Thea 2: The Shattering

Thanks Nesrie. This explains some of the problems I was having a couple evenings ago when I checked in for a trial run and had quite a few frustrations all in a row.

New Interview

So they have this Island thing going on which is definitely new to Thea 2, compared to 1. I mean I like the idea of the boats, that you can craft them and float around and the concept isn’t bad but… I am not a fan of how they’re doing it.

We’re on the middle one on the right… it just looks so, I don’t know, weird, like not a real world. I’m hoping they’ll make the world maps feel a little less like this in the future.

I don’t know why, but so far I have not really gotten into this one like I did the first. I pick it up, play a bit, and realize I don’t really want to go on. Repeat a few weeks later, same thing. And it is usually around the time I get to the boat part of the game that I stop. I keep hoping that as development continues, I’ll regain my enthusiasm. But I think that I like exploration best, and so far I am finding the exploration experience less fun.

You might want to take a breather for a bit. I think they still have a ways to go with this. I still enjoy several components of the game, but it’s been rough for awhile. Heck there was maybe a week when the MP crashing was so bad I told my sister no, not playing it, we get 10-15 turns in at most.

I backed the KS on this but have not bothered to load it up. This seems to me to be one of those titles that are more than the sum of their parts and playing it in a half-done state would simply not work well.

It works fine, depending on what you’re trying to get out of it. For example, the combat is completely different. I understand it pretty well now. Whether they add or change or even remove abilities won’t fundamentally change the combat system. They also have in game feedback, so some of the changes are from the people playing it… like me. I gave them a lot of suggestions for MP. MP was kind of tacked on last time. It works a lot better now, and you can tell they really put effort there before the feedback even.

So if you want whole experience, then yeah not worth it yet.

So last night we experienced some pretty harsh lessons from what can seasons do. As a reminder you actually have some options with seasons at the moment, where you can take only the good things from the seasons or have all the seasonal affects. Seasons themselves are new with Thea 2, and of course we took all the effects. This is the first game where various issues didn’t get in the way that we actually got into winter and past it.

So the first thing that happened is my sister went into winter with very little food, mostly due to events and bad luck, and promptly ran into issues and started starving. Not having food is so much worse in Thea 2 than 1, you start losing health and die. Food gathering is heavily penalized in the winter for many food sources, and you can burn through wood faster. She’s in desperate situation.

Well it won’t do any good to lose one of two parties, basically the second person, so I run over there and give her enough food and wood and last her to find a better spot to gather and decide I am going to try and advance the story… I’m promptly robbed by bandits. It’s not an event you can really avoid but you can go chase them down. This robbery is a lot worse too, takes like half of all my supplies, and suddenly I am trouble too.

She’s barely hanging in there, I am bouncing between two locations for food and wood trying to stay alive myself, can’t gather either enough to really get ahead real well, but we’ve got some experienced people to actually we can handle the events and the attacks but are basically stuck in a holding position.

They’ve done a great job allowing people to tweak the difficulty to start with, and within seasons are other season events, i forget what they are called like blizzards and things. It keeps things a bit interesting.

I think I can see why you don’t like it. It looks artificial. To me it looks sort of like six versions of the same island with differing amounts of erosion applied to them

Yeah exactly. It’s still early on, so i imagine they can fix it. I’d prefer it be more like Civ, some options with the layout of the landmasses and for it to look

The colors are actually the biome. Thea 2 has more meaningful areas, so certain resources and monsters and things like that are found in some biomes or more likely to be found than others. The one we’re on has some green but also sort of a dark, stripped down area where you can find dark wood, bones but not a lot of food.

here is a remark from Steam from another player

For me it is the Ice Demon island. It looks great, you can find a s*load of Diamonds and the Ice Demons look very cool (pun intendet) :P

The second one would be the Goblin Island. I like the Mushroomtrees and i am a fan of Theas Goblins.

Third place is hard, i do like the Elven island, very cool design, but also the Orc island looks great with all the burned trees and the lava. I would say it is a draw.

Because I play exclusively MP, we don’t get as far as others. It’s, well slower this way. heh. But it has allowed me to give them MP specific feedback which I hope is helpful.

I think there intention is something unique for each island , but I would prefer large landmass and then making it worthwhile to go to these places over what I am seeing now.

I decided I am going to share some pictures today. The island lay-out is a little better, and I did visit an island so I’ll share some about that. I am not going to spoiler the pictures or most what I post, today, but I will one piece and then try to be conscious about what I post going forward because… the game is table enough that we’re getting further in so I am seeing new stuff.

Resources

This is a familiar concept and not hugely different from the first game except… it seems like you actually have to research ALL the parents in order to get to the later tiered stuff. I have no been able to do that yet because it takes a long time and I can’t put all my gems in one basket.

Seasons.

I’ve mentioned seasons before, and their affects can be option. I recommend it. Even if it makes the gamer harder there are other ways to make the game really, really hard and this is more like a challenge. See winter’s unique… ugh.

You can see the games difficulty at anytime, and there are some fun things to view, at any time in the summary.

My play style is a little different than my sisters, that combined with luck often means she struggles a lot at the beginning of the game, like me having to haul my group over there and give her food so she survives type stuff. This usually means i have the strongest character and the strongest item early on. Later around turn 200-250 she often beats me either in the item or the character. She games more with kids I think.

