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I'm only halfway through this LP so far, but I wanted to share my favourite line so far, from our noble OP himself:quote:as someone from Scandinavia, I'm perfectly well-used to fish-based war crimes Makes me feel better about the slightly disappointing sausage rolls that I had for breakfast.
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Mar 13, 2022 04:24
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JustJeff88 posted:Makes me feel better about the slightly disappointing sausage rolls that I had for breakfast. Ask me about "Hakarl" and why its existence is a perfectly reasonable argument for all of us being dead and in hell.
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Mar 13, 2022 11:22
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PurpleXVI posted:Ask me about "Hakarl" and why its existence is a perfectly reasonable argument for all of us being dead and in hell. look, piss fetishists have to eat too
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Mar 13, 2022 12:06
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Update 16: Computer Controlled  We return to the action in Imazi where I realize that Lokath back in Choth didn't just shove some spare rations into my inventory and crash my game, he also provided me with a quest item that I completely missed.   Let's give that one to Birge and see what happens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTYmdXSLyOU So what strikes me most about this conversation is that Lord Gersson, who is presumably the officially sanctioned ruler of the region, has already tipped off the authorities that he's under siege. So what's going to happen when the peasants and mercenaries hang him from a lamp post? Is William's dad just going to accept that the peasants are in charge now? This usually is not how things go when there are peasant rebellions, either they gotta hang every noble or they get hung in return. ANYWAY. We need some holes dug. Let's get some hules dug. Who do we know that's good at digging?   The Montari down on the south coast, obviously. On the way, nothing much happens, but Aren researches a couple new spells I'll never use.  Rachel's Song is a theoretically great spell except for the part where it only works in melee and is thus terrible and bad.  I can either do 1 damage to every enemy in melee contact with Aren, which would probably be like... twelve points of damage total over the course of the battle, max. OR he could cast Swarm and do 120 damage split between the targets in contact with him, which is a lot more than twelve! And also loving kills some enemies very dead most likely. Hell he could beat the poo poo out of someone with his staff and that would still do more damage than Choking Cloud would do over an entire battle!     I stop by Ligano on the way and it's this guy again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLY-DSRV5jo Scott is very unfazed by us being wanted for a capital crime. It's cool, it's not like guards or authorities or anything ever give a poo poo except for that like... one time in that one town where they tried to stab us and then gave up.   We're on the coast pretty soon and... it's kind of weird how, while in chapters 1 through 5, any areas we return to usually have some sort of updates happen to them, even if it's just a house or two. But here in chapter 6, nothing in Pianda except for Imazi seems to be updated at all.      There isn't even a single new Maslith in the tunnels up to Chee, and I don't think we ever see another enemy Montari. It's also kind of weird that... I got the impression from Birge that they wanted the Montari to tunnel under the walls, but Chee is talking about tunnelling under the moat which... doesn't actually block access to the front door of Gersson's estate, only the back way around. Aaaanyway, back to Birge! Try not to collapse under this pulse-pounding action.     So now we're going back to Lokath in Choth... also along the way I'm hunting around a lot for that wine for Lord Dakka that got stolen from the innkeeper. FAQs suggest it should be along the route from Briala to Bakril, but I feel like I killed every mercenary and pirate along the way without finding anything. I guess we won't see how that sidequest ends.    Didn't even clean up any of the corpses, very classy Lokath, or did you have some more new recruits gut your old hands like fish? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDyB11tiTj0 I'm moderately amused by Lokath struggling with Birge's use of long words. It makes me imagine Birge is some out-of-work guy with a degree who's only doing mercenary work because no one's looking for someone with a Master's in Applied Vell Studies, and he's peppering his reports with five-dollar words and poor Lokath just knows SWORD and FOOD and can't follow along. Anyway, you might've noticed a few tents in the back of Choth the other times we've been there, now we can actually go to them without getting told to gently caress off.     I feel like what this game is missing is a way to shortcircuit situations like this. Either an option to go along with Lokath and etc. or just drawing steel and cutting our way in through hard combat encounters. Similarly with the thing in Imazi, imagine if we actually helped deal with Gersson rather than just leaving, and depending on how much help we gave the mercenaries, Brunia and the peasants, there'd be more or less of Gersson's troops hanging around. But no, we gotta go through every loving hoop every loving time and then we just loving leave. Anyway, Kahleth.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4__rgRUBMQ4 Oh drat good thing we proved ourself enough that we can be trusted to deliver a handful of bottles.  Delicious bottles. Anyway, to get to where Kahleth wants us, we start by going back to Torlith.    Then you face down the road of destruction, trying not to vibrate out of reality and turn left to where we talked to those Grrrlf for no reason a while back.    Where a few mercenaries are hanging out. I think what's worth noting here is that the mercenaries locked up their important hostage in a place where they couldn't get to him without magic potions. Like why not just lock a loving door. Or keep him in a cave. What happens if you run out of magic potions? Or your supplier has a heart attack? Or gets cut in half by idiot adventurers? Or has his soul stolen by wraiths? Your hostage is now hanging out in a cabin in the swamp, starving. Whatever, let's give them the swamp potions.     Potions drunk, time to swamp for like five seconds.   For that matter, what if their hostage could, you know, loving swim five meters or some such poo poo? I mean it's a swamp, not magma. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTOTB0Vi0zM Short version: The Consort has been drugged, so Aren scares off the mercenaries with the most goofy-rear end expression I've yet to see, then he and William un-drug the Consort and haul him off to safety. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yu-lDziMyQ Short version: Raal and Kaelyn leave Kaelyn's father, with Kaelyn receiving a charm from her dad after he tries to excuse not telling her the truth about her mother for decades. I will note this is the only thing that happens in this cutscene.  We're now dumped unceremoniously into the Ridgewood as Kaelyn and Raal, with our world map objective being "Join William and Aren."  This thing actually has an unlisted effect of granting +5 Defense. Frankly I thought it would just be an annoying quest item clogging up my inventory, but it actually does something! Now, I want to repeat: the cutscene above tells us nothing, and we have access to the entire rectangle of area from Grandeur to south of Isten. So where the hell are a woman and a dog to go? Thankfully, I, being a genius, refer to a guide, because I don't intend to bumble around in the woods for five hours shooting arrows at fire wolves before tripping over the arbitrary trigger that progresses the plot, and it turns out our next location is Grandeur, which is a bit odd since it's pretty out of the way for William and Aren. Or, at least, I assume it is, because we also don't know where they're heading! I'm assuming they intend to bring the consort back to Antara(the city, as opposed to the empire), but for all I know they might well have brought him to Briala for some home cooking or something.  