Wonderful game with a few bugs, and yes, triple crown solo is definitely doable (spoilers)

[IndiraLightfoot]

Hi y'all!

 

***SUPER SPOILERS AHEAD***

 

Having played the game now to the end with both a party with a mix of companions and adventurers on Path of the Damned and then doing it solo with an Orlan Cipher (my favourite race and my favourite class - the latter so very flexible and always resourceful - the mental McGyver of CRPGs), I must say that PoE is a masterpiece. It's one of the best CRPGs ever made - it certainly can rub shoulders with BG1 and BG2 and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. 

I won't go into the combat mechanics and such - I'll just leave my premature review here first:

I had played the beta a lot, almost always on Easy or Normal, but I knew the mechanics decently. Also, I had replayed games like BG1, ToEE, NWN2 OC and PST before I got my hands on PoE.

My first playthrough became a plain PoTD with three party members: Aloth, Eder and Durance, and three home-made adventurers (a sucky Ranger, I had to have Indira Lightfoot in my first party, though, it's tradition, a two-weapon fighter, and then my main Breida; an Aumauan Druid (very competent druidic tank.

Breida survives almost anything unharmed, and Indira usually suffers hard - and now and then Aloth - at least early on.

 

 

The pros:

-I absolutely love the story. Considering it's a low-level CRPG, it's brilliant, it's a homerun out of the ballpark, kind of thing. Superb!

-Music, sound effects, art - everything is outstanding! Love it, love it, love it!

-Very nice exploration and plenty of hidden stuff for a completionist on a first playthrough

-Pretty decent class/race/build smorgasbord, at least on paper, as it were.

-Combat on the PotD-level is truly deadly, and it is especially fun in Act I and half Act II, this also goes for triple crown solo, it seems. I like that complete urgency feeling.

-Aloth and Durance are great fun as companions, while Eder is so-n-so.

 

The cons:

-Party play is basically me directing and owning combat with my tank Breida, with the exception of teleporting phantoms/shades etc and burrowing beetles, nothing can really touch this "put the tank in a choke point, and rain ranged pain and AoE hell on them baddies"-tactic. I do, however, have a variety of ranged attacks and spells to pick from, so it's not all monotonous. Breida is very rarely hurt at all (I've built her entirely as a tank - so she has super-high defences in everything and dex 3 - you get the picture - she can stand in her own AoE effect and melt almost any group of baddies herself, without any party. However, I have Aloth be the big damage dealer, and that he certainly is. As a contrast, I use Durance in the old pre-buff role of the IE games, but he's doing it in combat, instead. He's built entirely as a support character. He has 800 damage in like 90 hours of play time. He simply protects, heals and buffs my party, nothing else, and that is a bit boring. I am dreaming of the 3.5 ed D&D monster priests of doom.

-Soloing the game is far too much a matter of RNG - the system doesn't really allow for my skills being rewarded with my passing/resolving encounters (including violently). Often, it's all up to where I am at the start, casting the same spell, running in the right direction fast, chance has a lot do with it, sadly. I keep pressing on, however, although it's a chore, sometimes. I feel such a challenge should involve tactics, first and foremost. That's why I don't like some fights where you get entirely locked in, with nearly no tactical options available to you when combat starts but trying to flee to some corner and survive.

-Some of the quest nesting in Defiance Bay is too confusing, and it's easy to make a mistake and almost wreck the game without you knowing it.

-Crafting is alright, but it still feels lacklustre. When you play on potD, and even more so soloing it all, you do need to use food, crafted stuff and scrolls, etc, a lot. You wouldn't make it, otherwise, which in itself is a flaw, I reckon.

 

And well, the game isn't all bug free. This happened when I had to Alt tab out of the game to check some mail and then returned:

 

Overall, though, I'm extremely happy with the game. It's certainly a low-level classic isometric CRPG, already.

 

My Triple Crown Solo PotD hellride with a cipher charmer runner sneaker trapper certainly took quite some time and patience.

 

Here, heavily damaged and all, I thought I was done for, but just by picking the right words, I got myself some dragon friends instead.

 

I did use quit and reload quite a number of times, over 20 during the whole game, and once in the last boss battle. I had to made use of the invo-recovery glitch in some bad situations in like five or six fights, including the last (there it was a must), and it all came down to charming and confusing spells like Tenuous grasp, and later spells that stole power from enemies and sometimes even increasing my accuracy, and then having a 2H weapon to beat through DR on singled-out enemies. I had my eyes set on a weapon I found with my first PotD party, a certain 2H Rose morning star (at Cliban Rilag) that heals you 20% per hit - extremely useful on a solo run, especially with a cipher that doesn't really need to rest with high Con and Focus as a resource.

 

And if I was caught-up and flanked, I confused enemies (just 10 focus for TG, it's a steal!) and then bolted. Despite my using glitches, it was a very exciting playthrough.

Oh, I almost forgot, get figurines with more than one summon on them - they'll work wonders in engaging many enemies when you solo - you need three, not one. I just love those - in the game, I found three such figurines, and I needed them all, often.

