yet have the legal underpinnings for Tree Law.      So, it might amaze everyone to know that we've already been where this key is for! As far as I can tell there are no loving clues whatsoever to it, I had to look up a FAQ. If anyone can guess it before the reveal, I'll buy you an avatar and title celebrating your vast megamind. Do show your work, though, I won't believe a word of it without a proper reasoning, because I refuse to believe a normal human brain could figure this one out.     The Prophet, and his well, actually do exist down in Camille and we'll be seeing them shortly. The Prophet is an... interesting character and I wonder if he was originally intended to be more central to the plot.    The local store also sells the best staff in the game despite being named the House of Swords. It amuses me somewhat that attacking someone with a carved stick, a literal work of art, is more effective, combat-wise, than a steel-shod staff or any number of magical wizard rods.  The local inn just has the usual rations and resting, no interesting NPC's or even a gambler. Something worth noting, though, is that every tavern in Chuno has the following musical theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY2_T4dweEU It sounds loving eerie! Genuinely what I'd expect in the borders of a magi-nuclear wasteland, though the gameworld outside the taverns doesn't do a lot to present the area as such.     There are very few combat encounters in the Grandeur-Eastbank-Camille-Durst-Friole line, mostly just one, at most two, per location, though some sections actually have none at all. It feels more peaceful than the Ticoro heartland of the empire.    It turns out that the prophet of Camille dwells in this completely unspectacular shack in a little town at the edge of the Waste. Might make you think he's just some sort of huckster, right?    You'd think that giving up a weapon actually used for war, and thus lessening the amount of violence, would be more appropriate for a blessing of peace, but oh well! The Prophet will accept any 100% sword, I knew about this in advance and have thus been carrying around a 100% version of the worst sword in the game, bought somewhere in Ticoro, for this very purpose.    The game is very bad at indicating bonuses given by equipment, but now the Blessed Insurance Policy should provide +5 defense to whoever has it in their inventory. It's the only game mechanical reason to get the insurance down in Imazi and haul it all this way. If you don't have it, the Prophet's blessing is entirely set dressing and doesn't have any mechanical impact. But, yeah, it feels like the churches were supposed to be more plot central or something, considering that you've got this guy living humbly out in the rear end end of nowhere who embodies all the magical powers of the three faces of the Triune without wearing fancy robes or having huge coffers. You'd expect some faithful of Kor or Henne or something to come egg his house or whatever. It also continues to make Kaelyn's atheist streak down in Ticoro even weirder considering that divine magical powers clearly exist outside of the temples, too, apparently just manifesting spontaneously in sufficiently virtuous or chosen people like the Prophet.    The only store in Camille deals exclusively in shields, which is probably the most absolutely useless type of store in the game.    Like in Krondor, we can run across a weirdo selling sips from his well. It works just as well as in Krondor, but there we sadly actually have to pay the price. It's a completely negligible price, mind you, a single sold suit of armor or sword(of which an average encounter will yield six) will usually pay for two drinks. On the other hand we could also just sleep at the inn for a quarter of the price.     Along the way to Durst, I run into a riddle chest.  S-HI-R-A  If you're going around Chuno counter-clockwise rather than clockwise, this might be the first Grrlf bow upgrade you find, so it's not as pointless as it seems. I mean except for the perpetual issue that William can't use bows worth a drat.     Further along, we hit upon another bead chest and... honestly, they're starting to get too complex for me. I really can't figure out most of them in any reasonable time without a guide past this point. I'm not sure whether I'm just a loving idiot or impatient or what.  Solution: Trade in Red-Blue. Trade in Green-Orange. Trade in White-Red. Trade in Yellow-Yellow. Trade in Green-Orange. Trade in Blue-White. Trade in Yellow-Yellow-Green. Trade in Red-Green. Trade in Red-Yellow. Trade in White-Orange-Orange-Green.  The reward is a Frost Band which is a notably better version of Oil. On average Oil gives you maybe a +5 damage due to the random factor, the Frost Band just gives a flat upgrade to damage which ends up closer to a 15 damage increase, which is pretty nice and much more reliable.     Welcome to Durst! I think that short of Briala and Imazi, no other town has as many of its houses actually be interactible and contain someone to talk to, taken as a proportion of the whole.   A new supply of shovels is nice, I've been running out, though I'll note that 19 out of 20 buried caches contain absolute dogshit. Either completely outdated gear or something worth less than the shovel charge spent digging it up, it's got nothing on the nice poo poo you could sometimes find in graves in Krondor. Senwater is 90% of my strategy for winning fights, however, so I'll always take more of that.  The tavern looks cozy except... that trophy on the wall just looks like a giant housecat to me. Anyone else? Is it just me?      Sometimes I don't get the logic of why some one-off NPC's get portraits and others don't. Anyway, her neighbour is more interesting and less stinky.    A human village? Holy poo poo, gang, cool it with the loving racism! Dude's just got a lumpy face, not loving horns or whatever. Goddamn. Also this is the first ethnic Chunese we see and... I think it might be the last one we meet that isn't just some rando we murder and loot on the roads. Let's talk to some more of his neighbours.     I love how when it comes to the Grrrlf, the party is usually the enlightened progressive "naw, seriously, they don't eat human skulls! honest!"-voice, but when it comes to this one guy with a slightly busted-looking face, the party is interrogating everyone with this "DON'T YOU SOMETIMES WANT TO RUN HIM OUT OF TOWN??? JUST ON PRINCIPLE???"-voice while the locals seem to be fine with him. Anyway, the last house before the church is the one we really care about.     True to his word, this guy will give everyone in the party a +5 boost to Melee skill in exchange for a pearl. Despite saying he only needs one pearl, however, you can trade him any number of them, even over multiple chapters. We have access to Ormede where we can buy pearls for about 400 burlas each. We are currently carrying so much money that it's straining the party's inventory. Off-screen I make sure to bump William's melee skill up to its cap of 100.  Doing so also leaves Aren around 80 melee skill and changes my combat tactics up a bit because I can now (sometimes) rely on them hitting things, since enemy defense skill can negate a lot of their newfound advantage. Anyway, the church!   Just another church of Henne except, you see that lady with the blonde hair almost hiding behind the guy in the foreground? She's an interactible NPC! And you actually have to find her to complete this chapter, too! Super cool since her interactive area is easily mistaken for the foreground guy and usually any interactible NPC's in a screen are explicitly facing the party or alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv7eOxLWCFw I'm starting to feel like one of Aren's character traits is that as soon as he's gotten freed from his betrothed back in Briala, he's clumsily hitting on every woman even vaguely near his own age who isn't Kaelyn.    At long last we reach Friole, the second-last town we visit in Chuno and also the farthest east we can travel for now.    This conversation is entirely to get us into the barn which we formerly couldn't enter. We can easily rest, but this barn is Special for three reasons. Firstly, like the barn down in Levosche we can rest here for free.   Secondly, it contains some deep lore.    This is supposed to be a hint that the Feeblepox was unleashed by digging into ancient Vell chambers. Sadly, the chamber mentioned in this particular note can never be found. It was probably intended for a planned sequel that never happened. Lastly, in the next chapter where, surprise, we play as Kaelyn and Raal, Friole and Durst are also accessible, so anything we want the two of them to have, we can leave here, like nice suits of armor, upgraded swords, a small cache of pearls so they can go get themselves trained up, that sort of thing!      There's no mechanical reward for saying hi to these two, so we just get to feel happy on their behalf.   The local store just sells(now useless) buckets and picks, while the inn is... just an inn. Nothing special. Now, I could head for Isten right away, but instead, we now have a bit of cleanup to do. Back south of the mountains we've got to collect our reward from the conservatory in Varnasse, we've got the green key to us and off-screen I have a small fortune in pearls to collect.   