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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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JustJeff88 posted:Edit: Do you hate this game more than Wizards & Warriors? I... kind of like that game, but I read your LP of it in one big gulp and you loathed it. Wizards and Warriors was fun to hate, it was clearly the work of someone who overvalued their genius, thinking they were much better at writing funny, hot and dramatic dialogue than they were. Also even if things were loving stupid at points, they largely made some degree of logical sense and the game mostly kept on point. Plus it had enough potential for killing my dumb rear end that it kept me on my toes and some sequences required creative tactics or quick thinking(dealing with those loving poison plants, largely). Betrayal in Antara, on the other hand, resembles its colour palette, in that it's sort of a gritty brown mash that doesn't really inspire many emotions except for boredom and the occasional explosion of bafflement. Rather than being the work of one self-proclaimed auteur, if anything it feels more like it was very much designed by committee, being sent back and forth through dozens of revisions until it was full of little nonsensical appendixes(because all their connecting tissue had been cut away) and having no real consistent identity or atmosphere. Return to Krondor... well, we'll see in a week or two, but I will say this for the game: I can remember 90% of it in pretty good detail, even down to voice clips and sound effects, which means that it stuck in my mind. What might conjure it as a "lovely cash grab" in some people's minds is that it's a sequel that came out a long time after a game that a lot of people remember fondly and was by another studio(that part was entirely Dynamix's own fault!). Considering Antara, though, that was probably for the best. Antara also suffers from Betrayal at Krondor being a much better game that it has a very clear pedigree resemblance to. As for why it's better... In terms of pure gameplay, Krondor does a lot more to make battles dangerous. Even having gotten a ton of maxed-out gear, all the spells, every trainer in the land, etc. there were still fights that could wholly or partially kick my rear end, in part because it squeezed your resources more. Food competed with repair materials and buff/healing potions, which in turn competed with pure valuables(gems and spare armor/weapons) for turning into money. Plus in fights if you were chugging down a bunch of potions, that took up your turn, so you had a choice of EITHER making a wounded attack OR drinking rare recovery items and hoping you didn't get dunked on for more than you recovered in that same turn. Even breaking the game as I was, there were points, like the six-wizard battle, any fight including Pantathians and the start of the first chapter with Patrus, where I was in trouble! Now imagine how it would go for someone who hadn't milked the game for every bit of available advantage. On top of that, it frankly looked a lot nicer, because despite lower detail it stuck to bolder, clearer colours and the "ren fair dumpster" design philosophy for the outfits was at least memorable and striking. Plus less re-use of the same canned sprites(with their one single pose and expression) during even the most dramatic bits. Not being afraid to sometimes just give the player a page of descriptive text also helped give the writers more to work with, they could put in thoughts, stage directions, narrations, etc. rather than just dialogue, in an era before there was the budget to smush in animated interludes everywhere(and if I may say so, the skip to making everything in games voiced and animated, rather than text and narrated, or a mix, very clearly has had a negative impact on how much dialogue a lot of games have, because now each line costs a lot more time and money). Lastly, Krondor seemed to understand that a good bit of its gameplay complexity and choicemaking came from having a wizard in the party and thus never deprived you of a wizard, Antara seems to have been made without any conscious thought, analysis or reflection on how things worked. Without any active self-critique, testing or QA(that wasn't ignored, at least). You get these games sometimes, where it felt like no one ever played them(except to possibly make sure that it would boot at all) before kicking them out of the door. Where it felt like there was no design document looking at the core gameplay loop and analyzing which choices it makes sense to present the player with at all(a choice is not a choice if it is made with zero information or if there is a single no-duh choice that any player in every situation will want to make) and/or what the challenges are meant to be(are they meant to be long-term resource management? reflexes and rapid assessment of threats/opportunities? short-term, high-effect tactical choices? something else entirely?). In some cases what Krondor got right feels accidental, like it has a lot of every simple combat encounters, so the more challenging ones do occasionally feel like aberrations, like they weren't designed that way because the devs understood what was a challenge and what wasn't, but even if that's the case, then Antara is the opposite of that mostly-happy accident where practically everything that could randomly, designed entirely by feel and gut, turn out bland and boring, did so.