 

 

And later Cipher spells are super-powerful. I could even use Thalos himself as my own Titan-bashing puppet! Poor sod.

 

So, Mr Sawyer, no need for that smug smile anymore...

 

Finally, I'd really like to commend Obsidian for this fantastic story:

The writing really impresses me, the great tone and its consistency.

It is for the most part serious, with slight undertones of light humour and cleverness at select nodes in the plot lines.
Everything is told with a very nice sincerity and intellectual stringency, and it's always done honestly, with a straight face, as it were. It's almost the opposite of another recent CRPG - Divinity: Original Sin - where almost everything is jovial in tone, tongue in cheek and often nudge-nudgey. I'd actually say that quite a lot (perhaps too much) of WL2 also had this style of writing being prevalent almost throughout. I hadn't played WL1, so I do realize it could be a part of the genre.

Moreover, it's more descriptive and story/plot-driven - the narrative structures are always at the forefront, no matter how difficult the subject matter is - souls, animancy, hollowborn children, etc - any factions are derivatives of this. A contrast to this would be DA:I, where almost all text you get, whether from companions or narration, is either personal or faction-driven, and the rest is almost included like an afterthought.

 

I'd give PoE a 95 out of a 100 (minus some combat stuff) - there's always room for some improvement.
 

Edited April 24, 2015 by IndiraLightfoot

[gkathellar]

Nice job, Indira. Working on my own Triple Crown playthrough right now (with a paladin ubertank), and it's rough going, but fun!

[IndiraLightfoot]

Yeah, it is exciting alright! Even with an occasional quit and reload, doing that triple crown solo is not for the faint-hearted. I have everything on slow mode in combat, always, and I changed my settings so that it pauses on almost everything but getting hit, IIRC. It also takes patience and quite a bit of meta-knowledge on PotD (how many enemies, and especially: which areas to avoid - mostly, phantoms, spectres, shades, etc - I skipped the temple in Gilded Vale, I even skipped Raedric's Hold, but then I did most stuff in Act II (obviously ignoring the stronghold and Od Nua, as well as Searing Falls and them Bluffs and that Stormwall Gorge ghost fest dungeon. I snuck by lots of other annoying baddies - like them Dyrford crossing teleport beetles - and I also ignored those poisonous spiders in droves at that ogre. Despite doing that, and being quite selective during act 3 - mostly sneaky and non-violent, I barely made it into level 11, so the game is pretty forgiving that way.

Edited April 24, 2015 by IndiraLightfoot

[IndiraLightfoot]

I double post this post of mine here, since it better explains how you can solo PoE with a cipher, and it also includes another criticism of the game, which actually concerns movement and engagement - it's too hard, I reckon:

I just read this post:

 

Did anybody explain why the decision to prevent running from combat was included? Still feels like a heavy-handed way to force players to deal with a situation, and goes against the spirit of table-top/BG imo.

Probably has to do with developer time needed to implement it. Like most of the missing "basic" features that IE games had.

 

 

And then I pondered a bit over what I had just written about Tenuous Grasp for ciphers:

Leon: I see where you are coming from, but I love that OP aspect of the cipher!

And its most important spell, which can be cast before combat - tenuous grasp - 10 Focus (cheap) - I would not have made it through triple crown solo without it, since I can control most encounters with it. I can chose to escape, I can break a flank if things go south, and I can even use it to lure off enemies one by one.

 

 

And I suddenly realize this: I most likely love this character because it's one of the very few builds that more or less can move rather freely in combat, from the very start of combat to the end in short, it can ignore engagement pretty often.

Perhaps I'm not that fond of the engagement/disengagement mechanic, after all?

You learn something new every day.

[Karkarov]

Well Cipher is OP as hell to be sure.  In my playthrough by the end as a cipher with GM most fights only lasted a few seconds.  I could do that massive aoe level 5 skill 4 times outright and very very few groups could survive it.  This makes me happy I play on GoG though, I don't have to stare at achievements seeming to imply how I should play the game.

 

In the end though needing bugs and summon spam only proves that no.... you can't solo the game.  Solo implies one character, not one character and his 9 summon friends with bug abuse.  Either way I doubt hardly anyone has those achievements so well played Indira.

Edited April 24, 2015 by Karkarov

[IndiraLightfoot]

Karkarov: As I grow a bit older, my cheevo-craving has grown too, not at any alarming rate, but I am enjoying the hunt for a few weird ones (like in Dishonored), or sometimes reaping them en masse (for instance, in COH2).

 

As for Cipher, well OP is the word, perhaps, but I somehow want all classes to have that kind of power and resourcefulness at their disposal.

 

And, finally, triple crown solo is mostly about patience, with some necessary cheese, glitches and exploits. The game was not built to be played like this, especially not at Path of the Damned.

 

EDIT: There were a few places in the game in Act 2 and 3, where my solo character was spoken to in the plural, heh, as "we" etc.

Edited April 24, 2015 by IndiraLightfoot