Taking the road in the shadow of the mountains back to the pass, I run into some bandits and decide to try out some new spells the party's picked up. Some of them just get looked at, though, due to their being inherently bloody awful wastes of Aren's lifeforce. Firstly there's Adrenaline, which raises the target's Strength by up to 20 points. Sadly it's not quite as busted as in Krondor since damage seems to scale slightly less linearly with strength gained, but it still makes William able to do more damage with swords than Aren can with spells for the first time. Combined with Quicksilver at full power, it also means that most rounds he hands out two hits(which are now very likely to hit because of the training) for a total of ~100 damage every round. Then there's Muscular Decay which does the exact opposite. Antara doesn't have a lot of "big single enemy" fights, which is likely the only place I'd consider using it. Communion wastes a turn displaying all of a target's stats. Great if you're writing a FAQ, less great if you're playing the game to complete it since you just wasted a turn.  Every fight from now on till at least the end of this update is William getting stuck with a max power Adrenaline and then a max power Quicksilver and then going through the enemies like an angry blender.     It doesn't make the combats completely dangerless, though, before the first round is over, in several fights, William's gotten mobbed and almost cut down. After that he rapidly turns the odds around, but the first round can still be scary.       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cteEzMnTGx4 So something interesting and easily missed here is that Naomi actually teaches Aren a new type of magic. Poison magic. It's not very good or useful, but it does seem a bit odd. Why would a kindly, caring gardener-mage know poison magic? Oh well, I'm sure there's nothing at all shady about that. While stumbling around down here, I also tripped over a chest I'd missed up by Korus Landing.    Yellow, Green, Blue-Yellow, Red-Yellow, Blue-Blue-Green, White-Black-Black  The only gain for all that work is a Carluda's Chain with a single charge, though it does show off that it visually gets a sprite with less links as it's spent. Now, has anyone figured out where that key we found in Eastbank goes? The green one? No? It's used here in Korus Landing.  The cheese-hungry local official has one of the few houses in the game with two doors, and they actually lead to different things. The green key is for his back door.    This out this is what happened to the ancestral tree of that poor guy in Eastbank. Not that the game ever deigns to tell you this. Now, back to Eastbank...    It took me about ten minutes real-time to find the loving stump he was talking about, because I expected it to be in any way different or to stand out compared to other sprites of stumps and the like.      Idol buried. Dare we hope for a reward?   At least it's a reward. It'll probably get me like 400 gold at best which is... kind of trivial for anything but buying food and senwater at this point. Before I head on up to Isten, I also want to take a stop at Elona to see how much that friend of Naomi's is appreciating the help we provided for his garden!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oZXW77I8uk This is super easily missed since you never have a reason to go back and check on this guy. I guess he should be thankful that the evil poison mage he apparently has a feud with just cursed him with a fart joke rather than killing everyone at the party with poisoned vegetables.Now we can finally move on to Isten and advance the plot!    The road to Isten is, I think, supposed to be feeling kind of mountainy with the boulders/hillocks to either side of the road. Along the way, though, we run into this corpse who's carrying a novel's worth of letters on him, so strap in for someone's completely pointless life story.                So you've got a lady who becomes a nun because of some family fuckery, she has a kid, keeps in touch with the kid's father via letters. The lady then dies when the couple are finally to be reunited... and then the dad also dies along the road before getting there and learning she's dead, leaving basically just the kid by herself. I guess we should, uh, deliver these letters or something so the nuns aren't left wondering when the dude's gonna show.    Good thing we were already heading in that direction, I suppose.   ...I had also totally forgotten we were heading here to help out that lady in Everton. Good thing the game remembers these things for me so I don't have to.   "Oh well, maybe it was for the best that he died horribly while travelling rather than ever being a father to his child." What the gently caress, lady? Isn't your sect supposed to be all about compassion and caring? I swear everyone in Antara is some kind of sociopath. Whatever, let's grill the locals in Isten and try to remember why we were coming here in the first place.   Oh, yeah, we were coming here to question an actress because her son had joined a fascist death cult and maybe he could point us to their hideout rather than attacking us on sight like all the other idiot death cultists do.        I think you can find this lady's chest and get the tickets from there, but I never had any drat luck locating it, so I had to do it the other way where, unbelievably, the Lucky Charm I berated as useless actually came in handy.       The other way to get tickets is to roll the dice against this guy over and over again until you score enough "wins" to clean him out and win the tickets. Zero player involvement, just mash the random rolls over and over again.     Like it could at least have been like Krondor where if we wanted to own someone at Chess to complete a quest, we needed to find a cheaty-rear end secret move to bust out against them. Time to interrogate the rest of the town and then head to the amphitheater.        This guy's treatise boosts the party's Haggle skill by a not-inconsiderable 7 points. I like his next door neighbour more, though.       And this guy breaks us into Charm magic and... I want to complain here. I generally do, but specifically here. We've learned Charm and Poison magic this update, each of which are fully-fledged skills running the gauntlet from 0 to 100 points and each of them only have one or two spells related to them at all. I think we've got, in total, something like... 20 different skills that make up our different magic types, and yet each of them affect barely one or two spells, and then only in the sense of having a breakpoint that allows learning the spell. It's such a stupidly overcomplicated system for such minor payoff. Graaahhhhh. Badly considered mechanics make LP'er angry.    And that's the last chatty person in Isten, now we can go not watch a play.        Once again I can't help but note that they totally COULD make nicer looking things, they just didn't in so many cases.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR3EHnFTeMU So her kid joined the death cult and then un-joined the death cult before running off to Durst. At least, I suppose, we've cleared the roads there already. Also is it just me or is she one of the first voice actors for this game that actually feels like she's trying to be a character rather than just read the script? The only one with some cadences and speech tics and, you know, more natural-sounding speech? Some speech with personality? It may just be me, but I felt struck by how, while not the best VA I've ever heard, she felt so much better than the rest of the ones in this game.    Next time: we go waterboard her idiot kid and then we bust this cult. Surely it'll be simple to solve.
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Feb 15, 2022 01:01
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PurpleXVI posted:So, it might amaze everyone to know that we've already been where this key is for! As far as I can tell there are no loving clues whatsoever to it, I had to look up a FAQ. If anyone can guess it before the reveal, I'll buy you an avatar and title celebrating your vast megamind. Do show your work, though, I won't believe a word of it without a proper reasoning, because I refuse to believe a normal human brain could figure this one out. I won't pretend to have figured it out either, but I think the intended clue is the line about it being a curio on some jaeger's mantle. The culprit was super excited about showing off his new Chunese tree idol when we met him earlier, and wouldn't you know it, that's the one. Why anyone who wanted to make a totally bogus Chunese tree idol would bother cutting down an actual Chunese sacred tree to do it is beyond me. Also, I believe there are six poison spells in the game. They're all dogshit, but they do exist. The magic system really does feel like they had a lot of big ideas, then they ran out of development time and had to pare it way back. I think they wanted to make one of those "combine the elements to research over 1700 distinct spells" deals, and instead it turned into, well, this. It looks really cool, until you realize it's just a clunky mechanism gating access to an unremarkable list of hardcoded spells.
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Feb 16, 2022 02:30
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With the letters you take to the sisters I don't think the NPC was suggesting "hey it's good that the guy was never a father to his daughter" but more "it's better that he died on the road coming to see her than to arrive and learn she died and his dream of finally meeting her was in vain" which isn't much better since they're all still tragically dead.
