Kliwer
Savant
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2018
- Messages
- 216
TLDR: All in all I have learned to love this game. To enjoy Grimoire you have to understand its systems (which are very un-intuitive and not transparent) and get used to a very clunky interface. But after that – you will find a great dungeon crawler with enormous sense of adventure and discovery. The game is still unpolished – but almost every great game is. Personally I still prefer Wiazards&Warriors and Might&Magic 3-5 (my favorite blobbers), but Grimoire goes into my top 10.
Question. Some skills are a mystery for me. What is the purpose of: Meditation, Astral Vision and Nature Lore (for now I had developed this skills to 30 and stopped adding points because I see no benefit)?
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This time I’m in a different mood – maybe it’s why I have started to appreciate this game. It’s really great. One of the best gaming experiences of my life. This game, of course, has a lot of flaws and shortcomings – like all the brilliant games I've experienced. In the long run, however, these disadvantages do not matter. The whole thing is just a great, evocative fantasy adventure. I don't think I'm too far yet: I've cleared Briarpatch Woods (whit all its dungeons), Crowl (here I still need to do something at the Museum of Magic, but I don't know what), Gardens of Midknight (with purple cave, Tomb of Saint George, The Eyrie with Sky Barge and Raptor cave, Cenotaph). Now I’m finally going into depths of Samhain. My party is on 6-7 levels of experience in their first classes. I’m going to advance them to 8 level and I will change class after that. I’m planning only one class change per character – I know this system is designed for multiple class changes, but I do not like this feature. I prefer each character to represent a specific archetype and fulfill a specific role. I’m playing on Improved difficulty (3. level) and with random monsters set on Rare (it’s still quite annoying when I have already cleared the location and have to solve some puzzles).
Some things I do not like.
- I love blobbers, however there is one thing I do not like in this style of cRPG: our party. Heroes are just tables of numbers without any personality. Some games can liven up our characters a bit: with interactive portraits (Might and Magic 3-5), paper dolls (M&M 6-8), voices and banners (Might and Magic X or Wizardry 8). But this is not the case. In Grimoire our team is extremely soulless.
- Character system is mediocre. Classes have not enough special features or skills, everything is so similar. Spellcasters are barely different; after some time all of them have similar spell repertoire (because everyone can learn every spell from books). I like advancing heroes into prestige classes, but the whole development is too quick and not very special. Advancing thief into pirate gives what…? one new skill? I have to compare this system to my beloved Wiazrds&Warriors, where every new class gives us new special abilities or traits. And development is much more engaging because of guilds and promotions by quests. In Grimoire we have - in fact - 3 classes: fighter, backstabbing fighter, spellcaster. The end.
- I have never liked this type of encounters where enemies appear out of a blue. Much prefer World of Xeen style, when we can see monsters in a distance. It’s especially terrible in case of friendly NPCs. I do not understand why they can’t just stand in their locations all the time. It’s particularly great when given NPC is moving around the location (or even between locations). Finding Sir Coffergus (to give him an item) took me about half an hour… (because this fucker moved without a word from Eyrie into the Tomb). I had to use Detect Person spell to find him – but the spell is cumbersome to use; you have to scroll through huge list of all NPCs presented in the game. Yea, this aspect is really shitty.
- World, lore etc. The game looks like a themepark without any cohesion. Well, it is too early to fully judge this aspect but… Everything looks so random. Some knightly orders without any story or background, some surface empire of drows, a lot of furries (lion-men, rat-men, dog-men… gosh, I hate this), alien races, religion cults using some random real-live deities names… Worldbuilding looks very weak. I have no problem with some unconventional or crazy stuff (because it enforce the feeling of discovery; all those stories about Samhain, Duroh’Mal etc. are great) but everything looks here like a random mish-mash of tropes. It is even wors when the art-style also clashes (in the village of Crowl we have cool-looking robed monks along with awful anime-like girl with glasses… and she is standing next to the Ackme Snickers distributor…) – yea, disgusting. I like light tone in cRPGs, I have nothing against easter eggs and jokes… but Grimoire comes too far. This Ackme thing is worse than anything by Larian…
- Economy does not exist. Maybe later it will change, but for now I have tones of gold and nothing to spend it. In most games, at last at the beginning, money is useful. But in Grimoire there is literally nothing to buy. BTW: I have noticed that good economy exists mostly in those games, where leveling-up or learning new skills costs money (like: Might and Magic, Wizards&Warriors) or where designers are very careful with rewards + they can ensure a constant supply of new goods in subsequent stages of the game (Gothic and especially Archolos). In Grimoire we are receiving gold rewards after every battle (even if it’s absurd – why do carnivorous flowers provide gold?), loot mostly contains trash to sell + shops are empty (and easy to rob). It is almost as bad as in Gold Box games.
