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Yes you are right Mr Jaekl, a skill check sounds like the most logical thing in this situation. Probably I would just wander south from Phexcaer, and then back again, after maybe half of the whole route at most, just to increase the chances to find that place
According to my hint book, the sword should have been on the purple route and the orc cave on the red route. I've seen some posts claiming that it took more than one travel through the red route so there could be a skill check or something, or it may depend on which direction you're travelling?
Definitely the sword was on the red route, so indeed it may be variable. In fact the dungeon remains there, and can be revisited, so I am 100% certain. Tried a few more times the red route, up and down, and no orc cave.
EDIT: found it, just a matter of trying again and again.
Doing the dead ship quest, my picklocker got a curse from a chest. No flavor text, no choice; it was just another chest, which was empty by the way, and I got a prompt saying my poor dwarf's attributes are reduced (-1 to all).
I haven't found any spell or potion that can remove curses. Tried to sleep for 100+ days and it doesn't go away.
Love it, but I hope there's a quest or something I can do, otherwise I'd need to reload and repeat the whole ship. Anyone knows how to lift curses?
The spell "Verwandlung Beenden" (End Transmutation?) lifts the curse. Alternatively you can try the mage academy in Thorwal, but it doesn't seem to work if the character in question is in the lead position.
My idea would have been to donate and then pray to Praios or Boron. Praying to Boron can also bring dead characters back to life btw.
The spell "Verwandlung Beenden" (End Transmutation?) lifts the curse. Alternatively you can try the mage academy in Thorwal, but it doesn't seem to work if the character in question is in the lead position.
My idea would have been to donate and then pray to Praios or Boron. Praying to Boron can also bring dead characters back to life btw.
Damn, I would have been furious if I bought the hintbooks with these games back in the day, it seems to be a rule that everyone who plays RoA will run into at least one problem that requires advanced online archaeological research to solve. It was the stupid ass unicorn for me.
I learned something reading this thread. Vault Dweller was acting like an asshole to some random, which probably contributed to negative karma and might be the reason colony ship was a complete and total failure.
Won the game! It's been quite a ride, the game is sometimes obscure and confusing, but overall, difficulty was very much like in other RPGs from the era: extremely hard until you learn the ropes, then pretty easy.
For the final "duel", I was unable to hit the orc champion at all with my fighter, even with grimring. But once I retried with a few ST and AG potions, it was a walk in the park (and they stack!!! killed him in 2-3 blows, with 28 Strength)
I have really enjoyed, despite some limitations and frustrations, and I'm looking forward to Star Trail. I'm so glad to have yet some of these old gems to discover!
nop, there's a special encounter right after you leave the first town that will magically bring a new party up to level 5 IIRC. Unless you're talking about equipment, I don't know how much of that transfers to Star Trail.
The combat is just gonna be easy no matter what you do, especially since you can shoot diagonal in this one. Starting new characters will delay the inevitable slightly perhaps.
The combat is just gonna be easy no matter what you do, especially since you can shoot diagonal in this one. Starting new characters will delay the inevitable slightly perhaps.
On Twitch, I saw a German guy playing the Realms of Arkania series with some kind of custom/modified portraits that looked really good. I tried to find where I could download these portraits... without luck (mainly because 99% of the information/forums/webs/etc. about the RoA series out there is in German).
On Twitch, I saw a German guy playing the Realms of Arkania series with some kind of custom/modified portraits that looked really good. I tried to find where I could download these portraits... without luck (mainly because 99% of the information/forums/webs/etc. about the RoA series out there is in German).
I'll probably give myself a couple months before playing Star Trail,I might appreciate and enjoy it more that way, and sadly I don't have much time to play this summer, anyways...
You actually lucked out Dave, my adventurers all turned into the same young boy after importing and I had to learn how to hex edit the save files to fix it. Your adventurers just spent their adventuring money on nose jobs and laser eye surgery. They'll probably miss less now that they can see.
As expected from a game based on a German ruleset, it's
, with a focus on exploration, binge drinking, and only then genociding orcs. It is a mesh of Isles of Terra's blobbery exploration of cities and dungeons, turn-based combat on a grid, and CYOAish exploration. It would be easier if the manual would explain the essentials of the setting - but the one released with the GOG version is subpar at best. It lacks the Arcane Lore section that should contain descriptions of spells and wand effects, among other things. You can play without them, but how to figure out whether the spell with the initial -10 value (thus, not usable during some first levels) is useful? The Amiga manual contains them (though, apparently, it's not complete either compared to the German version).