Now, the other problem with this chapter, aside from the lack of guidance, or not even guidance, but in fact even the absence of hints at what guidance might theoretically be, is the combat. Because we're back to Kaelyn and Raal.    Which means every fight consists of the highly advanced strategy of "drink relevant boosters in inventory, hit nearest thing until it dies, rinse and repeat," unless there's a mage in which case hitting it first is more important. So I do, once again, the extremely clever thing.  I flip on the AI controls and read a book, deciding to re-read The Disaster Artist since I don't have anything new to hand. Any recommendations? Because just completing this update I managed to read 75% of the way through that one, so I'm going to be eating through a lot of books completing this LP. It's also worth noting that friendlies on AI seem to function pretty much exactly like hostile AI, which means that they can't focus fire for poo poo, and the two idiots managed to get themselves killed a couple of times by trivial encounters.   Outside of Grandeur, we run into Naku again. Let's hope he wasn't the one who ratted out William and Aren three chapters ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQiIq-A5WeA Naku delivers a letter and, sadly, Raal talks him out of joining the party, which sucks. We should've totally have brought along the bird! Just imagine him kicking enemies wide open like a loving Cassowary or some poo poo. Boo, bad Grrrlf.  The letter then promptly sends us in the immediately opposite direction. Welp, back to Darvi.   Also because the developers hate me, you can't actually just beeline to the inn, you have to head to the post office/book store first, because that makes perfect sense.   Thank you for telling us exactly what the letter already told us. Jackass.    I'm sure the innkeeper won't give us any static and will just tell us what we need to know. That's how this game works, right?   Well, at least he just wants a bribe.  Okay, he wants two bribes.   Oh, cool. They don't tell us a loving thing. Thankfully a bit of logic will solve this. They went west from Ghan, they're not in Grandeur or Darvi, so if we assume William and Aren have not developed any superpowers since we last saw them, they can only have gone through Durst and Friole unless they scaled the mountains to the south.   These fellas along the way die while I read about Tommy Wiseau trying to stiff his movie crew on their wages. What an rear end.    There's literally nothing new in Friole, so we skip straight to Durst, where most of the town's homes are shut and don't have anyone who want to talk to us. How about the helpful mercenary guy, though?      Alright, making progress! Now we know Aren and William passed through. Let's go to the church instead of doing anything about the forest fire thing, though, because Jhana has some stuff to say to us. It's also worth noting that Kaelyn and Raal apparently know about a forest fire that they have yet to see or hear mentioned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWHaDEQ0EGo Short version: Jhana tells us that the forest fire is raging(but not exactly where, it's to the west, though), and someone is trapped in it, and we need to bring a shovel and Senwater to deal with it. Also they didn't bother to change her goodbye dialogue, so after all of the "oh no the fire is about to kill someone! how tragic!" she sings a song of the kind you'd get kids to sing in kindergarten or something. This lady is on some heavy poo poo. Oh and she makes us temporarily fireproof.     Here we go, there's the lady guarding her tree.  Nice loving sprites, Christ. These look awful. Now let's talk to this lady, then toss her a shovel, then toss her a bunch of healing holy water.    I gotta say, though, the whole Senwater thing feels so weird. Like, what you've got is a miracle. A literal loving miracle that bubbles out of the ground somewhere, and it feels like it's treated with the same reverence as an industrial solvent or something. Like it's just another tool. It felt a bit less weird with the Restoratives in Krondor because they were just something you made in a cauldron or beaker from a bunch of herbs and stuff, but as far as I can tell, Senwater is just naturally occurring, completely unvinvolved with the works of men or other sapients.  Like here they're literally filling a loving moat with it to save a tree that has sentimental value, when that same volume of Senwater could probably cure like, a dozen crippled people or something. Whatever, let's go back to Jhana and get some sort of reward.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cpwiITxDJA Short version: Jhana goes "yaaay how great that you did a thing" and then BZORP we get a magical +3 to all of the characters' skills. Sadly not to any of the really important stuff like strength, health, stamina, etc. but I guess it's an okay reward. We can now finally never see Durst again. I make the wild assumption that Aren and William continued west and follow the road.    Oh, yeah, there was a bridge and a river there, wasn't there?   Oh no! Someone's cluttered up the bridge with a bunch of crusty jpegs! However shall we get across? In a rarity for Antara, there are actually three different ways across this, though one of them feels unintended and is probably down to someone missing an interaction. For now, though, let's head north, we know there's another way over the river up north of Eastbank/west of Grandeur.    We reach Camille first, though, and it's got some updates.     You might think this is related to a subquest where we can help this poor guy out, but it's just some scene-setting.      This is a good question. Why are the authorities just allowing mercenaries and bandits to roam all over the place? At least in Krondor we had the excuse that they were largely aiming for our party, and thus not ambushing everyone in sight or burning down infrastructure, but here they're damaging important poo poo like bridges and barges, and until chapter 4 they don't really have a reason to be aiming for us more than anyone else.      So this is our first and, in my opinion, clearly the intended way to get across the river, by hooking up this girl with a wizard so he'll magic up a crossing for us. The second is that if we go up north, there are more bandits, but we can pay our way through them(I don't think fighting is an option). Lastly, the "fast" travel carriage will just completely ignore the logistical issues and will allow us to skip, at the very least, over to Isten.  I'm 99% sure it's unintended and don't want to accidentally break anything more than what's already broken, however, and also the fast travel prices are insanely high.   Now we'll be hopping back and forth between Camille and Eastbank a couple of times.     I buy some cheese because this guy does provide some useful info and seems to be on hard times. Thanks to him for telling us about the blockade to the north. Across from his house...       Let's go back and serenade her for him. Got it. I'm sure Kaelyn can own that.      "This lady has terrible taste, there's no way he can be too bad for her."     There we go, secured a way across that doesn't involve us having to bribe our way through any bandits or exploit game mechanics.      And he didn't screw us over or anything. What a nice guy.   ... ... ... Son of a bitch, more bandits already. I'm going to hold it here until I can come back with a fresh book. Maybe I should read the First Law trilogy again. Next time: More autocombat, possibly plot advancement? Maybe some idiotic stuff happens.