- The game is still unpolished. There are a lot of minor bugs. To name a few:
a) Character creation is broken. Barrower metalsmith received no bonus points. Other characters did not receive their race bonuses. Ex. rat-thief rolled 46 bonus points. Nothing were subtracted for class requirements and he should have received 10% race bonus. But after starting the game he has only 46 points of attributes to spend – so the plain roll. The same is true for all others.
b) There are minor mistakes in dialogues. Sometimes when I’m asking NPC some topic he answers me “to ask @NPC” (so placeholder instead of a proper name).
c) This is the funniest thing, showing how weird game’s code must look like. Sometimes when I’m adding a note to the map the text of this note is added to my party’s name. So, for now, my party name is: “Hammerfall+Barracks”.
Except of this – everything else is good to great. Some other thoughts:
- Writing is inconsistent. Sometimes very atmospheric, even poetic, sometimes very “modern” (eq. “mining company” – not “guild”, not something medieval, just “company”) or try-hard funny. But when it’s good it’s very good. Most of dialogues, descriptions, “Dungeon Masters” comments and narrations are excellent. This is one of this things which build the sense of adventure. Different smells and odors in dungeons, strange items descriptions, distant views from the mountain top (looking through windows of Sky Barge, enforced by narration, was a better experience than any 3D view from Skyrim or other open-world hiking sim). Imagination works together with limited but stylish graphics (I love this dark-blue dungeon walls…) in perfect proportions. Yes, the game could benefit from more varied tile-sets (even some simple color changes would be cool), but the narration is so good (mostly), that every dungeon feels different.
By the way – the game is great to learn English… I’m (obviously) not a native speaker, but I haven't had a problem with playing games in English for a long time. Yea, from time to time I come across an unfamiliar word, but most of video games texts are clear for me. Not this time. After last 4h long session I wrote down 111 new words to learn… Thank You, Cleve. May your cadaver never be distended, swollen, squirming, wriggling, reeking nor puckered!
- This time I have started from the “Imprisonment” prologue. I like it more than “The Shrine” (my previous choice): at last I have some equipment at the beginning. It was a bit harder (especially random encounters in the village are scary for low level party) – but I prefer to start in a town hub than in the middle of nowhere.
- “Crafting skills” (metallurgy, sharpening weapons etc.) are cumbersome to use because you have to find a proper crafting station. Without this limitation they could be quite nice.
- My bard, for now, is ridiculously overpowered. She has about 50% of all kills. Her main tool is some lyre which casts Cone of Cold on 7. power level. She is relatively quick (I’m not going to change her class so all attribute points are spent immediately) so she acts mostly before anyone else. In case of most easy encounter she just cleans the screen in first or second round. In case of hard encounters with single powerful enemy (lich, spider demon, strange creature from Sky Barge etc.) the paralysis spell is a way to go. My Aerob sage almost always succeeds with this spell, although he is slow so my party has to surview the first turn (sometimes pre-buffing is required). But after that the paralysis spell almost always works (even when casted on 1 power level… strange). The only enemy type which I can’t handle are Dragon Flies – they appearance = reload. After some hard time at the beginning the game is relatively easy and plays almost like World of Xeen or something (I’m just mowing through encounters with occasional harder and more interesting fight with a boss). Tactical system is cool enough – boss encounters are great, but I can’t imagine this game with more or harder random encounters (respawn is set to Rare) – it would be a chore. Defensive spells are mostly useless because they are single-target (ex. Fire Shield) – it is much quicker to reload a bad roll than casting this on all party members. My dwarven metalsmith has a bit too few hit points for a first line (66 on 7. level; giant fighter has more then 100) but it will change after promotion. The armorplate spell is my main defensive buff. I have 2 characters with a lethal blow skill (dwarven metalsmith and drow ranger) but it is not useful for now because I do not have proper weapons for them.
- Consumables are, as usual, too numerous and not powerful enough to bother.
- I decided to not reload after level-ups (with exception of my drow ranger and rat thief – both of them need a lot of points to qualify for their prestige classes). It is why some of my characters are a bit weak; ex. dwarven thaumaturge has rather few spell points (even drow ranger has more…). But fuck this, it is too cumbersome to reload, especially when two or three characters advance at once. Plus it is hard to judge a good/bed rolls because you have to count: HP and SP gains, attributes gains, skill points gains… I do not like that advancement is so random in this game, but I can live with it.
