Gingerbread Man on 24/3/2005 at 21:08
You heard me. TWO of them.
Better late than never, they say. I have finally installed Arx Fatalis, and I am playing it. Generally speaking, I hate RPGs... well, I hate isometric-view, micromanagement, cheap-ass D&D wannabe, lol I r a figther-mage-theif-pantherman RPGs. But I liked Morrowind -- I guess the isometric camera is the main thing I hate about most classic RPGs -- and so far I'm digging Arx.
After punching things I was trying to talk to, whapping stuff with a bone, and generally wheeling around like a drunk who had just been flung out of a centrifuge (lol mouse sensitivity waht), I stood over the corpse of a goblin and tried to figure out how the hell I get back into inventory mode.
Ten minutes of fiddling with keybinds, and I ended up deciding it was probably easier to learn the defaults than attempt to create a semi-familiar set of controls... I'm still making eerie magical hand-gestures every time I want to crouch, and I have punched a couple of people I was hoping to talk to, but on the whole I'm getting the controls worked out.
In typical GBM-Plays-RPG fashion, I am currently squatting in front of a campfire I managed to light in some kind of gemstone mine, trying vainly to cook pig ribs. I came across some chickens and pigs lurking outside some outpost of carnage, so I bludgeoned them and took their meat. And some leeks. And about 15 bottles of wine from the tavern next door. And loads of cheese and bread. In fact, my inventory consists of probably 5 swords, 3 clubs, and the rest is wine, leeks, carrots, fish, random mushrooms / water lilies / morning glory flowers and other nonsense.
I have tried to combine flour, water, wine, fish, and mushrooms in a mortar / pestle. No luck. I have tried to repair a sword, but I think I just banged it on the anvil and made it worse. I fed a cooked fish to a dog.
The gobbos are funny as hell. Plus the little ones are way easy to dispatch (though I'm still wondering how the hell I manage to literally separate one gobbo's torso from his legs with a solid thwack of my club). Unfortunately, now that I'm UNDERCOVER AS A GEM SALESMAN, I'm not as free to bash heads. Which is annoying, seeing as how I have five swords of varying quality to test out. And I wasn't about to use them on the spiders that I found... Clubs are what you use on big spiders.
So anyway. I'm trying to cook some food, wondering what the hell I'm to do with this weird-looking rock I found in the stream. I'm guessing it belongs to one of the big-ass trolls that won't let me pass, but so far no luck giving it to them. I even tried giving one of them a flower. He wasn't visibly moved by my gesture.
Oh, wait. Four swords. I ruined one of them trying to hack some gemstones out of the floor. I'll have to see if I can find a pickaxe or a hammer or something.
But first I'm going to get a sodding roux going and make some bloody bouillabaisse if it's the LAST THING I DO. Leeks, carrots, fish, water, flour, mushrooms... Okay, so it's a crappy bouillabaisse, but goddammit I want some SOUP. I even have bread and cheese and wine.
Living it up in a spider-infested gemstone mine,
GBM
Arx-God on 24/3/2005 at 23:15
Dude ur pretty funny man... lol.. The rock you found in the river stream is probably the Amikar's Rock, if you double click it, and place it into any weapon (can't be magical, or already imbued) then cast an enchant spell using the actual spell, or a scroll, on the blade, then it will become indestructible, and it has a nice white aura surrounding it.. If you have anymore questions about Arx, just ask :thumb:
Gingerbread Man on 24/3/2005 at 23:45
Notes to self:
* thumping a troll across the belly with a club is not a Good Plan. Not yet, anyway.
* when guards tell you that they're gonna give you three seconds to stop trying to bash a door down in the King's Throneroom, you should take this threat fairly seriously.
* snake-women are really sexy.
So now it seems Mr King has decided I'm to be trusted with some kind of a letter to give a troll-king. Me with my no-shirt and spider-goo-encrusted leggings that I stole off a corpse. Wow, these people are really hard up for a saviour. I'm surprised they even let me in the place... What must I smell like?
I've had to leave a whole load of foodstuffs in a barrel in the caves. I don't want to go back there at the moment on account of a gigantic poisonous spider that keeps trying to eat my knees. When I have better stuff to bash the spider with, I'll go back to reclaim all the flour and fish and leeks etc that I left behind, but right now I'm more interested in seeing if there's anything to steal in this castle. So far I've managed to pinch a bucketful of cheese and a hat that I'm apparently not strong enough to wear. One day I will be strong enough to wear this hat, mark my words. It is now my life's ambition to beef up, get buff, work out three times a day, until I am able to support the massive weight of this wee hat on my apparently too-skinny neck.
