behold_a_man
Educated
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2022
- Messages
- 175
To summarize my impressions about Viking that I haven't seen here often:
Combat-wise, it was quite something to see how a small subset of support skills made the game very interesting:
-> Inspire allowing me to defer an action for a character (very useful for having ranged units have more actions at the start of the fight, then reversing it by the midfight).
-> Demoralise reducing the enemies' accuracy was so useful that I essentially had one character dedicated to casting it until all ranged enemies were down - and sometimes I had two characters using it, if the first missed multiple archers (also, it makes shieldless characters viable).
-> Tyr's Favour allowing to withstand quite an onslaught.
In the end of my playthrough, each character was specialized in his weapon skill, and then everyone with high enough sense had multiple skills from the support tree to cast them while other units were invested in death dealing.
Also, probably the strongest possible party build since the midgame - with spearman having Gugnir, potentially attacking 2 melee fighters each turn, ignoring their shields, and companions inspiring him to commit even more atrocities - is unavailable if you avoid glass cannons (which aren't that glassy if you disable archers using demoralisation and beat meleefellas quickly).
Until around ~200 skill points, the game gave me a rough challenge; and even by the end, a wrong movement could cost me an injury and the tedium of either restarting the fight or setting up a camp and possibly getting a new injury right after camping.
What I hated was the ?initiative? model, where I had no ability to use an attack action first, even when it made no sense (my favourite, during the Helsott Curse quest: I move close to an enemy camp, see an animation of my characters running up to a camp, then the enemy attacks first), and an artificially limited combat space (same encounter - I could not retreat behind a tree one meter from my character because of reasons).
As a side note, I saw here remarks, that only an axeman can wound Leofric (same on wiki: https://expeditions-viking.fandom.com/wiki/Leofric):
There are two things to note. First, if I understand correctly, the game was trivial at launch combat-wise, and the developers made it non-banal later by artificially adding requirements for character progress (skill points spent) to make it harder. I don't have any problem with it; I think entertaining gameplay should be preferable to sensible character development. Secondly, I have a feeling my impressions of combat could be completely different had I chosen other party set-ups (specifically, experiment with parties where all melee units have shields).
Exploration was mostly bad; was I expected to highlight the containers or not? On the one hand, the containers are clickable or not depending on the camera angle, so probably yes; on the other hand, some quests expected me to find a specific place on the map (like during the Isle of Apples quest), which was trivialized by 'alt' - but then, did they consider completely counterintuitive, unnatural zooming as a form of exploration? It's not fun either way.
The game had a few bewildering bugs, including repeated icons on the quickbar and the inability to make a decision twice if it's related to a dialogue menu. It's silly; while normal games sometimes suffer from bugs related to unexpected branching, here I didn't see a single one; but I saw ones that should be trivial to cover with automated tests - or giving the player the ability to tailor the quickbar, which even the shoddiest games I've played usually had.
Above, notice how pretty the bar with available actions is.
Here, I cannot come back and take stuff, even though I say I don't want to take it yet so as not to alert the enemies - and the items are still there.
The "decision" bug also occured in a ransacked church on Lindsfarne.
Writing was good enough, but psychologization of mythology and dreams was bizarre. I wonder if the writers are used to getting a hefty lore dump every once in a while while sleeping.
Obviously, the game was eerily good in choices & consequences department; great items were appropriately sparse, but crafting coupled with overabundance of gold made most of the items somewhat trivial; and audiovisuals felt pretty run-on-the-mill most of the time. Overall, this game seems to be vastly underrated - which, well, isn't surprising given what I read about it at launch.
Combat-wise, it was quite something to see how a small subset of support skills made the game very interesting:
-> Inspire allowing me to defer an action for a character (very useful for having ranged units have more actions at the start of the fight, then reversing it by the midfight).
-> Demoralise reducing the enemies' accuracy was so useful that I essentially had one character dedicated to casting it until all ranged enemies were down - and sometimes I had two characters using it, if the first missed multiple archers (also, it makes shieldless characters viable).
-> Tyr's Favour allowing to withstand quite an onslaught.
In the end of my playthrough, each character was specialized in his weapon skill, and then everyone with high enough sense had multiple skills from the support tree to cast them while other units were invested in death dealing.
Also, probably the strongest possible party build since the midgame - with spearman having Gugnir, potentially attacking 2 melee fighters each turn, ignoring their shields, and companions inspiring him to commit even more atrocities - is unavailable if you avoid glass cannons (which aren't that glassy if you disable archers using demoralisation and beat meleefellas quickly).
Until around ~200 skill points, the game gave me a rough challenge; and even by the end, a wrong movement could cost me an injury and the tedium of either restarting the fight or setting up a camp and possibly getting a new injury right after camping.
What I hated was the ?initiative? model, where I had no ability to use an attack action first, even when it made no sense (my favourite, during the Helsott Curse quest: I move close to an enemy camp, see an animation of my characters running up to a camp, then the enemy attacks first), and an artificially limited combat space (same encounter - I could not retreat behind a tree one meter from my character because of reasons).
As a side note, I saw here remarks, that only an axeman can wound Leofric (same on wiki: https://expeditions-viking.fandom.com/wiki/Leofric):
I whacked this fellow with Gugnir spear (I think I could also use Excalibur for that purpose).
There are two things to note. First, if I understand correctly, the game was trivial at launch combat-wise, and the developers made it non-banal later by artificially adding requirements for character progress (skill points spent) to make it harder. I don't have any problem with it; I think entertaining gameplay should be preferable to sensible character development. Secondly, I have a feeling my impressions of combat could be completely different had I chosen other party set-ups (specifically, experiment with parties where all melee units have shields).
Exploration was mostly bad; was I expected to highlight the containers or not? On the one hand, the containers are clickable or not depending on the camera angle, so probably yes; on the other hand, some quests expected me to find a specific place on the map (like during the Isle of Apples quest), which was trivialized by 'alt' - but then, did they consider completely counterintuitive, unnatural zooming as a form of exploration? It's not fun either way.
The game had a few bewildering bugs, including repeated icons on the quickbar and the inability to make a decision twice if it's related to a dialogue menu. It's silly; while normal games sometimes suffer from bugs related to unexpected branching, here I didn't see a single one; but I saw ones that should be trivial to cover with automated tests - or giving the player the ability to tailor the quickbar, which even the shoddiest games I've played usually had.
Above, notice how pretty the bar with available actions is.
Here, I cannot come back and take stuff, even though I say I don't want to take it yet so as not to alert the enemies - and the items are still there.
The "decision" bug also occured in a ransacked church on Lindsfarne.
Writing was good enough, but psychologization of mythology and dreams was bizarre. I wonder if the writers are used to getting a hefty lore dump every once in a while while sleeping.
Obviously, the game was eerily good in choices & consequences department; great items were appropriately sparse, but crafting coupled with overabundance of gold made most of the items somewhat trivial; and audiovisuals felt pretty run-on-the-mill most of the time. Overall, this game seems to be vastly underrated - which, well, isn't surprising given what I read about it at launch.