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Mar 22, 2022 11:15
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disposablewords posted:Having played Krondor 2 through twice, with at least a couple extra aborted attempts, I wouldn't call it a lovely cash-in but I also wouldn't really call it all that good either. Fun in its weird way that still makes me itch to play it occasionally, ambitious but unrealized, and with its share of odd and not always good choices. And guess what! It got a novel tie-in, too! In fact there was even an interstitial tie-in novel set between Betrayal and Return! And I've got both and will talk your ears off about them. 
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Mar 22, 2022 19:46
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Night10194 posted:Let's not get ahead of ourselfs; Return is really bad. I'll admit it's been a long time since I last played it, but nothing I remember is as bad as Antara. Guildenstern Mother posted:Its not nearly as bad an Antara. There's a plot line that you can explain to someone, characters have identifiable motivations even if they're stupid ones. I think the worst part is probably trying to navigate around the world with the terrible 3d. I forget if the magic was cool or not, its been so long since I've played, but I remember liking the priest. I mean, Midkemia has never really had much subtlety. People are generally driven either by HONOR, generic doing good or a deep desire just to be the biggest, most miserable shithead imaginable. But big, blunt motivations beat poorly handled subtlety any day, it's much harder for poor or mediocre writers to gently caress up. The closest you get to subtlety is Midkemia's conflict with Tsuranuanni where the novels touch on the wild and foreign concept that two cultures might be at war because of internal politics and cultural differences, rather than simply because one is good and the other is evil. Far as I can tell, dealing with that deeply shocked Feist and in the other novels of his I've read, he deeply abstains from touching it again.
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Mar 22, 2022 23:13
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Update 18: The Nightmare Ends https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w93SWh3f_Qg  So, to recap: While attempting to recover the stolen souls of the Emperor's daughter and his son in law, we had pretty good evidence that Lord Sheffield(William's father in law) was involved in some connected shady bullshit. However, the instant we show up on his doorstep to make him explain at swordpoint why he's made me suffer through this loving game by initiating the plot, it turns out that pirates have also shown up, gutted every guard in the Sheffield household, and taken the place over. Since we do need those souls back(kind of), we're kicking down the doors and gutting them in turn. Let's get started.  We've fought pirates before, but there's something new and interesting about fighting them now. Notice how, rather than all having red bandanas, they now have a mix of red and blue? It took me a moment to catch on, but! The different types of pirates are now visually distinct. Blue bandana pirates are heavily armored melee fighters, while red bandana pirates are poorly armored archers. Visual distinction of enemy types! And it only took nine out of nine chapters! There are, of course, also some mages in here, which are distinct by virtue of having sticks rather than swords.   It's also worth noting that every second or so pirate fighter has Montari Plate, meaning I didn't entirely miss the train on getting Kaelyn a suit, though it's too late to go get it blessed. In every fight prior to this, I'll also point out, it's more or less guaranteed that every enemy would have the same type of armor and weapon, with very tiny exceptions. Enemies in a fight both being varied and being visibly varied to the player, so they both have to, and can, make choices about who to target first, is something the game desperately needed.   In any case, I immediately turn left and try to avoid as much fighting as possible, rather than barrelling on ahead. Something of note is also that this is like... the best-looking interior in the entire game. The doors, while overly thick, somehow aren't just flat sprites, among other things.   Things actually feel kind of... like a human space, not just like a bunch of random cubes, hell, look at that door casting a shadow(from a non-existent lightsource, but still.)  It's also amusing to me that the party literally ends up spending several weeks sleeping inside the estate while clearing it out(sure hope the Sheffields aren't in some kind of immediate danger) because it easily takes a day and a half for Aren to recover after a good fight's worth of buffing his party mates and maybe taking a sword or arrow to the face.    I eventually find my way to the first floor. Note that there are like... 20 fights or something in here, probably more, but only two things of actual plot-advancing interest. One room on the first floor, and the basement.   For real, though, check this poo poo out: clunky polygonal objects and furniture! They could have done this poo poo for Kaelyn's dad's workshop and the Shepherd Hideout if they could've been hosed to! The engine can perfectly well handle it! It doesn't even look all that bad! God, this is giving me flashbacks to the interiors in the Birthright videogame... ... I'm not going to LP that, too, shut up. Anyway! We crack the chest and find...    That someone's been faking Lord Sheffield's signature and they also handily left behind a key to the basement. We could go there now, but I want to head around the corner where I accidentally found the nicest-looking rooms in the entire estate.    