Tigranes

We decide we should probably try and help the poor fellow. After all, XP gain is rarely proportional to the wealth or sanity of the questgiver. Nearby, we come across what is probably a likely candidate - the only white chicken we've seen so far. Unfortunately, we can't talk to it or pick it up or anything. Now, I had completely forgotten that one of my magical items has a passive ability: it periodically sets enemy creatures near me on fire, dealing a uselessly miniscule amount of damage. But it shouldn't matter, because the chicken isn't... ...maybe it was looking at me funny. Finally, we make a quick stop back at the village to receive the bounty for Jagon, the bandit leader. You'll recall we killed him a while ago, but the proof of death is a unique magical amulet, which had been quite useful to us so far. In fact, this was the case with most of the bounties, a nice dilemma between completing the quest or not. Manny has cclearly decided that ham > amulet. Alright, enough crazycide and back to it. Approaching the big fat temple of McGuffins, we are finally reunited with our fellow Dragon Slayers. You know, the ones that disappeared for about 10 game hours after taking my bloody sword. Oh, you can sense I'm a Dragon Knight now. We overcome the resulting social awkwardness by slaughtering the lot of them. Welcome to the MacGuffin Temple! We do breakfast until 10.30 each day. As soon as we enter, we're given some cryptic advice by our old friend, Harry Potter. It's so cryptic that it cleverly elides all imaginable kinds of practical use. More impressive architecture. To reach the macguffins, we must overcome the various tests pre-built into the temple. These remind me a bit of the Jedi initiation in Jedi Knight II, actually. First is platform-jumping, which would have been frustrating / challenging, if there was any fall damage in the bloody game. And then, our ability to not pick up incredibly valuable things all around us. We thought we just had to wait a while, but apparently the solution was to pick up a pumpkin lying around. Do these people not know that a pumpkin is an incredibly valuable item, often used as optional quest rewards?

Yeah, there's a lot of references, this game's full of them. I don't intend on showing every dialogue and every sidequest, though, it would just take years. It's a much richer game than I had initially thought. Anyway, one reply? May my team of monkey LP-slaves throw rotten pears at your family! We must continue, since I keep playing on and on. We now return to Lord Lovis' tower to get on with the main quest. Level 8 skellie mobs are now no trouble for our little Manny, all grown up. Div2's dungeons are a reasonably fun mix of relatively simple puzzles. Here we have to jump up some platforms to open the barred gates... ...then hit the switches on the gargoyle lamps in order. Manny's intellectual faculties are challenged but not beaten. And finally, the great Lovis. We'll start to provide a bit more critical plot information from now on, now that I'm a bit less confused. So there seemed to be this super-powerful mage named Maxos, who was a bit of a nice guy with Dragon Knights (= Dragons) under him. Lord Lovis was his right hand man, so to speak. He's been condemned to walk this tower as punishment for, well, becoming drunk with his own power and not guarding the lands properly. For now, he is our source of some very important information. Damian, the Big Bad, is soul forged with Ygerna, his dead love. Normally, soul forged beings share life and death together, but here it is inverted, so that if Ygerna were to be brought back to life, Damian would die. ...but of course, that's a long way off for us. Our immediate task is to find Amdusias, Lovis' old rival, and gain some necessary McGuffins. Lovis would also prefer it if we'd pick up his soul stone on the way. You know, that eternal damnation thing. We also took the time to explore Lovis' dungeon, where we found a sentient skeleton smith, and some sort of gauntlet that led to magic items. Now, outside, we take some final detours of the Broken Valley before reaching Amdusias. It would be our last time in these idyllic hills, filled with goblins, skeletons, bandits, Black Ring and a Full Set of Crazy Peoples. Here's a wishing well. We opted to wish with a thousnad gold, and received 5000 xp for our troubles. Worth it. We also meet an enchanter. There is quite a lot of customisation in Div2: items come with 'charm slots', where you can insert charms you find in the world, or enchantment slots, which are used by hiring an enchanter, having the right recipe and the right gems. We will start maximising these things a little bit later. For now, we use our extraordinary psychic powers for the glorious task of petty theft. Crazy people quota up again. What is this, don't eat teh pigs, don't eat the chickens, do these people not understand the importance of protein? Oh, right. Soul forged with a chicken. But you can eat pigs, right?