I only utilized a mage during combat when in dire need of a spell. My thief was good for nothing during battles, being prone to enemy attacks with her low armor rating (since low strength limits encumbrance needed to wear something nice) and not being skilled at missile weapons. Despite all that, I steamrolled most combat encounters, losing close to no health from level 2 forwards. I had two fighters clad in the next-to-best armor available, along with a pair of rangers with a crossbow and a bow. Since the AI went for the closest available hit, sending my borderline invincible (as long as magic was not involved - a rare sight in the game) tanks forward made them the only target of the adversaries' attacks. And then my hidden-in-plain-sight rangers turned them into sieves.
The above would not be a huge problem itself, but the average combat encounter took some minutes. When I wanted to hit someone, I had to click "Attack", point at the enemy, and when in melee, select the type of attack. I could not make any action automatic. I could allow the computer to take control over my character, but the computer oftentimes sent my squishy shooters (or a mage) into a melee range, punching enemies with arrows instead of stepping back to use a ranged attack. The keyboard was borderline useless - I was only able to use directional keys and Enter. Since the amount of available options was
, it didn't help me a bit. Even pointing at enemies was a problem, since the mouse was locked in a direction of the attack - so I couldn't just point at the enemy to attack him; I had to reset the direction (by pointing at my own character), then point at the enemy.
The town exploration had its shortcomings. Take the visuals, for example: What is
? It is, of course,
. And
? Correct, it's
. While the automap was one of the admirable features of the game, recording a lot of info I didn't really have until I entered the building (like - which ones are inns or shops), it doesn't mark buildings with special interactions. This is not a problem if I know who I'm searching for - I can just ask at the tavern - but how about buildings I don't know I want to enter? I had to make a ton of mundane annotations externally about which buildings I had already visited. Thankfully, except for three cities, this pretty much didn't matter, since in villages almost every house was devoid of importance.
The exploration of the overworld was the most interesting part of the game. Each road could potentially contain an unmarked event, a dungeon, a skill check, an opportunity to lose a ton of equipment, or other staggering calamity. Since the game did not contain a lot of text concerning things outside of civilization, those things usually came as a surprise - for example, one dungeon became available after sleeping in an abandoned inn and investigating noises coming from the cellar. However, the most common event during those walks was exhaustion followed by preparing a camp in the wilderness, where my party's survival and potentially herb lore skills were tested - which, as you may guess, I could not automate, so I had to manually repeat the same routine over and over again (with a mouse, of course). Travelling around the world was tied to a few batty gimmicks. Firstly, one could travel only between cities, not between already discovered caves or places. Secondly, after exiting the dungeon, the party went
, regardless of the length of the path or the dangers ahead. What follows, I cannot go from city X to dungeon Z lying on a way to Y, then return to X; I had to go to Z, then to Y while exiting, then come back from Y to X in some way - which was important, since some pathways contained an unfortunate event (like most ways to Phexcaer- coincidentally, they hosted a few dungeons).
Dungeons were pretty nice; each had some associated story or purpose told through dialogue boxes, and while they lacked good puzzles (only sometimes utilizing the ability to split the party), they gave me the opportunity to use items or skills on some cells. I liked the lethality of traps and the lack of respawns there. Some of them even contained keys. Those dungeons contained hard-to-open doors nearby. Despite that, keys were not usable - my guess is that they couldn't fit another option in their sacred 3x3 options grid, so they simply removed the option to use them altogether. This was one of the most frustrating things about the dungeons, since it took me a while to figure out whether they have any importance (each had unique name - its color, so normally I'd assume they should have) and they took space in my backpacks (which was limited).
The saving system was one of the brighter ideas this game had. One can freely save in any but two temples; any other time during the blobbery exploration, such action costs 50 experience points. What gives me 50 points of experience? Subsequent random encounters of the same type - so, the save can be thought of as a reward for a random encounter. And rewards for encounters other than experience became immaterial after the very beginning of the game, since I could afford almost any sort of equipment I wanted very quickly, and almost all the equipment I ended up with was available in shops. I ended up with ~2500 ducats (I guess I needed 3000 for a ship - which didn't matter in the end), and the most expensive practical item costs 150 ducats, while I was getting money at roughly uniform pace through the game. One use for all the gold was replenishing the supplies - I had to buy missiles, and weapons oftentimes broke - but that didn't cost a lot. The interesting detail is that, at a low skill level, the cost of using melee weapons is roughly the same as ranged weapons - since the ranged ones don't break. The further in the game, the less often did my blades and axes break.
The game was oddly polished in some respects (usually meaningless from the gameplay perspective), while seemingly rushed and bug-ridden in others. The lighthouse had
despite not being usable, while the most important buildings in the game were indistinguishable from the others. Each landmark or village had its description, and each place had a unique line for an NPC when entering his house uninvited. The dialogues sometimes
and in a deterministic fashion (that is, they never played out correctly), and one plot-related NPC does not work as expected, not giving the player the map.
