KickStarter Pathologic 2 (AKA Pathologic remake)

[Wunderbar]

Feels like I'm losing hunger faster what sucks.

hunger rate is the same, death just slashes your hunger bar (just a couple of pixels).

 

[Jaedar]

Feels like I'm losing hunger faster what sucks.

hunger rate is the same, death just slashes your hunger bar (just a couple of pixels).

5% reduction maybe ? It's not huge.

Rubin

I've ignored the quest, assuming he wouldn't survive the night without my help, but he did. Great... Does the no-hug penalty even have consequences, or is this a joke?

Spoiler

It's no joke. You can't hug people any more. But hugs only feature in a few dialogues anyway. Most of the death penalties are actually quite lenient

 

[HansDampf]

More questions.

1) What happens if you ignore major events, like meeting Murky's friend or the Inquisitor? You could just sit in your workshop and twiddle your thumbs 24/7. But the plot has to move forward somehow. What's the punishment?

2) How random are the dice rolls at midnight? I tested it the first time it happened on Day 3. Two named characters were in danger, and I gave one of them a simple tincture, the other a plus tincture. Neither of them got infected. Then I loaded a save from before midnight 5 more times. The needle always landed in a different spot, but they never got infected. That's 12 rolls in total with what looked like a 25% (ish) chance to infect. Highly unlikely. The game is either calculating the dice rolls at the beginning of the previous day (as soon as a character is in danger), or maybe even at the beginning of Day 1. And the graphical representation is just for show.

3) Will I take less damage from infection when I raise my immunity?

 

[Puteo]

2) How random are the dice rolls at midnight? I tested it the first time it happened on Day 3. Two named characters were in danger, and I gave one of them a simple tincture, the other a plus tincture. Neither of them got infected. Then I loaded a save from before midnight 5 more times. The needle always landed in a different spot, but they never got infected. That's 12 rolls in total with what looked like a 25% (ish) chance to infect. Highly unlikely. The game is either calculating the dice rolls at the beginning of the previous day (as soon as a character is in danger), or maybe even at the beginning of Day 1. And the graphical representation is just for show.

The rolls seem to be done in the background at the beginning of each day. Whenever their infection level changes the rolls are redone. The animations are all just fluff. So if you don't treat someone and they die with a roll of 4, you can go treat them with a small tincture and they might then survive with a roll of 2.

Some characters can't die until their role in the plot is finished.

 

[HansDampf]

The game also answered my third question.

But it doesn't matter anymore. I'm cured. And it was rather disappointing. This has been mentioned before, but I consider it a major spoiler.

butthurt inside

While I was looting in an infected district, someone threw a molotov cocktail at me, and I've noticed my infection went down. Then I remembered, Wunderbar said something about this being an intended mechanic. And it really works. I could completely cure my infection like this, at the cost of like 15% health. If that's intended and really supposed to be that easy, then it's total bullshit.
1) I thought this was an otherwise good setup to force you into a tough decision. You take the infection willingly to save Murky (I'm assuming), then have to decide whether you take that one panacea you've been working on the entire game for yourself, or save it for the children or other named characters. Shmowders are also rare and expensive, though conspicuously more common at this point. It was pretty hard to manage the infection. I was already planning my routes accordingly to farm bandages and extra organs to brew my own medicine, painkillers, and immunity boosters, take more naps to recover health, etc. It's very tempting to take that panacea. But when you can just walk through fire and be cured, there is no decision to make.
2) I haven't finished the game yet, but this doesn't make any narrative sense either. The plague is supposed to be an insurmountable threat. You need to wear protective clothing, watch your immunity meter, be careful when treating the infected, etc. Getting infected in the early/mid game is almost as bad as dying. But when you can cure it with fire, it makes the plague appear less intimidating. A mere inconvenience.

 

[Wunderbar]

HansDampf it's still a secret mechanic, a lot of players might not find it out. Not to mention that during later days you may not have enough health to do the fire trick since hobos with bandages are rarer than in day 1-3.

 

[HansDampf]

Yeah, I've noticed. Also, trading water (bottles) during later days may not be the best idea. Still, it felt a bit cheap.

