Game News Expeditions: Viking Released

[daveyd]

Avonaeon I know fixing bugs is a priority but I hope you continue to make balance improvements as well. Since leaving Denmark I have found that combat is generally far too easy (even on Insane). For one thing, I think you're too generous with the Skillpoints you receive in quests. You're able to max out weapon / shield or dual wield skills fairly early in the game. Being able to create your own party members (as many as you want!) also allows for min-maxing and skill / crafting monkeys. I stopped using the archer I built in combat but my party is unstoppable with Ketill and Aife.

And it's way too easy to get most of the resources through camping and barrels. In Conquistadors you sometimes had to trade for rations or medicine but in Viking food and herbs are so ridiculously plentiful. The only resources that I've needed to trade for are wood (because you need a lot for homestead upgrades) and hides (if you want to craft armor / helmets). Crafting itself is way OP.

I love the game overall, (aside from the barrels full of junk) but I hope you can do something to make the game more challenging. The game is too easy and (aside from roleplaying reasons) there's no incentive to use diplomacy, Sense, bribery, etc. to avoid fights.

 

[Avonaeon]

We'll be doing small balancing tweaks as we fix bugs as well, as those are thankfully very easy and fast to do. In 1.0.3 crafting skills will be more expensive (Because they're very useful) and we'll be lowering the amount of salvage you get a little in subsequent patches. We have ideas for pacing the difficulty a bit, but it's a non-trivial thing, so it's further down the priority list. We're reading what strategies people are posting and what they find "exploity" and trying to remedy them as we go along.

 

[Tigranes]

That's all we can ask, at this point, so kudos to you.

In my own experience resources were incredibly plentiful even while not looting 80% of containers: the few times I ran out of, say, medicine I'd just go to a merchant and trade in the thousands and thousands of valuables that I got from, I guess quests, who knows where.

Does the clan power / prosperity metric of the homestead ever do anything? It's not explained when you first get access, and then I never found any use for it except, well, getting even more resources that I don't need.

Given that random battles are almost nonexistent (I only had two the whole game), fatigue and camping is also far less relevant - you just march to your destination, fatigue be damned, then camp just before entering, or camp out just to heal and craft. There's never any need to go for an occupied spot, and due to skillpoint glut there's never any worry about camping in a nonideal spot. In other words, most of the decisionmaking on camping from Conquistador disappears. I wouldn't welcome more random battles, though, and maybe a decline in the resource glut and increase in combat difficulty will solve this problem.

Crafting is currently mostly gated by available salvage, not skill, and then ~30 salvage is already enough to get you a weapon better than most you find until late game. This isn't going to be solved by just jacking up crafting skill cost, because you get a million skill points anyway and you can easily get a craftingmonkey to spend all their points on it. Without making major system changes, it would be more important to jack up the salvage cost - hell, you could double the salvage cost from now and crafting would still be powerful.

Adding a preparation phase is crucial, but that would also make the combat even easier than the roflstomp it currently is a lot of the time, so enemies would also need to get beefed up.

 

[Irxy]

Game seems to run like shit when I enable SSAA. Are you guys encountering this as well?

SSAA renders the game in 4K (or 4x whatever resolution you use) and downsamples it to 1080, which is usually too resource consuming and thus rarely used.
At least SMAA is ok, though I'd prefer to see FXAA and TXAA in the list.

 

[daveyd]

Does the clan power / prosperity metric of the homestead ever do anything? It's not explained when you first get access, and then I never found any use for it except, well, getting even more resources that I don't need.

I haven't headed back home for the Althing yet, but I've heard this affects the endgame... You need to have a certain level of prosperity / power for the King to decide that you are a good theign. If you don't, he'll basically side with Skule in his takeover (I don't know if this results in an instant gameover or makes for a tougher fight).

Given that random battles are almost nonexistent (I only had two the whole game), fatigue and camping is also far less relevant - you just march to your destination, fatigue be damned, then camp just before entering, or camp out just to heal and craft. There's never any need to go for an occupied spot, and due to skillpoint glut there's never any worry about camping in a nonideal spot. In other words, most of the decisionmaking on camping from Conquistador disappears. I wouldn't welcome more random battles, though, and maybe a decline in the resource glut and increase in combat difficulty will solve this problem.

I assume you meant you would welcome them? I would, too. At least, a few more. I've gotten the tainted water random event too many times. "Damnit guys, check the fucking stream for decomposing animals before you take a drink!"

I think making the resources more scarce and combat encounters tougher (either by adding another unit or two / beefing up their stats) would do wonders for this game. The other big thing change from Conquistadors is that in that game if a character was injured they couldn't participate in fights. This forced you to use different party make-ups and of course camping to heal your injured companions ASAP. I wouldn't mind seeing this requirement return; at the very least it should be an option in the difficulty settings. Perhaps let them fight with light wounds with a significant stat penalty but further wounds prevent them from fighting at all. As it stands I am in no rush to heal injuries as I barely even notice the stat penalty in fights...

