Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager

[visions]

Beat Shattered Lands, tried Wake of the Ravager. Tried importing my party. First impressions are bad.

My Shattered Lands party was Mul Fighter/Thief/Psionicist, Half-Giant Gladiator, Half-Elf Preserver/Druid/Fighter and Thri-kreen Psionicist/Cleric/Ranger. The Thri-kreen was bugged in SL, I chose the fire sphere for her, which is also what the char sheet showed but she got spells from the earth sphere instead. I noticed this after I had already played a few hours so I just rolled with it in the first game. I wondered how importing would handle my Thri-kreen's weirdness. Well, she doesn't get imported. But my Mul gets all her psionic powers instead of his own. What the fuck.

Some items get fucked up in the inventory, like body armour showing up in one character's helmet slot, ring turning into rod, weird shit like that.

I tried to start the game a few times. On some occasions the enemies won't spawn in the starting battle and instead I am attacked by chairs. Sometimes one of the enemies has a chair stuck to his ass when he moves. One time I managed to almost beat the first encounter but one of the enemies became untargetable after he had only a few HP left and I couldn't do anything to him.

Aggressive chair in the spoiler.

Spoiler

For some reason, unlike in the first game, the intro can't be skipped so I have to sit through it every time I try to start the game again, which is often. I think I'll pass Wake of the Ravager for the time being, this shit is depressing.

 

[MRY]

I found the changes in presentation and scenario so off-putting that I could never get more than a half hour or so into the game.

 

[Elwro]

Seems ridiculously bugged. I don't remember this Thri-kreen bug from SL, either... I'd start the second one with a new party if you'd like to give it a chance. While not a true classic it's still miles better than most modern games...

 

[visions]

I solved the problem with my Mul at least. I loaded up my last Shattered Lands save, dropped the Thri-Kreen from my party, made a new save and imported that into Wake of the Ravager. Now my Mul gets the correct psionic powers.

First time I tried it, it didn't work but after reinstalling the game it worked. Probably deleting the old imported chars from Wake of the Ravager would have been enough but I un- and reinstalled it just in case.

 

[Cael]

I somehow got the opposite of what you guys got. My Wake of the Ravager was fine, but my Shattered Lands was buggy as heck. It was so buggy that I started Wake with a completely new party rather than try to complete Shattered.

 

[Sacred82]

playing Shattered Lands right now (why do we need two threads for these btw?) and it's still as buggy as I remember it from the 90's. Semyon gets stuck in the arena 2/10 times (yes, I restarted that often).

 

[Elwro]

Hehe, I honestly never got that particular bug the psionics used to work randomly for me, though

 

[Brandon LaRocque]

Wake of the Ravager was one of the first RPGs I ever played, and man, I was obsessed with it. Thankfully, when I got older, I managed to play Shattered Lands but have never been able to enjoy Wake of the Ravager ever again. My obsession with nostalgia tells me it's a good game, but the reality is that it needed some work. People are remastering modern RPGs like mad, and I'm wondering if they're ever gonna get to working on this game. It had everything it needed to be an amazing game. It just fell a little short in comparison to Shattered Lands.

 

[Sacred82]

can some of you AD&D geeks enlighten me on the 'exceeding level limits' rule?

Let's say I roll a Ranger. Prime requisites are str, dex and wis. Since I need a wis of 14 it wouldn't make sense that this raises the level cap by 1. Does it mean I need at least a 14 in all of those stats? Or maybe just the first one (the prime prime requisite xD²), which is str, because the first of the prime requisites of any class is always below 14?

edit: nvm, I guess this is how it works http://www.mountnevermind.de/Dokumente/DMG/DD00224.htm

The only race/ class combination hit really hard by this is the Half-Giant ranger, I guess. Too bad, that was one combination that made sense while having a clear trade-off. Since you automatically gain a 17 in your first prime requisite for any class, even if you don't edit or re-roll stats, you'll be fine since characters only advance up to level 15 anyway, and 15 is p. irrelevant as a caster level compared to 14.