Yeah, I probably lost Obsidian a few thousand sales there.

Meh, in the end, devs always do make that kind of decision about what information to leave in, and what information to leave out, and they can't make tickboxes for everything. I don't think it destroys the RPG experience or anything dramatic, either. I'm simply puzzled as to why that stuff can't go in a separate help screen or the back of a manual. It does bring up an intriguing subject for some focus testing though. When you get a GUI tooltip that is longer than 5 lines, do people that do not want all that information (a) get lost trying to find the info they want? (b) just say screw it and ignore the tooltip completely? 50-50?

Sorry alanschu, but I don't think the reasons you provide are very good and I don't think they actually rule out providing information. (1) You do get some information, but as you say it's all relative, it's scattered, you have no way of viewing it up before you click the button, and you don't have anywhere you can go to look at the numbers laid out properly and plan out your character. So the information currently provided doesn't address the issue. (2) Of course GUIs are the best way, but not providing the info in a manual or anywhere else because you can't fit it in the GUI? Makes zero sense. Not putting it in the manual because manuals can be inaccurate in print? Makes even less sense. O_o That's not a reason to leave it out, this isn't a MMO where the numbers change every month, either. That said, I can't quite remember how much/little info you got in DAO, so I don't know if DA2 does the same, and if that will be enough. It's not a gamebreaker, but I just think it's silly not to provide that kind of information in any RPG.

There are 4 characters. Currently the best guess is that you either play alone as one character, or you play alone but have AI-controlled buddies (1? More?), or you play co-op with other humans. Since DS3 was always going to be quite different and go for more of a Diablo type experience, I don't think you can ever really expect it to have party-based combat in that sense. Never bothered much with DS1/2 though so can't compare specifically.

Good stuff, now I have Div2 I'll probably never get around to this. Would be interested in seeing how skills/spells do in here too, compared to ROA?

I wouldn't worry. This is almost certainly possible, because it would make zero sense if you can't, and because only people who say otherwise are going off a rumour from a source that is just as clueless as everyone else. It's as if some random game journalist made up "In Dungeon Siege you can't use swords" and now everybody is worried about it.

Moving on, we find another room where there are about five skellies chucking magic from beneath (sorry, they're hard to see in the distance on my low settings). With our trusty bow and our beloved jumping skills, they aren't as difficult - no more poison. The previous screenshot showed a part of the giant bust of a Dragon in the middle of that room. Climbing it up, we emerge above a waterfall and into an area with lots of lava. When you try to walk on the lava rock to get to the other side, it kills you. Fast. At first I was stumped, but then we realised that the water is safe to wade through, despite being surrounded on all sides by flowing lava. Protip: Water and lava don't mix. Finally, Jagon the bandit leader has run out of tricks, and must fight. His bow can kill me in 2-3 shots, though, so we drink a dexterity potion... ... and bull-rush him. One fireball and a few chops later, he's down quick. Little Manny is growing up to be vewy stwong, yes he is! Some nice loot. We pick up his legs, to use for our Creature, apparently, and a spiffy necklace. The portal to the man behind it all. He appears to have been commandeering the bandits for his own purposes, only requiring that they bring to him a regular stream of bodies. Preferably young women. I think we know what you need those bodies for, amirite? Unfortunately, after a short conversation, he uses his jedi powers to push us back through the portal, then remotely collapses it on this side with his magic. That is some power you have there, Johnny. Having concluded our business with the bandits, we now proceed to reveal their hideout and password to the Lieutenant. We might visit later, to see if the game has reflected our choice with consequences. ------------------------------ Manny is now level 12, and finally does some decent damage. He seems to be able to stand up to Black Ring mobs now, which means we can now explore the areas of the valley that were too tough for us before. But first, tomorrow's update, we'll check out that Main Quest Tower.