 

[HansDampf]

the end

The Polyhedron is gone.
I was surprised that what you see in the Abattoir is to be taken literally. That entire sequence is so surreal and removed from the rest of the game. You have no map, no thoughts, and you don't have to worry about hunger or exhaustion, because time runs so slowly it may as well stand still. Your inventory is also taken away and you are forced into melee combat (which wasn't as bad as I expected). Then you create a talking heart out of a candle, a spindle, and a coin, then jump down into the literal guts of the town.

A few characters died, but the children survived. I got mostly lucky roles. Nobody got infected until act 4 except Notkin. And he survived 3 nights until I had a cure. I like how chaotic the plague gets in act 4. Almost every district is either infected or burnt, and it's less predictable. I didn't have enough time to treat everyone properly. That one hidden mechanic ruined the mood a bit, though. If I had used a shmowder on myself, I wouldn't have had enough to guarantee the survival of every child.
I'm looking forward to playing the Bachelor and the Changeling. I may even revisit the Haruspex, depending on how long it will take them to add the other characters. This feels like a complete game.

One thing that annoyed me was the cabinet in the workshop. Time stops when you are looking at your inventory but not when you are looting. They should have made this cabinet an exception, because it is effectively an extension of your inventory. Every second you spend dragging items around is wasted time, and suddenly I'm playing osu.

Someone complained about hunger rising faster after a certain number of deaths. I don't think this is true. The penalty only cuts off a portion of the hunger meter, like it does with the health meter. There is another reason:

Day 7/8

Some time after the inquisitor arrives you can talk to some hobos who spin conspiracy theories about her causing time to run faster. Time is created by the cathedral, and her presence in the cathedral is supposed to somehow mess with it. Again, this is to be taken literally. Normally, 1 in-game minute is equal to 4 seconds real-time. After Day 7 or 8 it's 2.5 seconds. That's why hunger and exhaustion appear to grow faster.

 

[Jaedar]

the end

Day 7/8

Some time after the inquisitor arrives you can talk to some hobos who spin conspiracy theories about her causing time to run faster. Time is created by the cathedral, and her presence in the cathedral is supposed to somehow mess with it. Again, this is to be taken literally. Normally, 1 in-game minute is equal to 4 seconds real-time. After Day 7 or 8 it's 2.5 seconds. That's why hunger and exhaustion appear to grow faster.

The voiceover at the end of every day keeps pointing out that time grows shorter. Something along the lines of:
Each day is followed by a shorter night, followed by an even shorter day

 

[oscar]

What did people take out of the endings?

Spoiler

Took nocturnal on the reasoning that there's thousands of ordinary towns throughout the world, let's keep one that defies modernity. But the children being confined to the tower while the disease continues and the Kin seem to become even more animalistic made me wonder. Had I confined them to a never-ending adolescence or shown that even as an adult there is room for wonder and fantastic impossibility. From the sounds of it both endings are extremes, it seems impossible to keep the status quo of quirky yet productive co-existence between the Kin and the townspeople (what seems like it will be more equitable to the Kin when the sympathetic and aware Young Vlad takes over from his father)

I also only found out about sneaking being controlled by the c key (real intuitive) from a load screen on Day 11. And this was after a million useless splashes about coffee being vitalising and lemons bad for your health. I had to tank the entire abattoir blood section without stealth and consequently died about five times from that alone..

 

[oscar]

Some interesting background lore from the old website. Fuck Anna Angel

Fuck Anna Angel (Vars was also part of the Caravan too..)

The caravan of the "Diamond Ace" is one of the most terrifying events that happened in the country for the last fifty years. Unofficial investigation data has it that the caravan was to blame for the disappearance of over one hundred young people. Of sixteen murders the caravan was accused and found guilty, and there is suspicion of them being the weapon for carrying out another thirty four murders. This hellish team floated to the surface somewhere on the outskirts of the Tarunian area and traveled for four hundred kilometers down the middle of our country, taking lives as they went. Some people were killed and many disappeared never to be seen again. The strategists of the governmental secret services made several mistakes for some unknown reason and the Caravan managed to escape a number of times, just to appear somewhere else spontaneously. It was on September the 14th that the Caravan was caught and massacred near Orv.