Crafting is currently mostly gated by available salvage, not skill, and then ~30 salvage is already enough to get you a weapon better than most you find until late game. This isn't going to be solved by just jacking up crafting skill cost, because you get a million skill points anyway and you can easily get a craftingmonkey to spend all their points on it. Without making major system changes, it would be more important to jack up the salvage cost - hell, you could double the salvage cost from now and crafting would still be powerful.

Adding a preparation phase is crucial, but that would also make the combat even easier than the roflstomp it currently is a lot of the time, so enemies would also need to get beefed up.

I'm almost of the opinion that crafting in RPGs is an abomination that should be abolished alltogether.. To me it almost always ends up either being irrelevant or making the magic / special equipment you find less magic and special. I have a preference for relatively rare unique loot with lore behind it (e.g., Baldur's Gate) rather than constantly tripping over magic items (e.g., D:OS). I've found some items in Viking that would be pretty awesome, but I've already crafted something better or equal. And that sucks. Of course, since it's already in the game it's too late to get rid of, so I do think making salvage a lot more scarce / increasing the salvage cost is the way to go. As you said, as long as we can create companions, the skill point cost doesn't matter...

Also, speaking of the companions we can create in Ribe, I was thinking of a ways to make them less of a problem. Since they're supposedly mercenaries I think at least you should have to spend some valuables to hire them. And we could perhaps have several different tiers of mercenary at varying cost... Essentially pay X amount of valuables for mercenaries with y number of starting skill points. Or, alternatively, remove the ability to generate your own companions and have a limited pool of pre-generated mercenaries but at least to limit the potential for min-maxing. E.g., you can hire Erik the Blacksmith for 1,200 valuables, Einar the Hunter for 900, or Aslaug the Shieldmaiden for 700. Make the skill monkeys limited and cost more than back up fighters.

 

[Tigranes]

Thanks, that's interesting to know. I'm trying out some very different things in this second playthrough, including skipping homestead upgrades, so we'll see.

On random battles, I wouldn't necessarily welcome them because they become trash mob fights, whereas Viking has done a good job tailoring and designing a lot of its encounters. If adding some more random battles is required to rebalance everything else out, though, it's certainly not a bad price to pay.

Equipment isn't very exciting in this game at all, crafting or not, because there aren't a lot of interesting effects or tradeoffs (and, really, adding them would probably have made crafting even more OP). Like Battle Brothers, though, I don't think the system can really handle having tons of 'special' items in a way a D&D game can, so I don't consider it a huge problem.

Spending valuables to get mercenaries, and limiting mercenary strength to resources, could be a great idea - the cheapest / default ones should be far weaker than the story companions. That would introduce a money sink. For it to really work, though, hiring companions shouldn't be a one-time thing like it is now - it should be possible for companions to die and to be newly hired. (Do companions actually die if you allow severe injuries to degrade? I'll have to try that, though it would require a comically artificial process of sending them out to get knocked out battle after battle.)

 

[daveyd]

Just finished my first playthrough tonight. Near the end my palisades were specifically mentioned by someone "Wish we had improved those more", so it may be that they and other homestead upgrades impact the final battles. I had jacked up my prosperity and not so much my power. When I do my ruthless "conquer everyone" playthrough I will focus entirely on upgrading power to see how things change.

Yeah, I don't really want more random battles either... I'm definitely not a fan of trash encounters and really the amount of combat in this game was just about perfect; I just wish it was more challenging. The last battle in particular was very disappointing and I think I could have won it with just Ketill and Aife. What I really think is missing is more of an incentive to camp as soon as your hird becomes fatigued. As it stands now, you can just keep running around the map now hungry and fatigued... Perhaps a better solution than more random battles would be to have morale begin descreasing if you go more than a couple of hours without camping once someone is hungry / fatigued.

I am not sure if companions can actually die in this game. Even falling in battle is not a guarantee of receiving an injury in Viking so it does seem you would really have to try to get them killed.

 

[Grunker]

The combat is being too easy in this game is honestly fairly surprising since that was easily the most voiced concern about Conquistador, which had combat become not only easy but entirely trivial halfway through.

 

[daveyd]

The general impression I get is that people are far more likely to leave negative reviews if they think combat is too frustrating / hard, which might pressure many developers to err on the side of making their games too easy.

HBS Shadowrun games have the same problem... I love those games but the combat is often too easy even on the highest difficulty setting. Of course in both SR and Expeditions I have the option to take along fewer companions than the maximum, which would certainly increase the difficulty, but I don't really want to do that as I might miss out on some of my companions' special comments and interactions.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Hopefully they'll be able to tweak some of the design elements in this to make it a little more challenging in later patches. I won't be playing it again until I hear these things have been addressed. Hopefully someday soon I'll actually be able to play through this game!

