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KickStarter Serpent in the Staglands Thread

jungl

Augur
Joined
Mar 30, 2016
Messages
1,420
oh THIS game. The combat system is a complete mess. Shit ton of spells are useless and the best build without a doubt is full strength so stuff dies asap. I have no problem with the real time combat and in fact enjoy real time. Its slow enough that it is practically turn based. The rpg mechanics were a mess though. I thought the story sucked and lore was not interesting at all. Most of the gameplay was hack and slash with little choice or consequence. The game reminded me of prince of qin but qin was more entertaining.
 

Deuce Traveler

2012 Newfag
Patron
Joined
May 11, 2012
Messages
2,899
Location
Okinawa, Japan
Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
So the actual review is coming out in May, but I'm now halfway done with the game and can state a few of my thoughts so far:

1.) Graphics are a bit rough when it comes to discerning what you are looking at. The game looks like it came from the late 80s or early 90s when it comes to detail. I normally don't care too much about graphics, but it is hard to see what you are looking at most of the time. For instance, a chicken is a set of small white pixels that could have been any bird, or a piece of blowing paper for all I knew. Mousing over to an item does help, as does the fact that loot is given a blinking set of pixels so treasure is not easily missed.

2.) Enemies that you fight often seem to drop loot that does not match what you expect them to have on them. Sometimes I fought bandits and found a simple weapon on them and shield, but no armor even though their icons looked as if they might be wearing leather. Then again with the low level of detail, maybe they were wearing brown clothes and not brown leather armor. Again, hard to tell.

3.) I like the skill-based system, and the fact that magic is important, but not as dangerous or critical as it is in a D&D based game. There also doesn't seem to be a dump stat, as each is important. Right now I am running with a party of three melee combatants (my main character is one), one ranged attacker, and a spellcaster who throws vials when not using spells. I think you would be better off creating your own party and optimizing their abilities and skills for a certain style of play, but I like the idea of recruiting NPCs from those that I meet in game. The NPCs that I have recruited don't have the personality of a Baldur's Gate game, although they have some rough discussions about their stated goals.

4.) Combat is real-time with pause, but tactics are limited. Outnumbering your opponents matters greatly, so I have been practicing alerting an enemy to my presence, getting him to leave the group he is with to attack me, then leading him away and into an ambush in order to make it 5-on-1 or 5-on-2 odds. That's the way I've been winning most battles against strong enemies since combat is brutal and healing slow, so you can easily lose a character if not careful. Some spells like Hallucination are awesome, while others I wouldn't bother to invest points into. Strangely, you can gain XP when allies, such as city guards, attack and kill an enemy even if you were not involved in the fight.

5.) I really, really like how you start off the game pretty weak and have to slowly build yourself up. I spent a lot of the start of the game with basic armor, a knife, and a shield. Slowly, I defeated better armed and armored opponents to build up my own inventory. Or I would take money earned and purchase better weapons and armor I found from merchants. Right now my party wears heavier, non-magical armor, helmets, and shields and have magical weapons. My spellcaster and shooter fire magical munitions with non-magical ranged weapons. There has been no specially named armor or weapon yet, but instead they are given basic plus bonuses when shown to be magical.

6.) The game is detailed in some places, then bland in others. The manual and background story is incredibly detailed. You can run into innkeepers that tell you a lot of in game lore, such as about local unrest and violence in farther away lands. Then you'll walk into a city full of NPCs that mostly can't talk, and the ones that do talk to you have barely anything interesting to say. It's like the city was built just so you can trade with a variety of merchants and then move on to the next encounter. There was a temple that I visited that had four different priest of for different religions just hanging out together in a chamber. When you talk to the four of them, three tell you to move along as their god doesn't agree with you. The fourth is an ally of the Moon God, so he gives you a small tidbit of information of where you must go for the next clue in the storyline. Since religion and gods are supposed to matter a lot more in this story, you would have think that the game would have really beefed up the lore here instead of leaving you with such a letdown. Darklands, which influenced this game, was better at this despite being more limited because every location was infused with cultural or religious references.

