xzar_monty

This is a good point, by the way. I wonder how many left the game at that point and didn't come back for Deadfire. I was in Twin Elms when I reached the level cap (this was before the DLCs came out), and I remember totally losing all interest in the game. I did finish it, with White March 1&2 installed, but I remember feeling exactly like you did.

Has a Lada ever abandoned you in the middle of your road trip? No, but I have abandoned mine several times.

There are several instances where the game just stacks the odds against you in ways that you absolutely cannot prepare for. This means you almost certainly have to reload a save and then find a workaround. One notable example is the encounter with the nymph at Verdant Chambers. You can safely enter the courtyard, but once you speak with the nymph, you cannot really leave, because a trap and a dangerous (but immobile!) monster have appeared out of nowhere into the path you just walked ten seconds ago. When this happens, you are quite likely to die. Then, you just have to reload a save and find another way. There are also several encounters where new monsters just keep teleporting into the battle in ways and into places you cannot prepare for. There is no way these monsters can teleport themselves, and there is also no way there's some creature teleporting them into the battle. It just happens. There is at least one lair of creatures where you can make sure that certain spaces are empty of monsters, but when you travel further, monsters have suddenly appeared into places that were empty a second before, and this way you can suddenly be attacked from both sides. This is just mean-spirited in my book. In PnP, a GM who did this would lose his or her players in a hurry and wouldn't get them back.

This seems to be some kind of cultural thing. I could be wrong, of course, but that's what I'm inclined to think. I cannot comment on WotR, but P:K also had stats bloated to a ridiculous extent. The game also cheated against the player quite a lot. This was mean-spirited, ungenerous and completely uncalled for. Now, my question to you all is: have you seen anything similar in any other cRPGs anywhere? I have not. Games should be neutral, but to the extent that they divert from neutral, they tend to divert so that the benefit is on the player. P:K's approach was totally the opposite.

I think we can safely say that anyone who praises WOTR's writing simply doesn't know what they're talking about and doesn't understand what good writing is. The writing is so obviously poor that there's no argument about it. But, as there's such a dearth of games like this, I'm going to play it all the same, although not just yet. And I enjoyed P:K despite the fact that the writing was awful! (Good and bad are not simply subjective terms. For example, Freddie Mercury was a good singer. No one has to like his music, or even his style, but the fact is that he was a good singer. Just try and sing one of his songs. Similarly, the writing in WOTR is bad. The technical faults in style, originality and even language are so obvious.)

Given the amount of bug-inspired talk on this thread, I'm a bit surprised the official WotR forums aren't full of it. Perhaps quite a lot of people are playing happily, despite everything?

Interesting. Thanks! Saving time simply isn't a justification, in my book anyway. I mean, I could forgo error checking in my work "to save time", but that's a very serious no-no.

This doesn't count as a proper bug, but it crops up often enough to annoy me. Let's say you're playing a slayer. Some of the abilities you'll get are from the rogue pool, while others come from the ranger pool. These abilities are always described in terms of the main class that gets them, so even if you're a slayer dude, the description of your, say, sneak attack will read something along the lines of "The rogue will be able to..." and so on. The descriptions of my current set of skills make my character look a bit like a smorgasbord in terms of class, even if I'm playing a single class. Bad design. I wonder why they didn't think of this.

Dang. That does sound like seriously bad game design. As I'm sure you know, in DD (and variants) diseases and ability damage are meant to be a nuisance, something you can't get rid of just like that. So there's that. But if you keep getting that kind of punishment from random trash mobs, then I completely see your point. Heck, Owlcat does have these design problems. It's such a shame.

Well it does look good, I must say. I find myself playing it, and there seem to be no problems with it (famous last words). I'm only on level 2, though, so I haven't seen much yet.

Haha! Hey, it was a good joke -- only it didn't connect, because I didn't spot the reference.

Sorry? That's a different thing. It was good to be able to finish the critter (after 3-4 tries), and it felt like an accomplishment. This concerns what happened after.

This might happen if these tough optional battles were common. I don't think they are. Fairly strange that they put in a serious challenge and then don't properly reward you if you finish it.

I am frankly astonished by some of the design decision Owlcat continues to make. Early on in the game, there's a clearly optional encounter with a difficult opponent. I'm almost certain every player is going to be at level 2 at this point (the entire game up to this has been completely railroaded with no options to choose anything other than what is put in front of you). The opponent is at level 8. It's tough. All this is fair enough -- but then I managed to kill the opponent and was rewarded with a whopping 36 XP points. In other words: NOTHING. Why do they do this? I mean, seriously, why? It seems like their approach is to be unfair and cruel just for the sake of it. I don't get it. In real life, GMs like that would lose all their players in a hurry. (I know there are rewards in terms of items, but surely the XP reward should be substantially greater. Like, ten times what it is, at least.)