And I need better pants. These ones chafe and they smell like corpse. :(
I could like a shirt, too... But then, if I buff up so I can wear the hat, maybe shirtless is a good look. I wonder if I can tape all these ferns to myself and pretend to be a bush? That spider will never see it coming, I'll tell you. Tiny brains, spiders.
yrs in stinky pants,
GBM
twisty on 25/3/2005 at 08:39
Quote:
GBM:Better late than never, they say. I have finally installed Arx Fatalis, and I am playing it. Generally speaking, I hate RPGs... well, I hate isometric-view, micromanagement, cheap-ass D&D wannabe, lol I r a figther-mage-theif-pantherman RPGs. But I liked Morrowind -- I guess the isometric camera is the main thing I hate about most classic RPGs -- and so far I'm digging Arx.
I guess that one of the greater technical challenges for a developer creating a 1st person rpg is making the convergence of game-driven stats and player skills within combat both fun and believable within the context of the game. To my mind, no RPG has really come close to perfecting this yet, but Arx handles this fairly well most of the time. Deus Ex pioneered this in a more-modern sense, and pulled it off rather well once you got used to it:- In my opinion, it probably stands slightly above VtMB and Morrowind in regards to it's balancing of player skills & character stats.
At any rate, playing Thief DS first should have prepared you for the wonkey ambulation of your avatar in Arx. :p
Gingerbread Man on 25/3/2005 at 08:51
I'm still coming to grips with Wobbly Bob, to be honest. It's a wonder I can hit anything at all.
Well, I did hit Miguel the Blacksmith.
I THOUGHT I HAD ENTEReD INVENTORY MODE FS
Luckily I had a QuickSave from only a couple of minutes previous, so I was able to undo the resulting carnage.
Here's something I'm suddenly wondering, though... Am I taking this way too fast? Seems to me that I'm getting through on blind luck, and once in a while I'll run into an opponent that there's no WAY I can mangle.
Since my last epistle, I have given the trolls back their thingie, got them back to work, robbed the gobbos blind (and then decided that, since there was nothing left to do in Goblin City I may as well slaughter the King and everyone else in the place... but I reverted a save after doing that, so technically they're all still alive and that was just a murderous fantasy I had), and now I'm standing over the bloody shreds of what used to be a bunch of Akbaa's most promising acolytes.
Admittedly, given the decor in this temple a few more bloody shreds won't even be noticed.
Had some fun with a couple of slow-witted golems. Actually, I had a tedious half-hour of running around and jumping from ledge to ledge while storing up triplet fireballs and firing them -- then I started to wonder if golems were all that vulnerable to fireballs... I didn't want to chip my lovely new Gobbo Scimitar, so I kept poking them with some flimsy-ass shortsword I found in the Crystal Caves until they died. Meanwhile, Blind Steve the Akbaa Priest is happily praying his way across the room, through the altar and over to the other side. Plus then I cut his head off and stole his bracelet. >:D
But now I'm a bit buggered. Seems that -- at level 4 -- I have neither the equipment nor the skills to take down a demon. And I'm not sure there's a lot I could get up to that would help me level up (other than going back and slaughtering the Goblin King and his ridiculous minions).
Probably it's just a case of me stinking at combats still. I think maybe I'll go push that goblin into the river, steal his fish, and sell them. It's not going to get me much cash, but I'll feel better about myself.
Knee-deep in excrement,
GBM
(ps: I just figured out that I can enchant my scimitar to paralyse my opponent... plus I just smeared nasty poison all over it. Now maybe I'll go kill me a demon. PRAY FOR ME)
twisty on 25/3/2005 at 10:42
Been to the crypts yet or anything? Still sounds as though you've got a fair bit to do - ie earn some more exp - before going medieval on Akbaa's ass.
Gingerbread Man on 25/3/2005 at 19:41
Yeah, I was afraid of that. I haven't been actively rushing through anything, but I also haven't been dawdling. I learned my lesson about dawdling in Morrowind: Far too powerful, far too fast. I was plucking the nosehairs from Ascended Sleepers in broad daylight before I knew it.
