it’s just such a bad requirement for the mid-game! it would be fine if it was like chrono trigger and you go mop up cyrus’ ghost and let robo sow his wild oats before you go off and face the end of the world and don’t have any more plot threads to track at that point (which is something the first game seemed to understand perfectly well). they would’ve actually benefited from having some quests just lock out others and advance the same plot threads either way! there’s just so much in a game like this, it would be like if witcher 3 locked out a bunch of side quests before you went to skellige. even if you had no intention of doing them, you know the fun in a game like this is in all that miscellany; why not leave it for another time?
I am still not that far yet, but based on what I have seen so far I wonder if that was a deliberate choice to add to “replayability.” Like, if you never get locked out of certain quests, you won’t have as strong a motivation to reply through the entire game again to pick up stuff that you missed out on.
A lot of aspects in this game are making me think about how, even beyond the “JRPG” / CRPG divide, there is a kind of double connotation on what the R in RPG stands for these days, like in some games you are meant to sort of fully inhabit your character with your own identity, and something that goes along with this is creating a world that feels like something you can “live” in rather than a series of trials you have to get through.
On the other hand, games like this feel more like they are all about confining you to a certain character-based role, and then forcing you to see how the decisions you make while in character as that person play out. There is still a lot of freedom, but it just seems like in these cases the game world is not really able to respond to motivations that are entirely based on the player’s own desires. I guess that is what people call a “sandbox” style RPG nowadays or something, “Open world.”
But in both camps all of these games I have played that purport to be about choices and their consequences seem like they just as often end up being about the opposite - forcing you to either make “blind” choices with entirely unpredictable outcomes, or forcing you to confront situations in which the choices you make end up being utterly arbitrary.
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yeah, the problem here is that there’s very little you can realistically miss out on during one playthrough of this – I don’t know anyone who started witcher 3 over from scratch to try out another build – and yet it’s not quite sure what it wants there. it basically will give you everything if you ask, as long as you don’t rush ahead, but it winds up demanding too much there.
fair but check in with me when you’re finishing up that second area
As with all design it’s mostly pruned and selected to emphasis the aesthetics of a thing (‘choice’, ‘freedom’, ‘role-playing’) rather than actually simulating it. Pen & paper is always going to be sitting right there, with full imaginative possibilities, so they’ve got to make choices on a continuum between crafted stories and systemically modeled interactions to match their aesthetics.
And that shifts over time with what’s fashionable, what technology allows, etc.
What I’m thinking of is more a writing issue, I think.
Like, there’s unpredictable, which can be good, but then there are also situations where cause and effect feel basically random
E.g. play tag with this child, so he shows you… His cursed zombie friend who is nailed to a wall with a spear…
It starts to feel like narrative mad libs after awhile
I agree that Divinity falls into that. They’re playing with wacky! humor and they don’t have tight bounds on their world rules so if the joke doesn’t land it disrupts the consistency of the fantasy. It bothers me but I’m not a Terry Pratchett fan so it tracks (and a lot of what they’re doing is so good, so).
Contrast to Witcher which is entirely about using surprising quest outcomes to teach you about its medieval folk morality and contrast that against the modern police procedural structure of the stories.
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If I can’t beat the second Trompdoy fight at level 5 does that just mean I suck or is there just some cache of mandatory exp I haven’t found yet
Because this honestly just seems impossible
Also I keep mistakenly thinking his name is Portnoy which will be funny to precisely one other person on this forum (you know who you are)
yoooooooooooooooooooooo
anyway work on status effects and stuff, skill books are still pretty expensive where you’re at so you might not be able to afford many but one spell can probably turn the tide for you
you can probably get to lv6 before you go in there but you shouldn’t need to, that fight shouldn’t be that bad iirc
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I know someone who worked on this game!
so apparently if you take too long to fight him he summons like three additional dudes to attack you. i think i read somewhere that if you just take out the main one who is not an illusion or whatever they all die.
i also managed to find and take out an encampment of magisters and do some other random crap to get up to level 6, which also earned me some better armor and junk as well. gonna try this again.
it’s pretty bad! but honestly in other cases having one extra level makes a huge difference so i’m hoping it will go better this time.
it did!
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i feel like i want to keep posting in this thread but also most of my posts would just be like, ‘this game is pretty cool, huh. it’s so hard though’ over and over again
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i keep forgetting what game this thread is about, this time i assumed it was DQXI
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It’s time for plausibly the worst thread title ever made
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wow it has really been three weeks since the last time i posted in here?
i have still been slowly working my way through this, and i have come to realize that there is something i’m just not quite ‘getting’ about a basic strategy for combat in the game.
i can’t tell if its because i just didn’t really build my team right, but i feel like each enemy having two separate types of armor makes it really difficult to actually deal any damage. like, everyone has either a ton of magic armor or a ton of physical armor, so my typical approach is to focus spells on people with more physical armor and vice versa.
i guess in general that seems smart, but then the other problem is so many of the spells revolve around AOE environmental stuff that also damages my fools, and also every enemy has some kind of teleportation ability which means it’s not really possible to force any character to stand in a cloud long enough to actually take any meaningful damage. and trying to launch spells at them from a distance doesn’t work because the armor just blocks it all.
i have a feeling i’m supposed to be like layering on the environmental damage by exploiting the compounding effects, but no one ever stays in the same place long enough to actually do that, and if they are it usually means its because they are meleeing my close range fighters, who would end up suffering just as much if not more from all the environmental damage i’m trying to create.
plus the cooldowns on a lot of spells seem like prohibitively long, there isn’t really an effective way to heal consistently without using potions, which are not particularly easy to come by.
somebody help me, my family* is dying
*of bold adventurers
I bought this game for PS4 to get me through the death flu season. It is arriving in 7 days. I hope this was a smart decision.