Manny does not like being played a fool. Immediately he trots back to Locke and demands satisfaction, to which he receives a Quest Failed and a bugger off. If we actually bothered to investigate the guard's claims a bit more we might have had a different result... Bereft of more lettuce, Manny returns to the guard to see if there's anything to salvage out of the mess. Aha. And so we return full circle to the mysterious cart. Inside which we find... a ledger and twenty-five gold. Seriously? You enchant a password-protected magic cart for twenty five gold? Manny would chop apart the merchant into little bits for the insult, but next-gen RPGs have incorporated the Geneva Convention. aaaaand we're back with psychology 101. Being a servant of Chaotic Neutral, Manny decides to keep the crazy axe dude. You can't deny the demographic, baby. We'd feel bad about this behaviour, but then he immediately reminds us why it was worth it. Alright. Now we're back in the bandit camp - enough questing, more dungeoneering. We'll clean up here and then finally go after Lord Lovis' tower to advance the main plot. Having completed a couple of small quests without trouble, we enter the Temple - apparently the bandit leader is the only one who has passed its obstacle course to gain audience with the necromancer / Dragon Knight / fluffy bunny behind. Manny copped it something like twenty times in this place. Wherever you walk you get continuously poisoned. At first I thought it was silly design that you'd have dead bandits right in front of the door (because, you know, they're that useless), but it seems the entire room is poison-trapped, pretty much. I'd question the resources that would have to go into keeping something like that maintained, but then bandits aren't known for environment-friendly policies. We can follow the trail of bodies and blood for the only safe path. The whole place is complicated by several magic-firing skeletons that are hard to dodge unless you dodge into the poison. Thankfully, having hit level 12 I can use a unique bow that I picked up - it does +50 damage per hit even though I have invested literally nothing in related attributes/skills. Our trail of blood finally takes us to this area. We'd jump, but to our left we can see Jagon waiting. So instead, we jump, immediately pause, and lob a fireball. I was going to jump back and forth doing this, but apparently that's enough to scare him off. The other side also has high-speed fireballs coming out of the walls. My great-aunt Lara used to tell me stories about these kind of places, but unfortunately we don't have any giant breasts to plug the traps with at the moment.

Manny suffers from a chronic potion shortage. It may have to do with how he guzzles them down as soon as he gets them, but he thinks there be more sinister causes afoot. Perhaps commando ****roaches with bottle-piercing instruments. Due to certain short-sighted goverment policies in the past few decades including dubious tax cut categories, the Broken Valley sports a higher than average population of crazed wizards with unlimited funds. This Bellegar has seemingly constructed three ruins for us to stumble on, just so he can... well, give us some free xp. I thought something would happen once we got the final group here, but nothing doing. You've let us down, crazy mage. Nearby, we come across some sleeping beauties. Notice the realistic design which has the woman use the shade to protect herself from sunburn, whereas the guy on the left will probably end up like some sort of half-Black half-White frankenstein. Use Sunblock. It's The Right Thing. Once again mindreading, we learn that each sleeper is trapped in their dream because they are missing something. As far as fetch quests go, this is pretty cool... we get a gem for helping out. I haven't really mentioned it, but Div2's world is full of gems, ores, herbs and the like. Apparently you can use these things to mix potions, enchant items, etc. later on in the game. In line with the previously discussed crazy demographic, we then find a schizophrenic, half bloodthirsty axeman and half goody two-shoes welded together in some sort of Disneysque magic spell. Our journey for a cure takes us back to the village tavern, where Manny meets more interesting people. we have to give credit to all the guards in this valley, it can't be easy keeping law and order when the entire population is largely composed of pigloteriat growers, schizophrenic axemen, gullible mercenaries and a tinfoil hat doctor. We are told that we can separate the personalities, but with only one body at hand, we can only save one. What is this? Can it be? Have we stumbled across... choice and consequences? We'll find out after a few images. While we're back in town, we explore the place a little more. Contrary to my earlier observation the village is actually quite packed with things to do and people to see - one nice touch is that every NPC seems to be named, even individual guards. The tavern was repopulated with guests after I kicked the mercenaries out back in the first update. Here we win a one-upmanship battle with a boastful hunter (named... Brave Sir Robin), and have the privilege of obtaining The Lettuce. It's about time we moved up from cutlery. We also find a new merchant, Locke, who asks me to get a guard to fess up with the rabbit he was paid to hunt. The guard insists that Manny is being played for a fool, however.