 

[Grunker]

The general impression I get is that people are far more likely to leave negative reviews if they think combat is too frustrating / hard, which might pressure many developers to err on the side of making their games too easy.

Just make a difficult setting a la Path of the Damned..?

 

[daveyd]

The general impression I get is that people are far more likely to leave negative reviews if they think combat is too frustrating / hard, which might pressure many developers to err on the side of making their games too easy.

Just make a difficult setting a la Path of the Damned..?

Well, Logic Artists have said an ironman mode might be implemented.

I haven't played PoE much as I loathe RTwP combat but I gather PotD adds many more enemies (possibly increasing their HP too?). I think some of the fights in Viking could benefit from one or two more enemies but adding too many more could just end up making the fights drag on too long. For similar reasons I don't want the enemies to just become HP sponges. Probably should beef their stats a bit in the British isles though.

But think the game really needs balancing tweaks across the board. That you can max out your weapon skills so early in the game is a problem . (Either the cost of the skills need to go up or the amount of starting skill points / skill points awarded by quests need to go down). That you can generate an unlimited number of free min maxed mercenaries in Ribe is another problem. And the salvage, herbs / medicine, food, is too plentiful; you don't really have to worry about managing most of the resources, even if you don't loot every barrel you probably won't have to trade for anything other than maybe hides & wood.

There are other changes that could be reserved for higher difficulties like making wounds always occur when someone falls in battle (currently there's a chance they won't be injured at all.) And perhaps make the morale bonus / penalty a bit more substantial (at least I never really noticed the changes between high and low morale). If permanent death of companions is even possible in this game it should become a real danger to be short on medicine on the highest difficulty setting.

 

[Barbarian]

I decided to hold out on the game for a couple of months. I loved it, but the developers will be fixing so much stuff and have conceded to add new content(either through patches or dlc).

Honestly it is just better to wait till the game is finished.

 

[Grunker]

I haven't played PoE much as I loathe RTwP combat but I gather PotD adds many more enemies (possibly increasing their HP too?)

In Path of the Damned difficulty, enemies receive a bonus to most stats and encounters have many more enemies. Warning: this option can't be changed in-game! It is only intended for players who want the most punishing encounters!

All enemies from all levels of difficulty are enabled and the combat mechanics are amplified to make battles much more brutal for everyone involved. It is the only difficulty level which changes enemy stats, giving enemies +15 Accuracy and +15 to all Defenses. Enemies may use abilities on Path of the Damned which they don't use on lower difficulty levels.

 

[Tigranes]

Viking has really nice customisable difficulty settings, the only problem is none of them matter because even at their most punishing they hardly do anything and you just roflstomp to victory.

My memory might be failing me, but the combination of battle difficulty and strategic scarcity meant Conquistador could be reasonably challenging at times on my first playthrough, and was still not as roflstompy as Viking afterwards?

 

[Tigranes]

On another note, I did find out that the homestead actually does do stuff, and in quite interesting ways, it's just concealed in a way that makes you have no idea what homestead is for unless you deliberately ignore it and/or really test out different lategame paths

Spoiler

You can choose to side with Picts or Vikings, but if you choose to rape them both, you will need 100 Power to activate the Viking Invasion path
This is not telegraphed, you just later get 'bulid up power in britain' quest which is very ambiguously written because nobody ever tells you where your homestead is (Orkneyjar), etc
If you don't have 100 power or allies, this enables the back-up plan of getting 100 Prospeity to show you've been a good tradebuilder
This is really cool because all the flavour text about going out there to trade actually means something, but it also means this is really easy to miss because you're never even hinted it's possible
You can actually pay money to your mom back at home to build up Prospeirty to represent you bringing home wealth from Britain
Anyway, that means you'd need 100 Power, 100 Prop, or allies, to fulfil at least one of the requirements to persuade the king at the Althing

 

[Grunker]

Viking has really nice customisable difficulty settings

No it doesn't. As you say, they don't matter: like Conquistador, it has the appearance of fine-tuning but the systemic faults of the combat means cranking the difficulty to max will still make it insufferably easy very quickly for most players.

 

[Tigranes]

Viking has really nice customisable difficulty settings, the only problem is none of them matter because even at their most punishing they hardly do anything and you just roflstomp to victory.

 

[Grunker]

As you say, they don't matter

My post was more of a clumsy attempt to say that the first part of your point is negated by the latter. The point is: game doesn't differ from Conquistador which met the same criticism.

 

[ArchAngel]

I guess I will be waiting for a few more patches before I start playing this game.
Long War 2 patch 1.3 was released and I am now gone for 1 month playing that. Probably a good thing as I can get the full experience instead of this "being patched" one.