Game News Expeditions: Viking Released

[hivemind]

I only ever went second in situations where I was ambushed

 

[Junmarko]

what would one call the difficulty mode above Insane? Hel perhaps?

Insane, Suicide then Hell.

 

[Shadenuat]

I tried it out and while I liked the writing and mood, I am not too excited with combat. Battle Brothers have retarded flash blob graphics, orcs and skeletons but combat there feels more medieval-inspired. With sniper archers running from bush to bush, AoE buffs & debuffs and heals it could have been a Wasteland 2 mod.

When an obligatory fight against wolves came, I dropped the towel and quit the game. At least for first round. On my own - since before game quit itself at least 3 times by crushing to desktop.

 

[Mortmal]

Game is good art is really great, very atmospheric,everything improves compare to conquistador, so far its the rpg of year. However its still quite not very polished, theres a few crashing bugs in area transitions, i encountered a game breaking quest "ghost of the empire", some christians follower dont leave so you cant exit the map and finish the quest.
Plenty of choices and consequences, they even took a huge risk in this game, i am pretty sure killing kids in a video game could grant them a ban in several countries. The quest "the rats" allow you to kill several mostly harmless kids and the only peaceful solution is only available if you exiled a family earlier in the game...Could have expected as a lord the possibility to bring them as workforce for your village or get them adopted by your tribe members if you provide valuables.
They are lucky no one knows about it if it was bethesda doing that, you would read it on the news.

 

[Starwars]

When the game is good, it's pretty excellent, but... the game does make it exceedingly hard to love it at times. Just had the game crash when I just had one enemy left in very big fight, and I crashed once in the previous (also rather big) fight just before it also.

And the whole "you never know if you or your enemy will move first" thing, and the fact that you can't (as far as I can tell?) start combat from afar if you see enemies ahead...

 

[Cynicus]

The 1.0.2 patch is in the beta channel on Steam. Might help some of you guys having stability problems.

 

[Sensuki]

Is Hulda not available at night time? Need to give the flowers to her but she's not there.

 

[Saduj]

Had my first mid-fight crash last night despite the new patch. There's a lot to like about this game but the crashes are going to ruin it for me real fast.

Question about the timer: After completing the intro tasks, my timer was almost 20% used up already. I know the game mention days passing by during the intro but I hadn't camped at all. Am I supposed to start out with a partially used up timer or is this a bug?

And what is the timer counting down to? After the intro, you get three major quests and there is a little under a month on the timer. Are these quests all I have to complete before the timer runs out or will there be additional quests that I have to complete in that month? Asking about major quests that require travel to a new location, I get that there are sub-quests in each area. I'm not doing much exploration right now because exploration is directly tied in with camping and unnecessary camping wastes time. If I was sure that the game isn't going to throw more quests at me during this month, it would be much easier for me to figure out how much time I have to screw around with exploration/camping.

 

[Sensuki]

You have a time limit to sail to Britain, it's a pretty generous timer. I've been taking my time and I think I've got 20-25% on the timer left and all I have to do really is travel back to Skjern from Skellige.

 

[Gruncheon]

Was enjoying it quite a lot, but the tendency for enemies to spawn in and immediately have a turn violates so many principles of good battle design and fun that I'm dropping it. I can't think of any other game where the enemies are regularly given a free punch that you can't plan for at all. Even the terrible pod system in new XCOM gives you a chance to avoid popping pods by not moving too far forward.

 

[SniperHF]

Beta testing patches is not a problem, gamebreaking bugs are a problem.

I've seen almost no bugs, only a couple crashes, myself, but bugs are always a luck of the draw thing.

Most of the bugs I've run into are minor. Party ending up in the wrong place on the campaign map seems to be the most common one but a reload seems to fix it.

Also seems silly that you can't loot red items (w/o penalty) after you've murdered the owner but that's probably an oversight.

Do people use a lot of consumables? I loved them in COnquistador, I end up using them less here but a lot of them look interesting. And of course I've stumbled into enemy traps a fair few times then got coup de graced.

The lack of a setup phase like E:C means I forget to use them even though most of them are free actions. Poison caltrops have helped out a few times though.

 

[Sensuki]

I also dislike the decision to drop the planning phase, but I'm not finding any of the fights difficult regardless, especially if you equip most people with shields in the first weapon set and swap on your turn.

The Conquistador (and AoD/Dungeon Rats) way of doing it is much better.

 

[Mark Richard]

Is Hulda not available at night time? Need to give the flowers to her but she's not there.

For some reason Hulda vanishes whenever you have her apprentice Röskva in your party. Just leave and reenter the village, and don't select Röskva. I don't know if its a bug. It seems awfully specific given their relationship.