- Skills are weird. Some of them are extremely easy to grind (ex. robbery), some are impossible to upgrade through usage. And so only non-grindable skills are important to improve during level-ups. For example I have put only 10 points into my thief’s robbery and now this skills has a value of 54 (after pickpocketing NPCs in a village). I made some mistakes, especially in case of my bard (I have spread her skill point too widely) but I hope it will be not a problem in a long run.
- Interactions with NPCs by keywords are great. It is a much better system than typical dialogue trees. You really have to think what is your goal. I would only wish that NPCs could answers for more topics. It would also be nice to have a list of topics that were successfully used. In general - in-game notepad would be great. For now I have to play in a window mod with Notepad opened all the time.
- Exploration, dungeons, puzzles and riddles: these are the game's strongest points. It is hard to imagine how different all dungeons looks and feels like, even with only one graphical style. For now I have no problems with puzzles, everything were maybe a bit too obvious (only very careful exploration was required; you can screw yourself if you will neglect scanning every single dungeon tile with Detect Secrets ON). We'll see how it goes in later dungeons. Maybe locations are not as packed with content as in M&M games (caves are a bit boring, as usual), but still very good. Grimoire has some virtues of point&click adventures, which I like very much. I wish more cRPGs would follow this style of puzzles.
Well, in quite a lot of games, mostly older ones. Those without any in-game journal (Eye of Beholder) or with very shitty one (Wizards and Warriors). And especially games, where dialogues are based on keywords (Amberstar, Ambermoon, also Grimoire of course). If you have dialogue trees (or a list of topicks) it is easy to scan trough all options and find a proper solution. But if you have to write the correct word by yourself (in dialogues or in case of some riddles) you have to be more careful. I love those games, where you have to find useful information in a sea of lore dumps and rumors. Even in case of some newer games I have a piece of paper on my side – to note places to come back later (ex. in Dragon Age: Origins I took notes about chests to open when my lockpicking skill will be high enough). In some games I’m using map notes to record quest information (ex. Divine Divinity). Heh, playing Baldur’s Gate Trilogy (with lot of quest mods) I had to make extensive notes by myself because in those times a lot of mods had not proper journal entries. Luckily in BG games you can edit in-game journal by hand. I wish all cRPGs have a possibility to make map notes and to edit in-game journal.
In case of Grimoire I’m playing in a window mod with 3 separate Notepad files opened. One – for lore information + alchemical recipes. Second – fore quests, NPCs, items, puzzles, keywords etc. Third one – for new English vocabulary.
Question. Some skills are a mystery for me. What is the purpose of: Meditation, Astral Vision and Nature Lore (for now I had developed this skills to 30 and stopped adding points because I see no benefit)?
----------------------------------------------------------
This time I’m in a different mood – maybe it’s why I have started to appreciate this game. It’s really great. One of the best gaming experiences of my life. This game, of course, has a lot of flaws and shortcomings – like all the brilliant games I've experienced. In the long run, however, these disadvantages do not matter. The whole thing is just a great, evocative fantasy adventure. I don't think I'm too far yet: I've cleared Briarpatch Woods (whit all its dungeons), Crowl (here I still need to do something at the Museum of Magic, but I don't know what), Gardens of Midknight (with purple cave, Tomb of Saint George, The Eyrie with Sky Barge and Raptor cave, Cenotaph). Now I’m finally going into depths of Samhain. My party is on 6-7 levels of experience in their first classes. I’m going to advance them to 8 level and I will change class after that. I’m planning only one class change per character – I know this system is designed for multiple class changes, but I do not like this feature. I prefer each character to represent a specific archetype and fulfill a specific role. I’m playing on Improved difficulty (3. level) and with random monsters set on Rare (it’s still quite annoying when I have already cleared the location and have to solve some puzzles).
Some things I do not like.
- I love blobbers, however there is one thing I do not like in this style of cRPG: our party. Heroes are just tables of numbers without any personality. Some games can liven up our characters a bit: with interactive portraits (Might and Magic 3-5), paper dolls (M&M 6-8), voices and banners (Might and Magic X or Wizardry 8). But this is not the case. In Grimoire our team is extremely soulless.
- Character system is mediocre. Classes have not enough special features or skills, everything is so similar. Spellcasters are barely different; after some time all of them have similar spell repertoire (because everyone can learn every spell from books). I like advancing heroes into prestige classes, but the whole development is too quick and not very special. Advancing thief into pirate gives what…? one new skill? I have to compare this system to my beloved Wiazrds&Warriors, where every new class gives us new special abilities or traits. And development is much more engaging because of guilds and promotions by quests. In Grimoire we have - in fact - 3 classes: fighter, backstabbing fighter, spellcaster. The end.
