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Game News Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness releasing on March 17th

Infinitron

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Tags: Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness; GrapeOcean Technologies

Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness was released into Early Access back in August. As far as I can tell, the few people who have actually played it have found it to be fairly mediocre, but it remains an anticipated meme game nonetheless. After nineteen rounds of fixes, yesterday the developers announced that the Black Geyser will be erupting on March 17th.

Ho there, adventurers!

Since Black Geyser released into Early Access in August 2021, we've been blown away by the sheer amount of feedback and support we've received. We knew that the game wasn't quite where we wanted it to be, and we wanted to work hard and use this time to refine our vision.

In total, we've delivered over 19 huge updates. From significant improvements to loading times, all new quest chapters, to a fully reworked tutorial and fresh zones: explore the northern frozen harbour of Freynagar, separated from the city by a huge ice dome, or take a trip to Amanuel's Hoard, the seaside fort owned by the greediest man in history.

We've also delivered Linux and Mac Support, a full rebalance for casters, implemented improved boss mechanics and delivered major improvements to its combat and damage scaling. We're not finished, and with our launch date agreed as March 17, 2022, we've still more to do in the coming weeks!

We wanted to thank everyone who has been on this journey with us, and we can't wait for you to dive into the full release as we get over the finish line. In the coming days, we'll be releasing more information on what's on the horizon, as well as some blog posts giving any new players greater insight into the world we've been creating and our all-new launch trailer.

The Black Geyser Team
​
Kudos to the devs for actually making it to the finish line, I suppose. Hopefully there won't be any last minute delays!
 
NJClaw

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Whisper said:
Anyone played this in EA already? Impressions? Worth buying?
Click to expand...
Kem0sabe said:
Hows the early access?
Click to expand...
Rusty's first impressions in the GRPG thread:

rusty_shackleford said:
loading screens are pretty bad btw
Otherwise, not really sure what I'm judging here. I played about 8 hours worth or so and ehhhh? time for a Rusty mini-review.

Lots of weapon diversity. Polearms, hammers, axes, staffs, slingstaffs, tridents, so on and so forth. Not in the "oh one kinda exists" like kangmaker, each weapon type has a lot of weapons from what I've seen. Weapons have reach as a statistic on them, polearms can hit from much further than swords, etc.,
Environment art mostly looks fine. It's obviously not pillows-tier, but it's not bad either.
It seems like you can solve most quests in a pretty open-ended way? There's rarely ever a dialogue that railroads you into a decision and pretty much always a "nah go fuck yourself" escape hatch.
Emphasis on resource management, rests don't seem to actually heal you very much and are risky in the wild. Consumables are very important, and all the crafting seems to be related to brewing potions and creating dusts. You find recipes while exploring and looting stuff.
Itemization is pretty good. Also, there's cursed items you can find that you need a cleric to uncurse to get rid of the malus on them. BUT I'm pretty sure it actually makes the item weaker, so it's up to you if you want to do it, there's no going back afaik.
Lots of items that give unique bonuses such as more spell slots, innate spells, abilities, etc., The unique items I've seen so far seemed pretty well designed and had stories behind them that fit the overall design of the item. The cursed items helps in this department due to the maluses on them.
When party members die, they die. I think you have to get a cleric to revive them if their body isn't too badly destroyed.
There's a bunch of different damage types, lots of armors have different strengths and weaknesses against them.


Is this like pillows at all?
no, not really. The main story feels very much like an excuse plot, which is fine.
There's nothing like dialogue directly with your companions afaik, but they do speak during regular dialogue. Also there's some things that I don't really understand with regards to party, but I think the more you use certain party members together the more synergy they develop with each other? Also, you get some sort of bonuses for making your party more well rounded in class composition.
But there is a good deal of ambient dialogue with other people in the world. Not sure what the proper term for this is atm, definitely feels more exploration-y and world-buildy. I talked to most NPCs I encountered, and there's a lot.
I didn't mean to imply the dialogue is bad, it just feels terse. There's also a lot of immature dialogue choices, but they're often right below much more diplomatic responses etc., which is actually kinda refreshing rather than there being 5 dialogue choices written as if the player character is a philosopher.

