Sing for me!
Question on the pacing of the game. I’m on my third attempt to get into this game, but I’m always put off by the start of the game (Fort Joy). It just feels like there’s piles of dialog and exposition with not much of anything going on, so I end up getting bored by the time I shut down the game and then never have much of a desire to load it back up and it gets forgotten amongst my backlog.
Is this pacing kind of the norm through the game, or is this a particularly slow starter? Or just not a game for me if I don’t enjoy spending most of my time talking to NPCs?
I personally think that the pace picks up a lot generally, but I also just started speeding through the dialog unless it seemed like a really important part of the game.
It picks up somewhat after you get through Fort Joy, but it’s never a fast game and like a lot of CRPGs you should expect a slowdown anytime you get to a new town. The beginning is the slowest though because they want you to pick your party in-world, but that means listening to them all tell you their life stories one after another.
After over 150 hours I finally finished this long slow ass CRPG. The first island is really just the pits. I probably spent 50 hours there alone dicking around, dropping this game several times to play other stuff for months on end.
Stuff I learned to hate:
-Chain movement. This can fuck off. I want more control of my party and this sabotaged me repeatedly throughout the run. It is optimal to always split the party and position everyone one at a time but that is a royal pain in the ass because…you can only select one character at a time! I would be forced to do this to win some particularly hard fights.
-Item level scaling. Just as bad is enemy level scaling. Replace all your gear on all characters every two, three levels or feel ridiculously underpowered. Also loved replacing my unique named sword with a non-magical vendor trash sword because it is higher level.
-The amount of stupid puzzles. I used a wiki a lot.
-Container opening simulator. There is skill in the game that gives you a chance to find great loot in every container you open…
-Inventory. Worst. Ever. Period.
And you better believe I used all the gift bag quality of life features. (Achievements disabled)
I powered through and started to enjoy it a lot more once I was about half-way through the second map in spite of the above.
My main was Fane (Pyro/Geo) + Ifan (Ranger/Summoner), Lohse (Hydro/Aero), and Beast (Two-handed melee). Once everyone had teleportation, adrenaline, and a actual real “teleport” skill for movement, combat became much more manageable and “fun”. Although still a pain sometimes because there are specific level zones if you don’t do in the correct order you’ll probably die, a lot.
Fane to my surprise is main character and central to the conflict in the overarching story, especially with the antagonist, which is a weird choice because you can totally not choose him in your party, let alone as your main.
Overall I’ll give it a B-, if you can tolerate some very annoying systems. It would probably work a lot better and be less shit if you didn’t manage 4 characters.
One thing that the game doesn’t explain well but makes such a huge difference is that you really need to accumulate a couple movement skills on your characters very early on (and you will keep them). I went into it thinking the combat would be more about like establishing a melee line with mages and archers in the back, but it’s more like Into The Breach where efficiently moving your characters around to finish enemies is key.
Early on you also want a lot of knockdown ability and stuff like chicken transformation powers.
I agree that you just need to play the game with a zone level guide, my playthrough didn’t really take off until I did that. I also would play through the acts organically and then before I went on to the next area check a walkthough and snipe a few extra quests that I missed that sounded fun.
Movement and positioning is so crucial I think they needed a separate AP for Movement vs Action. Actually moving characters during combat is for losers. Winners always teleport right where they need to be. I like your Into the Breach comparison.
I am actually fine with harder zones versus easy zones in principle, but not how it is implemented here, where a couple levels difference can be insurmountable and totally a one-sided ganking of massive overkill resulting in near-instant velocity complete party-wipe via the enemies opening alpha strike. Bloody hell.
Hmmm… perhaps say, a Move, Standard Action, and even a Bonus Action for example… ?
Yup. Teleport and any other skill that can move your characters around while they attack, especially if it can spring them to new heights.
The height advantage is massive, especially for rangers…The Huntsman skill literally only increases damage from higher elevation. And being higher increases your range. A LOT.
This is helpful, thanks. I completed through the first island a few months ago, got to the second area and got completely stuck. Mainly, I swapped Fane into the party at the last opportunity to do so and gimped my party in the process. He was dying so fast in combat and then everything tips against us. Resolute individual that I am, I gave up.
But I’ve been wanting to come back to the game and finish it, and I know I wasn’t thinking about some of these strategies enough.
There’s a ‘gift bag’ you can enable in the options to let you respec whenever you want. It can be really helpful.
Just for comparison sake, according to Steam, I completed Baldur’s Gate II + Throne of Bhaal + The Black Pits II…all faster than this game.
I think the container opening simulator + the constant party itemization level upgrade kerfuffle + general terrible inventory chores + puzzles increase the play time of this game considerably, not to mention the slower turn-based combat.
I noticed those, yes, but then saw they break achievements, right? It’s been a while, but isn’t there a mirror on the ship that lets me respec at any time now too? IIRC, it was more that I didn’t have the right skill books learned, and didn’t have good weapons/gear for Fane. So he could only do a few semi-useful things and was even more squishy than normal. And right as I picked him up there seems to be a natural spike in difficulty. So those two things together made combat super frustrating.
I was thinking to switch to story mode to get past the difficulty spike. But … stubborn.
Out on iPad for $25. No reviews on the store yet.
You can’t enlarge images on the Apple App Store from a PC. Why am I not surprised.
That’s me. I’ve never really been past it. I’ve gotten OFF the island, but by that time I’m always sick of the game after having gone through that slog. I’ve just chalked the game as not being for me, as much as many others seem to love it. It’s too bad because the co-op options are pretty rare in a game like this and I want to like it, I just can’t.
EDIT: Oops, saw this thread bumped and didn’t realize this post was from half a year ago. :)
In the nameless Isle area, you come to a point where you have to choose to side with Bishop Alexander or Gareth. I always sided with the Bishop because it made the most sense and for some reason I Gareth’s personality always rubbed me the wrong way.
For those of you who got this far, which side did you take and why?
Kill all Magisters.
Also had Ifan in our party so while I think it might be possible to pass some checks to keep him from killing off Alexander, that was the easy route to go through.