Looks surprisingly swanky and detailed compared to the formerly completely blank areas we're used to.  I think this is meant to be a bathtub.   These glimmers of talent in design annoy me unreasonably much, because it shows they could have done better, that all the poo poo was just laziness or executive meddling or something. Having checked out Sheffield's private rooms and found them disappointingly empty of anything valuable to loot, the party decides to head for the basement rather than leaving him to get cut in half by pirates.     I still absolutely love how lazy these gates are, I'm glad we got to see another one before the game was over.   As another cool thing, the interior of the Sheffield Mansion is bugged, and despite the murkiness of the main floor and the basement, neither torches or magical light actually improve the lighting. I loving love everything being grainy dogshit.  You can barely even tell I left this room covered in a half dozen corpses in various states of dismemberment!    After hacking up another pack of idiots and their mage, I decide it's time for an experiment.   I've spent all game ragging on the wizard staves, calling them useless trash, but I've never actually shown them in use. Time to embarass the game devs(and not myself, because if it turned out I had been hugely wrong and they were actually useful, I sure as hell would not have posted about it).   Go on, Aren, show them the might of wizardry!   That's the exact same damage his Grrlf staff does when he just whacks these idiots over the head with it, and consider that magic damage is in every other case apparently unaffected by armor, so against less-armored enemies, just beating them with a piece of wood is more effective. loving Antara.  Past the latest patch of dead idiots is a cave network that the Sheffields, like the geniuses they are, built their estate on top of without posting guards or ensuring it was inaccessible or something of the sort. At least torches and light spells work in there so we can enjoy the lovely brown.    There are predictably more pirates down here, clogging up a large amount of underground real estate with, as per usual, exactly one(1) point of interest that we're looking for.    The one "interesting"-looking thing down here, aside from the point of interest, is this "cliff" overlooking... yet more brown. Approaching it closely enough will trigger some dialogue from William.  Thank you for the insight, my lord Escobar, I have no idea what we'd do without you.    Eventually I spot some silhouettes in the darkness(note that this is WITH light-generating magic active, it doesn't get any more visible than this) that seem slightly different from the rest and cautiously approach.     There's no sound effect or anything to accompany it, but after this baffling loving exchange, one of the silhouettes turns into a crumpled pile on the ground. Let's hope it wasn't the one we wanted to question.  Phew, it wasn't. Let's paw over his corpse before talking to Sheffield and his daughter.   Ha ha, you thought it was simple. Sheffield was the bad guy behind it all but no, there's yet another layer of bullshit here. The dead guy on the ground is one we've never met before. I mentioned near the end of chapter 4 that according to FAQs, we were supposed to be able to have met Fellich Marr, the Clown Pope, in Ticoro's temple, making his presence outside a bit less baffling. According to the same FAQs, this guy was also meant to have popped up there. Apparently just to barge Aren out of the way, but it would have made his presence at this stage slightly less out of the loving blue. Whatever, time to harass Sheffield and make him fess up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddN4i4CeOXs Short version: Turns out Lord Sheffield is actually completely innocent. His finances were just going to poo poo, so Selana decided to impersonate him, make deals with pirates and hang out with the racist fucko Shepherds without his knowing about it! But it also turns out she's not responsible for loving with the Consort or the Wraith, that's actually down to Sheffield's conveniently absent court wizard Bryce. Guess we're going looking for Bryce! Lord Sheffield says he'll catch up with us, note this, he will catch up with us. As in, he will arrive after us.  While I make my way out of Sheffield's estate, I want to note how little I explored of each floor, I explored this much of both the ground and first floors, barely a third of each, and that still got me close to ten combat encounters. I didn't even know where to go, I just absolutely lucked into an optimal path through it, but imagine what a loving slog it would be, especially for someone less aggressively trying to beat the game and draining every side opportunity for power and gear, if you managed to bungle into every loving fight before making your way in and out.    The way to Bryce's workshop is around the back of the Sheffield castle.   For the next thirty minutes or so, the only enemies in the game are Karns.   Also caves. And we get to the part where you have to have rope to progress(though on the far side of this hole there are plenty of caches containing it).  Because crossing a pit consumes the rope you use for it, so you could theoretically paint yourself into a corner.     Our goal is to reach this poorly detailed little lair.    So we can find Bryce's journal and learn what his deal is before we inevitably stab him in the face. Spoiler: We will be stabbing Bryce in the face.            