Also because some people will probably care, yes the casters use vancian magic and yes wizards scribe scrolls. Maybe some of the casters are spontaneous? Not sure. It features dual & tri-classing, you pick at character creation. Speaking of which, I'm fairly certain each class has its own XP curve.
I guess it's sorta like pillows in that people set out to make a CRPG system derived from D&D by taking the good parts rather than adapting D&D.

oh yeah and the game has a builtin anti-kleptomaniac mechanism. I have no idea how it manifests, but your greed is an attribute that is tracked and the game heavily hints that being greedy will have some bad consequences as it's part of the lore or somesuch.

so to tally it up:
+ rather refreshing, good deal of new ideas with very little pandering to nostalgia fans
- loading screens are a bummer
+ combat is pretty fun
- rough around the edges, quality that's hard to describe.
+ cool itemization
- ...idk I ran out of negative things to say

I liked it enough to actually buy a copy after playing it for a while, so, I guess that's an endorsement.

[edit]
oh and the game is just pure fantasy with fantasy politics if that's something you're worrying about in $currentyear

[edit2]
o yea, performance. I found two ways to fix shit performance:
- switch to low settings then back to whatever graphics setting you were on. I think it's disabling something GPU intensive that's not turned on again when you switch back to the higher graphics setting but I can't even tell what it is. Maybe high quality reflections or something?
- don't play above 1080p. Performance took a nosedive going from 1080p to 1440p.
Click to expand...
 
rusty_shackleford

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Rusty's first impressions are positive enough, but I will wait a while after the release to decide. Most post EA games have been underwhelming to say the least.
 
Roguey

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Tacgnol said:
Been a while, but from what I remember once you got to a certain level as a wizard on poe then your low level spells became per encounter. I think that was at quite high levels though.
Click to expand...

That only applied to Pillars 1.0 They changed it because it was too OP obviously.

Misremembered, but in the base game it only applied to the first two levels of spells at the most and only for a single spell.
 
luj1

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i played a fighter in poe 1, almost all of his abilities were per encounter

anyway it remains one of the worst design decisions in recent RPG memory (along with endurance which was also in poe 1)
 
thesheeep

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luj1 said:
i played a fighter in poe 1, almost all of his abilities were per encounter

anyway it remains one of the worst design decisions in recent RPG memory (along with endurance which was also in poe 1)
Click to expand...
There is so much wrong with PoE, it feels extremely weird to pick on the one thing that really doesn't matter one bit.

Who cares if abilities refresh after battle? All that matters is that the combat in itself is challenging.
In fact, per-encounter (or completely unlimited) abilities are superior as they allow every encounter to offer gameplay on the highest level of abilities instead of having to sprinkle the good stuff through multiple encounters and never using certain abilities as you don't know if you really need them now or if it would be better later.

Either way, any design can be made to work well. You "just" need combat to be designed around the systems you have. Which both PoEs completely failed at because 90%+ of encounters are trash encounters...
 
rusty_shackleford

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thesheeep said:
luj1 said:
i played a fighter in poe 1, almost all of his abilities were per encounter

anyway it remains one of the worst design decisions in recent RPG memory (along with endurance which was also in poe 1)
Click to expand...
There is so much wrong with PoE, it feels extremely weird to pick on the one thing that really doesn't matter one bit.

Who cares if abilities refresh after battle? All that matters is that the combat in itself is challenging.
Which is possible with every kind of ability design, no matter if refreshing automatically, after rest, with resources, etc. as enough games have proven.
You "just" need combat to be designed around the systems you have. Which both PoEs completely failed at because 90%+ of encounters are trash encounters...
Click to expand...
because each battle is meant to be part of a larger adventure, and you have to carefully manage your resources
 
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