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Mar 14, 2022 14:42
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm going to hold it here until I can come back with a fresh book. Maybe I should read the First Law trilogy again. I can recommend the sequel trilogy too, the Age of Madness, if you haven't got around to it yet.
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Mar 14, 2022 20:40
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Black Robe posted:I can recommend the sequel trilogy too, the Age of Madness, if you haven't got around to it yet. Grabbed every book practically the day they were out! I don't think there's an Abercrombie book I haven't read.
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Mar 14, 2022 20:48
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Thanks for your sacrifice. If it wasn't for this LP, I'd def try the game again at some point.
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Mar 14, 2022 22:27
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If you need some light reading for the next autobattles, I would recommend Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, which is about the Theranos mess, also the entirety of what Arturo Perez-Reverte has written, in particular the Captain Alatriste novels.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:20
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SIGSEGV posted:If you need some light reading for the next autobattles, I would recommend Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, which is about the Theranos mess, also the entirety of what Arturo Perez-Reverte has written, in particular the Captain Alatriste novels. Bad Blood sounds like an interesting read, I do love some entertainingly-written non-fiction. What's the elevator pitch for the Captain Alatriste stuff?
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Mar 15, 2022 18:26
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I'm just gonna recommend The Locked Tomb series until someone tells me to stop. Haven't read anything that fun and enjoyable for a while.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:33
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The adventures of an unemployed soldier in Philip IV's Madrid, the inquisition is doing its thing, the empire is in decline and the schemes and messes from above tend to roll down the slope and cause trouble, also, rent has to be paid. I like that Perez-Reverte uses first person narration to really make the past a foreign place, with foreign ideas and behaviors.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:34
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Cooked Auto posted:I'm just gonna recommend The Locked Tomb series until someone tells me to stop. Too late, I'm already desperately clinging on to sanity while waiting for the next book. SIGSEGV posted:The adventures of an unemployed soldier in Philip IV's Madrid, the inquisition is doing its thing, the empire is in decline and the schemes and messes from above tend to roll down the slope and cause trouble, also, rent has to be paid. I like that Perez-Reverte uses first person narration to really make the past a foreign place, with foreign ideas and behaviors. I find it... harder to get into historical narratives unless they're very blatantly fictional, like the Count of Monte Cristo, and not afraid to just add in completely new poo poo that never existed and get a bit ahistorical at times. What kind of tack do these books take with that?
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Mar 15, 2022 18:46
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Fundamentally they are swashbuckling novels, historical reality is there but the novels are such that you don't need to care for it or know any of it, it's just that such drunken poet getting in a duel or such idiot king actually existed, such as Fransico de Quevedo who, however, did not, as far as I know, assault a nunnery in a bid to rescue a young lady from the clutches of some plot or other. And both the books and history are somewhat unkind to poor Philip IV, because he was not very good at his job.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:55
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PurpleXVI posted:Too late, I'm already desperately clinging on to sanity while waiting for the next book. Welcome to the club.  Justina Robson's Quantum Gravity series was a pretty fun read too. 16 Ways to defend a Walled City is good as well. Been meaning to pick up the sequel at some point.
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Mar 15, 2022 19:04
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Oh man, so I have some wild news. Antara has nine chapters and in the next update, we reach chapter 8 and... get this... the plot actually advances! Holy poo poo!
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Mar 15, 2022 19:11
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sounds fake I bet we just buy more cheese from some dribbler
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Mar 15, 2022 19:36
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PurpleXVI posted:I find it... harder to get into historical narratives unless they're very blatantly fictional, like the Count of Monte Cristo, and not afraid to just add in completely new poo poo that never existed and get a bit ahistorical at times. What kind of tack do these books take with that? The Three Musketeers' depressed Spanish cousin. Broadly speaking, history happens as it does and there are real people around, but Alatriste is among them in a "just off-screen" way - almost literally in one book where Alatriste returns to service in the tercios (and most importantly get out of Madrid because he's on some powerful people's radars), and he's mentioned as having supposed to be in the painting Surrender at Breda but is turned away so you can't see his face. The events of his life could have happened in the interstices of history. Perez-Reverte purportedly started the series to dig in to a period that was largely glossed over as a generic good time for Spain in his daughter's classes.
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Mar 15, 2022 20:05
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disposablewords posted:The Three Musketeers' depressed Spanish cousin.
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Mar 15, 2022 20:25
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The Johannes Cabal series is always good for some time killing. The gist of it is a necromancer is trying to get his soul back from Satan and has to steal 100 souls using a carnival. It's absolutely hilarious. Edit: excited for plot happening, I lost it again. Have we saved the consort yet or not? Phone reading makes it hard to tell sometimes and I keep forgetting to go back and reread on desktop.
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Mar 15, 2022 20:47
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Guildenstern Mother posted:The Johannes Cabal series is always good for some time killing. The gist of it is a necromancer is trying to get his soul back from Satan and has to steal 100 souls using a carnival. It's absolutely hilarious. Aren and William have sort-of saved the consort, which is to say that they'll have saved him if they manage to stay just ahead of a pack of mercenaries trying to kill them, which they're so far doing pretty well at. Meanwhile Kaelyn and Raal are trying and failing to keep up with them. Once we catch up, though, we'll see how their whole consort-saving shenanigans are going.
