KickStarter Serpent in the Staglands Thread

[Ninjerk]

Well, I thought of Zeus when I played it and found out more-or-less what the central problem was

Spoiler

when you go to the city under siege

and I guess my question is less about Zeus than it is about borrowing storytelling elements. Is your objection to the central dilemma that, "The old cultures wouldn't have need of that theme?"

My objection to it is that it is out of character for a person from said cultures to even consider trying to use those arguments to try and lecture a deity. It's the cultural equivalent of pulling a gun on Caesar; the thought wouldn't even occur to you because it's a concept that is incompatible with the time period that you live in.
It's a conversation between powerful mortals that reflects modern ideas regarding equality, justice, responsibility, and so on, while I was hoping for something closer to the source material.

Okay, that's more-or-less what I thought. FWIW, I think the ambitions were rather petty.

 

[sstacks]

I was thinking of loading this up again. Do I miss anything if I just create my own party? Am I required to take anyone.

I don't think you miss anything from a story perspective like you do with other games where companions have sub-plots. However I've heard that the existing NPCs are pretty powerful compared to NPCs you create yourself.

 

[Ninjerk]

I was thinking of loading this up again. Do I miss anything if I just create my own party? Am I required to take anyone.

I don't think you miss anything from a story perspective like you do with other games where companions have sub-plots. However I've heard that the existing NPCs are pretty powerful compared to NPCs you create yourself.

Might be worth creating them just to steal their stats. I don't remember how that shakes out.

 

[Fenix]

Might be worth creating them just to steal their stats. I don't remember how that shakes out.

I did this. ) Works fine. )

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I just wanted to give an update, since I know a lot of folks are still waiting for the review. Last week work was a lot busier than I had anticipated, so this is the first day that I had a chance to get back to my draft review. I went from the two simple paragraphs that I had started out with to about 2500 words so far in the review. With how much more I still have to say, I anticipate that the review size will be doubled at the very least. I am critical about the game's shortfalls, but I am also quite positive in other ways and I do believe that the game is better than many of the other small company CRPGs that I've reviewed and enjoyed from recent years. I also feel it is better than the second half of Pillars of Eternity (and PoE in its entirety), though the first half of Pillars of Eternity had so much promise that I do enjoy sometimes imagining the game stopped at around the time I earned a fortress.

Here are some of the critiques that I may be wrong about that I plan to discuss, so let me know if I am wrong so I don't post an erroneous review:

Spoiler

- You had to kill at least one child to progress in the possessed children side plot
- The end game accused me of not being very polite to the second to last boss, though I never attacked her men on that stage, nor did I ever attack her. Was I supposed to be polite over the militant manners of her and her troops?
- There seemed no way to use your non-combat skills to affect the last conflict with the end boss
- The party NPCs seem bland. I would be fine with them talking to you before recruitment, then being quiet the rest of the game, but the NPCs continue to speak once every blue moon but hardly with anything important to say except when telling you they are leaving. Are there any side quests involving NPCs that I missed along the way? The game seems to flirt with the idea by giving these characters a bare bones personality, but then it never seems to go anywhere
- A couple of times I attacked an enemy or hostile creature, just to watch some non-hostiles turn hostile and attack me. Someone here mentioned that can only happen if I was using a weapon with an area effect. I didn't recall using an area effect weapon the first time this happened, though I did the second. Did anyone else see this as an error, or is my memory likely incorrect?
- It looks like creating your own NPCs to accompany you is a bad thing at the end game, but I seem to remember no warning of this and the game encouraging you to do so. Again, is my memory faulty?

 

[Mustawd]

Here are some of the critiques that I may be wrong about that I plan to discuss, so let me know if I am wrong so I don't post an erroneous review:

Spoiler this please. Think of the children.

 

[Ninjerk]

- It looks like creating your own NPCs to accompany you is a bad thing at the end game, but I seem to remember no warning of this and the game encouraging you to do so. Again, is my memory faulty?

They're suboptimal compared to the ones you can find in the world, but you can steal stats from them before changing your party.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I had the opposite experience with regards to recruitable NPCs at end game:

Spoiler

Of my companions, I took 2 pre-generated NPCs into the final confrontation, one I had dominated earlier to prevent them leaving the party and one I had not. The non-dominated party member was the only one to rebel and attack me at end-game, both scenarios making me wish I'd just used self-generated characters throughout.

In the case of the one incident where the locals also joined the fight for no apparent explanation you'd have to explain which situation that was. for example, if it was the guard/inquisitor past the gate after the bridge toll guards then...

Spoiler

If you have any dominated party members he automatically knows you're the god and will attack, if you haven't dominated any party members you can pass without conflict.

 

[Rahdulan]

Jesus, I just realized game still doesn't have enough "official" reviews to form a score on Metacritic.

