Operencia: Zen's Turn-based Hungarian-Folklore-Inspired Blobber

Invest in health, the mage does a crapton of damage with zero added to intelligence, and you get a bunch of bonuses through talents anyway.

Overall my mage probably did 75% of the damage of my entire party. The first level frost spell is extremely powerful, as is blizzard later on.

I finished this over the weekend, which is kind of a big deal for me! Dungeon crawls start to feel generic over the long run for me, I don’t often see them through. But this game has oodles of personality and distinction, the party characters are actually characters and they have something to say about themselves and the world around them. Also, it helps that while the game can be challenging, it doesn’t go over the top to punishing, at least on the default difficulty. I really dug the balance between combat and puzzles, it kept the game feeling fresh, which also helped pull me along. I’m really glad I came across this, they tease a sequel at the end and I’m hoping the studio gets the chance to follow up.

Did you play the newest Bards Tale, and if so how does this compare for you? I did get this, but I haven’t started yet.

No, I haven’t played that, is it any good? I should probably mention that I’m not nearly as hardcore as I used to be on gaming generally, or RPGs specifically. There was a time when I’d pick up a new game, an Ultima let’s say, and open up a new notebook and just get to work, resurface maybe six months later. That’s not me anymore. I like the bells and whistles now, the quality of life stuff like the game keeping track of mapping and notes and stuff like that.

Plus, I’m not super into stats and fiddly stuff, I am no min maxer. For Operencia, I paid attention to stats for sure, and pushed what I guess you’d call a character’s “primary” stat, but tried to keep others at least in relative balance. I mean sure, your fighter doesn’t need high INT or WIS, but then again their skills use points and bumping those up will give you more points to work with. There aren’t any dump stats, but they seem more like Diablo type stats, you don’t really need to overthink them, and that works for me.

I did play the old school Bard’s Tale games, like just about everyone I guess, and they were pretty good I thought. I knew there was a new one but I guess I forgot it had released, so I should probably take a look.

It is pretty good, with a fairly high amount of combat and puzzles. I’ve already played 40-50 hours in it and I don’t think I’m close to the end. Lately I’ve had a hard time staying interested in these longer RPGs. They all seem to have something that just starts to annoy me and the fun starts getting sucked out of it. Divinity Original Sin 2 has way too much inventory management. Bard’s Tale 4 had me running back and forth a bit too much and the voice acting is kinda poor. Pathfinder Kingmaker just became too much of a slog.

I believe Operencia is a short game than the ones I mention, but it isn’t short. I also have Tower of Time to play. I think I am more likely to stick with either of these because I think they don’t try to overload the game with extra stuff.

DDD this is a good game. It can get puzzly… but not Bard’s Tale IV puzzley. I like it a lot.

What is DDD? I thought you meant Divine Divinity, but the third D?

On Operencia, does the whole combat line distance thing ever matter? It seems to have no effect whatsoever in hit chances or damage as far as I can tell. Maybe because I am playing on normal or because I am still early on (mushroom cave)? Combat seems like it should be more interesting than it is. Not that I don’t enjoy it, just wouldn’t mind for it to be a bit deeper.

Each attack shows you how much it hits for (or, rather, how much efficiency it has compared to its max power) at each distance with a little graphic showing the 3 enemy lines.

Right, just in practice, damage seems to be about the same, or at least not a huge difference. Also, once the front line is wiped out, why don’t the other lines move up?

So, I got through the castle, but I realized that it kicked me out before I got all the secrets. Luckily, I saved it before I finished the mission.

But, I’m wondering if I’m happy with my build for the thief. I put all his points in stength and agility, but I realized that for talents, I went down the poison branch. Maybe I should have gone under the the stealth on instead? Is there a wiki out there is information?

For my main character, I went as the hunter. There seem to be a lot of skills that boost initiative and the chance to attack twice, and I’m focused on Agility, with a bit of Wisdom and Intelligence. I think I’m happy with that combination. Double attacks real make a lot of the battles a bit easier.

So, did I screw up my thief? I’m only 2 hours into the game, so it’s not like restarting will be an awful thing to do.

I did the same thing, and then got sick of searching for hidden walls and left.

My understanding is you can’t get all the secrets until later. You can go back to earlier areas later in the game supposedly. There is definitely a tool you get later for finding some secrets as well.

I was able to get to the armory (If you grab the starlight, and run all the way down, you can get to the rune right before the timer runs out) but I’m going to see if I can find the 3rd weight before wrapping up the mission.

Oh yeah, the weights are accessible immediately, so definitely finish that one. I am just saying don’t spend all your time trying to find all the secrets it says on the map screen.

The thief sucks anyway, you should dump him as soon as you get a chance, which won’t be too long.

You can return to every location in the game with quick travel later on. You will not be able to get every secret your first visit to many zones as typically they require “artifacts”, like the shovel. There are a bunch of those.

Does he? The fire/poison spells seems to work out pretty well.

Nearly everything is immune to poison, and quite a lot are immune to fire also. What you want is lightning and frost.

In my experience, many bosses are not immune to poison, and this is an effective tactic against many of them.

I have to save his energy for healing mostly anyway. Probably should have listened to stusser and went with a mage over a fighter.

You’ll find two much better healers later on too.

I like my hunter so far. The ability to give everyone double attacks should be fun when I have more characters in my party.