All I know about this game is what I have read here and your collective enthusiasm is infectious.
Is it fair to say that if you enjoyed Massive Chalice you would enjoy Wildermyth? I assume they play quite differently and yet they both generate great stories, which is attractive.
As much as I liked Massive Chalice it was a very enjoyable ‘one and done’ experience for me. Wildermyth sounds like it encourages players to replay in ways that MC did not?
I’ve been saying it like “Gene Wildermyth” as well, because the game is wild.
I didn’t play a lot of Massive Chalice so I’m not the best qualified person to answer this, but from what I know they’re doing pretty different things while both being centered around a tactical RPG core. Wildermyth is very interested in telling stories rooted in relationships between characters. While characters can have children that join your party there’s no “genetic” component to that, the parent-child relationship is just another hook for story telling. The time scales are also vastly different, Wildermyth generally spans perhaps 2, at most 3 generations.
That said, if you enjoy good tactical combat, narrative rooted in actual character, and a larger scope of time than your typical RPG I think it’s safe to say this is something you might like.
Funny, Wildermyth also made me think of MC.
On the flip side, never having played Massive Chalice, what aspects of Wildermyth would I find more of in MC?
Here’s Tom’s review of it, I seem to recall he also wrote a series on it when he played it too.
That sounds fabulous, actually. I might give it a shot when i need a Wildermyth palate cleanser.
Not sure… I really didn’t get into Massive Chalice (can’t recall why), but I love this.
I remember disliking how enemies were largely triggered in pods in the tactical combat, a bit like XCom.
It meant your optimal path was to always scout, then hit the enemy pod from a distance, and then kill them as they ran to you.
And then 20 squares away from this big fight there is another pod waiting, who somehow didn’t realise there was a fight happening.
Or were just waiting as an additional surprise for you to deal with, because on numerous occasions I had them scoot into the fog and work their way around to flank me or catch a straggler out.
How is the loot and skill development? Is this game compatible with short-ish play sessions?
I have a massive backlog and plenty of wishlist games currently on deep discount for the summer sale, but I kind of want to ignore all that and just buy and play this game at full price after following this thread. Thanks, Qt3 effect!
Loot and skill development are both on the light side of the spectrum, but work well for what the game is doing. The overland map is in some ways like a light strategy/management game in its own right as well.
It’s very just-had-a-baby friendly, take it from me. It’s easily played with one hand, purely turn based, save-anywhere, and lends itself to playing a bit of overland management and a combat and calling it a (15 minute) session if that’s what you need.
For those who found the first campaign too easy, do you recommend bumping the difficulty for a first play through or did you find it better for learning the game that it was a little easy? I think difficulty picks up in later campaigns, right?
I think leaving it at default for the first campaign is wise simply because nothing is familiar, and it blunts the impact of mistakes that result from just not knowing things. I bumped it up when I started my second campaign and that’s worked out fine.
It is absolutely great for short sessions, one of my favourite things about it. :)
Loot and skills are simplified and I think this works well too, really fits the character of the game.
For skills you are presented three choices when a character levels up, these seem to be semi random in that they’re selected from a big pool for that class, and there are usually two new ones and one upgrade for an existing skill. Many skills seem to have a few upgrade levels - note that everything tends to add abilities/buffs/debuffs, not just minor stat increments.
You usually get an item reward for each event/combat you do. There is no inventory management or transferring items, it’s all bound when you choose who gets something, and replaces anything that might have already been in that slot.
There are two of each type of ‘thing’ (like two swords, two great swords, two bows, etc) and each has three levels/upgrades. These seem to be randomly drawn from a pool for each campaign, mainly to do with their elemental type. All of the weapons are available for crafting, if you have the resources.
There is some ‘loot meta’ too, where the elemental items you unlocked in a campaign can be saved with a legacy character for use in future games. And there’s a big screen showing all the weapons you’ve discovered in your games so far.
In my experience there are usually at least four options.
To clarify, you can craft any elemental weapon you’ve had in a previous campaign, so there are really 5 types of (for example) dueling swords, you just may only have access to two because you’ve only unlocked one elemental variant for that weapon type. It should be noted, though, that while the art for all 5 is different the base stats are the same except for the elemental bonus.
There are also 4 tiers of any given weapon type (0 - 4) and the artifact designation, which provides additional bonuses, so it’s more complex than it looks at first. Plus there’s a lot of lootable items that fall outside this scheme, since they’re not craftable, and the diversity of lootable armor pieces is pretty broad from what I’ve seen.
The big thing is that gear can’t be traded around because the game is violently allergic to inventory management, though there are mods that can change that.
Sorry, yes on all counts! :)
Yep, that’s what I’m looking for–something easy to get into and get out of, with enough complexity to engage me but not so much that I feel compelled to min-max or spend much time researching the game mechanics vs. just playing and going with the flow. And thanks also, @Profanicus! That all sounds about the “just right” Goldilocks level of gameplay that would fit the bill.
Meanwhile, I’m getting deeply concerned about my current game. I’m in chapter 4 of a 5 chapter campaign and literally all of my heavy hitting vets are going to retire before chapter 5. This would not be a problem if I had successfully trained up a second generation to replace them, but a combination of poor decisions and lousy luck has left two of them dead. I’m literally going to walk into chapter 5 with two heroes that have ever seen a fight. Even if the game is generous about kids and recruitment this is likely to get very, very ugly.