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Feb 16, 2022 21:23
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Update 12: Big Birds and Racially Motivated Violence This'll be a comparatively short update since there was less left of chapter 4 than I expected. We start out heading southeast from Isten to Durst.    There are a few Masliths along the way since I skipped them by circling out of their aggro radiuses coming up, but I decide to wipe them out this time around since I realized how much easier Adrenaline makes it. I also got two new spells while in Isten which I will never, ever use.   There's all of one(1) charm effect in the game, and I'd never even know who could bust it out ahead of time or who they could target, anyway. Poison weapons... slightly more of a worry, I suppose? But I could also just use the turn to cast Storm, Adrenaline, Quicksilver, Call Lightning, Geyser or any number of spells that would actually kill any theoretical enemies who could poison me faster.   William's one-shotting these idiot lizards now. Early on they'd take like 30 damage a piece, and dodge half the swings aimed at them, so it would take six or seven swings to put one of them down.    On the way to Durst I also stop by Everton to cash in that one quest there.    Oh boy, I bet her house is going to be full of an exciting volume of gently caress all.    The exciting contents of her broom closet. I'll also note that at this point the party's hoarded a good number of gems and such which, off-screen, I offload at the jewelry store in Elona. It turns out that even an 80% sapphire or other gem stone barely yields as much as a suit of chainmail. They do also take up a lot less inventory space, but if they were more valuable, as in Krondor, they might serve as an alternative to pure liquidity now that our wallet has a size limit.    In Durst, we'll obviously look for Simon at the temple.  It's important that we get blessed before talking to Jhana, since otherwise she'll basically just stonewall us and not tell us about Simon.        Good thing we already met the Party Pope and know where he's hanging out. Time to head back to Ticoro.    Lucky for us he hasn't moved an inch and will be here at all times or day, in all weathers(if Antara had any weathers...), waiting for us to hassle him with minor questions.       And Fellich points us off down to Ravenne... good thing he's being so helpful.    Coming down past Melay I see something odd on the road. It looks weird at a distance, like some sort of gross ghoul thing. Not quite human proportions...  ...are you a bird? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xxg7LToSgo This encounter is entirely optional but is one of the rare few chances we have in the game to learn something about the world's fourth sapient species, the Trkaa(the other three being humans, Grrrlf and Montari). I'm not sure if they're flightless birds or can actually fly, but they're apparently who you pay to deliver messages when it has to go fast. You might remember that Scott mentioned them in chapter 1 related to the feathers in his hat, which he's apparently earned by telling Trkaa stories they haven't heard before. Someone obviously had fun with these and the Montari speech tics, though.    Time to pry Simon out of his house and give him noogies until he tells us where the fascists are hiding.   It chafes my balls unreasonably that they just used generic mercenary sprites for these supposed Imperial Soldiers.  The cramped battlefield prevents me from getting all the usual buffs on William before the soldiers get all up in Aren's face.  Not that it helps them much, it just delays their deaths slightly. That poor archer in the back just kept shooting at him all fight and missed every single shot, which was somewhat funny. But it did kind of make me wish that the enemies' equipment was more visible. Like, so you could see who was an archer, or who was wearing stronger and weaker armor, so you had some clues as to who to prioritize for buffs/debuffs/armor-ignoring magic damage.   Breaking into Simon's house again, we find one of his letters explaining where he's at.  Weird that someone knew where we were going, though, maybe it was that drat bird who tipped them off.    Simon now exists in Levosche, but so does an NPC that wasn't around before and is one of the... weirder encounters in the game.     As far as I can tell, there's no... resolution to the fact that this lady is apparently a mass-murdering enchantress. We can't stab her, get trained by her, undo her enchantment, get tasked by her to do anything. She's just... here.  Anyway... here's Simon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpjPGmrdWWY Simon quit the Shepherds after beating a Grrrlf child to death, not after his buddies told him they were planning to kill children. Now we're hoofing it back to his garden in Ravenne to collect his Shepherd amulet...    Good thing no one's going to try to stop us in any way beyond having sent these four poor idiots to die at our hands.  The amulet we've just picked up is the exact same one we started the game with, which disappeared on us at the end of chapter 3, probably confiscated by Caverton as evidence. It does raise the question of why we couldn't have picked one up off any other other dozens of Shepherds we've stabbed so far. Oh well, we're headed off to Ticoro, again, and then north into an area we couldn't enter in Chapter 2 since the party would just say they had a vague feeling it wasn't time to go there.    It makes me realize that we haven't actually seen a lake in the game before except for that one underground one.    This chapter ends with a puzzle.  Our clues: the amulet itself and, on the back "R, L, R". You flip it right(clockwise), left(counter-clockwise) and right again to indicate the correct symbols. What are the correct symbols? They're actually carved on the shepherd on the amulet's staff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrKdiENn1lk This contains the end of chapter 4(including the amulet solution), the start of chapter 5 cutscene and inexplicably also the first fight of chapter 5. Next time: we actually see chapter 5 and what Kaelyn and Raal are up to.
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Feb 16, 2022 22:37
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Yeah, in the mid and especially late game, anything without armor turns into a bit of a joke. Even without strength buffs, damage goes up as you get better weapons, and the durability of non-humanoid enemies can't keep up. With armor in the mix, your increasingly well-equipped humanoid foes do fine, but animals? They just keep getting easier to kill.
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Feb 17, 2022 02:00
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Holy moly a talking ostrich...is what I was going to say but that enchantress encounter sticks out in my mind more. The yard is full of bones too? How does it just end there?
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Feb 17, 2022 03:06
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That William, aren, and so many others use the same head tilted doofus faced character portrait with minor adjustments really makes the game feel like a sharp drop in quality compared to Krondor since at least the bad office cosplay outfits made people look unique. ..even though a bunch of BaK characters didn’t look like how the books described them.
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Feb 17, 2022 03:30
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Evil Fluffy posted:..even though a bunch of BaK characters didn’t look like how the books described them. Retroactively, the BaK book-game mismatch bothers me a lot less now that I've seen Antara but yeah, visually this game feels way too 'Always Brown' for the world and it's just got very little in the way of visual interest. It's very muted, with rare exceptions like Party Shirt Guy in this update. And I think that's a mistake! Bring back the vibrant blue and gold cloak moredhel; at least you knew exactly who to target first! Give me goofy Renfaire Locklear! At least things were distinct and interesting there. (I'm not saying every shirt must be a riot of color, but a featureless expanse of blue is a wasted opportunity.) Psion fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Feb 17, 2022 |
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Feb 17, 2022 03:58
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Psion posted:Retroactively, the BaK book-game mismatch bothers me a lot less now that I've seen Antara Hell, practically everyone in this setting is clean-shaven, too! Where are the giant waxed ren faire moustaches? I think Lord Caverton is the only man we've seen in this setting with some flamboyant facial hair. Hypocrisy posted:Holy moly a talking ostrich...is what I was going to say but that enchantress encounter sticks out in my mind more. The yard is full of bones too? How does it just end there? I guess after having killed like a hundred people in the last few weeks as well as assorted crabs, chimpanzees and monitor lizards, William and Aren are starting to be pretty blase about murder. "I'm sure she had a good reason."
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Feb 17, 2022 11:35
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Update 13: They Made It Worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrKdiENn1lk  So! Last chapter ended with William and Aren infiltrating the Shepherds' headquarters, and so, right at a dramatic point, we're skipping to Kaelyn and Raal heading off to visit her dad and getting intercepted by a racist hit squad.  It's slightly odd that we're spawned looking in the wrong direction, with the Shepherds not technically blocking our way(if we turn around and move, we're still within their aggro radius, though), and we can't even really go the direction they're in because they're practically right on the edge of the area we're allowed to explore in this chapter, being a rectangle that's roughly got Grandeur as its upper left and Durst, Friole and Darvi as its lower right edges.   Kaelyn is as we left her, same inventory, same skills, and by default she inherits 50% of the end-of-chapter-3 burlas and food the party has.   Raal is... he's pretty chunky, which is the best thing about him. High hit points, high strength, but, despite being a staff-wielder, not a mage. For this chapter we only have two physical combatants, and only one of them has any kind of trick(in the form of being able to use bows). With Antara having much less in the way of combat expendables(no Horn of Algon-Kokoon, no scare-enemies-away potions, no Eliaem Hearts, etc.), it makes combat a lot less interesting and also... a lot more painful. To illustrate, let's go beat up those racists that just threatened us.  If this was William and Aren, Aren would buff William with Adrenaline, then Quicksilver, and he'd killing one per turn, possibly more if Aren softened some up with magic. Kaelyn and Raal, however...     Even ignoring the Pearl Trainer Guy, Kaelyn and Raal start out about 20 points of Melee below William, which means 20% less chance to hit enemies than he had, and he was doing plenty of missing already. Hell, even with the trainer he's not guaranteed to hit anyone. I only tucked away 4 pearls for them in Friole, but God, I wish I'd done the work to stash away 8 pearls. On top of that, they do miserable damage against armored enemies. Raal roughly does as much damage as William would, without Adrenaline, while Kaelyn both has lower Strength, has a lower-tier weapon(still a rapier) and lacks the combat skill, once she gets a broadsword, to use the most damaging attack(overhead slash) without missing most of the time. It makes the fighting something of a slog.    