Yes indeed, maybe his backstory was one of the ones where he'd murdered his wife, but still labelled as a fisherman. I think I saw one of those at one point, maybe I bought one eventually. Nevertheless, as per usual, the nitpick about the why is a sidetrack from the shittiness of the event. And again, yes, it might well be ok for that kind of event to occur, but as
Teut Busnet says, the event gave no suggestion that replying "can I have a look at the drawing of the wanted man" would take you directly to the battle screen, and
this is the only important part of the tale,
this is what made it shit. If the choice was just Yes/No then you'd get what's you choose, but, no, it gave some bullshit options just because it felt entitled to.
And yes, the time and effort commitment required for Battle Brothers is indeed much higher than an average roguelike & constantly repeating the early stages of the game is already getting old after just 15 to 20 hours as it's almost impossible to die in the first five or so hours unless you take a deliberate step into the unknown or are just naturally retarded, and in those five hours you've had to micromanage so much & move so slowly around the board to fulfil just a dozen or so extremely repetitive missions it really doesn't motivate one to do it all over again. I was only 18 hours into this game before I started thinking about starting Banner Saga 2 instead.
I can't imagine playing this without Ironman. Without Ironman you're just savescumming your way through a loot grinder, as I said, unlike a good cRPG where there is so much more going on that going back to square one after playing 20 hours just isn't an option for sane play. I was expecting Battle Brothers to be just a battle game, a test to see how long you can last against ever increasing difficulties of opposition by careful micromanagement of various gameplay elements. Instead its just a repetitive 'gotcha' game.
Teut Busnet , yeah, I've retreated quite a few times. When you're 10 hours in & your best characters die though & it wants you go through the rebuilding phase again with your left over shit characters then it's preferable to just watch them all die IMO. That first time I was expecting lots of end-game charts and graphics I could analyse post-game. Alas, just a game over screen, which I'm assuming the fanboys will spin as just being in sync with the game's whole "don't give a fuck" vibe.
Yeah, I agree, if you attack things just for checking them out then you gets what you find. However, the game does suggest the player is scouting to some extent as we see footprints and we see the number of enemies, but even here you'll see the enemy marked as (7) as you close in, but the pre-battle pop-up declares "a few Brigands", even though you know full well it's exactly 7. So I don't see why it can't be scouted to see what difficulty they might represent. I mean, if you were wandering around the jungle and you heard russling in the bushes, your guy up in the tree wouldn't shout "three animals!", they'd either shout "three rabbits!" or "three lions" & it would be fairly obvious if you should be scared of them because of all those 25 years growing up with people telling you what was scary and what wasn't.
Some other notable things:
The game appears to have level scaling? Loot, enemies, rewards, offers, prices at markets, statuses at towns, everything seems to be related to current level and standing?
Also, people don't drop what they use. In this regard the loot is more Diablo than cRPG. This is highly demotivational to putting in the effort to defeat stronger mobs. Initially it was quite exciting to defeat a gang that had some metal-clad toughies, it really felt like a big reward was coming. But, alas, it doesn't really matter what you kill, they'll drop fuck all either way. You might as well stick to killing one-skull bandits for 30 hours & gradually buying all your gear. But is that even possible if it's level scaled?
Likewise, you can't even harvest the items your own guys drop when they die. Oh, you had a nice 135 Armour on that guy did you, oh well, sucks that they died to bit of misfortune, now you've also lost that 135 Armour. Did we hammer home the futility of life aspect enough for you, are you thoroughly dehumanised enough yet?
And another thing, the zone of control attacks of opportunity are quite the most overzealous I have ever seen in a game. Ever. You don't only get a hit chance hit when you move away from an opponent, if you get hit you don't even move away. You can literally go from full health to death just from trying to move one Hex away from an opponent. It's not really a game that has attacks of opportunity, it would be better described as a game with almost locked encounters, in that once you are standing next to someone you're pretty much there until either you or they die.