7.) The game is grimdark to a fault. The one character who seems supportive of you simply because he seems to be just a great guy is killed off during the game seemingly unnecessarily. Everyone else you meet is some category of asshole. There are people who live right outside your starting point who treat you suspiciously since you seem to be a foreigner, even when I brought two NPCs with me who had been living near that town for some time. You meet one NPC who wants to join you because she is tired of the backwater village she was stuck with and the people there. There are a number of NPCs that ask you to sell someone an NPC into slavery. A couple of thugs kills a woman who cheated on her man, because said man put a bounty on her for her infidelity. Another NPC craves battle and exploration and joins you because your trip promises the potential for violence. Two girls you can recruit are in a brothel and wish to flee, and if you say you can only take one of them, the older one is ready to ditch the younger without missing a beat. Both are highly trained in violence though, so there is that. One town of folks watches your every move with suspicion. The police (arbiters) act like entitled thugs. A chief arbiter admits to being too important to be on the front lines with his men. Many NPC encounters lead to a dialogue that results in violence no matter your response or your skill points placed in speaking abilities. Everyone seems to be in a competition for the title of Jerky McAsshat.

8.) The problem with grim dark is that it causes me not to care about the people of the game. At one point I told some forest spirits about a village they could attack, and when I went back inside the village I found it overrun. Now normally I would have reloaded, but since everyone there acted as bigoted jerks I decided I'd rather enjoy the fact that I could get more experience and loot coming back to this now respawning town of forest creatures and bandits than I ever could solving that locations series of quests. I would have reloaded this game at an earlier save point if this was an Ultima, Baldur's Gate, or Exile game.

9.) There are small errors in game. At one point I entered a town without a hitch, but on my way out a guard tried to charge me money to enter. Another location had a creature attack me next to some town guards, and when I engaged it and killed it, the guards attacked me. When I reloaded and entered the town, I ran away from the creature and let the arbiters kill it and was left alone.
 
Last edited:
Self-Ejected

Excidium II

Self-Ejected
Joined
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Messages
1,866,227
Location
Third World
Outnumbering your opponents matters greatly, so I have been practicing alerting an enemy to my presence, getting him to leave the group he is with to attack me, then leading him away and into an ambush in order to make it 5-on-1 or 5-on-2 odds.
Now that sounds fun a hell.

Point 7 and 8 makes it look to me like BG is the perfect game for you. A game where you are forced to kill random people to avoid being a complete angel by just going around doing quests.
 

sstacks

Arcane
Joined
Jan 30, 2014
Messages
1,151
Outnumbering your opponents matters greatly, so I have been practicing alerting an enemy to my presence, getting him to leave the group he is with to attack me, then leading him away and into an ambush in order to make it 5-on-1 or 5-on-2 odds.
Now that sounds fun a hell.

I have kited my way through many battles in SitS. No other way to make it through that I could see.
 
Self-Ejected

Bubbles

I'm forever blowing
Joined
Aug 7, 2013
Messages
7,817
Use only fast weapons, add -speed modifiers and a few +damage modifiers, don't wear armor. People always say "ohhh, you're min-maxing, that's not the only way to play!", but at least you never need to run around in circles kiting hapless mobs around.
 

agris

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 16, 2004
Messages
6,760
you don't have to play like a pussy, use the 1st level continual healing spell, radiant stave and morph extra enemies into fiends to fight their friends. it's the codex way. don't think I kited anything for the entire game.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
That baiting tactics sounds like Gothic thing. But this one was due borky control when it comes to fight more than one enemy at once.
 

Deuce Traveler

2012 Newfag
Patron
Joined
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Messages
2,899
Location
Okinawa, Japan
Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
I just completed the game and will start working on my review this weekend. I hope to finish it within the first week of May, and then have it posted 2 or 3 weeks later, after some editing and suggestions from the staff.