In the end I win the fight, though, Kaelyn and Raal have a quick chat and we get to pick over...  The corpse. As in singular, because when you have a harder time hitting enemies and do less damage with the hits you do land, they also get more chances to run the gently caress away. At least this dickhed was carrying a breastplate we can toss on Raal so he isn't still wearing leather armor, he might be chunky, but he's not chunky enough to survive multiple stab wounds without decent armor.     The first order of business is to head east to Friole and the barn, in addition to the pearls there I had also stashed a broadsword(which Kaelyn finds on the way anyway...). If I knew how dogshit she'd be at fighting, though, I would have made sure to bless it at a Temple of Kor first, since the borders on the party's exploration in this game prevents me from getting to the one Temple of Kor I know is in the area, son of a bitch. In the Friole inn there's also a free Grrrlf Bow under one of the tables, which is an upgrade for Kaelyn, though arrows still do comparatively negligible damage. Using the pearls just barely get Kaelyn and Raal to where William was before he used pearls himself. Friole has no updates, but Durst has one change.      There's another lost kid to find. I'll get around to this before the end of the update. At this point I'm also not aware that I can get east enough to get to Darvi, nor know what shops it has, so instead I loop around westwards through Camille and Eastbank to sell off armor and bulk up Kaelyn and Raal's inventory a bit. There's not a lot for them to buy, not even Kor's Blood, Dervish Discs or anything of that sort, so it's mostly a fund for food, Senwater and blessing gear on the off chance that there's a temple around that I don't know about.    Past Grandeur's walls, on the right, there's a mountain pass leading south. If you try to enter it in chapter 4, Aren and William bitch and complain about not wanting to get off track and refuse to head there, but Kaelyn and Raal will happily head that way as it leads into the Ridgewood where Kaelyn's dad and a bunch of Grrrlf live.     There are a few generic enemies on the way and also...  A chest. Now, you might think, "oh, it's just a locked chest, full of trash," and yes! That's right! But Kaelyn smashes away at the lock with her lockpicks and, predictably, picks up a bit of lockpicking training doing so.  Oh did I say "a bit," I meant "it instantly teleported her from 20 lockpicking to 70." I have no idea if this particular chest is bugged to gently caress, or if the "training multiplier" for lockpicking is just set insanely high for this chapter, or perhaps for Kaelyn(since Aren was marginally better than the others, I had him do all the lockpicking in chapters 1 through 4), or maybe the game is just loving weird. But I guess Kaelyn knows how to crack chests like a pro, now!     I think this body of water is meant to be the ocean to the north rather than a large lake, but I'm not sure. In any case, we're about to enter the Ridgewood proper, and that's when we encounter an NPC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFckd3-SBYQ It's the leader of Raal's Grrrlf tribe! Here to tell us what's going on, which is that Kaelyn's dad is: gone. And evil ghosts are: eating people's souls and turning them into murderous zombies, which explains a lot about why everyone keeps trying to kill us for no obvious reason. I also just... I cannot deal with the loving Grrrlf speech tics and their terms and stuff. It just... it his some sort of deeply annoying note for me. I think it's because it feels halfway between furry roleplay and some sort of pastiche of an aboriginal group(possibly Native Americans?). The smart move would be to peace out and hope Kaelyn's dad shows up and, if not, hiring a boat and moving to somewhere not infested by mind-eating ghosts. Unfortunately Kaelyn and Raal are not smart and instead decide to keep going.   Also despite what the Big Grrrlf said, the Wraiths are super-visible, big glowy fuckers, you have to really be barrelling ahead without looking around to bounce into one. However, he's right that we can't do a drat thing about them yet so for now a lot of the Ridgewood is inaccessible to us.   The next fight we run into is mildly interesting, not because of its contents, the brain-wiped husks in the Ridgewood fight like anything else except I don't think they ever retreat, but because of a bit of dialogue afterwards.      Firstly, Raal, everything we run into randomly attacks us anyway. It can never be negotiated with and a lot of things fight even when wildly outmatched. Secondly, while some of the husks in the Ridgewood are just "peasants," i.e. carrying dogshit weapons and trash tier 1 armor, these guys were actually wearing plate and carrying around big swords, so either they're not just random farmers or farming in Antara is a high-risk job.    Heading southwards, I actually reach the end of the Ridgewood and arrive in Darvi, revealing to me that it's actually accessible, which I didn't know. Time to go poke around and see what Darvi has to offer.   It's one of the rare towns that has two shops, and one of them is thoroughly useless, just another store full of overpriced books(including the one that doesn't teach you jack poo poo) we've already read.     I couldn't find any wine for this guy, but apparently it only provides a single shieldstone, so I'm not very torn up about it. The house behind his, though, is slightly more interesting.      I like that it actually gives Raal a bit of personality beyond "slightly congested generic native." Don't get used to that, though, he doesn't really have much personality outside of "I am Grrrlf" in most interactions.    I've not been having much luck finding this guy's book, but apparently it gives a large Assessment buff if you read it, and just some arrows if you give it back unread, so it's objectively a better choice to just read the drat thing and toss it in a ditch.   The other store in town is only worthwhile because it sells Senwater, everything else is stuff that you literally can't get to it without already having or having a superior version of.      Any stat boost is better than no stat boost, but archery is a lot less useful when it's only Kaelyn and Raal, as it prevents Kaelyn from being outside of the big melee scrum where she can snipe wounded enemies.    Right next to Darvi is the rickety bridge to the swampy province of Ghan. We can't go there without getting complained at so I guess we shan't. Before heading back into the Ridgewood, I decide to clear the road between Friole and Darvi and rescue that lost kid. Along the way I run into a few Shepherds guarding a chest and something... odd, happens.  One of the Shepherds tries to fire an arrow at Kaelyn and it quite literally backfires. Aside from crashes, the game's usually been relatively un-buggy(aside from the Lockpick skill thing...), so this one was something of a surprise.The chest they were guarding also has something new.   So, this bow fires two arrows at once, as one attack, at the cost of a worse both damage and accuracy mod than the Grrrlf Bow. It means that Kaelyn can now actually do non-negligible damage, but since she's also lost access to places where she could buy Enchanted Arrows, and the +damage fire and corrosive have a nasty accuracy malus, it's more of a sidegrade than an outright upgrade since bows are never super-accurate, even at their best, though I think the game displays their accuracy wrong in combat.    Heading north of Durst into the Waste feels... odd. It's supposed to be a big hellblasted zone, but it's just sort of crammed in between Grandeur, Durst, Eastbank, Camille and the Ridgewood, all relatively verdant areas. Like, I'm fine with a mage apocalypse creating a verdant hellhole, rather than a blighted hellhole, but that's not the mental image that the name "The Waste" conjures up. In any case, the entrance is guarded by a few generic miscreants, but once we get inside, we actually reach a new type of enemy!   Like how Trerangs are just a primate .gif hit with a blue bucket tool in MSPaint, Fire Wolves are just, well, wolves, hit with a red colour bucket. They're not particularly strong and do thankfully underwhelming damage, but predictably have an unusual ace up their sleeve.  Cool, right? I wish I could tell you how devastating it was, but every single use of it missed Kaelyn. I think something like ten shots or so all whiffed her, completely absurd. I could imagine it being the same as the spell that uses the same projectile, which would mean probably 20 to 40 damage, depending on the power level.    Just around the corner, another pack of Fire Wolves are patiently sitting around poor Toddy, probably considering doing something awful to him shortly before the heat death of the universe.    And now back to Durst.    A book, hm?   Reading it gives +3 to Melee, Scouting and Stealth skills. I mean, I'll always take a skill bonus, but it's pretty minor. With that sorted, it's time to head back to the Ridgewood. Maybe if we range a bit off the main path we'll find a clue or two.      Alright, the North of the Ridgewood. The Ridgewood is sort of L-shaped, with one end at Grandeur, the corner above Darvi and the other end east of Darvi. Since this cabin is near Darvi, the "north" could be either along the horizontal or the top of the vertical, I check the former first.     No secret hideouts here, but plenty of wraiths and their thralls... including one hanging around a suspicious stone circle.   I also get ambushed by some Grrrlf husks, which are exactly the same as human husks. I'm als pretty sure they're literally a slightly colour-shifted Raal sprite. Time to check out the vertical.    It's honestly perfectly easy to miss the entrance to Kaelyn's dad's lair, especially as a lot of paths are cut off by wraiths, but here it is, hidden behind this little cluster of trees.    Despite visibly being made from stone, an artificial structure, it's full of weird twists and turns and some pretty weird textures besides.    But, weirdness aside, it's really just a twisty corridor with no enemies or loot which leads to a large open area within which...  We find an NPC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpVRz7ybV_0 In my opinion they hosed this up, and they hosed it up bad. They wanted to have both an emotional reveal(that we have really not spent enough time with anyone involved in it to earn) and a huge loving lore dump. Plus the game's never really made "being a wizard" feel special enough that it seems like a big twist this guy is one, especially when said twist is revealed the moment we meet him. Anyway, the Cliff's Notes: Kaelyn's dad accidentally killed her mom with bad magic, never told Kaelyn. Never even told her he was a wizard. Cat is now out of the bag and Kaelyn isn't happy. Wraiths are from an alternate dimension where they breathe magic energy, should not be able to survive on Ramar for long. Kaelyn's dad will jazz up our weapons so they can cut open the sheath of magic energy that the Wraiths breathe, thus allowing us to kill them.    So now all we gotta do is purge the Ridgewood of extradimensional invaders before they spread and eat the brains of everyone in Ramar. Sounds simple enough. I'm sure it can wait an update, though.