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Mar 15, 2022 21:22
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If you haven't read The Three Musketeers, Purple, in any language you are missing out. D'Artagnan has such a good character arc, and the main villain is to hateable. I'm re-reading a translation of the last book from Forgotten Realms based on the Time of Troubles, after three of the main characters are deified. It's my favourite of the five, easily.
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Mar 15, 2022 21:22
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Guildenstern Mother posted:The Johannes Cabal series is always good for some time killing. The gist of it is a necromancer is trying to get his soul back from Satan and has to steal 100 souls using a carnival. It's absolutely hilarious.
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Mar 15, 2022 21:31
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Xander77 posted:Goddamn, I hated this book so much. Totally unfunny, pure rear end in a top hat characters, and even the basic conceit - stealing souls has to be complicated - is thrown away instantly with "oh, just get people to sign any paper, they don't have to be actually told they're selling their souls". Man, this is what I hated about Needful Things. A story about people signing away their souls is only interesting if the soul stealer has to technically tell the truth. If they can just loving lie, the entire interesting part goes away.
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Mar 15, 2022 21:41
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I don't remember details, but a friend lent me that book 10+ years ago. I didn't care for it, but I couldn't tell you why.
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Mar 15, 2022 22:10
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I didn't mind it so much since the whole soul getting thing was just there to hang a moral crisis on and for various characters to do whatever the literary equivalent of scenery chewing is with it. It would be like being mad the that the train was running at an unrealistic schedule.
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Mar 16, 2022 02:57
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Guildenstern Mother posted:It would be like being mad the that the train was running at an unrealistic schedule. to be fair I've been mad at books for train schedules before. Train schedules have rules, magic doesn't
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Mar 16, 2022 09:28
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It's a magic train anyway so even that's moot
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Mar 19, 2022 19:29
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Update 17: Molotov Cocktails?! Welcome back to Kaelyn and Raal's amazing automated adventures where we helped a wizard get laid so he'd let us walk across a stream so we could get into more goddamn automated fights.   I went with Stephen King's Tommyknockers, I know he's not everyone's cup of tea and lord knows I have my critiques of him, but I think he's pretty good at the "creepy small-town vignettes"-bit that the middle of the book leans hard into. Mostly as long as you skip over Gard's entire early-book solo adventure in being a drunk and a ranting fuckup, the rest of the book is largely solid.     After they robotically hack a few morons to bits in the woods, Kaelyn and Raal emerge into Everton where they sell the morons' shirts, buy more healing mineral water and chat up the locals.     I do genuinely appreciate that when we do return somewhere later, we can often see the results of our actions. This was a thing Krondor didn't have an awful lot of, few characters had updates to their story later on which were related to what we did or did not do, except as was story-mandated, i.e. Ugyne getting all hosed up about her family.      This precocious girl does at least offer us a hint as to where to go next, but I'm taking a detour first since I know that in order not to waste my time, I need a stock of oil. Plus dousing Kaelyn's sword in oil and setting it on fire is one of the few ways I can increase the current party's damage output when they inevitably have to mindlessly smash through some bandits.    I make a brief detour to Teal to pick up Kaelyn some stacks of Enchanted Arrows. I'm still trying to figure out how enemies do the insane damage they do with bows, I think something's bugged about the "double arrow" thing the Speed Bow does, because it absolutely doesn't seem to even approach doubling damage over a Grrrlf Bow, and at the same time I think arrows aren't protected against by armor like melee attacks are.    The detour also involves a carriage ride to Isten for the oil.   Now we can go find Aren and William. I'm sure they haven't gotten themselves into trouble.    For some reason, the road from Isten down to the "mountain" pass is crawling with Masliths, and I just cannot be hosed to fight something that doesn't drop money for me, hence the party's crawling through the boulder fields rather than following the road.   Oh, they're having a nice rest break with the Consort! Very kind of them to wait for us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijmhdYG4TC0 Short version: William and Aren insist that they're "pinned down" in their "hidey hole"(the open road) by mercenaries which, if we turn 90 degrees to the right, turn out to be three loosely dispersed group of idiots that William and Aren could reasonably murder in about as much time as it takes me to read another chapter of Tommyknockers.  Instead of doing that, though, Raal teaches Kaelyn how to make molotov cocktails. Sadly we can't use these in combat, and I don't think we could make them before this point. Being able to pelt enemies with burning oil flasks would've certainly spiced combat the gently caress up, though.   The three enemy groups have no aggro radius and we can, in fact, walk up and fight them.  Each fight is just a trio of mercs, but, sadly, even if we kill them all, they don't disappear from the overworld, nor do they produce any bodies for us to loot. What a sham.    Instead, tossing a flask at them makes them vanish from the world map, hence we need three flasks to continue. I feel it would've been more interesting if you got the choice between burning a rare resource or burning "limited" resources like Senwater(assuming you couldn't just pick it up in every drat town by the cartload) by going through combat to clear it. But there I go again, daydreaming about meaningful player choice. The first two groups provide the same dialogue, but the third one...    Magically teleports Aren, William and the Consort to Antara! Let's cruise down and say hi.     Korus Landing has gotten a small amount of fresh dialogue it didn't have before if we revisit the chatty shopkeeper.      Someone's in a good mood after selling overpriced cheese to the local noble. I also get the feeling it wouldn't be the first time Raal would have had to pick a stone-drunk Kaelyn out of a body of water.     There are absolutely no noteworthy encounters on the way down there, I even think the only one we can't casually dodge is a pack of Masliths, but we could also get into a fight with some Shepherds if we wanted to, but I have really had enough of those racist hicks for the rest of my playthrough. As we approach the gates, however, we get a conversation between Kaelyn and Raal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPSyRQXtP0 Short version: Raal goes "welp, my point in the plot is done, lol, laterz" and peaces out simply because we're about to get Aren and William back. I wish I could say I'm sad to see him gently caress off, but I'm really not, thank God that I'll be getting some useful characters back instead.  