Codex Review RPG Codex Review: Expeditions: Viking

[Saduj]

Some of the difficulty problems could be fixed by tweaking the AI towards heavily favoring attacks over non-damage dealing tactical options. In many fights there was one turn where I thought "this could go very badly for me here". Then half of the enemies would waste their turn using anticipate opening or using a stun attack that fails or repositioning pointlessly. Anticipate opening is by far the biggest culprit. Enemies often use it the turn before they are about to be killed or repetitively.

 

[cruelio]

This is a really long review when you could have instead written "they made customers pay for a beta and only the recent patch weeks after release claims to have fixed all the crashing bugs." Or you could have instead just written "archers lul" and the entire review would have been two words and summed up all the problems with combat.

 

[cruelio]

It's actually insane the review doesn't mention crashing or bugs until the last paragraph when you could have written an entire article just on them.

 

[Sensuki]

I must be lucky this go around, I've only noticed quite minor bugs, no crashes. There's some weird performance issue where the first time I load the game after system startup it runs like dogshit, but if I quit and reload it, it runs pretty good.

Balancing is usually a factor of how much resources you'll have to let people play through the game and then tweak values, and not a factor of how well you can conceptualise it out of thin air, so hopefully you'll get to do some (more) beta'ing next time round.

I mentioned this in the beta, but damage in Viking is a lot higher than Conquistador, attacks are just flat out more lethal. You cannot one-shot people with a sword attack in Conquistador to my knowledge, but in Viking you can one shot people seldomly and many enemies die in 2 hits.

When the player goes first, the high damage means you can drop as you said in the review, up to a few guys, and when the enemy team goes first they can too (though usually less due to AI). I thought the higher damage was problematic in the beta and it looks like it's ended up having an effect on the difficulty.

The more moderate per-hit damage in Conquistador made things a bit harder because it's more difficult to take enemies out in the first round.

 

[Invictus]

I liked what I saw from this game... but looking at my backlog and all the reports on bugs and issues with the early releases I decided to hold out for buying it down the line
I guess I rather replay my oldies than get new games... maybe that is the true reason of diminishing returns on sequels spinoffs and all that shit; in the end only games I realllly want to play will get me to Day One Purchases

 

[Kem0sabe]

Game is broken when you cant even turn off the music... Turn all the sliders to 0 and in window mode this thing still plays the same music tracks all over gain.

Oh, and UI buttons in options menu disappear, battles lock up at end turn, game crashes, game bugs, containers often being impossible to click or loot.

For a company to release a game in this state knowingly, its outright malicious and they deserve all the shit they get.

 

[Mark Richard]

I've got to agree, there's been a shift towards a more traditional RPG formula. The survival elements have become so subdued, they're like an obsolete organ. Features like camping feel as if they're in Viking simply because they were in Conquistador and don't really do enough to justify their presence. If there's to be another game, it'll be interesting to see what direction the series takes from here.

 

[Tigranes]

Game is broken when you cant even turn off the music... Turn all the sliders to 0 and in window mode this thing still plays the same music tracks all over gain.

Oh, and UI buttons in options menu disappear, battles lock up at end turn, game crashes, game bugs, containers often being impossible to click or loot.

For a company to release a game in this state knowingly, its outright malicious and they deserve all the shit they get.

It's tough to review on bugs because they're always a probability game as to how bad you'll be affected. I had very few. The only thing you can do is take a rough count of how bad things look from all the complaints, and note that the game was released very buggy & that they're seemingly trying to patch them up quickly.

Sensuki with the throw rock/harried trick + abilities like charge, once you start crafting you can definitely think to yourself "archers/healers are 1 hit to kill, the rest are 2 if you can get past shield". It's actually a good decision in several other ways - e.g. the faster pacing of the combat is welcome - but as you say helps break the difficulty.

 

[Jonas]

For a company to release a game in this state knowingly, its outright malicious and they deserve all the shit they get.

You're assuming we knew about those bugs.

We didn't.

 

[Kaldurenik]

So are you going to fix the problem where you walk up and talk to someone and start fighting directly in their face.
Can be... somewhat annoying as all your characters are stuck together, and at times your archers are all at the front :D

 

[Saduj]

Two other issues with the AI: Archers retreating and using over watch way too often and out of position to actually trigger an over watch attack. Enemies switching from their weapon to unarmed and then punching someone's shield for 3 points of blocked damaged.

Once in a while the AI will do something that seems well planned like hooking a shield and then following up with two attacks on the disabled character. But I've also seen shield hooks wasted by lack of follow up (same with stun, which at a certain point in the game is reliably resisted anyway).

I really think just having enemies charge straight at the party using special damage dealing attacks first (charge, flame arrow, heavy swing, etc) and regular attacks second would be a huge improvement. Not a great fix but doing that and removing anticipate opening and switching to unarmed would improve things.

 

[Serus]

I didn't mention the time limit, but it's such a weird thing to do: you make it so generous that you could only fail it by pointlessly walking back and forth 20 times across a map with nothing to discover, but by putting it in you still risk angering people who are stupid, OCD, larpy, or just like to take it very slow. Either make the time limit enforce some hard choices, or get rid of it.