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Feb 21, 2022 22:12
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PurpleXVI posted:I am Grrrlf I am Grrrlf
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Feb 21, 2022 23:03
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PurpleXVI posted:I've not been having much luck finding this guy's book, but apparently it gives a large Assessment buff if you read it, and just some arrows if you give it back unread, so it's objectively a better choice to just read the drat thing and toss it in a ditch. quote:So, this bow fires two arrows at once, as one attack, at the cost of a worse both damage and accuracy mod than the Grrrlf Bow. It means that Kaelyn can now actually do non-negligible damage, but since she's also lost access to places where she could buy Enchanted Arrows, and the +damage fire and corrosive have a nasty accuracy malus, it's more of a sidegrade than an outright upgrade since bows are never super-accurate, even at their best, though I think the game displays their accuracy wrong in combat. quote:Cool, right?
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Feb 22, 2022 02:05
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Vanigo posted:but fire wolves are bugged. Their flame breath works off of spell accuracy, but as non-spellcasters they have no spell accuracy, so their hit chance is always 5%. Oh my God, I thought it might be something insanely stupid like this but I thought it was too idiotic to even voice as a theory. That's wonderful.
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Feb 22, 2022 02:15
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm sure it can wait an update, though.  An update? Singular? Why, in my day...
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Feb 22, 2022 04:21
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Update 14: Get Into My Swamp So, let's get back to it. We now have the Wraithslayer enhancement on our weapons and can actually go beat up some ghosts. One thing I'll note before this happens, though, is that Kaelyn's dad is a filthy liar, the enchantment never dissipates, either that or it takes a lot more battles and wasted time than I spent. I was nervously checking it before every fight just in case I was wandering into one I couldn't complete, but it never wavered.   Now that we can actually hurt them, wraiths are completely unthreatening. As far as I can tell they have no special attacks, they aren't even armor-ignoring like magic is. In fact they do insanely piddling damage, like 14 and 15 points per attack... when they hit, because they also tend to miss a lot, and about three attacks will usually take them down. They do have a neat-looking death animation, though.  There are four wraiths in the Ridgewood, three of them have a couple of Grrrlf or human husks guarding them(no mages, no threats), while the fourth is alone. Only one of them is marginally interesting.    Due to hiding out in this circle of stones and having one of these rare long-and-narrow battlefields, which I wish there were more of. They're some of the only ones where the game's very lenient zone-of-control rules might be useful and leveraged in some fashion. Anyway, once they're all dead...  Kaelyn actually points out they're all dead, a nice touch, so you won't be wandering the woods for the next few hours wondering where the last drat ghost is. Obediently, we head back.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjdJlW6apKs Cliff's Notes: "Yaaay, we killed them all." "Anything weird out there?" "Oh, yeah, circle of stones. Also I'm cool with you again, dad." I took up this guy's chapter end video rather than posting my own recording of the conversation since he included it anyway. The chapter end animation picks up pretty much where we left off with William and Aren, wandering into a spooky cave.    A spooky cave full of Shepherds! And a few corners have some crabs as well. You can actually somewhat gently caress yourself over here as you can't back out of the cave and the locals are carrying barely any rations and rarely any Senwater, so if you came in here with just a few sandwiches and nothing for healing, you could be pretty proper hosed. Still, I'm good on both, so the caves resound with carnage and get a new, red paintjob.     You can explore the caves pretty thoroughly by just using the old left-hand-wall rule, since there are very few places where the caves loop back on themselves, they're pretty linear for the most part. You want to keep going until you hit this staircase.   You could probably brute force this, each red stone has a state of either pressed or unpressed, order doesn't matter. How many possible solutions would there be? I think about 150-ish or something without bothering with the maths? Still, the game does actually hide a way to find the right solution if you keep going on.    I don't think any NPC's ever talk about this guy, the only places he's mentioned are in one item description and probably also in the manual's lore though I can't be bothered to read it again to check. M-AL-K-E-RE  We bring this lantern back to the wall puzzle and...  It indicates the correct buttons to push. It honestly feels kind of dogshit as a puzzle. It can either be brute forced or we can fetch an object that just tells us the solution. I prefer things that require me to invest a little bit of brainpower.     On the far side are a few actually room-looking rooms containing some more shepherds, you'd figure this was indicating we're getting close to their inner sanctum, and we are, except, uh.   The inner sanctum is actually in the caves beyond the actual structures, for some reason. No don't loving ask me why, it's stupid as all hell.     On the far side of some corpses(they weren't corpses before we got there, though), is this oblivious fuckwit who hasn't heard or noticed any of the violence going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVdKe9W_xQI It's Gar Warren! Leader of the Shepherds! He is an absolutely stupid motherfucker who wanted to kidnap the Consort(his first plan was Princess Aurora but she was too well-protected) so he could force the Emperor to sanction a full-on race war against the Grrrlf. But then his pet wizard just casually teleported the consort away to someone on the far side of a portal. What an absolute jackass. Sadly there's no "kill him and laugh"-option, so instead we turn around and go on our way, except...     Okay, turns out Gar's pet mage did not in fact leave with the Consort but instead chose to hang around???? And decided that she, on her lonesome, can take us on. Let's see how that works out for her, shall we?   Whoops turns out it gets her loving one-shot by William because she decided to show up to a fight in melee range without wearing armor and without winning initiative. A fatal mistake on her part. No sooner does she drop to the ground, however, than...     I'm unsure whether the cops just happened to find the place shortly after we did, or whether they were tracking us ever since Ravenne and simply took a smoke break outside the cave because they knew we'd cut half the Shepherds to ribbons and spare them the work. Of course, not being total morons, our boys decide to peace out before the police pick up them, too.   They barely get two steps before a cutscene takes over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9diBBnd1cwA Trying to chase down Gar Warren, they get lost in the caves but stumble their way outside. They reason that the Consort must have ended up with Ghanish mercenaries and... wouldn't you know it? It turns out they've actually wandered out into Ghan.  This is an earlier screenshot of the map, but we emerge just within a short walk of Torlith.   And next to one of the rare stone piles that are worth digging into since it doesn't contain just another shovel or a single chicken leg or something.   Instead it's got two unique books.  One offers a small boost to stealth, though Aren and William still flub nine out of ten ambush attempts(doesn't help that you have to be almost right up in an enemy's rear end in a top hat to attempt it, and sometimes their aggro radiuses simply prevent getting that close without combat starting).  The other offers a small boost to Aren's electric skill, though I'm not sure if he still has any lightning spells left to learn.    Moving west to Torlith we encounter the most devastating enemy in the game: this loving road. It requires a bit of explanation. The low-lying swamp areas are impassable and un-enterable. This road is shittily made and only barely wide enough for the party, causing them to vibrate wildly left and right when using it. It will, in fact, vibrate them reliably into the low swamp which they can't escape from. Do not use this road, go around it and enter Torlith from the grass instead.    Torlith is notable for every building being interactible.        This is actually a chest we can find and the reward is... maybe worth it?        This one originally confused me a bit, but it turns out this is actually the rock pile we spawned right next to on leaving the tunnels and already cracked through.     I feel like this is a reference to something, but I don't get it. We also never see Ghan again after this chapter, so unless Betrayal in Antara gets a much-delayed sequel one of these days, we'll never know where they were going with this.    The last thing of note is that the store in Torlith sells the top-tier suit of armor in the game, it doesn't get better than this.  Weirdly enough, if you enter this little crossroad from Torlith, you can still get through, just do not use the part of it that's after the right turn up there. That's the one that kills you.     I suppose it's nice that it acknowledges the fact that the two parties are basically right next to each other, but this adds pretty much nothing. Anyway, let's go east and see what we can find in Ghan.   Mostly what we find are corpses that contribute to the "dress Aren up funny"-fund.  We already have the password here from the dad in Torlith, so we can crack the chest, it doesn't contain anything we want, though, just some worthless jewelry and plants.     The score is a Circlet of Senaedrin which is pretty eh. I also go get some Montari Plate for Aren.  It makes him look like he's halfway through a GWAR cosplay.     