 

[brunofalleiros]

Does anyone still use this topic?

I`m having trouble using chartran... when I try it, there`s an error message that about opening the objex.gff

Anyone knows how I can fix this?

 

[Ol' Willy]

Wishing to continue the adventures of my four female halflings party (guess their names, lol) I finally started Wake of the Ravager. Firstly, let's dispense with the bad:

- unskippable intro. Every time you launch the game it plays that little slideshow, and I'm already tired of this guy with the yellow teeth. All of this while Sl showed you only the mighty SSI logo and then - right into the game menu
- the game looks like shit. It runs in the same engine as SL, and assets are more detailed in a sense - but the art direction is lost. SL definitely looks better
- the game runs badly in DOSBOX. It lags a lot, especially when there are a lot of people or effects on the screen

But on the bright side:

- combat is more challenging. While in SL only a handful of fights provided a challenge and only the final fight was really hard, WotR has better and slightly harder encounters
- better encounter design. E.G., in SL, the only place where you can fight half-giants is the Slave Pens. Here, they are quite common. Defilers and hostile Psionicists are more common as well. There's no "ten Draj soldiers" types of encounters anymore
- more puzzles. They're not too hard, but give a good break from the combat and promote exploration

WotR is more linear, but I wouldn't say it's a detriment - just a different approach. The biggest detriment, in my opinion, is the changes made to the engine.

But I will say that one of the biggest setbacks of both Dark Sun games is the lack of Combat Log and no indication of status effects. In the games like this, with so much spells and possible status effects this is a must.

 

[Ol' Willy]

This Volcano platform puzzle, that's some really evil shit. Do you like arbitrary puzzles, where platforms appear and disappear after you stand on the different parts of some other platforms? Do you like timed puzzles, where failure is instadeath? Do you like doing that in a choppy engine that lags by default? And of course, after you finish the puzzle you can't save, there's another encounter for you. I managed to get through, but you ask me to repeat that and I'm gonna spend some time there once again because I'm not completely sure about my steps.

I really started to like this game before that puzzle, but this alone makes me not want to replay it again. Thankfully, this time I'm through.

 

[Farewell young Prince into the night]

Damn, I've always wanted to give this game a shot but that sounds painful.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Damn, I've always wanted to give this game a shot but that sounds painful.

There's also two more timed exercises in the Volcano: you had to defeat the Templar and his skeleton crew before the ruby sinks down and then get the fuck outta here or yet another instadeath.

Although it's doable - I'm through, after all. The key is to slow down the Dosbox to 6% or so cycles, otherwise you die before you can do shit. But the game is still choppy.

 

[Poseidon00]

Anyone else know how to get the damn chartran to work? I used to be able to do it just fine but now it always said it has a problem with objex.gff.

 

[Ol' Willy]

What's the joke? The Bloodletter sword in question has -4 penalty to AC. Yeah, gonna use it a lot, of course.

 

[Cael]

-4AC when you are running around in a full set of that Earth guy's armour is hardly a drawback :D

 

[Ol' Willy]

Well, let me tell ya about the Mines dungeon. It's divided neatly in three parts - upper mines, lower mines and mindflayer halls.

I don't deny that I have some sort of navigational cretinism, but navigation in the mines is absolutely bollocks. Upper mines is the series of fifteen or so separate screens. Combat there is light - few Umber Hulks, who look menacing but essentially pushovers; some light puzzles; and the main problem is to find where the fuck do you have to go. At first, I went with the systematic approach - I tried to map the place. Enter location, open minimap, screenshot, paste. After a time I realized that the place follows some weird non-euclidian geometry: I walk one screen west, one screen north and it takes me five or six screen east to get back where I started. So I ditched all of that and just followed a walkthrough.

Lower mines are even worse. There are several mining plots, transportation between which is accomplished by the means of carts - which can go up or down - and baskets. I spend good thirty or so minutes trying to figure out where I have to go. Once again, almost no combat here.