I think one thing that's a bit lacking in Arx is Obviousness of Side Quests. Maybe that's due to the way the main quest is made up of little pieces of seemingly-distinct things. Perhaps it's the size of the levels... Certainly in Vivec or even Balmora there was the sense that there were dozens of things to occupy your time with along the way. Or maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
But no, I haven't been in the crypts. I mistakenly assumed they were for a later stage.
So now I blunder and bumble my way back to King Whatsit, drop some stuff off in my bedroom, and see about getting into the crypt. Good thing I have a save just before triggering the Akbaa cutscene. \o/
Wandering around with a ninja-mask on,
GBM
(ps: can't get into the crypts and no one in town has anything new to say to me. Decided to beat up some gobbos and steal their things.)
(pps: Whoops. Accidentally disturbed a nest of Snake Ladies. Hooray quicksave. Managed to thief some nifty stuff first, though.)
Gingerbread Man on 26/3/2005 at 00:13
I gotta say, it also seems WAY too easy to do things out of sequence.
I mean, I've killed all the Akbaa Priests, got the trolls back to work, etc etc, and now I discovered a place I hadn't seen before in the Goblin Prison of all places. Wherein I encounter a fisherman troll who yammers at me for a bit before Bob Wobbles says "Wait... the trolls work for the goblins?" YES YOU ASSHAT YOU ALREADY DID ALL THAT.
Now, while linearity is in itself a big annoyance, you'd imagine an RPG would either set up scripting so that it would check itself and have alternate conversations etc to cover for things already done (I seem to remember this being a bit of a failing in Morrowind as well, but the other way around... I'd show up at someone's place for the first time with something interesting I'd picked up along the way, and they'd say "THANKS FOR BRINGING ME THE SHOES OF EXQUISITE LANGOUR MY FRIEND!!!!!" and sort of short-circuiting the whole thing. They could at least have said "Dude, I need someone to find these shoes for me..." so I could rummage in my pack and say "WOT THESE?" and they could say "DUDE!")
I've never been involved with designing an RPG, so I've got no real legs to stand on, but I get the impression that -- while Arx and Morrowind take a good run at it -- the balance between linear progression of story and the freedom to do things in a more realistic / free manner still hasn't been figured out.
To this point, Arx feels like a weird and slightly unhappy mixture of aimlessness and stumbling across things I shouldn't be able to stumble across yet. Like that Snake Woman lair. I get the feeling I've blown a plot twist or something, and that's not a good feeling.
Hrhhm.
And I'm still finding it very difficult to level up to a point where repairing things or even picking locks is possible / useful. A lot of side quests seem remarkably arbitrary and not things you'd deduce from conversation or exploration, and some things are just so ... erm ... random / arbitrary that it gives me the impression that the developers lost sight of what a player would be comfortable knowing / figuring out. That's also a big pitfall in development: It gets very easy to assume a player will have as intimate an understanding of the game mechanics and suchlike as the developers do.
Mind you, I qualify all this criticism with the following facts:
a) I'm not an avid RPG player, generally speaking
b) I'm enjoying the game, no matter what fault I find with it
c) I have a lot of positive things to say, but I'll say them later
d) I don't think I'm very far into the game yet
Of course, d is an unknown to me... It's pretty hard to tell how far you are in things when it all seems arbitrary and easy to do out of sequence. I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have been able to get at the Akbaa demon thing when I did, and it was pretty clear to me that the Snake Women are far out of my league.
And yet meanwhile I'm still running across the occasional tutorial tip. LOL CHECK IN TEH BARRAL!!!! Yes, I know about barrels, I have several stashes of stuff all over the place.
driver on 26/3/2005 at 00:33
Without spoiling too much, I'd suggest you pick a couple of skills and stick with them. There's only 10 levels of experience you can gain so you can't boost all your skills to uber levels, pick either magic, combat or stealth and bump your str, int or dex accordingly (I suggest magic for new players as it makes things much easier). Otherwise you'll be in big trouble when you meet the really hard enemies.
Musopticon? on 26/3/2005 at 01:40
Without spoiling too much; the evil doped-up überspider in the caves is a push-through when compared to those enemies that driver mentions. They might even be a bit too hard, albeit from being very challenging.