 

[ArchAngel]

Was enjoying it quite a lot, but the tendency for enemies to spawn in and immediately have a turn violates so many principles of good battle design and fun that I'm dropping it. I can't think of any other game where the enemies are regularly given a free punch that you can't plan for at all. Even the terrible pod system in new XCOM gives you a chance to avoid popping pods by not moving too far forward.

Fuck that sounds baaaad

 

[Cynicus]

It's not ideal and can be annoying at times, but imo its not as bad as some are making it out to be.

For some reason Hulda vanishes whenever you have her apprentice Röskva in your party.

I had Roskva in the party when I gave Hulda the flowers. Seems like a day/night thing to me.

 

[Tigranes]

None of the decisions are really catastrophic on their own, but they do niggle away at the game's claim to be a major step up from Conquistador. (On the other hand, this also means the game stays true enough to what made E:C really fun.)

I was quite surprised in one of the earliest battles, where it says "defeat enemies, reinforcements arriving in 3 turns"... so I set up to try and kill everyone before reinforcements arrive, and then they arrive anyway instead of the battle ending.

Initially I wondered what Sensuki was on about calling the game's visuals atmospheric and pretty, but I'm increasingly in agreement. I actually think snowy environs is often tough to do for video games - harsh white lighting, the colours and contrast, etc. I'm really enjoying how Pict and Brit and Viking villages look clearly different, and the work they've done to make springtime British forests look so much more temperate than Skjern in winter.

 

[Barbarian]

For some reason Hulda vanishes whenever you have her apprentice Röskva in your party.

I had Roskva in the party when I gave Hulda the flowers. Seems like a day/night thing to me.

Nah, there is a bug where certain characters will not spawn. Leaving and entering the area usually fixes it.

Of note, that is one of the only two bugs I have got(had a single crash when challenging Leoforic for the training duel). Either I have been lucky or the game isn't nearly as buggy as people make it out to be.

 

[Barbarian]

Initially I wondered what Sensuki was on about calling the game's visuals atmospheric and pretty, but I'm increasingly in agreement. I actually think snowy environs is often tough to do for video games - harsh white lighting, the colours and contrast, etc. I'm really enjoying how Pict and Brit and Viking villages look clearly different, and the work they've done to make springtime British forests look so much more temperate than Skjern in winter.

Don't forget that the soundtrack is really great as well. One of the best I have listened to actually.

Overall a surprisingly great game with great production values and output for such a small studio. I hope they slam dunk it. They deserve it even though they released the game without enough beta testing.

 

[Sensuki]

I would have loved to be able to test more, but I just do not have much spare time these days

 

[Avonaeon]

Surely it is possible to jsut extend the reach of the existing sliders? That said, I'm not sure if reducing ally damage and increasing enemy damage even further would just make it a slog, and make the "I have initiative for some random reason let me shoot you twice in the face" problem even bigger.

Actually, yeah, let me ask that - is there rhyme and reason to the initiative? Scripted? Random? Finesse-dependent? I can't work it out.

It's something we set up, in the places where we thought it would make sense (Ambushes and the like).

I was quite surprised in one of the earliest battles, where it says "defeat enemies, reinforcements arriving in 3 turns"... so I set up to try and kill everyone before reinforcements arrive, and then they arrive anyway instead of the battle ending.

We didn't actually have reinforcements in conquistador, but we did have battles that were "survive X rounds" that were framed as such.

 

[Tigranes]

OK, so some places are scripted, which is fine, but what about the others? It just seems a really puzzling decision, but if there's a rationale it'd be cool to know.

Re: reinforcements, yes, you're right!

 

[hivemind]

what fights did you not go first in?

 

[Tigranes]

I can't remember, since it wasn't very rare, but there was at least one instance where I attacked visible enemies that weren't ambushing me story-wise, which led me to believe there's some weird system at work.

Is the rule that you always go first unless it's scripted otherwise? I mean, that would also be a puzzling decision, but at any rate, I'll keep an eye out from now on and see whether my memory is faulty.

 

[Sensuki]

There's an ambush in Skellige that you don't go first in and it's mostly archers, but there are three paths to the encounter and the back one lets you walk right into the middle of some of them and get in melee range of a couple archers from turn 1, if you've all got shields it makes the fight an easy no casualty whereas if you approach from one of the other two directions you may lose one or more chars if unlucky.

 

[daveyd]

Avonaeon what is the best way for GOG users to report bugs? Should we email Logic Artists support email or should we just post on Steam support forums? I'm assuming you don't check the nearly dead GOG Expeditions forum (which doesn't have a support subforum in any case).