Since I've got some money left over and there's a temple of Kor here in the swamp, I go get the Montari Plate blessed.   It goes a long way towards rendering Aren invincible towards anything non-magical hitting us at this level, it knocks most attacks with broadswords and rapiers, still the most common weapons(and frankly I don't know if they ever upgrade beyond that), down to doing like five damage or so.   I get started on clearing the road east towards Keth, and thankfully all the enemies tend to be wearing platemail which yields good amounts of money when I haul it back to Torlith where no one blinks an eye at being sold blood-dripping armor.  Most of the enemies are just packs of generic fighters, though one group does drop this bow which I'll never use, since the Speed Bow does better damage-per-turn anyway and the Grrlf Bow can actually hit things well.    That's when I run into these pricks.  It starts out pretty normal, William gets his buffs on, starts chopping and then...  Yeah, fireballs are loving SCARY.  It doesn't stop William from carving everyone to giblets, of course, but it does mean Aren gets to spend a few days while his eyebrows and skin grow back thanks to massive Senwater infusion. Oh and these guys drop an incriminating and incredibly stupid note.   Why would you write a legally binding contract for an illegal venture, that accomplishes nothing but implicate everyone involved in some insanely shady poo poo? I swear everyone in Antara is suffering from lead poisoning. Their armor is also enough to afford Montari Plate for William.  Unlike Aren, between his pose, the sword and the shield, he actually looks like he means business in it. Returning to the scene of the crime, i.e. one of the many, many violent stabbings left behind in the trail of William and Aren, I happen to glance into the swamp to the south.   Being very wise, I understand that these glowing dickheads are Lightning Bugs and will probably fry my dumb rear end in seconds if I give them a chance to, thus, precautions are to be taken!  I frankly don't know how much Grounding Wire affects lightning damage, but I think it probably reduces it by between 50 and 75%.   They're VERY trigger happy and pretty beefy, able to eat two 100+ damage hits from William before going down. Thanks to the Grounding Wire, their zap blasts only do 10 damage, but I can only imagine how much worse it would be if they actually landed a hit without it. With the Grounding Wire, they just require a bit of patience, though they're some of the rare enemies that semi-reliably dodge William's attacks. What the hell is their defense rating? Assessment won't tell me.   It turns out they've been guarding a sinister goblin man, let's interrogate him.       At this point it's not super obvious, but guessable that you need to pass him a roll of Grounding Wire, so I do just that. The one I was using didn't have a lot of charges anyway.  As thanks for helping the mysterious goblin fella, we get...  A rating in Cold magic for the first time and.  His rather disappointing beatstick, the Grrrlf staff is still better nine times out of ten for when Aren needs to break some ankles the hard way. It's tempting to get out of the swamp before more Lightning Bugs show up, but there's also a coded chest behind the goblin.   CO-N-SU-L  It yields the first damaged shield that's enough of an upgrade that it's actually better than the mostly intact shield William is already carrying! I appreciate this further step towards tankiness, even though shields are an annoying purely-random mechanic. I'm genuinely not a big fan of how they work.     There are a few more Lightning Bug swarms and bandits on the way to Keth, but William and Aren arrive without too much trouble, though Senwater supplies are running a bit low because of the fireball accident earlier.   I believe we can find this guy's wine in one of the Ghanish towns, but I don't know which, so we'll see if I come across it. There's also a chest behind this guy's house.   So you're looking at this poo poo, right? Maybe working it out on paper to avoid digging yourself into a corner, you finally crack out the solution and then you get...  A single loving shieldstone for your half hour or whatever of trouble. This game displays just an outright disdain for the player sometimes, goddamn.        This is an insanely bad deal, by the way, this guy sells you 5 rations for 30 Burlas when you can get 14 ration-packs for that price all over the gameworld. Croc meat, tho.   A house where we just get told to gently caress off. No, this is unconnected to anything and never changes.        Once again, everyone in Antara has lead poisoning. Why the gently caress is this guy just randomly admitting to murdering politicians? We could be Imperial Shadows! Assassins out to avenge a dead Jaeger! Just public-minded citizens who want to stab and/or arrest an unrepentant murderer! But no, we accept his cookies, don't judge him and then learn more about killing people. Seriously what the gently caress. No, just. This entire interaction is baffling.   The local store is mostly notable for selling Senwater and Grounding Wire, it also pays a slightly better price for looted armor than the store in Torlith and is a second place to buy Montari Plate, albeit at a higher price. Ultimately, Keth is just a truck stop, so we continue south to Choth since it's one of the towns in the region where the writers display some fun and creativity.    If you're not obsessive about staying on the road, you can skip several fights by just heading across the grass from Keth to Choth. The special thing about Choth is that everyone has a tale to tell.         Pirate stories!    A store that sells exciting new swords we won't need.         Gory murder stories! This one is my favourite, personally.           Isekai stories! I want to kinda punch this guy.          Heroic stories!           Plague stories!           War stories! I think we need a drink after all that, let's go to the inn.   Bartender! Tend me your strongest bars!     I love the idea of the Liar's Festival, now... depending on who you pick, you're going to get a separate reward. The only one you can't pick is the "Hero," the guy who said he saved Princess Aurora, because he's the only one actually telling the truth(and thus, hilariously, the only one that William doesn't believe). I will be picking the Soldier because his reward is insanely much better than any of the others. What do the others get us, though? quote:Mage Gordostorini : you'll received 3 charluda's chain We don't want Carluda's Chains, fake maps are obviously not good, Halder's Brew is like wasting inventory space on a worse version of Adrenaline casts, an extra Shadowring would be good, but not as good as what the Soldier gets us.     Aside from the Everedge, we also get a 100% quality Tower Shield, but the Everedge... oh boy. Stat-wise it beats both the Broadsword and the local Onyx Blade for sale, plus it always stays at 100% so it never needs sharpening and never loses any effectiveness(plus we haven't blessed it yet...). There's one sword in the game that can do more damage on a Hack attack(almost twice the damage modifier on that, holy cow), but it's not quite as accurate and we can't get it until almost at the end of the game. It's actually kind of absurd that you can get such a good reward and then so many awful rewards with no real hint as to which is gameplay-wise the superior choice.  So that was a nice visit to Choth, next... we'll go to Imazi! It's not immediately obvious, but we can actually return to Pianda in this chapter! I don't think any town but Imazi has updated content, but I think folks will enjoy the Imazi updates.
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Feb 26, 2022 21:06
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PurpleXVI posted:Update 14: Get Into My Swamp It's a Starbucks joke, they took their name from a Moby Dick character, which Ishmael also is. See also Deus Ex 2 with Queequeg & Pequod and a few other games iiirc. Basically any time it's about drinks and Moby Dick names, it's a joke about Starbucks.
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Feb 26, 2022 22:04
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PurpleXVI posted:Why would you write a legally binding contract for an illegal venture, that accomplishes nothing but implicate everyone involved in some insanely shady poo poo? I swear everyone in Antara is suffering from lead poisoning.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:40
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Reward tables aside, I think Liarstown was pretty cool. That's a nice little bit the game did there, so credit where it's due.Hel posted:It's a Starbucks joke, they took their name from a Moby Dick character, which Ishmael also is. See also Deus Ex 2 with Queequeg & Pequod and a few other games iiirc. Basically any time it's about drinks and Moby Dick names, it's a joke about Starbucks. If it is, it's one hell of an early joke at their expense. I know Starbucks was founded in the 70s, but 1997 was before Starbucks' meteoric rise in store count and/or public awareness across the world. That said, Dynamix was in Oregon and Sierra was in California so it's entirely plausible because Starbucks was everywhere in the region well before they went global. Psion fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 01:35
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As someone who was pretty down on the writing at the start of the game, I do feel like it has hit its stride over the last few chapters. The main story is still a bit whatever but a lot of of the side stuff is pretty charming.Psion posted:If it is, it's one hell of an early joke at their expense. I know Starbucks was founded in the 70s, but 1997 was before Starbucks' meteoric rise in store count and/or public awareness across the world. That said, Dynamix was in Oregon and Sierra was in California so it's entirely plausible because Starbucks was everywhere in the region well before they went global. It fits the formula perfectly even brings up the takeaway aspect, but you also have to remember two things: Americans seems to treat any local thing as if everyone else is intimately familiar with it and game devs have always made some pretty local references in their games.