Like with Kaelyn's departure in chapter 4's intro, we get a chance to reorganize his inventory into Kaelyn's but... it's bugged in the way that if you actually go look at Kaelyn's inventory, you can't navigate back to his, and thus lose any chance to collect any of his stuff. Not like he had anything I wanted except maybe some spare Senwater, but whatever, he can have that for the trip home as we take another step forward and embrace a lot of cutscenery. Like a decent bit. Strap in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDnIlC43usM Short version: Aren complains that they aren't being invited inside with a red carpet and an honour guard. William, and in fact everyone else, points out that this is because the party, as it is, consists of convicted terrorists who've blown up infrastructure, killed cops, possibly kidnapped a member of the royal family, helped organize a peasant rebellion against a local noble and left a trail of corpses like they're a small army. Then we get the chapter transition... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMXNon455uw Short version: We're cut very rapidly from "the party is being interrogated" to "the party is being presented to the Emperor in honour." Oh and then I guess it turns out we played into the bad guys' hands all along and the Consort was actually just a vessel to bring a Wraith into the presence of the Emperor so it could attempt to eat his soul. It got his daughter instead, though, thanks to the work of the imperial mage team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14aksTFIKZ4 Short version: Since we're now persons of interest again, imperial mages spend their time raking through the party's brains. Then, rather than sending in a hefty squad of imperial guards and Kaelyn's dad to put Wraithslayer enchantments on all their gear, the party just gets dumped in the farthest corner of the world map to bumble around looking for some sort of evidence as to who just tried to turn the Emperor into a soulless husk. lol, I swear they didn't even really try to make up any kind of tangible excuse why the party has to do this rather than the military, except "well you killed a wraith or two before, good luck!"   Welcome to Januli, the last Antaran province! It's even weirder that we're sort of teleported into the middle of the province rather than, say, dropped off at the border, like, Nathby or something. And about the only reason we're here is because "Gregor came from here." Whatever, the game put us here, so there must be plot advancement here, let's poke around Breland.      It has an inn, an archery store with nothing new, and a pharmacist that'll sell the drugs(and, notably, also Fidali Leaves which we haven't seen since chapter 1) which are the only thing keeping the party on their feet. Maybe the locals here know something about a weird conspiracy.      Hm, looks like something's up. Let's check the remaining houses.   Yeah, looks like they're having trouble, we probably shouldn't loiter too much before doing something about this.        Nahhhh, we can spend the afternoon learning magic tricks from some old dude. It's pointless at this point, I'll note, Aren has learned every spell in the game already, which means that the last ~30 points or so in each magic type is pointless since they don't unlock any more spells or add power boosts to existing spells.  Last guy in town is just a sourpuss. Anyway, let's run off into the nearby woods and kill something, then come back.     A lone Trerang! Engage!    Hell yeah, we're heroes. Apparently. Because even though this monkey apparently stole a kid after trashing someone's house, we then kill the monkey and... there's no dialogue. There's no "A BABY" item on its corpse or in a chest nearby or anything. It flips a flag somewhere so every house in the town now has new dialogue, though, which is what's important!   Peace and love has returned to Breland.    ...maybe we're not such good guys. As far as I can tell there's no peaceful way to resolve this or anything, you can just murder a monkey and make a dude sad, that's it.  But we get a shiny thing for it! Hooray! ... ... ... There are no jewelry stores anywhere in Chapter 8. Off to Knightridge!    Along the way are the requisite bandits and some new enemies, dogs!  I'm sorry, Karns, which are dogs. Their only notable ability is that they have a completely absurd defense rating which prevents Kaelyn from landing any consistent hits and drags out the fights. Their ability to do any damage in turn is completely negligible.     I'm sure these dead guys were part of the conspiracy against the Emperor somehow. Hell, since we're here on his authority, could we just kill and rob anyone we don't like the face of and say we've got an Imperial license to kill?  Anyway, uh, Knightridge! It sells swords!    This'll let Kaelyn deal some decent damage until I find her something better, even though it's not particularly accurate. It also feels a bit silly that this extremely... un-dynamic pose they chose prevents them from making a "Greatsword" actually bigger than, say, a generic longsword or broadsword. If they had something more like the Ultimate 7: Serpent Isle paper dolls, they could really upsize the bigger weapons and such. ... Serpent Isle was released four loving years before Betrayal in Antara. I loving swear to God. Also note that I finally realized I had to actually put the defensive charm on Kaelyn for it to have an effect. I am a good videogame player person. There's also a tavern that's part of advancing the plot, let's talk to the guy behind the counter.   Not quite the lead I was expecting at this late stage, a tieback to the very first minute or so of the game, but I'll take it. Time to hassle the locals.          Random side story about a short guy becoming a toymaker and finding true love along the way. Not a clue, but sure.      What is it with this game and artists, anyway? It feels like it consistently depicts them as pretentious post-modern fuckfaces. Whatever, he gave us a name, who turns out to be his neighbour.      Hmmm, Lord Sheffield's court mage brought the magical mutant away? The same Lord Sheffield who's William's father in law? That's not suspicious in any way. That also completely taps out Knightridge for content, it only exists to sell us a nice sword(nicer if we didn't know Everedges exist) and tell us Lord Sheffield is not a side character as we might well have assumed all along. Let's head south to Beluckre.    Januli is comparatively low on encounters compared to the rest of Antara, I'd say it even has less than the core imperial province of Ticoro, mostly wild animals(lots of Trerangs and Karns), rather than actual bandits and mercenaries.    Beluckre has a lot of weirdos around.     It has a single general store whose main useful thing is that it sells Oil, don't mind the guy in blue on the shop screen, we can't interact with him yet.        Like with the lord in Isten, we can get something out of this guy if we just mash our faces against the RNG wheel over and over. Each roll requires 300 Burlas, though, so if our gambling skill is sufficiently low, it could be real expensive.  At this point Aren is actually quite good at gambling, so it doesn't take very long to get him this boost to his magic that he doesn't need. He might actually occasionally hit someone with fireballs now, though!     