Befuddled Halfling said:
What's this twitch reflex kiddie-console game (with quests) doing in the GRPG forum? Block, Attack, Dodge. Rinse-repeat.
In another thread said:
For me Risen was the ultimate in frustrating difficulty. Each encounter = reload 3-10 times.
Serious response: Perhaps these two problems of yours are related? Looking at your complaints from
that thread, a lot of them seem to come from treating Risen like a pure action game instead of an ARPG:
For me Risen was the ultimate in frustrating difficulty. Each encounter = reload 3-10 times. See a worm - it one shots you with acid. What's the counter? Kite it to a NPC who then takes the XP credit for the kill. Meet a ghoul - it one shots you with ice. The solution is to keep him busy, but then you get hit by his ordinary attacks, which he can take 20 of (but you can only take 3 of his). So you reload 30-35 times.
Or level up and come back when you're strong enough to take it on? If it takes you 20 hits to take down a ghoul, you're either using a very weak weapon or haven't invested many points in strength. Most likely both. And the only worm you "have to" fight in the first chapter is the one in the Don's camp where you have a hunter fighting along with you and, IIRC, still get experience even if he deals the final blow ("have to" is in quotes because fighting it is part of an optional quest).
(And really, worms are one of the easiest enemies to take down at a lower level than should be possible, since (1) a shield fully protects you from all but their rarely-used acid attack. One of my main complaints about Risen's combat is how overpowered shields are. And (2) they dodge by moving backwards. Maneuver one so that its back is against a wall and it can no longer dodge.)
Risen combat is plain timing. Enemy goes --AA--AA-- you respond A-BB-A-BB-A-BB. Except that sometimes the timing randomly changes to --AA-AAA- and you have to ... reload. Or if you somehow survive, you have to hop/leap back to a water barrel 10 minutes away, hoping you don't meet a chicken on the way (that will kill you).
So you can't just mindlessly apply the same strategy against a given type of enemy every time and expect to win...* and that's a
bad thing?
It's not hard, it's frustrating and twitch based (/luck based, given the timing patterns change even for the same foe). Two features I dislike in a combat system. Can be forgiven if it gets easier with new levels and equipment, and in Risen it doesn't. You are fragile all the way to the miserable end. So what's the point of gaining XP and crafting "good" swords? You still die in 3-4 shots (which can be at the end of one hour worth of good shots against a human parrying enemy). So where's my reward as a player? Where's my sense of progression or gaining power?
The sense of progression and gaining power is one of the major strengths of Risen and the Gothics. I have a hard time believing you when you say that you've played the game up to the middle of chapter 2 (as you mentioned in a part I didn't quote) if you truly believe that raising stats and crafting better weapons doesn't produce a noticeable effect on your combat ability.
I mentioned the ghoul and the worm because of the one-shot thing, but any random 3 wolves or 2 boars would have been just as bad (not to mention 6 lizard men at once). There was not one fight where I felt "that went OK". Each one meant skipping back to the fucking water barrel (plus 90% of the time 3-10 reloads on top of that). I spent more time skipping to water points than I did listening to dialog. There is no "rhythm" to the combat, it's just block and try to attack in the lull,reload until luck has it that the lull really was a lull (10 times in a row) as opposed to a fake lull where the enemy gets another 3 auto hits on you that were out of his normal "rhythm".
Ghouls were indeed tough, but wolves? As soon as I obtain a shield in Risen, I know that wolves will never be able to damage me again. Okay, exaggeration, but you really just need to block and circle a lot to make sure they never get behind you.
Or... level up. (This is going to be a recurring theme. Considering dividing the post into blue PaRaGon responses and red renegAde ones.) By the time you reach chapter 2, it should be possible for you to one-shot wolves with your weapon/magic crystal of choice.
And seriously, the only time you should spend running back to water barrels is at the very beginning of the game, when resources are scarce and you can heal a 10+ percent of your maximum health with each drink. Even without using alchemy to make potions, it's almost impossible to run out of healing items after the first chapter.
*Sigh* Did you even bother to read what I wrote when you quoted it? Let me spell out for you what the symbols you quoted meant: - = pause, A=Attack, B=Block. So, are we now clear that I did observe pattern, and, in the example you quoted, this was --AA--AA--AA--AA. So I countered with A-BB-A-BB-A-BB. No fucking mindless button clicking -naucz się kurwa czytać. The problem was that the attack pattern varied at random (with too little time to react ie AA-- became AAA-), the PC was too fragile, you need a good twitch reflex rather than good stats etc.
So sometimes the enemies would attack three times instead of two... And? You may have noticed that there's always a pause between sequences of attacks, whether the individual sequence consists of 2, 3, or 4 attacks. Just block for an extra half-second to make sure the sequence is finished and
then strike. Most enemies (wolves, moths, etc.) give you ample time to do this. A few higher-level ones have a shorter pause between sequences, but it's still there. And then there are a few who follow the pattern, but are dangerous for other reasons (e.g., scorpions), but you likely wouldn't have encountered any of these at the point in the game where you stopped.