- I have never liked this type of encounters where enemies appear out of a blue. Much prefer World of Xeen style, when we can see monsters in a distance. It’s especially terrible in case of friendly NPCs. I do not understand why they can’t just stand in their locations all the time. It’s particularly great when given NPC is moving around the location (or even between locations). Finding Sir Coffergus (to give him an item) took me about half an hour… (because this fucker moved without a word from Eyrie into the Tomb). I had to use Detect Person spell to find him – but the spell is cumbersome to use; you have to scroll through huge list of all NPCs presented in the game. Yea, this aspect is really shitty.
- World, lore etc. The game looks like a themepark without any cohesion. Well, it is too early to fully judge this aspect but… Everything looks so random. Some knightly orders without any story or background, some surface empire of drows, a lot of furries (lion-men, rat-men, dog-men… gosh, I hate this), alien races, religion cults using some random real-live deities names… Worldbuilding looks very weak. I have no problem with some unconventional or crazy stuff (because it enforce the feeling of discovery; all those stories about Samhain, Duroh’Mal etc. are great) but everything looks here like a random mish-mash of tropes. It is even wors when the art-style also clashes (in the village of Crowl we have cool-looking robed monks along with awful anime-like girl with glasses… and she is standing next to the Ackme Snickers distributor…) – yea, disgusting. I like light tone in cRPGs, I have nothing against easter eggs and jokes… but Grimoire comes too far. This Ackme thing is worse than anything by Larian…
- Economy does not exist. Maybe later it will change, but for now I have tones of gold and nothing to spend it. In most games, at last at the beginning, money is useful. But in Grimoire there is literally nothing to buy. BTW: I have noticed that good economy exists mostly in those games, where leveling-up or learning new skills costs money (like: Might and Magic, Wizards&Warriors) or where designers are very careful with rewards + they can ensure a constant supply of new goods in subsequent stages of the game (Gothic and especially Archolos). In Grimoire we are receiving gold rewards after every battle (even if it’s absurd – why do carnivorous flowers provide gold?), loot mostly contains trash to sell + shops are empty (and easy to rob). It is almost as bad as in Gold Box games.
- The game is still unpolished. There are a lot of minor bugs. To name a few:
a) Character creation is broken. Barrower metalsmith received no bonus points. Other characters did not receive their race bonuses. Ex. rat-thief rolled 46 bonus points. Nothing were subtracted for class requirements and he should have received 10% race bonus. But after starting the game he has only 46 points of attributes to spend – so the plain roll. The same is true for all others.
b) There are minor mistakes in dialogues. Sometimes when I’m asking NPC some topic he answers me “to ask @NPC” (so placeholder instead of a proper name).
c) This is the funniest thing, showing how weird game’s code must look like. Sometimes when I’m adding a note to the map the text of this note is added to my party’s name. So, for now, my party name is: “Hammerfall+Barracks”.
Except of this – everything else is good to great. Some other thoughts:
- Writing is inconsistent. Sometimes very atmospheric, even poetic, sometimes very “modern” (eq. “mining company” – not “guild”, not something medieval, just “company”) or try-hard funny. But when it’s good it’s very good. Most of dialogues, descriptions, “Dungeon Masters” comments and narrations are excellent. This is one of this things which build the sense of adventure. Different smells and odors in dungeons, strange items descriptions, distant views from the mountain top (looking through windows of Sky Barge, enforced by narration, was a better experience than any 3D view from Skyrim or other open-world hiking sim). Imagination works together with limited but stylish graphics (I love this dark-blue dungeon walls…) in perfect proportions. Yes, the game could benefit from more varied tile-sets (even some simple color changes would be cool), but the narration is so good (mostly), that every dungeon feels different.
By the way – the game is great to learn English… I’m (obviously) not a native speaker, but I haven't had a problem with playing games in English for a long time. Yea, from time to time I come across an unfamiliar word, but most of video games texts are clear for me. Not this time. After last 4h long session I wrote down 111 new words to learn… Thank You, Cleve. May your cadaver never be distended, swollen, squirming, wriggling, reeking nor puckered!
- This time I have started from the “Imprisonment” prologue. I like it more than “The Shrine” (my previous choice): at last I have some equipment at the beginning. It was a bit harder (especially random encounters in the village are scary for low level party) – but I prefer to start in a town hub than in the middle of nowhere.
- “Crafting skills” (metallurgy, sharpening weapons etc.) are cumbersome to use because you have to find a proper crafting station. Without this limitation they could be quite nice.