What is the significance of this 'master key' that was leaked?

Bloody hell, can RPGs stop moving towards "every battle is a new world" design? This isn't just DA2 obviously, but imagine rebuffing everyone every time in the DAO Deep Roads. So, between 25 and 35 hours then. Gotcha. Tactics didn't bother me too much because I only used them in basic ways (potion if near death, switch weapons, what if surrounded, save mage, etc). Then you could let the game play itself for some filler battles, even on Nightmare, then use pause for harder battles. I assume it was a lot more infuriating if you actually wanted to fight no-pause all the time, but to me it's silly to not enjoy the tactical squad combat it gives you.

...but not five (six?) archers at once, all of whom fire poison arrows at you simultaneously. Viper himself can hit you for a maximum of 116 + poison damage, in my experience. I tried the old tactic of charming one, running away, then slashing them up while they're fighting each other, but they just have too much firepower. Brave Sir Manny ran away. So, we can't check out the fortress, and we can't check out the bandits' quests. Brave Sir Manny decides to make several U-turns and try and visit the big tower in the centre - the one that we need to get to to advance the main plot. Climbing up some rickety ladders we spot what might be an entrance,but are immediately manhandled by about fifty skeletons. Run away! For Brave Sir Manny, even gravity is no danger. Faced with black ring (the fortress guys) mobs that are too high level for us, or Viper and his poison bandits, we end up running around the valley exploring and grinding for an hour or so. After several reloads and so forth, we are a bit stronger, and also stumble upon this happy place. Brave Sir Manny sure comes across a lot of dead or nearly dead NPCs, but it only inspires him to spread his unique style of humour to the world. Turns out this is where the necromancer's creations had got to. They are tough, but it appears even psychotic, undead-ish creations can be charmed. That's just how good Manny is. WHen he twirls his moustache it sends ya to heavan. Having dispatched the creatures, we conveniently find a crystal skull on one, which we conveniently find out will help the necromancer control his minions better, which conveniently means he can now create our own Creature. We don't have all the body parts right now, but we will come back when we do. -------------------------------- A little disjointed, but I've stuck to all the funny or major quests, and any particularly tough fights. Tomorrow's update, we will continue to explore the valley area and reveal even more exciting quest rewards.

