railway
Educated
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2013
- Messages
- 49
See you all again in 600 hours!
Roughly 720 hours have past since I made that post and I just beat the game. 600hrs seems like a reasonably estimate.
I want to thank you for making and releasing Grimoire, Cleveland Mark Blakemore !
I enjoyed the ride immensely, start to finish.
There are other great CRPGs released recently, most notably Underrail and Age of Decadence, but they excel in other areas. Playing Grimoire gives me the same sense of wonder and adventure which made me fall in love with games like Wizardry and Realms of Arkania.
Before Grimoire's release last month I was seriously beginning to think the lack of this experience in modern games might be on me and not those games, but Grimoire proves it is still possible today (of course, development beginning "back in the day" might have helped nailing this).
If there's one thing felipepe's review gets right, it's that there are always new places opening up to explore, making the game hard to quit, finishing one thing always leads to another.
I was following the game's development for the last 10 years and was looking forward to finally playing a new game in the vein of Wizardry 7 but I was honestly not expecting for it to be this good.
And yes, the game had and still has some issues. Like it has to be expected in a game that, for the most part of its 20 years in development, was worked on and tested by a single
Still, maybe I'm just lucky with my dice rolls, party composition and hardware setup or whatever, but after playing and finishing Grimoire I feel most of it is blown way out of proportion.
Sure, combat balance is off in the middle part of the game and I encountered a couple of fights where it was "destroy the enemy in the first turn or get a full party wipe" but certainly not on a regular basis as seems to be the case with some people.
Class changing, or rather the lack thereof for most of the game, is probably my biggest gripe in this regard. My party reached the required level 10 only shortly before the end and then I just did a quick test, after which I reloaded an old save as class chaning resets your level but not you experience needed for the next level-up which would seriously cripple a party if level has a similar effect on combat proficiency as in Wizardry games (Cleveland Mark Blakemore ?).
On the technical side I experienced the crash that would sometimes happen when clicking on a character portrait and once or twice I got the rare crash from monsters dropping a key after fights. Both issues were fixed quickly amd I haven't seen another crash since.
The issue with saves getting deleted did not affect me at all, probably because I wasn't logged into Steam in the time between this update and the fix.
The most annoying bug I encountered was some NPCs wandering off forever after talking to them.
This meant I had to look up the password for Khan's castle on the internet and because I talked to werewolf guy before getting the corresponding quest, I had to steal the key to the Green Mandarin's hideout.
And while it would be nice to see the handful of emptier/maybe not 100% finished dungeons get elevated to a level on par with the rest, I didn't really miss any of the not yet fully implemented features like crafting (that said I can understand people not being amused after paying $40 for a not feature complete game).
Grimoire is my CRPG of 2017 and probably the best blobber released since Wizardry 8. Can't wait for Grimoire II.