(* So really, you
can apply the same strategy to win most of the time; it's just not as simple as spamming block-block-hit, block-block-hit. Which is a good thing, because that would make for a very boring game.)
Ghouls are one of the few exceptions, what with their ice attack. There's a pattern to fighting ghouls, albeit a more complex one than any other enemy in the game requires. You can't
always predict when they'll use the attack, since they sometimes stop in the middle of a combo to do it, but you can predict it sometimes (I'd have to load up the game to tell you the exact conditions), and you can stay far enough away that you won't be hit the rest of the time if you lure them out into the open before fighting them and continually back away when you aren't striking. When you
do know it's coming, you can take advantage of it and get three solid hits, with the third doing double damage, before they can attack again. On my last playthrough, I managed to take down most of the ghouls you encounter on their own in chapter 1 despite having only ~30-35 strength and a weapon along similar lines in terms of damage. They took a couple of reloads each - I hardly ever play pure action games or FPSs myself and don't have the best reflexes - but it still contradicts the idea that the randomness in combat makes it luck-based. Each time I lost, it was due to a mistake on my part, not luck.
Now, that all may be too twitchy for your tastes, but that's beside the point; I was just addressing the luck argument. The fact is, you don't have to fight any ghouls until halfway through chapter 2. I'm not sure what exact level you can achieve by that point, but I'm pretty sure that it's somewhere in the mid-to-upper teens, which should give you some extra HP and 130+ learning points to spend on making yourself a lean, mean fighting machine. You also have access to weapons doing at least 40 damage (bows) and up to 96 damage** (axes) from merchants alone. Surely it shouldn't take more than a few reloads to survive?
** According to Mike's RPG Center, anyway. That axe number seems a little high to me, but I haven't played an axe-fighter.
Also, not every fight should be a potential 10 reloads. That's bad design. If I'm not supposed to fight the ghoul, where can I see his level? Was it in a book? In a conversation? In the manual? How do I know if the ghoul is one of the "return later" enemies, or just the usual "critter outflanked me despite me being in a bottleneck" -reload?
If you've reloaded "30-35 times", maybe that's a hint that the enemy in question is out of your league and you should go level up first?
(I agree if your point is that more games should give players a way to research enemies ahead of encountering them rather than relying solely on trial and error to determine if an area should be avoided, but in the absence of that? Use common sense.)
The point remains - Risen is a twitch reflex game, like Bad Company 2, except that instead of bullets I have swords. Your stats and equipment make minimal difference. I came back to a worm after a series of level ups, new armor, and new training. Still took the same 3 attempts. Still died after just 4 hits. You say you suck at action games, yet Risen is an action game, since most of your time is spent in combat, and I don't want to invest time getting good at that, any more than I want to be good at shooting Taliban in MOH.
Again, this is completely at odds with my experience of the game. There are very few other games where stats and equipment makes as much of a noticeable difference as in Risen and the Gothics, thanks largely to how damage reduction works. Boosting your strength up to 30 to wield a sword that requires it can make the difference between taking down an early-game enemy in 6-8 hits and 1-2 hits. Wearing stronger armor and making some armor-boosting rings (requires level 2 smithing) can make the difference between dying from a single hit at max health and surviving 3-4 hits against moderately powerful enemies. If this wasn't the case for you, I don't know what game you were playing, but it wasn't Risen.
Note: if you haven't boosted your damage output enough and/or are using a weak weapon type (e.g., non-blunt weapons against skeletons), you won't notice much of a difference against a high-damage reduction enemy due to how DR works in Risen. But the worms don't have high enough DR for this to be an issue.
Sure, I'll invest time in Shogun 2 or Civ IV, NWN, or Flight Sim X if I suck at those, because they are based partly or mostly on thinking. Risen (combat part, ie most of it) is based 100% on twitch. Attack, block, dodge. That's all there is. Any game where a 7 year old console player will -as a rule - do better than me is, in my books, a crap game to quickly uninstall.
Yes, it's possible to use twitch skills and take advantage of attack patterns to take on tougher enemies at lower levels. But you keep on acting as though it's the only thing that matters (e.g., "based 100% on twitch", "stats and equipment make minimal difference", and your posts in this thread). That's just flat-out incorrect, and continuing to argue it makes you sound like a dumbass because anyone who's played the game will know that it's not the case.
TL;DR: Your problems with the game seem to come from precisely what you're doing in this thread: you're treating it like a pure action game. You can do that if you've got good enough reflexes, but otherwise you're going to have to make use of its RPG elements. Level up, raise your strength, get a decent weapon, and you can start one-shotting those wolves that are giving you so much trouble. And maybe in the process you'll see why people consider Risen a good ARPG and not just an action game with quests.
Edit: Removed some irrelevant quotes/nitpicks. I do agree with you about the autotargeting system needing fixing.
it finally appears I'm not the only one totally despising the whole gothic franchise.
