I think I dun goofed. I’ve been playing blind avoiding FAQs and spoilers trying to figure things out on my own and thus far I made it down to Pharod where he wants me to go down into some catacombs to get a bronze sphere. Once down there I ran into the Dead Nations and agreed to become prisoner of the Skeleton King. Talked to a few people down there, got some skill points, but I couldn’t figure out a way to talk to the Skele King himself and so I decided to attack at random where I was eventually beaten to death. I respawned in the catacombs and explored until I ran into the collective of the cranium rats. They agreed to spare my life if I killed the Skele King but I instead opted to attack the rats themselves because rats are disgusting. Well that didn’t turn out as planned as they kept spawning rat upon rat along with pelting me with spells until I died. Up until this point I’ve kept Morte alive but he unfortunately died in the rat collective room and apparently I have the ability to raise dead comrades but I can’t figure out how to do that or if it’s even possible to do while being attacked by so many rats.
So Morte is dead and I’m at war with the both factions down in the catacombs. Is it salvageable or should I reload?
If you’re only going to pay this game once, I’d recommend playing with high INT. It unlocks much more then just spells. You get to know more of the nameless one story, which IMHO is the most important part of the game.
Discipline, Danielson! I’ve alwasy been intrigued by P:T and now that it’s in the Classic Game Club I figured I’d sit down and slog through it whether or not I like it and earn some street cred. But seriously, I’m just following the quest of having to track down Pharrod and then finding his bronze sphere and I haven’t done a lot of side quests. I’m not looking to turn this into a Witcher 3 like experience where I have 185 hours logged in that from avoiding fast travel and doing every friggin side quest I encounter simply because I love that game so much. Right now I’m level 7 and thus far I haven’t been able to switch or chose another class - I’m still a fighter. I guess that’s a D&D thing?
Recently I learned not to trust the skull eek That can’t be good.
Ah yes, that’s a good point. I’m constantly waylayed by side quests. It’s just how I play RPGs, I can’t help it. In fact, if I find a sidequest, I always have the urge to do that first, because the main quest is not something I can miss, but sidequests can be missed.
Ah crap, I love this game but partly due to the fact that I am on the road but mostly due to the fact that I have played it twice to completion: I must demur. Let me tell you that you will want high INT and WIS to get the most out of the game BUT - the endgame throws attribute points at you so don’t fret. You are in good shape, wherever you are. Isn’t that a good feeling?
I wish they had a version of this out on ipad, like BG and IWD. Would make it so much easier to play, especially since you can focus more on the conversations instead of combat.
Had a marathon session of little side-quests today.
I love that learning how to be a thief was simply a matter of paying someone to teach me the skills, but learning to be a mage turned out to be a series of chores that turned out to be lessons in disguise. Wax on. Wax off. Heehee. So nice. I’m finally a mage. I don’t have to pay 100 coins a pop to identify items anymore.
Damn I sure wish there were a way to buy and use more than one bandage at a time. Healing is a bit of a pain in the ass with this old skool UI if you want to do it on the cheap with bandages.
Kind of a detour but I wanted to talk about magic in the D&D universe. With regards to magic, my first exposure to D&D was through the first two Eye of the Beholder games, and it was those games that introduced the mechanic of resting + memorizing spells for spell casters. To this day I still have a hard time buying it considering everything else I’ve played relied on the old mana pool + mana potions to keep your mage up and running in battle. In EoB and Baldur’s Gate, your mage can cast only the spells he or she has took to memorizing from the spell book during their last rest session. Once a mage expends all of their memorized spells they fall back to darts and slingshots only because swords and axes are off limits unless of course you have a character that can dual/multi-class. So a mage with no spells left to cast is next to useless until the next rest session which kind of makes playing a mage a pain in the ass to me and why I kind of lost interest in finishing Baldur’s Gate.
Combat . . . rest + memorize . . . combat . . . rest + memorize, etc. That seems tedious to me unless maybe one of you can frame it in a new light.
edit:
And worst fear came true: Sold some stuff that’s required for a side quest but luckliy I was able to remember which merchant I sold the stuff to so I could buy it back. Quest completed, but, damn there’s no hand holding in these old games. I’m lucky I didn’t leave the stuff on the ground as I’ve learned the game deletes things after 24 hours. I learned you can use a barrel and chest to safely store stuff if your inventory gets too full of crap.
I installed the UI mod recommended in the main post, but the UI remains tiny. The conversation text is big, so that’s good. But the rest of the UI elements? Eh, not so much. Did something install incorrectly or do I just have to deal? I’m playing at 1920x1020.
When I played this back at release I lost my save in a disk crash, or the save was overwritten or something, when I was 2/3 through or so. I did a full playthrough 5-6 years ago.
Looks like no one had done it yet, so cite whoever said so back then (if someone actually did say it): PS:T is the best crpg you’ll ever read. Or, at least it was at the time it was released.
I’ve played a lot of AD&D, and boy that was a system that worked much better at the tabletop than in crpg adaptations.
For those of you who haven’t started it yet: A lot of fun is locked behind having high wisdom and intelligence scores.
You’re going to have to drop the resolution down a quite a bit. On my 27" 1440p monitor I have to play P:T at 1600x900 in order to see what the hell is going on because at 2560x1440 everything is soooooooo tiny. Even though you won’t be playing at your native resolution the game still looks great.
Gulp, I’m going to try the 1600x900 resolution. It means running the widescreen setup and repatching the whole game. I hope I don’t mess anything up, including my save games.
Edit: That went well. Though the aspect ration looks different than before somehow, even though it should be the same (going from 1920x1080). Things look wider. Probably just an optical illusion of some sort.
The various crypts are pretty vast. Lots of fighting. And those cranium rats can cast some mean spells if they congregate. It makes me glad I can cast spells.
One thing I miss is that the last couple of times I played the game, I thought I had Anna with me at this point in the game. Maybe I’m just not remembering correctly. I could have sworn she joined me at some point in the main story before I met Pharod.
Maybe you traveled to the Clerk’s Ward and visited the brothel first and did the associated quest to get her to join you before you started doing the quest to meet Pharod.
I’m loving the game but holy hell is this thing so long. I mean all the reading, all of which is great, but god what a tomb of text it is. I dug through the old CGW Museum archive and found the issue where Scorpia reviewed it (issue 175, Feb 99) and in it she mentioned P:T clocks in at around 800,000 words. Today you can gauge where 800,000 words lies in relation to the list of longest novels. The heaviest stuff so far is when you’re interacting with the sensate stones in the private sensorium as well as the one guy who talks your ear off in the Smoldering Corpse Bar about the various planes. Dude, cliff notes please!
Anyway, I’m kinda frustrated with the current part I’m tackling; the godamn Modron maze. There needs to be a game development commandment that states thou shall not make lengthy and tedious mazes. Maybe I’m underleveled for the maze because with the slider set to easy I’m getting my butt kicked by those robots. Of course it’s my fault for not stocking up on those “healing” pots but whatever. I’ll slog through it tomorrow.
Still a fantastic game though and it’s given me the overhead isometric RPG bug leading me to buy Pillars of Eternity of Steam. I can’t wait to tackle that one next.
BTW, the Nameless One’s “ugh” when he gets hit in combat sounds a lot like Butthead to me.
So I hit a crash bug when entering a hut. Seems related to the WS patch, and possibly because I resized the game resolution after starting it. Which hut (or small area) it affects you in is random, but once you get the bug it will always crash for that hut. The fix is here -
You have to hex edit the .exe, which is slightly crazy, but it works.