 

[Mustawd]

Can someone who understands how steampspy works please explain this chart to me? It goes from 8k owners to ~5k? Seriously?

http://steamspy.com/app/335120

 

[MRY]

SteamSpy randomly samples Steam accounts. When a game's ownership is low enough, the margin of error becomes considerable. So right now it is 5200 +/- 1800. Say before it was 8000 +/- 1800. If the total owners was 6500, that would be comfortably within the margin of error for both samplings. Also remember that samplings can just be totally inaccurate -- it is only saying that it has, say, 97% confidence that the number of owners is somewhere between 3400 and 7000. Not 100% confidence (which you can't obtain with a sampling, you need a full count).

FWIW, I have found it to be fairly inaccurate with Primordia. I don't know what to make of it, but I feel like Primordia hasn't really moved much on Steamspy in the past year, even though we've sold ~11k copies on Steam. Like maybe it went from hovering around 72k copies to around 75k copies. Although perhaps I'm misrecalling -- I just pulled up an old post of Dave's from April 2015 in which he reports 58k as the Steamspy figure for Primordia, and currently Steamspy lists 78k copies for Primordia. Which is itself silly: it's overstating the number of copies sold during that time by 9k.

I think when you get to larger numbers, the sampling gets more accurate and the margin of error becomes less significant. If you missample Dragon Age by 10k, that's pretty trivial.

 

[Mustawd]

Thanks for the explanation. I guess it's pretty inaccurate at low numbers, like you mentioned.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Started playing this and have a couple of questions (2 hrs in):
- Should I keep the gems in my inventory for later or should I just sell them?
- Used keys, notes from quests - any point in keeping them around ?
- Map south of Lumen Targ has connection to cavern network, i've found 3 levels with nothing but generic monsters there, anything I missed?

 

[Bubbles]

Started playing this and have a couple of questions (2 hrs in):
- Should I keep the gems in my inventory for later or should I just sell them?
- Used keys, notes from quests - any point in keeping them around ?
- Map south of Lumen Targ has connection to cavern network, i've found 3 levels with nothing but generic monsters there, anything I missed?

- I don't remember using gems for any quest, but I might have forgotten
- not if you've done the quests
- yes

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

- yes

Do I have to take a quest or something?

 

[Bubbles]

You can get a quest in town, though I'm pretty sure you can just find the place through exploring the caves. But beware the constantly respawning trash mobs!

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Couple more questions:
I had my spicer license stolen in the inn on the Orf Bridge by a child, how do I get it back? I suspect, the dude in the back is their mentor or whatever but I cannot confront him about it. Used all aptitudes on him but nothing came up and I cannot talk to children NPCs either. What do?

Bubbles, Deuce Traveler

 

[Bubbles]

You have to attack and kill the guy if you want it back.

 

[ArchAngel]

Isn't one of the power words one that allow pickpocketing or something?

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Isn't one of the power words one that allow pickpocketing or something?

Yeah, tried that with 3 levels in Linguistics and it didn't work.

 

[Bubbles]

Isn't one of the power words one that allow pickpocketing or something?

Yes, but it doesn't work on the guy. Tried 20 times with max level, and confirmed on Steam forums that it's been this way since at least September:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/335120/discussions/0/517142892060743376/

I'm guessing the devs want you to make a ~hard choice~ between either murdering him or abandoning your papers, so they've disabled the pickpocketing skill for him. That, or it's one of the many unfixed bugs.

 

[roshan]

Isn't one of the power words one that allow pickpocketing or something?

Yes, but it doesn't work on the guy. Tried 20 times with max level, and confirmed on Steam forums that it's been this way since at least September:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/335120/discussions/0/517142892060743376/

I'm guessing the devs want you to make a ~hard choice~ between either murdering him or abandoning your papers, so they've disabled the pickpocketing skill for him. That, or it's one of the many unfixed bugs.

It's not intentional as a "choice". As I understand it, there was a super fringe case where items were "misplaced" within NPCs which could lead to players missing out on some critical items. So for that reason, they had some critical quest items placed within the "unstealable" slots, as the game checks for these items upon load and replaces them if they are not there.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Isn't one of the power words one that allow pickpocketing or something?

Yes, but it doesn't work on the guy. Tried 20 times with max level, and confirmed on Steam forums that it's been this way since at least September:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/335120/discussions/0/517142892060743376/

I'm guessing the devs want you to make a ~hard choice~ between either murdering him or abandoning your papers, so they've disabled the pickpocketing skill for him. That, or it's one of the many unfixed bugs.

Aw, didn't the game offer you the specific choice you wanted, bless you're cotton socks, it must suck 1/10.

I just went on without it. Live with your decisions etc. Your game wont end because of it...

 

[Deuce Traveler]

If you can't find the papers, you can always kill your way through the inspection, or you can travel north to the harder regions of the game, and skirt around the northern shore of the bay, before heading southeast to the eastern side of the Orf Bridge. Or you can stay on the west side and never go east, since you can pretty much beat the entire game without exploring the eastern half of the Staglands.

 

[Bubbles]

You can also bluff your way through it. That's probably the most notable dialogue check of that particular skill (Harbinger, I think).