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In the sense that final confrontation with your task force happens earlier in the plot if time passes? That would be nice. It's heavily foreshadowed in the dreams that one day you won't wake up. I wonder if that leads to anything.
No. They start shooting even if you passed all skill checks and did well in the overall conversation. I got 3 mercs dead, 3 unionists dead. There was someone trying to off Kim at the end and I don't remember whether it was one of the mercs or a third party?
Does the crime syndicate plot line amount to anything other than finding out that you're not on the take (i.e. too insane to be relied on by a mob boss)?
Does the crime syndicate plot line amount to anything other than finding out that you're not on the take (i.e. too insane to be relied on by a mob boss)?
Re: the supernatural. Strange Fellow did you do any of the church quests? Because they get quite explicit with the supernatural stuff there. The crab man, the hole in the fabric of reality, the stories your encyclopedia can tell you about Dolores Dei and her glowing lungs at the stained glass window.
Also, if you tell Joyce what Evrart’s up to—that it’s a takeover—she tells you this big story about the discovery of the new world that’s heavy on the supernatural. And one of the reality lowdown checks with her gives you a ton of information on the pale, which is the most supernatural element of the setting.
Elysium isn’t even a sphere! It’s an archipelago of *isolas* floating in a sea of pale, which is like someththing between a formless void and raw chaos.
So, for me, the Phasmid wasn’t even the weirdest thing I’d encountered. The crab man is definitely more unnatural. Especially since your potential conversation with the Phasmid is locked behind inland empire checks, so it could just be your imagination.
I didn't do the church stuff, I forgot to check it again after the tribunal.
It's not really a complaint at all, I just loved the otherworldy atmosphere of, say, the abandoned apartment building and the various encounters I did get to on the peninsula, made all the greater by the fact that nothing explicitly supernatural was going on. My character was dumb as bricks, so I'm sure there was a lot I didn't pick up on.
As for the Inland Empire check to talk to the phasmid, yes it's left ambiguous whether or not it was all in your mind (and I'm tending towards yes, given that you can have a similar conversation with the corpse), but even so, it's still an alien species. I put the word supernatural in quotation marks because it's possible the phasmid is a completely natural phenomenon, but it's still something outside the bounds of our real world.
it's left ambiguous whether or not it was all in your mind (and I'm tending towards yes, given that you can have a similar conversation with the corpse)
I don't know where else to put this, so I will just dump it here. Pardon the sperging.
Quite a few people seem to be dissatisfied with the ending - basically tribunal and everything past it - sequences. I guess I will tag toro and Popiel since you guys seemed like the most vocal detractors (inb4 TLDR). I want to say that its understandable to be dissatisfied with those events, but maybe this will provide a different perspective on it for you folks. I should add that I don't really believe there are such things as objectively good and objectively bad aspects of art, so I'm not telling you "fuck you you are wrong," but more like "here is something to think about."
Like Kyl and I laid out before, I think there are reasonable narrative reasons for why Harry wouldn't be able to go to the island before the tribunal. This boils down to the fact that they already have a known suspect and an approximate location for them, and, more crucially, that the only people who own boats have no reason to ferry you across (Net-Picker is tarring her shit, whereas Joyce would obviously have reservations about leaving 3 unstable mercenaries in Martinaise.) What I found lacking is an option that recognizes the player having successfully deduced the killer's location as being the island (it doesn't take much, really: fact that no one heard gunshot + excluding the other 2 firing locations = boom, deduction completely, motherfucker, it had to have been the island). Basically, like Kyl and I have suggested prior, there really should have been an option to ask Joyce/NP about a passage to the island terminated in a refusal.
The other thing I found is that the game's relatively linear ending sequence makes quite a few people think that the game ultimately has very little reactivity in its finale. The sad part about this is that the very opposite is true - the conversation you have with the Deserter and your ability to concretely identify him as the killer, as well as your final assessment (and fate!) at the end of the game, takes feats performed through the entire game into account. Even Kyl Von Kull got the wrong idea when he said that discovering that a previously unknown actor was the guilty party all along made the entire investigation pointless. Like I mentioned before, the conversation with the Deserter is exactly when you have the opportunity to bring up all the major breakthrough in the investigation in order to establish the killer's motive, means, and ability: the military-grade bullet found inside the corpse's brain, the flowers/hidden space behind Klaasje's room, and, yes, having correctly deduced the firing arc all come into play then among other factors. Finally, the conversation with the Precinct 41 cops caps off the player's personal journey by going over their feats and achievements, and having either succeeded or failed to actually solve the case (by establishing beyond reasonable doubt that the Deserter is guilty) of course affects this.
