Gothic, Risen... ELEX

Git gud.

Heh, haven’t played it, and not passing judgment on it. Just saying, in theory, that it’s possible to have wildly opposing views and both sides be pretty much accurate. I agree, though, that you need more than a few hours with a game this big. I’m actually really interested in it, as I love this style of game, but I have a lot on my plate right now.

Reading the IGN review it seems like the game was super buggy for the guy, same as with Divinity OS2 for the polygon writer. But then other people don’t report any significant bugs.

Possibly most reviews didn’t have the day one patch which does fix some quest stuff. Or possibly we’re not up to all that broken stuff yet. :) The IGN review also says this:

And it’s all accompanied by almost shockingly high-quality voice acting.

Currently at Mostly Positive on Steam which I guess is a side effect of low expectations.

It’s in the global top sellers too, which is encouraging. I am loving it.

I am super excited to play it, but with my current backlog of Yakuza 0 and Bloodborne I think it is smart to wait, maybe they will release some nice patches and improvements (one that would show numerical values for experience etc would be welcome).

I consider this a beta game. The game balance is totally borked.
For example, does anyone find ranged weapons are actually good against anything that has a skull marking (which is like 97% of all mobs in the game)? I had a bow and shooting most skull monsters would barely damage them. Then I got a laser rifle which does 36 damage a shot. I can unload a clip into a monster and barely hurt it. However, my chain-lighting spell which does 40 points of damage, takes a visible chunk of health out of the monster.

It seems that ranged weapons are just for trash mobs and are useless against everything else.

Also, the Berserkers suck. I did a shit-ton of quests for them and the head asshole read a giant list of accomplishments and then says, “You need to do more.” So , fuck them. I go to the clerics and they are like, “Solve our drug problem and you are in” Number of quests needed? 2. One of them is totally non-combat, and in fact they both can be.

I have not done anything with the outlaws, so I can’t comment on them.

Anyway, if someone understands why ranged weapons suck and how to fix it, please let me know.

Combat in this game is about two things:

  1. Training two mobs on each other so they kill each other.
  2. Standing on some kind of perch out of harms way casting spells or shooting things.

Melee combat = death.

Thanks for posting that, Paul. I wish more game designers would also write game reviews. :)

-Tom

I thought the skull meant “you’re too weak to fight this”?

Maybe if you keep fighting things labelled with the skulls…

I got it, since I feel compelled to support PB, but will probably hold off playing it for a while. It actually has me in the mood to boot up Risen (1)

Gee it looks thematically discordant.

Part of the strength of the gothic\risen games was the consistency of the world.

Their forest\jungle environments still look quite nice

Vince is one of my favourite reviewers. Even when I disagree with him about the game overall, I still enjoy reading his stuff (same thing I got with you - I obviously disagree with most of your, say, classic Deus Ex review, but I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, because it is well written). For example his classic Oblivion review, game I enjoyed for about 90 hours:

Or DA2:

I guess I should try Age of Decadence one of these days.

Though the best review I ever read on codex is by someone else, for Fallout 4:

Maybe this video could help?

Yeah, that guy’s awesome. He’s a terrific writer and designer. I can’t wait to play his next RPG, The New World, as his approach for choice and consequence really resonates with me.

As in all PB games: if it is a higher level the you you will very propably die or need to cheese it. Enemies with skulls get more protection against your attacks and seem to do bonus damage against you. I hit lvl 13 yesterday and a bunch of creatures lost their skulls and now I can defeat them much more easily. It is very noticeable.

The problem is that nearly all the enemies have skulls. Its like every quest has me going to some area with dudes with skulls near the objective.

I think I have noticed this too. There was a quest I tried as a lower level, the recovery of the factory parts quest. Everything was a skull there, and even getting on a perch, I was wasting arrows. Now they don’t have skulls and my ranged attacks actually do decent damage. I am still using the same weapon as before.

Yea you are not supposed to do all these quests. They are not level appropriate. You have to pick and choose what you are going to do and when. Sneaking in somewhere at night or running and stealing are all viable options. I had one quest where I had to get a weapon back for someone and it was guarded by a robot that could one shot me. But I could sneak up behind it snag the weapon that way. You really need to explore all options and be clever about what you do. If I run out of quests to do I move to the next faction to do some beginner quests there. There are tons of XP you can get by walking back and forth and not fighting anything. And you should probably avoid fighting all together without a companion. It is the PB way. I usually dislike “earn your progress” games, but the PB formula works for me.

Two things here:

  1. I’m pretty sure that skull guys are basically off limits. You can’t fight them without cheesing them.

  2. you do in fact get tons of quests early on, which had these enemies. You aren’t really supposed to do them at that point, I don’t think.

This is a major point of confusion, since most games either only give you level appropriate quests, or at least tell you the level of a quest. This game does neither, and leaves it up to you to decide if you want to do stuff… With much of that stuff being literally impossible for you to do when you first encounter it.

This game is not for everyone, but I think there’s value here for folks who are into more hard core type RPG games.

There are skulls? D’oh. That must be that other thing I turned off. I guess I follow the I-hit-it-and-its-health-bar didn’t move threat assessment technique.

But it’s a game about running for your life, and somehow finding a way forward in a hostile world. Not one where knocking off monsters is easy. They’re monsters.

Yeah, the game world is far more dangerous than other more mainstream RPGs. But something about this makes it more rewarding.

I figure that eventually I’ll be able to fight those big as demon things. But for the time being, I must nope the hell out of there.

One thing that does make this annoying though, is that load times on the PS4 are slooow. Annoyingly slow. So when you die, even if you are quick saving often, it still sucks because it takes a while to reload.

Again though, the game has a very fallout feel to it, but with a nicer looking game world.

That’s very different from PC (at least on this SSD) - load times are very short. I was quite impressed there’s no transition time to speak of on fast travel either.

If load times were longer, I would be less sanguine about the difficulty :/