Now it's time to stop back at the village and take stock. It turns out that the Magic Glowing Ball that was our first nemesis was some kind of neighbourhood terroriser with a bounty on 'im. Returning the magic harness, we are given the option to choose our reward... a tankard. I guess it's better than a spoon. No, wait, the bandit we just killed is worth a bottle. Praise be the Gods! A bottle! Now I can quench my nonexistent thirst while on the move! ...OK, fine, so we don't actually have to choose those ones. Taking the XP we return to the field, and progress further down the valley. Our plan is to hit the bandit camp whose secret location we had learned before - I'm guessing there are some quests we can do there and it'd be a pity to turn them in to the lieutenant before that. However, the path there is lined with many bandits. The notable difference is that any bandit type can cast magic missile as well as melee or ranged, making it much harder to sit back and kite. Several reloads later, we're there. The whole place is quite cleverly designed: the entrance is hidden behind a bunch of houses pretending to be a lumber camp, and behind that a large rock-face. We pass the requisite rotting bodies hanging off a bridge... ...and also find some bandits quarreling over their share of the loot. As I say, quite nicely done. It's not possible for me to screencap everything I do, but we do pick up a couple of quests here - to find some bandit's axe, to aid a highway robbery. We also help a pregnant bandit escape the life of, well, banditry, by mindreading the gatekeeper and bribing him with rum. Finally, we'll come back later to gain entrance to a temple that the bandit camp is guarding - the word is that they are actually in service of an eeeevulll necromancer (as opposed to our good necromancer friend, still waiting for his runaway creations). And so we're back out in the valley. Near the camp, we find what appears to be a shell of a fortress.... ...that the bandits are busy blowing up, apparently. It seems ironic that the bandits are the most resourceful faction we've seen so far, equipped with explosives as they are. Sadly, it's not enough to stop the bad guys, uh, the guys badder than cutthroat bandits with explosives. At this point, our Dragon Knight lady, who lives on as the mentor-****-snarky commentator in our brain, warns us to retreat. Of course, Manny knows that when a woman tells a man to retreat, she really wants him to keep going. So we do. Then we reload, and then we run away. ...and straight into the path of Viper, who appears to lead a breakaway bandit camp. That's alright, we've killed bandits before...

I've played a good 3 or 4 hours today, so we must soldier on to catch up. The game is good stuff and getting more fun as we go. Welcome back to Manny's Slayin' Dragons. Last time out we felled our very first troll, thanks to some shameless kiting and running away. All that has rewarded us with a new level and a new ability - Charm. This essentially allows us to arrange our very own, on-the-spot, twenty-second gladitorial combat. We're mildly excited by the gazilion business opportunities this opens up. As we are still rubbish at ARPGs and this is on Hard, we will have to charm our way through most battles, so it's quite life-threatening when the odd bugger resists it. You don't have tow ait for cooldown if the spell fails though. This particular Random Dungeon is quite clever. See the switches? The first time we stepped on one it gave us a nice treasure chest, but as far as I can tell, all the rest are traps. But Manny is a learning animal and will not fall for it the seventh time. The dungeon turns out to be a very long one, turning weirder and weirder as we go. It seems that it was some sort of derelict mine with lots of dead citizens, and now mostly taken over by a combination of gobbos and skeletons (each with their own habitat area). We also find some talismen that are quest items for a yet un-found quest. After a couple dozen dead skellies we come across a particularly difficult battle where we had to jump around a lot. Cool thing is, if you run over that bonfire, you get quite a lot of damage; even cooler thing is, your enemies do too. Bones On Fire saves the day. We meet our first human being inside the dungeon - a bandit doing some stock take. He's probably one of those loners who always get stuck doing it every month. Manny's existentialism confuses Loner Bandit. Don't worry, it's all a bit like blood in the end, thick and clotted. The unhappy loner bandit responds to our philosophy with some brawl. This guy packs a punch - he keeps rushing us and doing a lot of damage, knocking us down at the same time, then pounding us some more. Get caught by that a couple of times and we're dead. Took about six or seven tries in the end... The Power of Reload is with me, little one.

Currently DA2's on my "buy if bored/cheap" list, but I'll try the demo when it's out. That's one decision I can wholeheartedly get behind, to release a demo.

There are lots of different versions of DRMs, which have a variety of restrictions. Sometimes you have to have an internet connection to play, which is annoying if your internet is spotty or if you're moving around. Sometimes you have to log into Steam, which sucks if you don't like using Steam, or if Steam bugs out on your computer all the time. Sometimes you have restrictions on how manyc omputers you can install it on, or other schemes. Personally, I don't think online DRM is too bad yet, but it can certainly be annoying and it doesn't stop pirates, so I would hate to see it spread or get even more restrictive.