The short version: Bryce wanted to use an inimical alternate dimension full of soul-stealing monsters as a public transport system, the government wizards told him to not do something that stupid. He did it anyway and almost died in the process, then decided to swear vengeance on the imperial wizards. He's responsible for the Wraiths that were stuck in the Ridgewood, which the Children of Henne helped him herd into the wardstone circle. Then, suspiciously immediately afterwards, Petrov(the guy Sheffield stabbed) sidles in and suggests how Bryce could totally use a trapped Wraith to get revenge on the Emperor. Petrov then manipulates Selana into manipulating the Shepherds into kidnapping the Consort. The journal also happens to contain the information needed to summon a wraith, which of course we'll need to do to finish the game, because otherwise it wouldn't be here.    Continuing past the workshop we end up in the Waste, which means...    Now we're going to spend the next half hour killing red dogs!    The Waste is a kind of labyrinth of canyons, where your goal is to reach this open space near the center of it all, since that leads to Bryce's new evil workshop.    Trust me when I say it's just a bunch of brown with red dogs attacking me every five minutes except for this one fight that features a thing that only happens to me one time in the entire game.  A fire wolf, for once, actually lands a fire breath blast on someone, in this case Aren, and holy poo poo that's some scary damage, I'm glad they can't hit for poo poo.   Past the only accurate fire wolf in the land we're...  we're back in more generic empty corridors meant to look like human habitation, Bryce's new lab.   More pits! It's actually weird how they've been completely non-existent in every cave or structure we've been in previously, and then the last two interior sections of the game are suddenly crammed with the loving things.    Much like under Sheffield's mansion, the end goal is to find some vague silhouettes and approach them.    Oh no, it's Bryce!  Oh thank God, he just set some dogs on us.   Oh no, it's Bryce again!  Oh thank God, he just set some dogs and himself on us. I have no idea why it was split into two fights, and it's less threatening as a result. If Bryce had just brought out all the dogs at once, he could've stood at the back and cast spells, instead he's now within whacking distance.   Also the one point where a fireball might've saved the day, Aren whiffs the shot like always.  Bryce also made the dipshit decision to bring and use a Carluda's Chain, which means that rather than shielding him, his bodyguards are now a liability.   Inexplicably, a spell hard-coded to do 40 damage also does 35 damage when he casts it. I wonder if he's using another version of Lightning Bolt or whether Kaelyn has some hidden non-conductive property.  Since it's also the last fight of the game(spoiler, I guess!) I decided to bust out Blizzard, a spell I hadn't shown yet, and it actually turns out to work!    It does enough damage that William can finish off the fight with one swing. Now let's find out who Bryce was holding at spell-point.   How the gently caress did you two get here before us?  We'll never know because Kaelyn refuses to talk to them.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1RUp_sFRKs Short version: Bryce gives us a very abridged version of his diary, refuses to help us and then dies. Now we have to summon up the Wraith that has Aurora and the Consort's souls and convince it to hand them over.  The chest to the left holds all the ingredients mentioned in Bryce's journal.  And the cauldron on the right is a container we can put them in. All the clues necessary are in Bryce's journal, can you figure out how to finish the game??? Senwater, nudberry, talicor dust, Trrkaa feather, and hardening fluid in no particular order. As soon as we do, we're then plunged into cutscenes, the final cutscenes of the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eORCpOflOXI&t=53s Timestamped to skip Aren putting the ingredients in the cauldron. Short version: The wraith shows up and goes: "Blarrr, I ain't handing over no souls." William says to just kill it, Kaelyn says we lack Wraithslayer blades to kill it with(interesting fact: her sword still had the enchantment at the start of chapter 8, but I sold it for an upgrade, I wonder if it would've dissipated at the start of chapter 9 otherwise or just been ignored) and instead we have to bargain with it for the souls. Then Sheffield and Selana rush in and offer up their own souls in exchange. Then the Wraith peaces out as the Consort and Aurora's souls zoom off to their bodies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Af-_XAJFs Short version: Two months later the Consort and Aurora are going to be married, and our crew reunite as they attend the wedding. Kaelyn has, in the interval, become the Emperor's official diplomat to the Grrrlf. William's still doing nobleman stuff, but now with somewhat more respect from his family, and he defends Selana's actions post-humously as "just doing what she thought was right." My man she attempted to empower a bunch of nazis for financial gain. There's no defending that. Meanwhile, the Clown Pope officiates the wedding and the party notices his staff of office. Which is tipped by a silver hawk. Petrov's orders were signed by the silver hawk. Petrov entered the plot after the Children of Henne assisted Bryce. And then the game ends. We'll never know why the pope was evil and wanted to gently caress with the empire. Presumably it was a setup for a Betrayal in Antara 2, a game that I pray we'll never see, because then I'd have to play it. That was Betrayal in Antara, thank gently caress it's done and thank gently caress I can move on to games that are less shoddily designed and written.
