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:
-
I’m pretty sure that skull guys are basically off limits. You can’t fight them without cheesing them.
-
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 :/
Does the combat still have that typical straight line mano a mano lock that’s so typical for PB games? I eventually got used to it in Risen 3 but it was still a little weird to see in action. Enemies basically mirror your sideway movement at all times.
Anyway, can’t wait to delve into this once/if my Warframe addiction stops. I suppose it won’t hurt to wait for few patches anyway.
I don’t think so? Lots of enemies lunge straight past you, and running circles round each other is a pretty good description of my fights :)
It’s interesting to me that the game, or Edan, looks much better at any time when it’s not full daylight. When they let the lighting or weather routines layer their effects over the landscape, you get a lot of mist, shadow, god-rays etc that add to the visual complexity. When those are absent it looks a bit flat and sparse.
And I hope everyone’s looking up at night, to enjoy the cool moons :)
Other random cool thing: I had a burning torch in my hand when a biter came and thumped me, so I dropped it :) A little touch I’ve never seen before. Presumably they’ve stopped letting the player drop their weapon Gothic-style,as that upset people, but they’ve used the same idea in this little wrinkle.
No, combat isn’t like that at all. You can sidestep lunging enemies. And god forbid you get stuck in a battle with two or three beasts… they come from all angles! :)
One thing I wish they’d bring back from earlier games - monsters always used to have a munch on your corpse after beating you which was really cool, and rubbed the salt in to an ignoble defeat.
Also given how much the game revolves around exploration, it’d be nice if it tinted the map or something so you could see where you’ve been.
And I do wish it remembered my shield status when I switched back from my ranged weapon.
Other than that, not much to complain about here. Game is pretty much what I’d hoped for.
The other consideration is that fighting for it’s own sake doesn’t net you much XP. It seems more about money, and I always want to bump up the ‘taking trophies’ skills a bit to supplement that income before wiping too many of them off the map. :)
I don’t think there’s any critter respawn in the game? (though I guess there’s also a skill that bumps XP for killing monsters)
I was thinking Vin Diesel too until I realised we’re playing Rio Ishida from Dark Matter.
As far as I have read Elex is the first game with limited respawn. But yes, monsters are more about trophies for money then XP. Quest XP is what’s important. Hence it is irrelevant how you achieve the goal.
How many times has the game been patched already? I might pick it up after patch #2.
The old gothic games used to only respawn mobs inbetween acts. So there was a certain strategy to clearing out as much as you could before you hit the next act, so you could re-farm critters.
The project lead talked about this in the Gamestar stream last Monday. The other PB games had event driven creature respawn, for example “player enters chapter 2”. Elex has that and then also additional (time based?) respawn with creatures selected according to the player’s stats. So some sort of level scaling. I have understood him in a way that this re-population isn’t done excessively. They want to avoid an empty world.
There was a day-one patch. No word on any more yet.
Keep in mind their last game Risen 3 only received one patch (as well as a hotfix) about 5 months after release.
Has anyone gotten ranged weapons skill past level 1? I meet all the qualifications for rank 2, but it will not let me buy it.
I’m glad you said that. I did the same thing, because I’m quickly realizing this ain’t Skyrim. I’m not going to be swimming in cash and armor/weapon loot drops will be extremely rare. You really do have to work for your gear in this game. It’s kinda refreshing, actually.
A core part of the PB formula is that armour is a very expensive status symbol. Free armour beyond a certain quality is a rare exception. (In all PB games so far you needed both permission to buy better armour and a lot of gold.)
I guess there is no NRA type organization in the world of PB.
Are you sure you meet the requirements? Maybe you wear an amulet that gives a stat boost? AFAIK these do not count for skill requirements.