So in the penultimate chapter, we finally find an NPC that would make magic staves worth keeping around. I still don't understand why Antara decided that repair NPC's were such a super-rare thing that needed to be kept away from the player, in Krondor, though you rarely needed it, every second weapons/armor store had a second interactible location for paying for repairs.       I thought this might've been the first NPC we came across in town, but as far as I can tell this doesn't lead to any side content you can interact with.   Oh and Beluckre also has a brothel. Once again, we can't interact with it yet, but sadly we will eventually have to.   The inn is also notable for having an exciting new item for sale. I am sorry to say that we will need one of these to complete the game. Still, Beluckre is a place we'll be returning to shortly, but for now we're heading on to Nathby, the grand cube at the south of Januli.     Lots of dead dogs on the road, but no fights on the way to Nathby worth mentioning.    We haven't seen a city this big in terms of locations before, so this is kind of exciting. Spoiler: It's not actually exciting.  For one thing, three of the locations here are actually inns.   The stores are remarkably lame.  Seriously, two of the inns are completely identical except for their inside screen. No NPC's, nothing.   What the gently caress is the point of this store? You can already sell your swords in Knightridge, which is two minutes away and gives you better prices anyway, and if you actually want anything this store sells wow are you in the absolute poo poo.  I actually ended up going to the docks last, but you're meant to go here before you go to the third inn(though you don't need to). Now, I want you to look at this screen, right? There's one thing or person to interact with here. Can you guess which person or object it is? It is of course the NPC that's hunched over, in brown, on a brown object, against a brown background, facing away from you so you barely even see any skin! I almost left without mouse-overing him and realizing he was interactible! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0n3MAokEyw Short version: This guy tells us a bit about himself, says he misses Gregor and then points us to the third inn to talk to the guy who can actually advance the plot.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_zwB744JTM Short version: Poul also misses Gregor, but tells us that Gregor's favourite prostitute in Beluckre might know more about him!    Back to the Brothel! And now there are more exciting interactions, for one thing something happens the instant we go in the door. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo7N5jrPvEw Short version: Aren is weirded out by being in a brothel, Kaelyn hassles William for being a playboy who takes advantage of women, William insists it's all consensual and Kaelyn, in a weird prudish twist, considers all sex to be transactional which is kind of an odd direction to take her character. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpcfWZhEwHE Short version: Business comes and goes. I saw what you did there, writers. Anyway, Misha tells us she could advance the plot, but she needs some cream for her various prostitution-related rashes before she'll help us. So now we need to go to the store next door and get her some cream. For her rashes.   Now the blue-shirted guy at the store has a purpose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdv40ajoeIw Short version: Sencream is made from lard(hence the fatty meat from the inn), senwater(holy water that can cure any injury or ailment should absolutely be used for anti-wrinkle cream) and fidali leaves. We have one, we can pick the other up next door, and the Fidali Leaves are for sale up in Breland. I'll do the clockwise loop down through Dumali and up to Breland because Dumali has a thing that's relevant to Breland.    This trip actually has a fight that's worth noting.  Four completely normal mercenaries, two of them archers, right? No big dealio. Just get Kaelyn to tackle one archer and the other should be able to only do negligible damage, while the melee mercenaries are too dumb to run over to Aren and swing their swords at him.  Just joking, one of the archers can do 50+ loving damage with a single arrow shot, what the gently caress, even our bulkiest PC in the entire game, Raal, only has about 120 total health, that's completely loving insane! This adds a slightly panicked edge to the fight as Kaelyn and William are now both needed to suppress the archers which, if the enemy AI wasn't dogshit moronic, could have produced an interesting tactical challenge where I might want to prioritize blinding or blasting the archers over boosting William and Kaelyn, but that might free up the enemy melee combatants to pile on Aren, etc.  Thanks to the aforementioned "moron AI," they don't exactly make an awful lot of headway and just end up dead face down in the dirt. On rooting through their corpses, I find that the archer is using fire arrows and a speed bow(for the double arrows), so my thinking is that while the speed bow doesn't double the base arrow damage, maybe it doubles the bonus damage on the fire arrows?   Dumali's a little seaside town, not an awful lot going on.    It does have a store selling magic stuff, including two boosting books that I buy for Aren because I haven't yet read the FAQ and realized that Aren no longer has any new spells to unlock.    I'm still kind of confused why they didn't bother to add anything for actually maxing out any of the magic skills.      This encounter is a bit weird since, first they call his donkey a burro, when everything else is in English. Secondly, would a medieval-world salt miner necessarily know a lot about how inland salt deposits are formed? I do like his description of the salt mines, though, they always sound like horribly inimical environments, but what I've seen looks kind of cool.     Also sounds like Lord Sheffield is having a hard time economically and Caverton, the generically evil noble we met back in Ticoro, is trying to take advantage of it. How generically evil of him. I'm sure that Caverton certainly is the game's generic villain.         Now, this is our one and only hint that this chapter has the one and only worthwhile use of a fishing rod in the entire game(very rarely you can get a few fish out of a river), but you can't acquire a fishing rod in chapter 8, so you'd have to have lugged one all since the start of the game, or at least since chapter 6(I don't think there are even any in chapter 7). Exciting! We'll see what that's about when get back to Breland for the Fidali Leaves. But first we have to poke around some bushes.    There's a single bead chest that's slightly well-hidden by various sprites, but is very much worth our time.  Because it contains the second Everedge in the game! Which goes to Kaelyn, it worsens her damage slightly(but not as much as you might expect, it should reduce her Hack-attack damage by about half, but the percentile damage reduction works weirdly, so it's not that bad) while improving her chance-to-hit by 20 percentage points, which she badly needs since she hasn't gotten as much pearl-boosted combat training as William and Aren. Now the only thing I'm missing is another suit of Montari Plate, but I was a moron and forgot that I had to bring a spare suit from Chapter 6. Still, it's not really a necessity.     I'm skipping the turn off to Havesly so far, since that really has more payoff if we resolve the bit with Misha first. There's a code chest at the intersection, though.   