That's super cool! Owlcat seems to specialize in dodgy math. In P:K you're supposed to have 50% spell failure chance in some parts of the First World, but I'd be prepared to swear that one's bugged to the hilt. It's not impossible to fail 20+ times in a row if the odds are 1 in 2, but realistically, it doesn't happen. Except in P:K it does.

@Amentep: Is there some kind of forum mechanics related reason why threads get closed down once they become long enough? Just curious, as I'm not sure I've ever understood why it happens.

Yes, I've heard of this Lazarus. The screenshots look very nice -- and indeed, they are absolutely worlds away from the original 1980s graphics. I really hope you like the game and get to experience some of its magic. Back in the day, it was groundbreaking: your moral choices really mattered, you had to find a way of surviving in a world that had fallen ill with an excess of (a particular kind of) order, which quite naturally deteriorated into tyranny. Sea travel, mountain travel and moongate travel were all extremely exciting, some monsters were really frightening and the dungeon puzzles were extremely cool. Heck, I can still remember certain passwords, mantras, and so on. The surprising things you could find on those tiny little islands, etc. Of course, the games of the time had no in-built journals, so we wrote our notes by hand in notebooks or pieces of paper and then spent a lot of time piecing those clues together. You don't have to heed me in any way whatsoever, but I think the game is likely to be more fun if you don't read any walkthroughs or spoilers. Because of its era, it's not that complicated, and finding the answers without help is very satisfying.

I've just played through the first hour or so, perhaps slightly less. It's astonishing how meta-written the stuff is. It's both funny and frustrating. You come across a couple of strange-looking people and strike a conversation. They go something like: "Dude! We are <our race name, just to let you know> which means we're descended from <information, in case you're not familiar with the mechanics>, so we're not exactly able to move around in <spoilery information>. However, we've got such-and-such capacities that you folks probably don't, and if you feel like joining forces we'd be more than happy to, as our combined strength would give us a strategic advantage against all the monsters this dungeon is bound to be filled with -- even if we've been here all the time, which clearly means that we've just been standing still but hey, this is a game. So wanna join up?" The artificiality is so in-your-face it's unbelievable. I must say this feel QUITE different from the kind of writing games like Deadfire and Disco Elysium aimed at.

Possibly. But we are using "hidden" in a remarkably loose sense.

Let us hope so. Owlcat are quite obviously limited by the constraints of the original stories/modules, whose content and tone are pretty much set, but even with these limitations, they're doing a poor job. The constraints they're working under do not force them to use too many exclamation marks, overly cliched or hopelessly over-the-top language and that frigging high-school level overacting in the voice department.

This sounds both promising and slightly alarming. I'm really happy that they've toned down the amount of loot, but yes, it's also possible to go too far. Heck, Kingmaker was really annoying and immersion-breaking in this regard. You walk around a city or a village and notice there are tons of gold, scrolls, potions and even really quite good magic items just lying around. I mean, wouldn't anyone else pick any that stuff up? How is poverty possible if you can literally collect coins from otherwise empty barrels on the side of a random house?

Whichever you choose. There are at least a couple of big conversations with the honchos of the main factions where the conclusion is that you'd be best off joining forces with one of them. I mean, after the Ashen Maw, the next thing you wake up to is precisely this kind of conversation. It's not exactly railroading but there's a strong sense of "Choose one, dude". Unsubtle and unenjoyable, this, for me.

Having played those games back in the 1980s (starting from Ultima IV), I know the general consensus (or at least *a* general consensus, i.e. among those I knew) was that the best games by far were IV, V and VI, and then it went downhill from there. However, all of those three titles are probably too crude to be enjoyed today, but they sure were groundbreaking at the time. With Ultima VII, but somehow the magic was just... gone. However, since you are only coming to those games now and don't have the experience of playing IV, V and VI, who knows how much magic there may be for you. It was very interesting to read your story, by the way. Thanks!

I can't see any real explanation for this. Apparently the company has NO good writers at all and very few people with any education in drama, literature, movies and other relative fields. Also, it appears they don't speak English very well, which may, at least in part, contribute to the fact that they don't recognize how ridiculous some of the stuff is. It's also possible that they just don't care.

What's a full party in this game, by the way? The fairly traditional six?