The footage didn't seem too rough to me, I like how the gameworld looks (though my laptop will die), I liked the murder investigation bit (even if you shouldn't be able to do it all through dialogue options), and combat looks pretty fun as well, better than the original Witcher certainly. I agree the encounter positions are a bit odd, though. As for pause menu, I think the slow motion is slow enough that usually, you can do what you want before anything really happens in the gameworld, so not too big a deal for me. edit: watching the latest dev diary, again, I think the game looks great - a lot of variety and colour in the world, and if they carry through with their promise about world design that takes into account how people/monsters in it live, even better.

Yep, it's mostly my fault on control clunkiness - I'm too busy to use the pause most of the time. Also the crosshair doesn't seem to correspond well with highlighting things to pick up, but again, that ight just be me.

At this stage I'm also happy to hear what you want to see from the LP if you're reading. I much prefered IWD/2 where I could pause for good screenies and also pack a lot of info on the screen - here I'm leaving nearly half the SS I take in the interests of space. Also trickier to do the running commentary without a party, but I can provide more detail on how the game works and such for those that won't buy it.

Suffering from the common yet tragic case of "just one lengthy expository dialogue away from death", the last Dragon Knight tells us that we've been hunting the wrong guys all along, and the REAL EVUL is actually coming up behind us with a giant, pointy stick ready to say 'boo'. Oh, it's just like my 7th birthday! The last Dragon Knight sends us on some crazy dream-like sequence to explain herself, and we get our first taste of playing as a dragon. I typically hate these kind of sequences, because I just get disoriented, but the dragon seems relatively simple to control. Not as fast as you'd expect, but I guess that helps the maneuverability. After a short sequence we get another CGI cutscene. The last Dragon Knight explains that Damian, the old guy packin' steel we saw in the intro, is the real baddie, though we don't know much about his plans yet. It turns out that our dream sequence was not so dreamy: arriving at Damian's stronghold, we are attacked, beaten down, and stamped by Damian's large, armoured foot. ...and when we wake up, he's there. Pretty neat trick. It doesn't make too much sense why he would do that, though. Manny's just spent all his life to become a Dragon Slayer, right? Then here comes along his mortal enemy, dying, who suddenly tells him this random 'Damian' person is the real evil for reasons unspecified. What are the chances he'd believe this and drop everything to stop him? Unless, of course, Damian substantiates all of these claims by kicking at us in the face. Ah, poetry. Truly, it is rich and thick like clotted blood, is it not? Damian leaves us vaguely threatening that should we now pursue the threat that his own appearance has clearly substantiated, rich and thick blood shall flow. Then, of course, a wizard from a saturday morning cartoon teleports in and helps us up. Next in queue is the big-busted, tough yet vulnerable heroine, the snarky black dude and the stupid good-natured sidekick. Together, we will save the world, and monopolise its fetch quest economy! ....Okay, so that doesn't happen, and we're told to seek a certain Lord Lovis. Fair enough. It's quickly looking like while Div 2 is a bloody fun ARPG romp filled with lots of quests, it ain't gonna make you shed tears and stare into the rain. And so we continue our romping. We are finally spared the gobbos and introduced to a new creature - the troll. It's several levels higher than us, and does ~50 damage per hit. I have 173hp. However, mashing the attack button like usual seems to make Manny do Mario double jumps, which is pretty cool. I think if you time it well you can avoid getting hit for a long time, but I can't manage too well. So after several potions and fireballs, we decide to whip out our bow - Div2 lets you use hotkeys to swap between weapon sets. Without investment it does an amazing 2 damage per shot, but at least I don't need to aim, at all. You were a worthy opponent, but you ain't no MGB.

