Renzatic on 20/9/2017 at 00:16
Are you talking about the fight on the Lady Vengeance, with Dallis, Malady, and co. ambushing you at sea? As far as I know, the only people who can permanently die are the two potential party members you don't take along to the fight.
But speaking of awesome fights, there's one in the Blackpits that's just absolutely insane in both the good and bad sense. Basically you're in a giant oil field, oil which very obviously burns when put to flame, and enemies start popping up after about a round into the fight that spread even more oil everywhere, shortly before another round of baddies show up that are both on fire, and naturally immune to it, spreading it about wherever they move The inevitable ensues, turning a good half of that section of the map, not just the immediate surroundings, into one giant raging inferno if you haven't done so yourself already via some sloppy applications of pyromancy. We're not talking about a scripted event here, it's just something bound to happen sooner or later.
It's insane in a good way because, well, that's awesome. The ground, buildings, people, everything is ON FIRE! The whole thing is one crazy, barely survivable scenario of escalating consequences.
It's insane in a bad way because a goodly chunk of the enemies in that fight aren't immune to fire, and the AI will go to great lengths to try to avoid traversing any ground that'll damage it. This leads to enemies freezing in place for a good 30-45 seconds while they try to analyze every potential move they can make to minimize damage while still making their way towards you as quickly as possible. It's like you can hear your computer trying to reason its way through a never ending series of contradictory if/then/else routines before finally saying fuck it, and taking the most direct path.
...now imagine you have 8 enemies in a row having to make those same choices. It gets real old, real fast.
Pyrian on 20/9/2017 at 03:07
It's hard to imagine what an AI could be doing that would make a modern computer chug for half a minute, unless it was trying to analyze possibility trees like a chess algorithm.
Renzatic on 20/9/2017 at 03:38
I was exaggerating a bit. It didn't chug my computer. Any framerate issues I had in that scene probably had more to do with everything being on fire (and some of that fire was cursed) than the AI going rampant.
But they would sit there for half a minute or more doing absolutely nothing at all, and I do think it was due to the AI trying to find the best answer to a bad situation it created. The burning blobs would move the moment their turn came up. They didn't have anything to worry about. Fire heals them. Ain't no thang. But the blobs that spewed oil all over the place, and were vulnerable to fire? They would sit there forever before making a move. It's like they knew that if they went anywhere near the flames, they'd light themselves up, so they just sat there for awhile, like they were weighing their options before committing to a move.
I dunno how something could manage to be rather impressive, and so damn annoying all at the same time, but that did it!
Malf on 20/9/2017 at 08:43
Yeah, that's the fight I was on about Renz. In my first attempt Malady died, and when they went down the mysterious hooded figure teleported to them and used an ability called "Source Vampirism" on their corpse.
I also suspect that if you somehow manage to out-level Dallis and her mysterious companion, you could take them down too (maybe by killing absolutely everybody in Fort Joy?). As it stands, I was only able to remove Dallis' shields and do some minor damage before Malady completed her spell.
I did get my main character on to the boat with them on my second attempt (gotta love Polymorph and the "Spread Your Wings" skill), but he promptly got utterly smashed by Dallis. On my last attempt, I'd actually managed to teleport Dallis on to our boat and into the middle of the firestorm raging amidships, but I couldn't focus everyone on taking her down due to having to protect Malady.
Renzatic on 21/9/2017 at 05:46
It took me three tries to make it through that fight. each time I let Malady die, the hooded figure would go all void-like, and would end the game for me. No one survived his attacks.
I imagine that no matter how high you level up for that fight, you probably won't be able to beat Dallis, and definitely won't be able to kill the Hooded Figure. It'd change way too much of the plot were you able to do so.
Malf on 21/9/2017 at 07:58
Might be worth cheating next time round to see what happens :)
scumble on 26/9/2017 at 17:09
Saw this on GOG initially - RPGs like this always seem appealing to me but I have a terrible record of actually getting anywhere with them. I didn't get far with Neverwinter Nights, more recently I've failed to get far with either of the Dragon Age games. I think it's partly due to time constraints or I'm not that patient with the combat.
I'm having a second attempt at Pillars of Eternity, but I'm a bit of a wuss at battles. I've put it on the lowest difficulty and while it's not trivial you can sit back a watch a party of 5 win without much intervention. I did this because the "easy" difficulty had me dying repeatedly to a couple of spiders. I thought I must have missed something fundamental.
Which difficulty level are you guys playing on? It sounds like some of the battles are a bit tough, I'm trying to figure out whether it's too intense for me or not, or everyone is just more hardcore than I am (probably everyone else playing RPGs). I wondered if strictly turn based combat in a party RPG would work better for me - the comparison with pillars of eternity is that for me your characters get in a bit of a clump and it's hard to see who is fighting what. Might be a side effect of the pre-rendered isometric format.
Can the scene be rotated in this game? I've kept wanting to do that in Pillars.
Malf on 26/9/2017 at 17:51
To be honest, I always thought Pillars would have worked better and been more engaging as a turn-based game, for the same reason you weren't that taken with the combat: it has a tendency to devolve into a higgle-piggledy scrum. And yeah, I found the difficulty to be all over the shop in Pillars, with the prevalence of skills that wrested control away from the player late in the game completely putting me off.
This is more like XCOM, and positioning and cover make a real difference.
As for the camera, it's fully rotatable horizontally and has a reasonable level of zoom, although personally I could use a bit more and it would be nice to have control over the Y-axis too.
scumble on 27/9/2017 at 13:56
Admittedly I could have just looked up a YouTube video, but videos don't tell you what something is like to play, and are obviously spoilery. I jumped about to find a section of combat and it looks like the rotate/zoom is ok. I'm also attracted by the voice acting accents being English. I guess that's just because I'm English but fantasy settings work better for me if at least some of the accents are English, or Scottish. Must be because of Tolkein rather than anything rational, because with fantasy a character could have any accent you like...