I thought that range of mountains was called the Glassrock Mountains, but no such luck. I had no luck figuring this one out. If you've been reading the dialogue in the game more closely than me and actually remember the answer, please post and tell me what cool poo poo I missed out on so I can forget about it immediately afterwards. I'm betting it's just a sandwich and some more holy water.    In the upper right of the Januli region is this little hole in the mountains containing a semi-hidden Church of Kor.     It has a little bit of lore, but the important thing is that we can bless up Kaelyn's Everedge, and also her plain suit of platemail just for what little advantage that yields.    Returning to Breland, it's time to get our fish on!    Get ready to see this, because I spent like 20 minutes not being able to find the right spot where to fish to get to the thing the Trkaa mentioned.  Eventually I give up and go buy the Fidali Leaves in Breland, but then decide to check a guide. I find one mention that I should fish "near the red flower."  Which I assume to be this thing on the right of the screen, the reason it's on the right of the screen is that as far as I can tell the right location is a good couple of steps to the left of it, which yields...  A unique shield! Tadaa! Amazing! Aside from it's Hardness, it has the best shield stats in the game. I still don't quite understand the shield mechanics, I think they block a flat percentage of attacks, but it definitely seems less than the listed protection percentage, so perhaps it plays into the wielder's melee or defense skill or some such.    Now, back to Marlon to get our cream. It's a short exchange, but I made it a video anyway because the way some of the lines got acted were weird enough to be noteworthy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPAmvZdQID8 Short version: Now we have some Sencream for Misha.   What a lovely and inviting description. I hope Misha appreciates the effectively zero work that got into acquiring this for her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzwVhheacXA Short version: Misha has a key for Gregor's home in Havesly, and she hands it over so we can go finally advance the plot a bit.   The only noteworthy thing on the way to Havesly is that someone goofed up and dropped a tree sprite in the middle of the road, which looks silly.    On the way in, on our left, is the Sheffield Estate which looks distinctly castle-like which... perhaps... Gersson's estate also should have? Might have helped sell it as needing a besiging to bust open. I bypass it for now because I, like a moron, assume that heading to the most important person in the area might advance the plot and I don't want to do that before I look the town over properly.   Likewise I bypass the inn and put aside Gregor's room until I'm done with the rest of the village. It is in fact super important not to go there yet(as I learned, from doing it), because it's actually inspecting Gregor's room that ends the chapter, so you can very easily accidentally shut yourself out from everything else in Havesly! For the purpose of this update, though, I made sure to go back to my quicksave and do all of the Havesly stuff, so you can all enjoy it.    The only store in Havesly is a store that just sells shields. It is magnificently pointless. Right next door to it is a moneylender sorta thing.       Good thing the proprietor is a loving moron who just hands over his client's records to William after only the flimsiest excuse, exposing his shady dealings.       A tailor tells us that we're all a bunch of ill-dressed losers and... frankly he's not wrong. The party does dress like dorks, I wish there was an option to buy Aren a nice shirt or something. I mean, all we're spending money on is holy water and swords. Is that really any way to live?      Now that this guy has told us about it, we can actually interact with that lighthouse in the distance behind his house.       As if we needed more hints about it, Lord Sheffield is up to something super shady... and also ordered Gregor loving killed. Oddly enough we can't confront Lord Sheffield about this even if we go to him after reading the note.         He did help out this poor lady, though, so maybe he's not all bad? Let's go hassle him.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blMIuhMyju0 Short version: Lord Sheffield is really no help at all. Anyway, since it's now blatantly obvious that Lord Sheffield is up to some Real Villain poo poo, this also makes it obvious how the game... "starts" wrong. Like imagine that the party starts out with no idea that there's a connection between Sheffield/Havesly and Gregor. First thing that happens is, rather than "we gotta get Aren some wizard learning!" is "drat, Aren, you're my only witness, come with me to my father in law, who knows Politics poo poo, and let's ask him about this assassination that almost killed me!" And then you have the first couple of chapters with Aren's magic wild firing, backfiring, clearly being a danger, as they make their way to Lord Sheffield... who appears to offer helpful advice but actually sends the party off on dangerous wild goose chases that risk getting them killed, but allow them to slowly gather evidence. Hell, perhaps it's even Sheffield who tells them they ought to go warn the Consort, which results in them flushing the Consort accidentally out of hiding and into the hands of whoever's hunting him. Along the way, Aren slowly learns enough tidbits from helpful wizards and experience to control his magic, which goes from a risky venture that might save the day, to some real archmage stuff. And then rather than having someone you met at a party once turn out to be one of the bad guys(obviously he has more of a connection than this for William, but not for the player!), you've got this guy who's been interacting with the party practically every chapter, whom they might be starting to suspect is at least incompetent, if not outright evil, suddenly turn out to be the King Dickhead, that might actually have some dramatic payoff. Anyway, let's go see what extremely blatant clues are in Gregor's room.      Oh thank God, he's one of those NPC's who keep a journal. Do any people, like any real people actually keep journals except if it's to keep track of certain data or for the purpose of showing off to others? I kept a dream journal once, but that was more or less because I like to see people's reactions when I share a really weird dream with them.  And for gently caress's sake they didn't even format it right. Why would they gently caress that up? For God's sake. Whatever. Enjoy the reading.       Oh dang, turns out Gregor was one of Caverton's agents sent here to undermine Sheffield, but instead it turned out that Gregor actually found evidence of Caverton supporting a racist death cult. I guess that explains why Gregor had to get dunked on. As soon as we leave the inn, however, we're plunged right into the end-of-chapter cutscene. Note the timestamp, the recorder also decided to keep in the entire bit with flipping through Gregor's diary, so I skipped past that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w93SWh3f_Qg&t=167s Short version: Just when we're about to go confront Lord Sheffield... uh, pirates show up and attack his castle instead? What? Oh God please don't let this actually have more than nine chapters. Please for the love of God. Next time: We fight... pirates? Hopefully finish the game? Please send help.