Oh, bloody hell, I still can't pick you up. It's almost as if I don't have opposable thumbs or something. This actually took about four minutes of acrobatics, which probably proves I'm not qualified to play ARPGs. Moving on, we discover that the lavish home is just a front for a den of iniquity. We know bad things are happening here because there is some smashing red lighting. Hang on, maybe not. Naberius insists that he studies necromancy for good, not evil, and that the red lighting is just a hangover from the disco party he had the other night. He'll invite me to the next one if I help find some of his runaway creations. Maybe I can choose the setlist, I have all of Phil Collins' albums on vinyl. He can apparently also help us make undead creations, which sounds really cool. We'll have to be on the lookout for some spare parts. Leaving the wizard's cave-home, we come across our old nemesis, the Magic Glowing Ball II. I will have my satisfaction! First we circle the gobbo encampment, picking off mooks that we can aggro away. Soon enough, though, MGB II detects our presence. I suppose you just know when I'm here, MGB II. We were born to fight, you and I. Yes, come. Come, MGB II. Come and face your doom, jumping at you with pointy eyes and squeaky teeth! Bloody real-time games make it hard to screencap things, but MGB II copped it just a bit easier than MGB I. Bloody sequels. We don't get to pick up their magic harness this time, though. We'll have to revise our home decor plans. Moving on, we start entering a different part of the valley, and find a huge pseudo-Roman ruin awaiting us. Here, we find the Dragon Knight that the bosses have been hunting down. Coincidences make the world go round.

Manny, our intrepid hero, continues. I keep wanting to play the game more but must keep a regular pace for the LP. We will stick with melee+fireball, but go dual-wield soon - Manny likes the idea of doubly efficient evisceration. Returning to the cave we couldn't clear earlier, Level 6 Manny now finds it challenging but manageable. However, he makes a mental note to be wary of the three-headed flying demon that they clearly worship. He would probably be less intimidated had he basic knowledge of meso-American cultures, but woe is the lack of state-subsidised education. Going up a ladder, we literally pop out into the bandit's cell. He is clearly uneasy at the prospect of two hairy men in a 4x4 cell together, though we can't imagine why. Does he have bad breath? He's more cheerful once we're out in the green. (Yes, the game really looks that bad, but only on my laptop & low settings.) Manny is suddenly seized by the desire to double-cross Lieutenant Louis, if only to see whether he can. He's not sure if such anarchic impulses are entirely healthy, though. ...Okay, not the smartest of bandits. Or he's in a heavy state of denial, as heavy as an abused wife. We also get a first good look at our intrepid hero in the open. The Slayer's silver eyes, the oversized shoulderpads and peasant's trousers all combine for an eclectic yet stylish man-of-the-land look. Look out for variations in green, pink and black in the winter catalogue. Anyway, having received the location of the bandit camp, we decide it's a bit far away at the moment. So we turn to more faction politics, helping an Aleroth (the, ah, 'Old Order' guys) mercenary get hold of the foodstuffs the New Order had requisitioned from the valley to resupply another town. Yes, that means the poor folks we tricked with tales of naked women to set free the pigloteriats.We get an option to bribe them, but I figure now is a good time to test the Mindreading skill... These aren't the foodstuffs you are looking for. Oh, so not only is he into naked women in the woods, he also has the hots for a certain Elisabeth. His brain must be working overtime to multitask several lusts at once. We now get an option to... well, once again lie to him about a woman, instead of helping him with his courtship in any way. Sorry Lomax, this isn't a Bioware game. Skipping ahead just a little bit, we get the quest reward back in town, then proceed with exploring the fairly large valley. It's filled with several small cave / dungeon areas that you can explore. We entered one cave to find it very nicely polished. Manny sets about looting the place, but can't seem to find the key for one particular chest... ah, there it is, in the bathtub. I would pick you up, my glowing little key, but items are only highlighted if they're right in front of me at exactly the right angle, and it's really hard. Would you help me, glowing little key?

Oh, you applied to