In the Cloister is easily one of the most interesting quest lines in recent memory.
It’s sort of the RPG equivalent of an FPS where they take away all your guns (New Vegas’ Dead Money also counts here), but talk about a complete sea change. I’m living the sheltered heavily regimented work life of a novice monk now.
I wonder if you can meta-game it though and stash items ahead of time?
In all that time I still never got a firm grip on the combat. Combos remained non-viable / completely un-utilized due to enemy parry / riposte rates being overwhelmingly high. I’d wager it was like 95%. Or I just never got it.
I probably spent far too much time looting and haggling for extra coin when money is basically useless outside of building up the town, buying repair kits / repairs, potions if you ignore alchemy, and some one-off purchases like getting a better horse. I had over 200K by the end of the game. Oops.
In the end, the game just ends, although the main characters story is far from finished. I really didn’t care about the character background reveal and it didn’t feel needed at all. I guess the game is mostly fine 7/10.
Congrats! That’s around how long it took me (190 hours) including a couple of restarts and lots of doing the same things it sounds like you did (riding around getting the best prices on sold loot, micromanaging my town, raising skills to max). It was rough at the very beginning, and I hated it again during the Monastery questline, but everything else was fun and I became very attached to Henry and many of the main characters. 9/10 for me!
As to the ending…did you play through the epilogue? I mean, you don’t do much during it, but it does provide some exposition on the current situation in the region and send you off (with Hans) on the mission that will presumably become the lead-in for the sequel.
Just FYI, the DLC Amorous Adventures of Sir Hans Capon is currently free to commemorate the fourth anniversary of release…and valentine’s day.
This DLC is quite short (and can be made shorter if you make the mistake of buying potion from Charlatan, which skips a great quest), but funny and enjoyable.
The rest as well as the game itself is on sale too.
Just reinstalled and picked it up where I left off. . .training with Sir Bernard outside of Rattay. So obviously I didn’t get very far at all years ago. Game still looks decent with everything maxed out, though like so many others I’m going to suck with its combat mechanics.
I read Scuzz’s post and thought, “That’s what I had to train myself to STOP doing with Elden Ring,” my first DS game. But still good advice, it’s not Oblivion or Skyrim.
On a different note, it’s letting me save whereever I want, and I thought there was some schnapps thingy in the game. Did they patch that out?
There is save and exit, that can be done anytime. For saving without quitting, you need to have saviour schnapps in the inventory. You can save either by drinking it from inventory, or through menu.
Learn all you can from Bernard, and practice what he teaches you against the weaker opponents (the ones with little or no armor and crude weapons) as often as you can. Resist the temptation to simply stab-stab-stab and try to extend those fights a bit with the defense and combos Bernard teaches (and that you learn via skills as you progress). Also, being well armed and armored makes a HUGE difference, so try to find decent equipment early on (buried treasure is good for that, and one of the DLC adds helpful maps to find it).
Another successful equipment acquisition strategy early on is to travel the roads until you get a random event where you either hear or see a fight in the distance. Usually it’s between bandits or Cuman and town guards. Hang around the periphery of the battle, maybe assisting a guard if he’s fighting a bandit one on one, until the guards win. Wait for a few seconds and the survivors will regroup and resume their patrol, wandering away and leaving the bandit/Cuman corpses and weapons lying there. Loot and equip as needed, but DO NOT take the equipment off any dead guards, as it will be flagged as stolen.
I was absolute garbage at the combat in KC:D for quite some time at the start, so much so that I wanted to quit several times. Once I realized Bernard had more skills to teach me (revisit him a few times), and I obtained some better equipment and improved both my stats and my combat-related skills, surviving became a lot easier, and combos and parries began flowing more naturally. By the end of the game I feared no one. I could still easily die if I was careless, but I also could defeat just about anyone one-on-one, and take on small groups of lesser-equipped enemies. It just took time, patience and better equipment/skills.