I beat the game when my party was about level 11, and I never created my own companions, nor did I ever control their minds. I tried peaceful means of handling situations, but normally dialogue encounters would eventually lead to violence. Sometimes there were bugs that caused NPCs near me to go hostile when I was fighting monsters near them, forcing me to kill the civilians. There is also a point or two in the game where you try to help folks and do the right thing only to find out you committed horrible crimes. I actually chose to walk away from one of the final bad guys instead of killing her once she and I were done talking. However, to solve many of the quests, you eventually are railroaded to resort to violence. So I take the ending a little personally when at the final scene someone condemns you as a horrible, horrible person and the game ends as abruptly as it does.

Now I heard there are some slight alterations to how the game can end, and I am sure I'll read about them once I go through this thread (hadn't done so previously to avoid spoilers), but I'm still ticked off that this seems an incomplete game which is pushing you to purchase an expansion. I felt there was no real end to this story arc in this game.

On the other hand, I did really like the puzzles and felt they were the right level of difficulty. I didn't need spoilers, but I was forced to think and use the notes, clues, and puzzles I collected. The combat difficulty stayed at just about the right level up until about level 10 where I ran out of folks with enough money for me to sell stuff and had some awesome armor and very good magical weapons. I was able to beat some of the toughest encounters with 3 melee fighters, an archer, and a spellcaster, but if I were to min-max I would go with 3 melee fighters and two spellcasters with different school focuses. I didn't complete a couple of large side quests either (the bloodless and the puzzles in the Native ruins), so there was still plenty to do.

Because there was a lot I really liked and a lot I didn't, I think this review is going to be a strange one where I partially rant and partially applaud the effort. Anyway, I think I'll step away from my keyboard and go think on the experience awhile. I also have my evening still free as I thought I still had a few hours of gameplay left. Silly me.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Sounds like it. Or neutral neutral. A lot of people have a "I hate it but I love it but I hate it" kind of reaction to it.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Whalenought_Joe , when the expansion is out, does it automatically make the base game 3d? I really want to be able to replay the original campaign in 2D a few times before going to the expansion. I like 2D better.

If not, that's cool, but it'd be cool to know. That way I'll buy a GoG version to keep my 2D intact or something. Sorry for all the weird questions, but this game really pulled on my nostalgia strings pretty damn hard and I'd like to keep it that way.
 

Whalenought_Joe

Whalenought Studios
Developer
Joined
Apr 11, 2014
Messages
215
Location
Nosgoth
That's correct, it will be a separate game following the moon-lord tragedy from a different perspective. We'll be releasing it as a free dlc/content package on GOG and Steam (I don't think we can just update a new executable in) and the standalone as a new download from our site.
 

roshan

Arcane
Joined
Apr 7, 2004
Messages
2,426
Whalenought_Joe , when the expansion is out, does it automatically make the base game 3d? I really want to be able to replay the original campaign in 2D a few times before going to the expansion. I like 2D better.

If not, that's cool, but it'd be cool to know. That way I'll buy a GoG version to keep my 2D intact or something. Sorry for all the weird questions, but this game really pulled on my nostalgia strings pretty damn hard and I'd like to keep it that way.

You won't have a problem with the 3D in the expansion, that's for sure. It looks, runs and plays exactly like you would expect a 2D isometric game with a Z axis to. It's really a best of both worlds scenario, as implausible as that might sound. You have the controls and perspective of a 2D camera, but you have Z axis gameplay like jumping off buildings, climbing up on objects and using grappling hooks, which AFAIK no top down or isometric 3D RPG thus far has implemented.
 

AwesomeButton

Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
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Nov 23, 2014
Messages
16,153
Location
At large
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
How stable and bug-free is the game currently? I've been holding off playing it until it's more stable.
 

Bester

⚰️☠️⚱️
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Vatnik
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(I don't think we can just update a new executable in)
I think you can do like Chivalry did. When I launch Chivalry, I always get this window first:

b7ed616621a51942f48e3b852c5abb3a.png


It gives you a choice of executable, it seems.
 
Self-Ejected

Bubbles

I'm forever blowing
Joined
Aug 7, 2013
Messages
7,817
How stable and bug-free is the game currently? I've been holding off playing it until it's more stable.

I found it stable, but definitely not bug-free. The most annoying bug is that equipped ammo frequently disappears, although that could be fixed by not making or recruiting any archers.
 

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