- My bard, for now, is ridiculously overpowered. She has about 50% of all kills. Her main tool is some lyre which casts Cone of Cold on 7. power level. She is relatively quick (I’m not going to change her class so all attribute points are spent immediately) so she acts mostly before anyone else. In case of most easy encounter she just cleans the screen in first or second round. In case of hard encounters with single powerful enemy (lich, spider demon, strange creature from Sky Barge etc.) the paralysis spell is a way to go. My Aerob sage almost always succeeds with this spell, although he is slow so my party has to surview the first turn (sometimes pre-buffing is required). But after that the paralysis spell almost always works (even when casted on 1 power level… strange). The only enemy type which I can’t handle are Dragon Flies – they appearance = reload. After some hard time at the beginning the game is relatively easy and plays almost like World of Xeen or something (I’m just mowing through encounters with occasional harder and more interesting fight with a boss). Tactical system is cool enough – boss encounters are great, but I can’t imagine this game with more or harder random encounters (respawn is set to Rare) – it would be a chore. Defensive spells are mostly useless because they are single-target (ex. Fire Shield) – it is much quicker to reload a bad roll than casting this on all party members. My dwarven metalsmith has a bit too few hit points for a first line (66 on 7. level; giant fighter has more then 100) but it will change after promotion. The armorplate spell is my main defensive buff. I have 2 characters with a lethal blow skill (dwarven metalsmith and drow ranger) but it is not useful for now because I do not have proper weapons for them.
- Consumables are, as usual, too numerous and not powerful enough to bother.
- I decided to not reload after level-ups (with exception of my drow ranger and rat thief – both of them need a lot of points to qualify for their prestige classes). It is why some of my characters are a bit weak; ex. dwarven thaumaturge has rather few spell points (even drow ranger has more…). But fuck this, it is too cumbersome to reload, especially when two or three characters advance at once. Plus it is hard to judge a good/bed rolls because you have to count: HP and SP gains, attributes gains, skill points gains… I do not like that advancement is so random in this game, but I can live with it.
- Skills are weird. Some of them are extremely easy to grind (ex. robbery), some are impossible to upgrade through usage. And so only non-grindable skills are important to improve during level-ups. For example I have put only 10 points into my thief’s robbery and now this skills has a value of 54 (after pickpocketing NPCs in a village). I made some mistakes, especially in case of my bard (I have spread her skill point too widely) but I hope it will be not a problem in a long run.
- Interactions with NPCs by keywords are great. It is a much better system than typical dialogue trees. You really have to think what is your goal. I would only wish that NPCs could answers for more topics. It would also be nice to have a list of topics that were successfully used. In general - in-game notepad would be great. For now I have to play in a window mod with Notepad opened all the time.
- Exploration, dungeons, puzzles and riddles: these are the game's strongest points. It is hard to imagine how different all dungeons looks and feels like, even with only one graphical style. For now I have no problems with puzzles, everything were maybe a bit too obvious (only very careful exploration was required; you can screw yourself if you will neglect scanning every single dungeon tile with Detect Secrets ON). We'll see how it goes in later dungeons. Maybe locations are not as packed with content as in M&M games (caves are a bit boring, as usual), but still very good. Grimoire has some virtues of point&click adventures, which I like very much. I wish more cRPGs would follow this style of puzzles.
Well, in quite a lot of games, mostly older ones. Those without any in-game journal (Eye of Beholder) or with very shitty one (Wizards and Warriors). And especially games, where dialogues are based on keywords (Amberstar, Ambermoon, also Grimoire of course). If you have dialogue trees (or a list of topicks) it is easy to scan trough all options and find a proper solution. But if you have to write the correct word by yourself (in dialogues or in case of some riddles) you have to be more careful. I love those games, where you have to find useful information in a sea of lore dumps and rumors. Even in case of some newer games I have a piece of paper on my side – to note places to come back later (ex. in Dragon Age: Origins I took notes about chests to open when my lockpicking skill will be high enough). In some games I’m using map notes to record quest information (ex. Divine Divinity). Heh, playing Baldur’s Gate Trilogy (with lot of quest mods) I had to make extensive notes by myself because in those times a lot of mods had not proper journal entries. Luckily in BG games you can edit in-game journal by hand. I wish all cRPGs have a possibility to make map notes and to edit in-game journal.
In case of Grimoire I’m playing in a window mod with 3 separate Notepad files opened. One – for lore information + alchemical recipes. Second – fore quests, NPCs, items, puzzles, keywords etc. Third one – for new English vocabulary.
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