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Feb 27, 2022 07:54
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Hel posted:The main story is still a bit whatever but a lot of of the side stuff is pretty charming. Well, I think kind of the problem with Antara is that the main story starts a few chapters too early. Like, imagine if, instead, we're starting in Briala where a bedraggled consort storms in the door, having escaped from the Shepherds. Aren Cordelaine is sent by his parents to the local noble, in Panizo, while they hide the poor man. On the way, he runs into Kaelyn, there's your starter party, Kaelyn and Aren with a clear and immediate goal. Hell, maybe even make the Consort female instead and replace Kaelyn with her to give her a more solid connection to the plot, because the way she's forced into the party and just hangs around no matter what insane poo poo happens around her feels a bit threadbare. On the way, Aren gets Random Magic Events where weird poo poo(usually beneficial, but not always), pop up, indicating that he has some kind of magic talent but it's dangerous to him and everyone around him for now. On reaching Panizo, they tell the local governor, who sends his son, William, with them to bring the Consort back. They're keeping it hush-hush and without a lot of soldiers for one of a million reasons, and along the way, as they find magical trainers for Aren, it turns into more formal spells and less random magic(but, perhaps, in a Wizardry 8 sort of thing, all spells have a power scale and casting at the top of the power scale always has a chance of random events, no matter how well-trained, to give magic a feeling of being dangerous and wild, to actually carry all the mentions of magic-gone-astray from just storytelling into gameplay). Like, the entire first three or four chapters, it feels like, are largely wasting our time and contributing to a lacking sense of urgency or giving a gently caress.
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Feb 27, 2022 10:32
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I'm not one to say you have to follow all the rules of writing at all times but yeah, Antara really could have benefited from understanding "Start the story as late as possible" a bit better. Because the first few chapters are spent establishing things that aren't really relevant anymore, if they ever were. And what is the tone here, is it Aren and William laying low avoiding the local cops for a crime they didn't commit or are they trying to avoid launching the kingdom into a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Because the lazy , no hurry traveling fits the first, but it randomly seems to ramp up into the latter whenever we get to certain plot points. Not problems unique to Antara by any means but still. I once again want to thank you for doing this, because while I do find it interesting I probably would have quit before this point if I was playing it myself.
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Feb 27, 2022 12:24
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Oddly enough, montari plate mail is only available in this chapter, so if you ever want a set for Kaelyn, you have to buy it before the end of the chapter and give it to her when you meet back up. As for the wraithbane enchantment, I think it wears off at the end of the chapter, i.e. the point at which you'll never need it again. I'm pretty sure the enchantment wearing off is for... plot reasons.
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Feb 27, 2022 20:07
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Hel posted:And what is the tone here, is it Aren and William laying low avoiding the local cops for a crime they didn't commit or are they trying to avoid launching the kingdom into a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Because the lazy , no hurry traveling fits the first, but it randomly seems to ramp up into the latter whenever we get to certain plot points. Yeah, the tone is generally all over the place. Like, in chapter 4 you have Simon sobbing his heart out and clearly being traumatized because he didn't back out of the fascist race purity cult before he committed a sin he can't atone for. Then in chapter 6, William and Aren cornering the leader of said death cult and he's just... some sort of goofy chucklefuck? A complete and utter jackass without a whit of charisma or even feeling like he's dedicated to any sort of cause, good or evil? It doesn't help that the voice actors who actually seem to be giving it their all usually tend to be the ones with comedic roles like Maria Liana and... another one in the upcoming update. Mind, speaking of the upcoming update, it may be a wee bit delayed for Elden Ring reasons. Because I'm playing Elden Ring. I have so many weird monkey people and octopusses and skeletons that need killing.
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Feb 28, 2022 23:58
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It is a walktapus and you will respect its gloranthan heritage.
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Mar 1, 2022 06:44
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I just finished catching up again. Others pointed out the Starbucks reference. One other note is that the pushbutton puzzle has quite a few combinations. I counted 10 buttons, which means 1024 possibilities.
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Mar 6, 2022 03:19
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Update 15: Lightning Bugs and Software Bugs We pick up as the party leaves Choth, cutting out a small interlude where I go get the Everedge blessed to make it really whip rear end. We're heading east to Bakril and then north up to Ganath, I was originally planning to blaze it straight down to Imazi, but it turns out that the party doesn't particularly feel like doing that until they're given a reason to do so. On the way, I also take stock of some new spells added to Aren's repetoire.  This spell is either a lie or game mechanics make it irrelevant. In a later fight, William gets poisoned and I cast this on him at full strength(note that it can only be cast in combat), which doesn't nudge the poison meter at all. In fact, it increases. Afterwards, I also feed him about five units of anti-poison paste(each should reduce poisoning by 50 percentage points), on a 60% poisoning, before it takes effect, so I think the poison mechanics may just be hosed.  If we hit something like the 6-mage ambush from Krondor, this could potentially be a useful turn one cast, but enemies generally only have one mage, as far as we've seen, so it would mostly just get in the way of us casting poo poo at them.  In a battle that lasts ~6 turns, I can either spend 7 hit points making an enemy lose one hit point per turn or I can spend 14 to make them lose 40 immediately. Hmmmm. Tough cost-benefit analysis there... do not ever cast this.  I will actually test out Monsoon in this update! Though mostly to show off the visuals. It's a theoretically useful spell if combined with, say, Storm or Call Lightning, except for the "random wander"-effect that means it might decide to slide over and coast William instead or just edge off of the enemies I actually want it to hit.  Oh and the party also gutted and filleted some idiot bandits on the way out of Choth. There are a lot of idiot bandits and lightning bugs on the way to Bakril, enough that I actually started avoiding fights when possible because they were getting immensely tedious.    This is what the road looks like more or less all the way. Some trees, a road, a swampy ditch on the left and a wall of "mountains" on the right.    It's odd but I feel like the spell effects are probably the nicest looking thing about Antara's graphics. They're not as crusty as the rest, they're actually other colours than shades of brown... I might've well enjoyed the game more if it just committed to a more cartoony and stylized design. It would at least have kept my eyes engaged. This little bit also shows off the issue with Monsoon which is that the battlefields are generally so large that enemies easily have a lot of places to be that aren't in the area of effect, though if an enemy is under it and has a ranged attack, they seem braindead enough to just hang out there and keep shooting rather than prioritizing moving out of a damaging AoE. On the one hand that makes Monsoon more useful for its "bonus to zappy damage"-effect, on the other hand it also makes Monsoon useless as a "suppressive fire" weapon that forces enemies to move rather than keep plunking arrows into my idiots' heads, something that will shortly become a very real problem.   Case in point. So! We've seen enemy archers before, usually one or two in some groupings, where they'd miss most of their shots, and the ones that hit would do ~15 points of damage, and for context our most fragile party member is Aren who has about 80 hit points, and unlike in Krondor, our hit point totals do not rise passively over the course of the game, nor have I found any events that improve them. In this case, though...    We start running into groups of these pirates archers, five to seven, all of which are archers. Since only inns and Senwater can heal the last 20% of Aren's health, he's usually at less than 75, especially after a first-round cast, and they WILL all pile on him and I think something is hosed up about the accuracy representations for archery, since they all always hit, or archery actually ignores defense ratings or something despite what it says. They're also fast enough to always act in between Aren and William, so Aren only survives, and thus I only really "win," fights with them if his first-round cast is Armorlight since enemies will still keep machinegunning arrows at invincible targets because they're morons.  I come out of it alive after a reload, but the point is that the game devs seem to have realized that vicious alpha strikes that can one-round-kill party members are the only real threat as long as the party is hauling around metric tonnes of Senwater, and are playing for keeps now. I hope this is a fluke, because this really ain't fun to deal with. It continues all the way to Bakril, though.    It's been a bit since we last saw the beach, at least this coastline doesn't seem to have any of those incredibly gross field worms, which is good because Kaelyn had our only set of drums and I never bothered to pick up any more because... I don't actually think the entire north half of the game world contains any field worms.    Thanks to some bad luck and impatience on my part, the party's zeroed out on Senwater as they stumble into Bakril, beelining for the inn to get some holy water to pour on Aren's dozens of bleeding wounds before he dies again.   Thank you, developers, for this small mercy.    I then turn around and pile the dorks into the inn for some rest which triggers an odd interaction.     This guy is acting like we've dealt with some sort of problem for him. Odd. Maybe we killed a group of generic enemies on the road that were actually part of a subquest? Whatever, let's just step out and check out the rest of the houses in town.   It turns out that the developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the thing to do here was to have the ambush trigger on getting too close to the inn, rather than interacting with the door, which means that if you approach from the right angle and interact with the door from just far enough out, you skip over it. And, since they never expected anyone to "sneak" around it, the innkeeper's dialogue is the same whether you've actually killed the mercenaries outside his front door or not. I also wonder what triggers these super-weird combat backdrops where it makes the participants look about two feet tall. It adds a bit of comedy to the game, at least. The rest of Bakril is also odd, about half the town's houses are empty, the other two...    