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Mar 23, 2022 16:04
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Ugh, bad news on the Return to Krondor front, it seems that it may be either a difficult or uncrackable nut with regards to actually recording the drat thing.
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Mar 23, 2022 18:33
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Xander77 posted:How so? Well, with both the GOG and Steam versions, no matter the settings and compatability options enforced on either the game or OBS, I'm only able to record the game as a postage stamp-sized window, no matter that it's actually a perfectly fine, full-screen size when I'm playing it. Googling around, no one else who's had this problem has had a solution for it. I see one recorded playthrough on YouTube and I'm hoping the person who recorded it gets back to me on how they got it to work.
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Mar 23, 2022 19:15
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With some settings fuckery, this is the best I managed for resolution: [img]https://lpix.org/4257200/2022-03-23 19-18-24.mkv_snapshot_00.30_[2022.03.23_19.19.48].jpg[/img] It's not terrible, but I worry that it'll make text and details troublesome. At least the game cinematics are saved as nice, separate .avi files I can just upload, at which point YouTube crusterizes them as it yanks them into a higher resolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3HndS65YSY
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Mar 23, 2022 19:39
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Hel posted:What I did was setting the canvas to 1280x960 Could you screenshot your settings? Because I could swear I did the exact same thing and it didn't work. Also lol, we're rolling anyway. 
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Mar 23, 2022 21:32
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Holy poo poo thank you, I guess it just isn't an LP for me unless I learn something embarrassingly simple immediately after making the first post. At least this time I learned it after making a first update that looked way worse than all the rest.
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Mar 23, 2022 21:43
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JustJeff88 posted:I read every word (or near as drat it), both yours and the game's, but I didn't watch a single video... so I was going to say 'gently caress recording, just do an SS playthrough of RoK, but it looks like you have it sorted. Part of the problem is that I need to record, because I record a video and then snap screenshots from it, so I don't play for two hours and then realize I forgot to screenshot the Space Dildo Mk IX or something in the first five minutes of the session. RtK also has the issue that it has... no subtitles. At all. For practically anything. It's aaaaaaaaaaaaaaall spoken dialogue. sb hermit posted:What would an Antara 2 look like? How much more batshit crazy could the plot be, given that the pope is the mastermind? I feel like Antara 2 would have focused on two plot threads, based on what the game set up: Firstly, you'd have the Vell, who got kind of dropped by the wayside. Maybe instead of an apprentice mage, one of the characters would be an apprentice Vell Forger or something, using Vell tech items, kind of like a Wizardry 8 gadgeteer. Secondly, the whole mystery of the Triune would probably be dug into. Perhaps one of the protags would be a priest of Henne(or perhaps the Triune Undivided, a new heretic cult), who felt a call to challenge Fellich Marr due to his political shenanigans losing him the faith of the god(s). Mind, this is assuming that a second Antara game would have competent, non-moron writers, which is a pretty bold bet.
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Mar 24, 2022 09:39
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malkav11 posted:I would never argue the character graphics in Antara are good, but (mostly) I still think they're better than digitized photos of goofballs in lovely costumes. That's something that immediately takes me out of any game that tries to use them in place of actual art. A couple of them were really bad, in particular Pug just looked like he was completely confused by anything he was dealing with and wearing a bathrobe, but they were memorable and adventurous. It wasn't just "this is brownland, everyone here wears brown, sometimes with a gold fringe." Like, point out for me an Antara character with a design that you'll remember as well as Gorath's? Or even just the animated interludes, in Antara they were crusty trash that looked like half-finished animatics, in Krondor we got Delekhan_Laugh.gif and Pug designing his Angelfire site on a stone wall.
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Apr 11, 2022 09:40
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