What was really so horrible about the Caravan (or the "Family of the Diamond Ace" as they called themselves)? If we were to compile all the rumors and doubtful reports, we could imagine that they were either some vile demons or death cultists. "The Pointless Diversion of Hell", "The Clockwork Scarecrows", "The Scrappy Cannibals"—such nicknames and bold headlines provoked the nonsense of the rumors. Reality, in fact, was more prosaic, but no less horrible. Apparently, it was quite a large (500 creatures, 600 with figurines according to some sources) roaming circus.

They left no one handsome or talented child anywhere they went. Their method was as follows: having arrived in some settlement (always at night, just before dawn), they would put their carts in a circle, make camps and some disintegrating stage; in the morning, they would make a performance for children: female singers' songs, the clown jokes, the somersaulting dogs, cats that could guess numbers and master gymnasts—all these were present. However, while the children were watching the performance, they were being watched from behind the scrappy curtains by dozens of keen eyes. They were out to spot the pretty, the talented, and these eyes would remember them.

After the morning performance, the happy children would return home and sleep happily in their cozy beds, dreaming about circus life and tomorrow's performance. Meanwhile the settlement would be bustling about the forbidden circus program—the "Macabre Theatre", and of course the town would go and see it. Ones that came at night would see the circus opening different carts to the ones they opened in the morning and they would be shown just the same tricks that were for the children, but always with a touch of lechery and cruelty. Moreover, they had freaks that they called "figurines" and would secretly exhibit in a separate pavilion for a separate price.

While the adults were watching the show, the acrobats of the circus would kidnap the children noticed during the day and leave behind freaks instead. The stolen children were integrated into the satanic system of the caravan to become all sorts of artists, athletes, clowns and prostitutes. Along with the children they would take the belongings of their parents. The acrobats were often accompanied by heavyweights and strong men, so that in case some parents didn’t go to see the show, they would be tortured and killed.

The reprisal against the caravan was terrible. The punishing measures taken were unparalleled in roughness for our humanist time. The population, however, having been warmed up by all sorts of slogans and theme publications, was rejoicing. It was the first time that the people were prepared to praise the authorities and establish granite monuments in memory of secret service generals. The gymnasts, heavyweights, animal trainers along with the animals and the innocent freaks were killed instantly. The directors of the caravan were taken prisoner for interrogation, but they behaved at the interrogation sessions in just the same way they did on stage, so they became subject to awful torture and beating. Many of the clowns didn't live to see the trial. Any who survived were given the death penalty.

After that there was a whole wave of repression against free artistry—those inspired by the government and ones performed by the people. Many innocent people suffered. Many had to leave their risky profession and conceal their past. For a few years free artistry was declared out of the law and driven underground. Even the innocent tricks with juggling became forbidden entertainment, being a reminiscence of the dark events.

Any interest for talented children aroused suspicion; as the interrogations showed, the interest for them of the Family of the Diamond Ace was absolutely pathologic—they couldn’t conceal this passion even being threatened with death. Perhaps Anna Heart, (nicknamed Anna Angel) who arrived in the town not long ago, has nothing to do with the Caravan, but when she came, she settled with some orphan girl named Vera Verbah, whose father died during the war and the mother died during the first outbreak of the plague. Vera took her in, welcomed her in her lonesome house, but soon after, she disappeared. Now she's gone and Anna lives in her house and wears her hair. Why would she need false hair? And others too... sometimes they act as if they fear the revelation of their secrets.

All this is loathsome forgery, lie and hypocrisy! How is it that everyone pretending to be someone else, why is nobody daring to say the truth about themselves? Substituted children, deceived audience, names, forever forgotten... Stolen actors put on vivid masks play other people's roles, playing with the puppet threads without even the shade of embarrassment! Sham and plaster casts are everywhere, mirage instead of truth—how do we fight this? How do we live with this now?[

General background

Nobody could imagine any of the difficulties or terrible events that could come with the building of the railway that was bound for the north-west of the Mountain Knot. So the Local Administrative Council decided to go on with the project.




This decision was inspired by the rate of development of our country and the promising results of the geological survey. The scarce settlements of this area, most of which were built in the previous century, are basically cattle-dealing factories, and few of them became small towns. Theses towns’ inhabitants are a society that is quite unusual and paradoxically pretentious. Manufacturers, ethnographers, inspectors, anthropologists, descendants of the political outcasts and random visitors – all in all educated people – managed to peacefully coexist with the native inhabitants of the area, whose traditions haven’t gone far from the archaic social system.