Like, why does it even matter whether Spooky Cackling NPC is male or female, guys? Is the truly scary thing here the violation of the gender binary?    And if we interact with another house a bunch of randos just charge out and decide to fight us to the death. I repeat my accusations that Antarans suffer from some sort of debilitating mental illness.  As I turn north to leave Bakril, I notice something... odd.   When cleaning up the sprite for this tree trunk, someone left a single bright-green dot on the upper left corner of the transparent section. At a range I thought it was intended to be a firefly or something, but up close it's clearly just a bright green pixel.     Reaching the northeasternmost area before turning west for Ganath, we spy the majestic cube of Nathby across the river. We won't get to go there, though, because despite it being barely five minutes off our path, William declares that it's too big a side trip. The same's the cast for Darvi on the western side of the zone, and Torlith in the last chapter. It feels somewhat immersion-breaking that they'll get that close before saying it's too far. My immersion would've benefited from those towns being shoved a bit back from the area borders or, hell, just loop it into the allowed zone in both chapters.  Just outside Nathby is this chest I can't open. I spent... 35 lockpicks, that's three and a half stacks of lockpicks, and Aren bounced off every single time, and that's with a ring to boost his lockpicking. I have no idea what's in here and I guess we'll never find out, completely mental difficulty on this thing.      If I'd been smart I would've ignored the Choth-Bakril road and just gone from Keth to Ganath to Bakril, because that road is way less densely packed with enemies, and more of them can be sidestepped. Either way, welcome to Ganath! It has two things.   A sword store with a new sword which, together with the Onyx Blade, isn't worth our time thanks to the Everedge. If we hadn't had that, though, I think the Malachian Bore would've been a good choice. It does about as much damage on a stab as the Broadsword and Onyx Blade do on a hack, and is insanely accurate with it at that. Toss a blessing on top and it would make you able to very reliably hit things. It does have a comparatively low Hardness, though, so you might find yourself unable to keep up with the repairs and needing to actually buy a new one before the end of this chapter, because chapter 6 has a lot of people and animals that need to die for our progress.  And a tavern featuring the dumbest motherfucker in Antara: Khorus Bale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VThW_MVnuxc Short version: This idiot is missing an eye because he burned it out with a super-spicy pepper just to make a point to someone, we need his approval to get hired on by a gang of mercenaries so we can maybe find this Kahleth guy who might have the Consort. Also you can't progress the game without trying to arm wrestle him twice, and the second time you must have chugged a Halder's Brew on William first. Even if you drink the Halder's Brew before the first attempt, you then still need to try twice, because the developers really did not consider any kind of edge case. Once he's been arm wrestled and exhausted for stories about his injuries, he'll finally tell us someone in Choth will now talk to us. Also on checking over things, I don't think any store in the Ghan region actually sells Halder's Brews, I found some on a dead enemy or in a locked chest somewhere, that was the only reason I had any. Is it actually possible to softlock your own dumb rear end here? Anyway, back on down to Choth...   A new NPC, Lokath, has materialized in front of the inn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cbhmYDghvE Short version: Lokath decides that, when two new members want to join his mercenary troops, he's going to force two old members to fight them to the death. This seems like a poor way to make a mercenary company function, but I guess he's the (new) boss!    Ha! Easy pea-   Uhhhhhhhhhhhh. The game did not take losing politely and decided to crash on me. This baffled me briefly, as my inventory had plenty of space. But then it turned out that the game was trying to force some rations into my inventory, and my rations/gold pack was completely full up. This bug can also set you back quite a bit, because the game autosaves before every fight, but if you reload that save for this one...  Lokath has dematerialized and no longer exists! Thankfully I had a quicksave just before the fight, so I reload, toss some food into a ditch, do the fight again and...    There we go! Now we can return to Imazi! Skipping ahead...    We see Pianda for the first time in a long while. Strangely, Aren's dad's dialogue hasn't updated, he apparently hasn't heard that his son is now a wanted criminal and that a member of the Antaran royal family has been kidnapped, or just doesn't think them worth mentioning. We can still rest here for free to advance Aren's magical scholarship, though, but I decide not to exploit that for all its worth, because A) I'm a gamer of honour and B) frankly I think we've already learned every spell of any value.    At first glance, Imazi looks much like it always was. Let's check in with some of the locals we met before, like... the guy who wanted Gersson, Garsson, whatshisface, to send his kid off to get an education and some political connections.     I'm genuinely not sure what happens if we never help Brunia, whether this entire subplot is just excised and we skip right on to the next part, or whether Brunia is just assumed to have gotten his stuff back anyway.   Yup, drums of war a-beating.    "Oh, the local noble raped my daughter, but I'm still on the fence about hanging him. I'm sure she'll get over it." What an rear end.  Once we talk to him, though, she suddenly exists outside his front door.    The best I can say for this exchange is that they're trying. Now, I wonder what an abused young woman would like...   Welp, not a bribe, let's reload that one. How about...    You go get him, girl. Garsson's in the poo poo now. I don't even care about the money she gives us, I just wanted to give her the option to carve him a new rear end in a top hat. Now let's see what sort of vicious siege they've got Garsson's estate under!   They've got one guy with a tactical bandana and he's dug a hole. Excellent. Truly we're making progress. Sadly this is also our contact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN5bB0eLyaU Short version: Mercenary man accepts his new lunch, doesn't believe we're useful for anything, and sends us back to Lokath for more information. At this point I'm a bit confused since everything I can find suggests that things are supposed to unfold differently and this guy is actually supposed to send us off on another quest.  ...I'll take a break and figure out what's going on later. Maybe it's another Brunia thing where I just need to find the right way to interact with him or I accepted some dialogue options in the wrong order or something. Next time: We probably finish chapter 6.
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Mar 9, 2022 01:58
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I've reached the tipping point here where I'm starting to genuinely enjoy how immensely stupid this entire setting is. Yeah, everyone is completely wackadoo and most of them are arseholes on top of being crazy, might as well just roll with it and encourage them.
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Mar 9, 2022 11:22
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Maybe there is fantasy lead poisoning in the water sources. That'd explain a good bit
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Mar 9, 2022 13:11
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Wasn't a lot of drinking vessels made out of lead back in the day? Mostly because of its ability to deal with germs, and then the poisoning was just a slight side effect. Or maybe that thing mostly went away after the romans disappeared since I think they were the ones who did it the most.
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Mar 9, 2022 13:13
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Cooked Auto posted:Wasn't a lot of drinking vessels made out of lead back in the day? Mostly because of its ability to deal with germs, and then the poisoning was just a slight side effect. I don't think they had enough germ theory to consider that part, I think it was just that it was soft and easily shaped, plus if I remember right a small amount of lead adds a bit of sweet taste, so it might've been perceived as improving the flavour. Black Robe posted:I've reached the tipping point here where I'm starting to genuinely enjoy how immensely stupid this entire setting is. Yeah, everyone is completely wackadoo and most of them are arseholes on top of being crazy, might as well just roll with it and encourage them. And yeah, if you forget that it's trying to be serious, and imagine that Gersson is cowering in fear inside his mansion because one guy outside is glaring at him through his windows while digging a hole, it becomes pretty funny.
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Mar 9, 2022 14:52
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PurpleXVI posted:I don't think they had enough germ theory to consider that part, I think it was just that it was soft and easily shaped, plus if I remember right a small amount of lead adds a bit of sweet taste, so it might've been perceived as improving the flavour. Looking it up I was probably off a bit but it does have a lower melting temperature which was preferable. Even then romans in particular got exposed to a lot of lead in their society. Should add you're not wrong with that last part, as per wiki: quote:Writers of the time, such as Cato the Elder, Columella, and Pliny the Elder, recommended lead (or lead-coated) vessels for the preparation of sweeteners and preservatives added to wine and food. The lead conferred an agreeable taste due to the formation of "sugar of lead" (lead(II) acetate), whereas copper or bronze vessels could impart a bitter flavor through verdigris formation.
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Mar 9, 2022 15:03
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 18:31 |
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Cooked Auto posted:Wasn't a lot of drinking vessels made out of lead back in the day? Mostly because of its ability to deal with germs, and then the poisoning was just a slight side effect. Romans didn't get lead poisoning from lead plumbing because they (deliberately) let the water flow in them long enough to form a mineral deposit on every surface, presumably after witnessing the effects of heavy metal poisoning on their metalworkers. Water vessels are another matter I suppose. (I actually have a tea strainer a pair of centuries old, given by my grandmother, with explicit instuctions to never use it because vert de gris froms on it and that's not good, so it didn't go entirely away.) I believe the chief use of lead in physical contact with bioavailability in daily life was, instead, for cosmetics. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Mar 9, 2022 |
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Mar 9, 2022 16:02
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