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Mar 19, 2022 20:13
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Fun fact: verdigris comes from the French term vert-de-gris, due to its greenish (vert)-gray (gris) colour. Also, I did laugh that Purple explicitly stated how many places sound typically British, then we come to a place called Everton which is letter-for-letter part of Liverpool, England. I'm hoping that there is a Kirkdale or Knott's Hole nearby too.  Purple, what are your thoughts on this game so far? I think that the writing is a bit better than BoK but BoK had a better plot. This game seems a touch better visually, but while BoK seemed janky in a cute way this game just seems annoyingly obtuse, mechanically as well as otherwise.
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Mar 20, 2022 00:12
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JustJeff88 posted:Purple, what are your thoughts on this game so far? I think that the writing is a bit better than BoK but BoK had a better plot. This game seems a touch better visually, but while BoK seemed janky in a cute way this game just seems annoyingly obtuse, mechanically as well as otherwise. My thoughts are that it's a bad game. The story tries to be more convoluted and "mature" than Krondor's, but this just makes it stand out more how the gameplay elements, like the free roaming, make it feel less serious, and I've repeatedly commented on why I'm not a big fan of it. The characters also have less big and loud personalities than the party members in Krondor, which makes them less memorable. Nor do they really seem to have much of a reason for doing... most of what they're doing. Aren just wanted to learn magic, why is he fighting Nazis now? Kaelyn has absolutely no reason to do anything with the party until the start of chapter 4, and even at the end of that, why doesn't she just stay home rather than going out again in chapter 7? This isn't her fight or her stakes, she has no interest once the Ridgewood is cleaned up. I've had running complaints about Antara's story, but there are just so many issues from characters to pacing to empty space, to the story technically not really getting to its feet until halfway or more through the game... Betrayal at Krondor had more challenging encounters and, bizarrely, better enemy AI, and generally more meaningful choices to make. Part of it being that without a guide you wouldn't necessarily have every spell, so you couldn't just count on passive "research" to always have the best ones. There's also more resource management since it's harder, if you don't really know the game and/or have a guide, to completely break the game economy in half, and having food as part of your conventional inventory forced you to make some choices about what to bring and what to leave behind, especially in the early and midgame. Do you bring something that'll rake in big bucks at the next store, or do you bring supplies that will help you survive until the next store? Basics like that. Betrayal at Krondor also had chest puzzles that were by and large based on completely normal and understandable puzzles, except when it used a few archaic words or the very occasional in-universe riddle that you had a chance of understanding anyway if you paid even the slightest attention. Also I absolutely loathe the Grrrlf and everything about them. I just don't know what it is, I just loving hate everything about their presentation and their species-particular speech impediments and neologisms. The way armor works means that if you don't really keep on top of weapon upgrades, you end up with very blade-spongey enemies that take forever to kill. I have no idea why the game can't just tell me what my final to-hit on an attack is, Krondor had no problems with that. And while Antara absolutely could handle more colours and detail than Krondor, it was supplemented by a really dull art style going for "realism" when it should instead have gone for slightly cartoonier broad strokes to be more easily legible and memorable.
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Mar 20, 2022 00:34
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You already had every spell at the start of chapter 8? Including lava sphere? I thought that required skill levels you couldn't reach in chapter 6. Mind you, lava sphere is pretty useless unless you've been making an effort to grind spell accuracy, but it's a pretty solid gently caress you when it hits.
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Mar 20, 2022 01:14
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Vanigo posted:You already had every spell at the start of chapter 8? Including lava sphere? I thought that required skill levels you couldn't reach in chapter 6. I don't want to spoil, so I will just say that according to the offficial strategy guide there are 48 spells in the game of which the above Lava Sphere is the most complex. I don't think that what's-his-name has the skills for it. Purple, any desire to post the spells known and current casting skills?
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Mar 20, 2022 03:33
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Vanigo posted:You already had every spell at the start of chapter 8? Including lava sphere? I thought that required skill levels you couldn't reach in chapter 6. Oh, you're right, Lava Sphere is the one spell I'm missing, though by virtue of being an explosive spell it's generally useful on the first round of combat and then not again unless you want to incinerate your own party members even on a successful hit.
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Mar 20, 2022 08:13
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If they had the Ultima 7: Serpent Isle paperdolls, the art would actually be more animated and lively, instead of standing straight and facing ahead like lifeless mannequins.
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Mar 20, 2022 10:51
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I FINISHED IT. I swear no one will believe how loving stupid this gets before the end.
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Mar 21, 2022 13:26
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oh boy 
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Mar 21, 2022 13:57
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PurpleXVI posted:I FINISHED IT. I will but only because I've finished it before and remember all these years later. Because it was loving stupid.
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Mar 21, 2022 14:01
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PurpleXVI posted:I FINISHED IT. How do I put you in for a Fortjenstmedaljen i Guld med Krone for surviving this nonsense?
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Mar 21, 2022 14:51
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JustJeff88 posted:How do I put you in for a Fortjenstmedaljen i Guld med Krone for surviving this nonsense? Simply DM the Danish queen on twitter and I'm sure she'll fast track me. I just... I'm not sure if I'm getting across how bad the game is because I'm cutting a lot of its dead space, repetitive content and bad combat. But I'm really trying to explain it without making you all sit through 200 identical screenshots of a pirate getting stabbed in the head.
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Mar 21, 2022 15:16
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PurpleXVI posted:I just... I'm not sure if I'm getting across how bad the game is because I'm cutting a lot of its dead space, repetitive content and bad combat. But I'm really trying to explain it without making you all sit through 200 identical screenshots of a pirate getting stabbed in the head. That's kinda one of the best reasons to read a Lets Play. It lets you get all the interesting parts out of old, inaccessible games, without all the old, inaccessible bits continually getting in the way.
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Mar 21, 2022 16:17
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