Isn't this mostly true of the time limits in FO and Star Control II?

Re SC2, nope not true at all. SC2 deadlines are pretty tight even early on, entire factions will just disappear off the starmap if you dally and look for RU riches or rainbow planets or whatever, and you'll end up in a practically unwinnable game state and reload. And it's not "bad game design" because the game pretty much screams at you that stuff is going on.

This is simply not true - the game time limits are extremely generous, you'd have to aimlessly travel from star to star for months or years to run into problems. I know because i played it first as a teenager in the 90s with a very basic understanding of English, on a pirated copy and no manual and no map that comes with the manual and as you might imagine i did mistakes and it took me a lot of time sometimes to find stuff on the star map - and i still haven't run into any problems.

For instance you are given the option to be a germanic pagan true to your norse roots, or an anachronistic 8th century unbeliever who doubts the existence of the gods and the supernatural, but even though so many quests involve an alleged conversion to Christianity your character can't legitimately convert to that new faith(something that was so common to germanic pagans ever since their contact with the Cross to the eventual demise of paganism in europe). The northumbrian questline also comes to mind, I see no reason why you can't actually side with Osred and must instead enforce a coup d'etat to ascertain influence in Northumbria and forge an alliance in the region.

I'll be honest with you. I just didn't have time to write that shit. We actually planned to let you side with Osred but it was just me writing the vast majority of this game (with a contractor, Elan, helping out with side quests in Denmark for a few months, and Avonaeon contributing a lot of the random events) and I had to sleep once in a while.

Ultimately, choosing between Osred or Æthelred wouldn't have changed much for the war part of the story - just the name of a quest giver. But we'd have needed a lot more complexity in the dialogue, and as our patch notes attest we had quite enough of that already. So I cut it pretty early on for the sake of my own sanity. An added bonus is a little historical authenticity: Æthelred I actually did usurp Osred II somewhere around 790 AD.

Way to answer the least interesting of the two issues...

 

[skyst]

Jonas

Why can't I name my longboat Boaty Mcboatface?

 

[Kem0sabe]

You're assuming we knew about those bugs.

We didn't.

How can you not?

Maybe steam could start to list disclaimers on the store page before buying a game...

"this game had no Q&A, are you sure you want to pay full price for this?"

The music slider bug is literally an in-game option not working. The container bug is aparent in the very first maps with impossible to click containers.

 

[cruelio]

For a company to release a game in this state knowingly, its outright malicious and they deserve all the shit they get.

You're assuming we knew about those bugs.

We didn't.

Pretty shocking that you didn't do things like "open the option menu" or "play longer than the tutorial missions." Actually considering the total incompetence of everything the company you work for has done since release conquistador I guess it isn't shocking.

 

[Anomander]

Well, i finished the game and didn't encounter any major bug.

 

[SniperHF]

I said the same thinga lot of others are a few weeks ago, lots of minor bugs but nothing huge. So far that has still been the case and I'm almost done with the game. I've got a running list I'll send LA's way later.

with the throw rock/harried trick + abilities like charge, once you start crafting you can definitely think to yourself "archers/healers are 1 hit to kill, the rest are 2 if you can get past shield". It's actually a good decision in several other ways - e.g. the faster pacing of the combat is welcome - but as you say helps break the difficulty.

My strategy lately has been to use inspire on a couple characters and give berzerkers a chance to use both of their charges of one-two in one turn. Murders everything except occasionally well shielded guys.

I've also been intentionally avoiding the use of more than one archer in the hird just to see what's what.

I'd like to see critical hits be a more viable strategy as well. Make it a worthwhile choice to go 1H weapon only no shield with high crit. Shields already nerf crits but only a little bit. Make the gap even wider and maybe even eliminate crits from shield users entirely.

 

[Darth Roxor]

A bit of a bummer this.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

A bit of a bummer this.

Game or review?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Well, game as according to the review. Guess I'll wait for the patches and the DEE ELL CEE

 

[MicoSelva]

Thanks for the review, Tigranes.
Looks like a good game - definitely on my wishlist now, especially if the difficulty issues will get resolved (another game with pointless and/or overpowered crafting - these are the times we live in). Although I need to finish Conquistador first.

 

[Avonaeon]

Game has been updated to version 1.0.5. This includes a new surprise round so you can position your people before the enemy attacks, a lot of balance tweaks and a mechanic to prevent camp slaves that make the game too easy. You can read all of the patch notes here:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/445190/announcements/detail/2917618592652699406

 

[Darth Roxor]

It's funny to revisit this revio now that I've finally played the game and read that the release version didn't have the total skill point caps/thresholds on character progression, because that's one of my major complaints so far - since they force you to pick so many things you don't really want to have.

Similarly, it's funny to read about the "surprise round" being added later because the mechanic's looked very weird to me since the first time it happened. I have to say I'm completely puzzled as to why the set-up phase from Conquistador was removed in favour of this (or rather in favour of no set-up at all initially, followed by this).

 

[razvedchiki]

So is the game better now than at release?