So a note on kids which is kind of different too from the previous ones, and I don’t think I said. what your kid can be isn’t tied to your group anymore. Before in order to get a healer or a hunter or a bandit, you had to have the building in your village or a like character in your group with some random chance built in. Now it’s a lot more straight forward but still chance. So if you want a hunter, you give your kid some perception as they level up before growing up. If you want like a healer or zerca, wisdom and another stat maybe or it’s just high wisdom. I’m still figure some of that out. Anyway, often it will say something like you can have a crater, or a gather or warror (Strength / Chance), chance meaning maybe the trial won’t work out. If you get them high enough I think you can lose that chance part entire and one time my sister sent a kid to go off on her own and they came back as a goblin mine often have something terrible happen to them and they come back as scoundrels. Usually no matter what they’re still better than a will be hit twice and die kid.

The Islands are unique. Sometimes they’re so close together you can see the landmass from standing on another island. Other times there is a fair amount of water there.

image

It looks a little more natural but I built two ships, a raft that didn’t carry like anything and a sail boat and happily sailed to the green one for riches and great stuff. and promptly got my ass kicked. apparently the consensus is stay on the start island a lot longer than I did.

Some of the islands are really high level and others are not. Some like the ice one has little or no food. I wish they did a large land mass and then smaller islands instead of a jumble but at least it looks a little less the same in terms of layout each game.

Finally the events. Just like Thea 1, tons of events, but they don’t feel nearly as repetitive now. In fact I invited a particular group to my campfire oh at least a dozen times in a dozen different games (this is normal not the repeat issue I was feeling early on) and maybe the 15th time a disaster took place making me now rethink how much i want to risk when they show up for each game.

Adult Material.

I haven’t really seen it. The first game and this one can certainly go dark but there were definitely adult like situations in Thea 1 that I found unique. I am missing them here. I hope they bring it back and it’s not a consequence of the gaming reaching a wider audience.

Wow Nesrie, your impressions are great. Please keep them coming!

Is the basic survival harder than in the first game? I don’t remember feeling like my settlement was ever at risk of failing due to a lack of food or fuel.

Thank you, Nesrie!

I think the best way to answer this is unfortunately yes and no. I’ll explain though.

Thea 2 does a lot better allowing the player to control their difficult from the start.

There are three settings that directly affect what I think we are calling survivability, not dying to combat or events but mostly lack of food and fuel, things like that.

So unlike Thea 1 where you could probably just pack you starting group with warriors and people with horrible gathering skills and just struggle for a bit until you got it down, here if you don’t use some of your starting bonuses to well start with more food (it’s an option), and you don’t have someone with some skill like my starting scavenger, you’re probably going to starve. In addition, I try to stay away from the meat like food resources early on because we’re so dang slow at getting it so the first thing I look for is some sort of non-meat source of food. If I’m really lucky it will be next to fuel… rarely am I that lucky. So for the first day cycle i’m desperately on the search for fuel and food, see what is there so I can do the next thing that was a throwaway in Thea 1 but right now is absolutely necessary in Thea 2, food recipes.

Food recipes make a huge difference, and I think everyone starts with sweet meat, meat + fruit basically, but if you run into vegetables. yay! food, but so sad, you get to spend a precious early resource point buying a recipe so you can make an actual meal.

Unlike Thea 1, you can’t just stack everyone and their mother on one gathering either and get like a 100 in one turn either. I think there might be a bug here, not sure, because i never get more than 10 it seems, but the intention seems to be to avoid that mechanic where you used to be able to just stockpile a years worth of berries in a couple of turns and then call it good.

Seasons can have a huge impact, and the negative side of that can really hurt in the winter. So this is a yes and no mechanic, but boy can winter hurt you… badly. I’ve nearly starved several times during winter or just straight up lost, not always due to being unprepared, okay I was unprepared the first time, but events. I had one event that straight up told me it was going to take 30% of my food. 30%.

And then of course there are god based affects. I have a dark goddess, and since the game updates can invalidate saves, I haven’t gone that high with her but her benefits so far as mostly combat based. She doesn’t help me with food and fuel at all. I think a couple of the other gods do.

So if you want it to be hard to survive, I think you can make it, and of course they still make this worthwhile by giving you a higher score which you use to get God Points which open up more benefits which makes the game easier… with that god.

I always treated the original as a whelp this is as far as I can go, time to restart and upgrade my god so i can actually survive this (especially with the Giant Expansion.)

There are still a fair amount of things not in the game, like traits/abilities that have description holders. They changed gathering to make it hard I think… around the first the year, and I’m fine that.

Cant’ say much about settlements fixing it, but I think it won’t. 250 turns in, I still don’t do settlements, sometimes my sister does, and she always regrets getting stuck. Also 250 turns in, right after winter, some bandits take my food, some other event took even more of it, and I’m struggling to survive again. I feel like that never really happened with 1.

edit: I forgot to mention, not having fuel and food isn’t passive anymore. It’s not just not healing it’s losing life every turn for food and I forget what fuel does, but it’s bad too.

I really like the direction they are taking on this aspect. I don’t need the survival aspect to be brutal and almost insurmountable, but I found it a bit strange that the theme of the first game was of rebuilding and surviving in a strange and harsh land, but that the actual interaction with food was more like being a banquet manager.

The greater number of world settings sounds great too!

Agreed. The backstory really demands that food and fuel be a problem. Although that does mean that the struggle to supply food and fuel needs to be done in a way suitable for a game.

Had to restart, again, because of an update. I now have the most diverse group I’ve ever had with my first 7 people (you can only bring in 7 into challenges)

Warrior, Witch, Hunter, Craftsman, Scavenger, Healer and Zerca. I am doing a fair amount of challenges with additional options now because I have so many characters… earlish in. The Witch and Zerca were probably my biggest chance rolls (not 100% sure how big of a chance it is).

My sister had a child go through something… awful and came back a ghost. That ghost wound up getting “friendly” with someone else and an living corpse was born. I have a feeling this might lead to some interesting story options.

Do you think May 13th is a reasonable amount of time for the devs to get the game ready for full release?