And mindflayer halls - they are perfectly fine, actually. Non-linear, but the navigation is easy, some light puzzles and finally, some combat. The fight against mindlayer patriarch and his posse is a fine challenge: dozen of mindflayer and dozen of Half-Giants; but Scirocco does wonders. I got to say, those mindflayers have some ridiculous saving-throw abilities: while they're weak in melee, they resist almost everything - they walk through Scirocco and firewalls like no big deal, and even resist Vampiric touch.

Next, Mountains, and while my jimmies weren't rustled by the cryptic navigation, Mountains surely up the ante in terms of combat difficulty. How about half a dozen of Half-Giants? Half a dozen of air drakes? A dozen of greater air elementals and half as many of lesser ones at once? It's good that I have two druids, and even that I ran out of Abjure spells long before that fight ended.

Economy in the WotR is as broken as in SL, even more so. Because I don't have any preservers in my party I sell all the equipment I can't use - and I'm a millionaire now! I started with ~200k due to imported party, but as you can see, the profits are immense. Nothing to buy, though.

And one more note, WotR has some really weird fetish with human eating creepy fucks. Snake people in the jungle who eat halflings and people; mindlayers who eat nothing, but human brains; air-drakes who eat half-giant babies. Those land around Tyr are surely fucked up.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Finished the game yesterday. As the tradition goes, it ends with over the top fight. Let me introduce:

- Lord Warrior. Decent in melee, spams AoE spells, has fire immunity and, most importantly, mirror damage - all the damage you deal to him is mirrored back to you.
- bunch of skeleton warriors. They're weak in offense, but have bloated HP.
- Greater elementals of your choosing: fire ones, air ones and water ones. Earth ones stayed outside.
- The star of the show, Ravager. Huge motherfucker with tons of HP, six attacks per turn that easily deal ~80 damage.

Sadly, my gimmick party wasn't able to cut it on the normal difficulty. All my halflings reached 15 lvl as fighters and thus attacked thrice per turn - six with akimbo, but also all of them had just 17 STR. I had lots of STR enhancing equipment in Shattered Lands and all of my chars were above 20 STR there; none of these items transferred correctly to WotR and no such items in the game, thus damage dealt per attack was in 8-17 range. Didn't stock on bananas as well. No prebuffing as well - as soon as you pass the gate all spells are nullified. Most of the spells don't do shit in this fight, so it just brute force and healing. Managed to win on easy on the first try, but the satisfaction from such victory is less - after all, I didn't switch difficulty in the first game at all.

Overall, WotR is a fine game. Though not as open as Sl, it still retains some of the non-linearity - some optional locations, and the order in which you get four items is all up to you. Haven't encountered any serious bugs or glitches as well. Aside from some infuriating puzzles it's perfectly fine and enjoyable.

 

[Cael]

I find that El's Drinker can blow the game wide open, especially since you get one in Shattered Lands also...

 

[Ol' Willy]

I find that El's Drinker can blow the game wide open, especially since you get one in Shattered Lands also...

True, especially considering that you can pass it around so every your char attacks with it...

Although the game destroyed my Drinker in the Mountains. I fought drakes and elementals, couple of turns - and it's gone. Reloaded several times, it's just disappears for some reason.

 

[V_K]

So I might be misremembering, but doesn't WotR drastically increase the enemies' HP when played with a transferred party? Like, to the point that you'll be shooting yourself in the leg if you do that?

 

[Ol' Willy]

So I might be misremembering, but doesn't WotR drastically increase the enemies' HP when played with a transferred party? Like, to the point that you'll be shooting yourself in the leg if you do that?

It raises the difficulty to the max, you can just set it back in the settings.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the knee I was an adventurer like yourself before I tussled with a fire drake.

 

[Poseidon00]

So I might be misremembering, but doesn't WotR drastically increase the enemies' HP when played with a transferred party? Like, to the point that you'll be shooting yourself in the leg if you do that?

It puts you on max difficulty, which does that, and you can just tune it down.