The railroad project was meant to bring mutual prosperity to the area, so the Committee members were extremely surprised to see the coldness with which the local inhabitants reacted to the news. The engineers even encountered sabotage and open diversion on certain occasions, which resulted in whole large parts of the railroad being spoilt. They used to make sacrifice altars from the sleepers and spirals from the rails… These diversions were explained by means of blaming some dark tribes for them; however the investigation showed that the acts of vandalism were not performed without notification of the local authorities, they had actually been encouraged by rulers.

Nevertheless, the road was built and heavy goods trains started moving along it soon.
The administration’s indignation grew even greater when they received notifications one after the other, about three trains’ mysterious disappearance. However, the local rulers (the owners of the factories, to be more precise) were using their far-off position from the metropolis to bathe in autocracy. They denied having anything to do with the events. The disappearance of the trains they blamed on the evil will of the Steppe, which was worshipped by many tribes as an ancient mother. What could be done about that?

The North-western line has a bad reputation now. Once a month would some regular train roll down it, driven by a frightened man; having unloaded the mail, building materials and manufactured goods, it takes cattle and produce. Then something, half-man, a deaf and dumb sorcerer would ascend upon it. He drives the train through the dark Steppe, praying to the spirits and ancient gods, so the earth would not unleash its wrath for the ones that are taking the skins, hooves and meat of her slaughtered children.

And the Steppe answers with a groan. She breathes scorching underground steam in front of the train, and huge dark animals scour the area around it, moving close to the train, jumping at it, stepping over it, and bend their massive horned heads to the train’s top. They move with the train until the horizon fills with the vague outlines of scattered outskirts of the capital.

Twyre

Viscous twyrin, drunken twyrin, smoky twyrin, gray and green, black, bloody, brown and rusty twyrin… What a great amount of tears and blood were shed because of this drink, and how much is yet to be shed… Similar to the western absenter, but more complex, more ancient and deeper, it like no other drink gives an unrecognizable distortion of reality. It also has a similar history to the one of absenter. First it was the drink of beggars, some barely literate steppe inhabitants, who understood the howling of their bulls better than human speech. Gradually, it was discovered by the aesthetes and rich eccentric people, and there, it is being collected, tasted at prestigious saloons and pharmacies sell it in silver thimbles as an expensive poison.

People collected numerous recipes, compiled encyclopedias dedicated to the different methods of brewing twyrin and preparing herbs. Some enthusiasts even arranged expeditions to the Steppe to infiltrate the Order and learn the secret techniques of making the drink. The problem is that the twyrin made by herb gatherers is always going to be different from the one made according to a written recipe, no matter what kind of a drink is being brewed.

Every bottle of twyrin is unique. The ability to distort reality and the different details to the effects depend on every tiny grass that was used for brewing the drink. Some mystics think that the herb gatherers give a name to each twyre root they find in the Steppe. The gatherers memorize these places and walk round them at a certain time to pick the roots. Some are picked as soon as they are born, some at certain days. They wait for the proper crop for several years in some cases.

A lot not only depends on how the herbs are picked, but also on how they grow. “Twyre is pain of the Steppe” – so says the Order ('huung twyrat ag agyl'). They believe that the juice that runs in the depths is the juice of the ancient gods, buried underneath the layers of clay, sand and fertile soil, and that twyre is the herb that absorbs all the juice before any other can. The people of the Steppe also think that twyre imbibes the pain of its time – the inspiration, the expectation of forthcoming changes, fear, the smell of war and the spirit of the people. Different twyre takes in different things, for example the bloody twyre is the kindest and most compassionate, regardless of its name, the brown is the most awful, the black has a feeling of anguish about it, and the rusty has a special memory of archaic history.

It is these details that determine the features and abilities of every drink, and not the proportions in which the spirit should be added, the choice of water and the mixing brews.

 

[HansDampf]

Fuck Anna Angel

The plague took her.