There was even some plot, I guess - you had to recover some sword and then beat some orc with it. First, you had to find nine pieces of the map, then find some damp dungeon, then do something no one told you about (could this be
Since the Eye tells the player the date of the attack, and one knows that orcs live around Phexcaer, one could just check the surroundings before the attack - I didn't check whether it works, and I think the game discourages this by how long it takes to rest for two years.
?) and wait. I liked the fact that one does not need to find all the pieces to unlock the main dungeon of the game - another similarity to Isles of Terra. While many people needed a referral to start talking, multiple people pointed to most map owners, reinforcing the non-linearity of the gameplay. I also enjoyed the delightful absurdity of waiting for several years in the same spot in the middle of nowhere until the army arrives. I disliked needing to do something
Getting the Orc Documents (maybe Hermit's Lake circle reveals it? But how many loops are needed until the Eye says anything about it?)
. I also detested the fact that some plot-related stuff seemed to be
I only saw the ruins between Skellelen and Phexcaer during the second trip, after savescumming when losing a possibly unique item in the swamps. And I couldn't decipher the document the first time I attempted to read it, so I wandered around the world seeking a linguist or something like that until I checked again and found out that understanding the language is non-deterministic for the party members, however ridiculous that sounds
.
Lastly, there were a lot of things I didn't discover on my playthrough (besides the things that should be in the manual but weren't). I never satisfied Swafnir; I never figured out the meaning of a membership scroll or the statuette from the altar of the nameless god, never found the writ for Daspotan old man, and I possibly missed some non-playable companions. The game had a lot of complexity with gameplay implications, but it didn't make it hard. Also, a ton of miscellaneous equipment pieces or stats had obscure use cases you could see once or twice in the entire game, adding opaqueness and potentially replayability.
Summarizing, the game had some potential with a complex ruleset, its rather proper implementation, secrets, some aspects of overland exploration, the chaotic, non-linear world, and a few interesting systems like splitting the party (allowing to even move the party members to different cities) or the saving mechanism; however, the interface (especially the lack of proper keyboard commands) was a disaster, the game was very slow - both combat (a sophisticated affair solvable with trivial strategies) and overland exploration (impossible to automate), the visuals didn't fulfill the only thing I would expect them to do (distinguishing things, including buildings) and the last part of the plot might be borderline unsolvable if you're unlucky. In the end, the game felt more like a chore than an adventure.
=====
As an aside, I think it's very hard to port the Might & Magic formula into games using the pen-and-paper system. Van Caneghem's RPGs relied on constant and unpredictable stat increments found in the dungeons or wilderness. Most pen-and-paper systems are not built towards arduous exploration-based skill progression, diminishing the relevance of the dungeons (especially here, without lots of interesting side quests).
That was interesting to read, thanks for your impressions and experiences from the game. I'm sure you'll be pleased that some of your criticisms were fixed in the sequel, "Star Trail".
I had two fighters clad in the next-to-best armor available, along with a pair of rangers with a crossbow and a bow. Since the AI went for the closest available hit, sending my borderline invincible (as long as magic was not involved - a rare sight in the game) tanks forward made them the only target of the adversaries' attacks. And then my hidden-in-plain-sight rangers turned them into sieves.
This is the tactic for "Blade of Destiny". It doesn't work so well in "Star Tail" anymore because the AI no longer automatically attacks the first enemy in range and actually prioritises other heroes - e.g. it fires at your mage with rangers. Incidentally, rangers can shoot diagonally from "Star Tail" onwards.
On the other hand, your rangers are no longer responsible for most of the damage in "Star Tail" anyway, this should now be dealt mainly by your warrior and your dwarf because at higher levels they actually have high enough stats to hit and deal damage consistently. If you found the magical orc hook in Daspota your dwarf can turn into a killing machine in "Star Trail" - provided you skilled him accordingly.
I could not make any action automatic. I could allow the computer to take control over my character, but the computer oftentimes sent my squishy shooters (or a mage) into a melee range, punching enemies with arrows instead of stepping back to use a ranged attack.
This is changed in "Star Trail". You can automate the whole party or individual heroes. You can accelerate the speed of battle and even choose a "calculate battle" option. The calculation is hilariously bad, though.
However, the most common event during those walks was exhaustion followed by preparing a camp in the wilderness, where my party's survival and potentially herb lore skills were tested - which, as you may guess, I could not automate, so I had to manually repeat the same routine over and over again (with a mouse, of course).
Realms of Arkania games are based on TDE 3rd edition. Drakensang and Blackguards are based on 4.1. There are major differences between 3rd and 4th edition. Small changes between 4 and 4.1 and differences between 4th and 5th are there and plenty, but not as radical as between 3rd and 4th. I find ROA games to be very faithful up to a point where they implemented stuff that is never used, but it's there. Not a fan of 5th edition and would say stay at 4.1 for P&P. 5th edition also implemented wokeness by changing race to species and have stories focus more on DEI (ludicrous amount of strong independent women in positions of power)
