I made a beeline to Neketaka and finished as many quests as I could. By the time I left, I had plenty of gold and was over-leveled for a decent chunk of the side-content.Pacing/difficulty really seems to depend on your wanderings. Sometimes I run into some lich or someshit above my paygrade and the fights are delicious and require full use of resources; then I get back to MQ or something and roflstomp the whole map in 5 minutes.
I suspect that if you (accidentally?) beelined to Neketaka and cleaned the entire place out with non-combat quests, maybe robbed every single container and NPC possible (I don't know why, but we know people do this), and so on, then you might find the entire game a very quick and boring stomp.
Of course, the onus is on the game to pace you properly, so it's still true that the devs fucked up on POTD difficulty (and, I suspect, the pacing / balancing of XP rewards and so forth all over the place, just like POE1). But my suspicion is that if upcoming fixes are decent, then it's perfectly possible to have a nice fun long romp around the islands, as long as I don't deliberately look for ways to make the game easier. (Right now, it's more like you have to look for ways to not make it easy.)
Hey, I am currently on an Ironman POTD All Scaling only Upward Blind playthrough with an evil oriented main character (Eder has been sacrificed in POE1 for example), I have completed Fort Deadlight (killing everyone). Do you think I have any chance to succeed?
Yes you can,it is pretty much pointless achievement.Can't you just rush the main story in Ironman mode and say that you've done it Ironman?
Yes you can,it is pretty much pointless achievement.Can't you just rush the main story in Ironman mode and say that you've done it Ironman?
Probably because I could just as easily challenge myself to something impossible (like beating the game without using any equipment, items, abilities or companions--... and MAYBE there is some way to do that with a Monk or something, but I'm not autistic enough to find out).
I suspect that if you (accidentally?) beelined to Neketaka and cleaned the entire place out with non-combat quests, maybe robbed every single container and NPC possible (I don't know why, but we know people do this), and so on, then you might find the entire game a very quick and boring stomp.
If you have to find out a way to "cripple" yourself in-game to make it more enjoyable/challenging that's a big sign of failure in design from the developers"
If you have to find out a way to "cripple" yourself in-game to make it more enjoyable/challenging that's a big sign of failure in design from the developers
Neketaka is low level content that gives out low level main and side quests, ofc you go there.
Trying going somewhere else from the beginning of the game will likely get you to level 10+ content.
For example playing second time I went to Deadlight and then pirate island. Took a quest to help actors.
Solved quest, got into scripted encounter with thugs, they have 100+ in all stats, I have like 40 accuracy
.
Yes you can,it is pretty much pointless achievement.
From a RPG design perspective, though, I think some of Deadfire's problems are symptomatic of any CRPG trying to offer more open-ended stuff. Think about it - we love it when games open up after the first 30 mins and say the whole world is free to roam, right? We don't want to be strung along with each location opening up in a linear way? And we also like being able to go to a huge city like Neketaka straight off. But it's hard to see how you could achieve really good pacing when you have that format. (Deadfire still should have had better pacing, but I'm thinking about the broader point; e.g. we see similar kinds of issues in games like Expeditions or DOS2.)
I think this is also where BG2 lucked into a good mitigation strategy; the relatively flat progression of D&D means that you could do the De'Arnise keep at level 9 or level 12, have a lot of gear from other sidequests or not, but the difference wouldn't be as massive as it would be in many other RPG systems. POE1&2 suffers from having accuracy & defences depend so heavily on level, so that being even a couple of levels under or over can lead to a roflstomp where the player doesn't even realise why. (I just had a quick look, and my dude should not be getting over 50% of his Fortitude or Accuracy from level. It would be much better if most of the gains were dependent on gear and skills.)
When I reached Neketaka for the first time I visited the whole thing and did most of its quests, because I was engaged by its quests and the politics going behind. I also found the place charming.
I never thought that by playing the game I would be ''cheesing'', which is really a new ground to me: playing the content of a game in the order that seems the most appropriate is now cheesing. Gotcha.
Fair of you, I retract my spit-spewing rage.
I wonder what can be done to pace a game where you have a big city full of quests & lots of combat outside. Quests in the city do try to send you to remote locations, but I think many players like to vacuum up all content in an area before moving on, which is entirely fair.
BG1 does it well, the big city it at the end.
Fair of you, I retract my spit-spewing rage.
I wonder what can be done to pace a game where you have a big city full of quests & lots of combat outside. Quests in the city do try to send you to remote locations, but I think many players like to vacuum up all content in an area before moving on, which is entirely fair.
Again, I think the solution is systemic. E.g. if combat capacity progression wasn't so level-dependent, it would be totally OK to get a lot of XP in towns, and most of the reward could be gold or ship-oriented, while you'd still have to journey to dangerous dungeons to get the cool combat gear (which, by the way, is one thing Deadfire has very well - have cool and thematic items discovered in remote dungeons). Or even a game where you have combat & non-combat points given separately, and you earn the latter through noncombat quests, etc.
BG1 does it well, the big city it at the end.
You make it so you reach max level in the city, and the challenges outside are not gated by level but encounter difficulty.
Deadfire does a lot to try and encourage you to explore, both by giving you quests in Neketaka that can only be done if you leave the city, and by tying a lot of triggers to advancing main quest, which again, requires you to leave the main city.
But if some people have a playstyle where they just methodically clear area after area, they will always just go back and continue cleaning, unless you force them not to. And that requires putting the game on rails. You can do it AoD style where the game is non-linear only within each act, but remaining content is blocked by plot-gates, or you can do it Wasteland 2 style with radiation zones, or you can do some various other shit.
But I think that with a seafaring game, it really had to be a no-compromise completely open, with no plot-gating, otherwise whatever the fuck is even a point of having a seafaring setting.
You make it so you reach max level in the city, and the challenges outside are not gated by level but encounter difficulty.