As for the tribunal, I similarly think it is both more fictionally plausible and reactive than people give it give it credit for. Narratively, you've got 3 drunk mentally unstable PMCs against a group of people too noble and pigheaded to disperse. The tribunal and subsequent casualties are inevitable, though Harry can play a role in reducing the latter. Also nearly every check in the tribunal positively benefits from a feat done prior in the game (from noticing the corpse's eye color to having good rep with Kim), and high-motorics players who can just bruteforce the encounter still requires some finesse in dialogue for optimal harm prevention as Shanky's survival depends on drawing out the conversation (which may in turn endanger Elizabeth). All of that being said, I certainly wish there were more options in the standoff. Flanking the mercs with savoir faire, setting up a line of fire with visual calculus, etc... but these suggestions are clearly unrealistic now that the team has (probably) exhausted its budget. Still, I think with a few tweaks, the encounter would have the additional complexity it needs to be more in line with the rest of the game.
Basically, I think a lot of people are losing the forest (the ultimate reactivity) for the trees (the linear progression of finale: ruby/day 6 > tribunal > island > cop assessment). And certainly one could argue the devs are to blame for making the shift that the structure of the finale takes too jarring to ignore, but I think ultimately the problem lies with the details rather than the structure of the story. What this means is that the finale is not inherently flawed but rather can work for a lot more people than it already does with a few tweaks to its execution.
I forwarded Kasparov a few (seemingly) easy additions that would make the inability to go to the island pre-tribunal less jarring and adds a bit more reactivity to the tribunal itself:
1. Add a dialogue option with Joyce and the Net-Picker asking them if you could use their boats after deducing the firing location to the island yet before the tribunal (their responses would be no, of course ; Joyce knows that her leaving will act as a green light for the mercs and the N-P just tarred her boat). I think the main source of the frustration comes from the players who have correctly deduced the firing location but feel like the game doesn't acknowledge that until after the tribunal's consequences have set in.
2. Have your reputation with Kim to have a greater impact on the check to try and save him (+/- 2 or even 3) while getting shot in the shoulder should penalize the check by -1 or 2 due to the additional pain. This way is more heavily dependent on the choices you made throughout the game - as it stands its a bit silly that getting the corpse's boots, which by all accounts should make Kim trust us less, give you +2 Authority, which is more beneficial to this roll than being a good cop in Kim's eyes. This way low authority players can still salvage the roll if they bonded with Kim, while the chances of high-authority cops could be crippled if they made Kim distrust them. As for the shot, maybe its because I keep succeeding that pain threshold check, but -2 damage is really not a big deal considering all the ways the game gives you to mitigate it - I feel like it would be much more consequential if it made saving Kim harder.
3. Make Shanky's escape from the tribunal a factor of time rather than clicking a specific dialogue option. I think its a bit too simple that you can just immediately go with the (I think) risk-free "What does Joyce think of this?" option and have Shanky immediately escape - I think it would be more interesting if his survival required you to draw out the conversation, such that you had to keep talking and potentially make the situation more volatile (ie: put Elizabeth at risk) to trigger his escape.
Call me an overly sensitive storyfag, but I was mostly disappointed in the closure of Harry's personal story. I thought his desperate frustration, sadness and anger was so well done throughout the game that I really wanted something more emotional for the finale. The final dream if you sleep on the island is nice but I really thought there could've been a better emotional payoff at the end of the game where Harry either sinks into oblivion or maybe finds a new perspective on life. The whole business with your partners showing up just felt weird in every sense of the world. to me.
I didn't mind the Deserter that much, because I liked that conversation a lot, and I thought it was satisfying to "tie the case up", even though I also found it frustrating that we couldn't go to the island in any way even though it was so obviously a point of interest.
But aside from than that, I really wanted more for Harry's personal story. I would've liked that to be the real finale for the game.
I found Harry's closure highly satisfying, and really genre-consistent too. Noirs never have a happily-ever-after, having him readmitted to the human race and the force and recruiting Kim to his precinct was already way more than he deserved. Letting go of the apricot-scented one was icing on the cake.
The one thing I haven't figured out yet is the password for the interactive online tabletop gaming radio console thingies. I'm guessing the ice cream box and the advanced crowbar has something to do with it?