 

[oscar]

The fact Anna's wearing another girl's hair (and implied skin/face giving her friendship with Vars and mention of her childhood hideousness..) gives a new level to her audio complaints about her hair starting to fall out..

 

[HansDampf]

 

[Average Manatee]

What's performance like for people who are right at the minimum? Min req of an 8th/9th gen i3 @ 3 ghz and 8 GB memory, yikes. I have 8 GB and a 2600 @ 3.4 GHz, and it sounds like things are bad for what I assume are people with way better rigs.

 

[Nano]

Questions for people who played both this and the original: how much is different, really? Are the changes all for the better? Did the modernization of the game take away some of the charm of the 2006 version? Would you say the remake is overall better than the original?

 

[Wunderbar]

Questions for people who played both this and the original: how much is different, really?

a lot different. Same city and roughly same story, gameplay and quests are different.

Are the changes all for the better?

for the most part - yes. Wasn't a fan of death penalties, but at the end it wasn't much of a problem.

Did the modernization of the game take away some of the charm of the 2006 version?

no.

Would you say the remake is overall better than the original?

yes.

 

[Owl]

What's performance like for people who are right at the minimum? Min req of an 8th/9th gen i3 @ 3 ghz and 8 GB memory, yikes. I have 8 GB and a 2600 @ 3.4 GHz, and it sounds like things are bad for what I assume are people with way better rigs.

Don't bother until you have something more powerful IMO. I have an i7 3770 - 16GB - RX 470 4GB. In 1080p, even after tinkering with the graphics options, there were frequent slowdowns/stuttering. It was not unplayable, but not very pleasant either. After playing for a half hour, I decided I'm going to wait until my next pc upgrade, to experience the game properly.

 

[Skdursh]

What's performance like for people who are right at the minimum? Min req of an 8th/9th gen i3 @ 3 ghz and 8 GB memory, yikes. I have 8 GB and a 2600 @ 3.4 GHz, and it sounds like things are bad for what I assume are people with way better rigs.

I'm not sure what the min specs, but on my laptop I can play the game on medium-high settings and get a fairly steady 60fps in 1080p. Laptop has GTX 1060-6GB, i7-7700HQ and 16GB DDR4 RAM. My desktop smashes it on high settings at 1440p, but that thing is a beast.

 

[Jaedar]

Bachelor when?

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Never, most likely

 

[Wunderbar]

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Ok. Here is a slightly edited google translation of Dybowsky's comments on Pathologic 2 and the release of two additional storylines.

We talked about the future, the past and the present. What about the new Pathologic?

Not everything is as good and smooth as one would like. As Nikolai Dybovsky said, at the moment when fans of the original game asked them to do a remake, they (Ice-Pick) thought it would be easy. Indeed, you just need to transfer the existing project to new technologies, and you don’t have to worry about success, as there is a big fan base. Is it so? As it turned out -- no. According to Dybovsky, the original gameplay turned out to be very outdated, so they had to redo a lot of the game in order to get the same feeling, which the original game had in 2005. And despite all the efforts, transferring to a new engine, laudatory reviews and love from the fans of the original, commercially the game didn't succeed. As for the two other characters who were in the original game, but are not present in the second part, their release may be very delayed, and in the worst case, cancelled altogether. Also, Nikolai adviced to young (an not so young as well) developers never do what their fans are asking for, according to him this is not a rewarding task. He also said that they would no longer make games similar to Pathologic or other projects that they had done before. According to him, games of this type are hopelessly outdated. While these games have their own fans, and some people like it and want more such titles, those people are just a minority, and even Dybovsky himself is already tired of such games.

Source

 

[Puteo]

That is a pretty old interview, 2 months ago. Back then the game had a ~80-82% rating on steam, it's now up to 87% and rising; 96% approval in the past 30 days.

Also, the digital games market has changed significantly since IPL published their last game. It used to be that you would get 40% of your revenue on launch, then 50% in the first 2 major discounts with sales tapering off sharply after.

Nowadays game sales have a much longer tail and Pathologic 2 still hasn't been discounted yet.

With word of mouth and time it could still become a success.

 

[HansDampf]

I don't know how much influence Mandalore has with his 265k subscribers. His video also had 1k upvotes on r/games. That could boost the game's popularity a bit, especially with him bashing game journos who cry about difficulty.