KickStarter SKALD: Against the Black Priory - retro RPG inspired by Ultima

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I rested probably once a chapter, especially after they fixed Spellburn. Before Horrun, I think I rested 3 times. Magos are a bit of a chore until Chapter 3 when you hit Level 7 or 8. The player will have tons of potions and food at this point, so it makes no difference anyway. While I do think the mana curve needs improved, Guild-Magos follow the AD&D route of quadratic develop that starts slowly and rockets off later. Heirophants are more consistent throughout the whole game, but are ultimately don't reach the same offensive heights as Guild-Magos. They also lack Spellburn, which becomes very useful the more powerful your Guild-Magos becomes.

The way it would work for me was to have my MC lockdown everything with poison cloud (maybe 2), follow up with gnats, and then use Spellburn. Elena would then DPS with fireball or gnats depending on distribution and end with a Spellburn. The idea would be to whittle down the average HP to setup chain kills with other characters, especially for the Ranger. Their ability to heal the party upon killing marked enemies is extremely powerful. Doing this I could spend whatever Attunement I wanted on my Magos and never even had to heal. If I did, the Ranger has good healing spells and I had crafted more healing potions than I knew what to do with. Drinni became a waste of space. I would have preferred to keep Iago.

 

[MjKorz]

The way it would work for me was to have my MC lockdown everything with poison cloud (maybe 2), follow up with gnats, and then use Spellburn. Elena would then DPS with fireball or gnats depending on distribution and end with a Spellburn. The idea would be to whittle down the average HP to setup chain kills with other characters, especially for the Ranger. Their ability to heal the party upon killing marked enemies is extremely powerful. Doing this I could spend whatever Attunement I wanted on my Magos and never even had to heal. If I did, the Ranger has good healing spells and I had crafted more healing potions than I knew what to do with. Drinni became a waste of space. I would have preferred to keep Iago.

I used my MC Officer as the sword&board tank coupled with Driina as the second tank with club&shield. Driina was actually very useful since she has multiple aura increases that combined with the AoE stunning club attack produced huge stunsplosions at no resource burn. She can also self buff with Serpent's Grace for extra +2 dodge and has full shield feats along with expert heavy armor proficiency, making her extremely hard to hit while still maintaining high damage soak. I coupled Driina with melee Kat who would backstab stunned targets when not being able to get into flanking position. Iben was indeed very useful and provided plenty of heals with his healing on marked kill as well as being able to buff the MC with Serpent's Grace and Roland was just a melee murder machine with 2h sword. For offensive magic I mostly spammed Swarm of Gnats on targets engaged in melee to make them easier to hit and Poison Globe against poison-vulnerable enemy groups. Late game started using Thunderclap as well as Swarm of Gnats into Distort Mass against bosses or high priority targets like enemy casters.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I didn't develop her club stun ability because she couldn't hit much. I used her as a tank. The aura spells were decent and cover a huge area, but I mostly didn't need them. I liked the theif Kat. I had her dance around the periphery sneak attacking. Once she got red arcs, she could chain kill with the rest of them.

 

[Sweeper]

You know how good (and bad) games get hundres of pages on here?
Yeah, SKALD is neither. It's just okay, and that's the worst thing a game can be. You can't love it, you can't hate it. It's just okay.
From this point of view one could make the argument that SKALD is, in a way, a bigger failure than Veilguard.

 

[sosmoflux]

Nah you just have shit taste, no imagination, and thoughtlessly consume media of which, admittedly, there is too much of.

You'd do well to lower your dopamine threshold and stop rushing through your life. Enjoy things on a deeper level. Skald is great, you're just too fucked in the head to enjoy it.

 

[Sweeper]

Nah you just have shit taste, no imagination, and thoughtlessly consume media of which, admittedly, there is too much of.

You'd do well to lower your dopamine threshold and stop rushing through your life. Enjoy things on a deeper level. Skald is great, you're just too fucked in the head to enjoy it.

>Someone criticized media I like consooming
>I know, I'll call them fucked in the head for it
Bruh, it's a mid game. It's okay if you enjoy it, but it's still a mid game.

 

[sosmoflux]

Bruh
Mid
>
Consoom

Try this instead

More protein in your diet
Start lifting weights and learning about self discipline
Less screen time
Read a novel for 30-45 minutes before bed

Also, judging a game by public consensus is meant to be the antithesis of your whole anon schtick. Take my advice above for six months then give Skald (and lots of other games your lack of attention span has skipped) another go

 

[Sweeper]

Good tips.
Here's one for you, stop sucking dicks.

 

[sosmoflux]

No problem, son
Keep it up and eventually you'll stop having homoerotic thoughts, too

 

[Falksi]

You know how good (and bad) games get hundres of pages on here?
Yeah, SKALD is neither. It's just okay, and that's the worst thing a game can be. You can't love it, you can't hate it. It's just okay.
From this point of view one could make the argument that SKALD is, in a way, a bigger failure than Veilguard.

I genuinely love it.

It's flawed for sure, but it's been a long time since I played a CRPG which I could just let myself sink into so easily.

The more I reflect on my playthrough of it, the more I want a sequel.

 

[Sweeper]

No problem, son
Keep it up and eventually you'll stop having homoerotic thoughts, too

I don't, you do. You know how I know? Cause every single thing you wrote was projection.
That and you're the most passive aggresive faggot on this board.
>Nah man, I'm not insulting you.
>I'm just telling you you're a retard whilst giving you tips to stop being a retard
Female behavior. So evidently, all that shit you tried to do to raise your T, didn't work out, did it?
Next time you've got a problem with someone just come out and say what the problem is instead of acting like a faggot.

 

[luj1]

Why is it mid?

 

[Sweeper]

The game does some things well, but the meat and potatoes of it is mid. The character building is pretty rudimentary, back when I played it martial classes were OP in comparison to casters which made the combat pretty mindless.
I did end up dropping it after Horryn, maybe it got better in later chapters. It's very much a style over substance game. The artwork and atmosphere of the game might be exceptional, but that alone can't make it great. Maybe mid is too harsh, but it certainly isn't great.

 

[Haba]

It is a good game. 99% of games released those days are not good or great.

Of course entirely matter of taste, but I had fun playing it, which I almost never have with new games.

 

[Lyre Mors]

It's a good game and a great foundation for even better games to come. Calling it mid is definitely unfair. What this small team managed to accomplish is absolutely worthy of the respect of any classic CRPG fan. Here's hoping future projects can progress a little more swiftly and that they'll be able to add a little more meat to the ruleset's bones. Beyond that, the only other hope I have is entirely handcrafted and handplaced loot in any future games.

 

[MjKorz]

It's flawed for sure

I wouldn't call the game "flawed". Skald is a game of limited scope created by a team of very limited size using very limited resources. Within its intended scope, Skald does everything well.

 

[Falksi]

The game does some things well, but the meat and potatoes of it is mid. The character building is pretty rudimentary, back when I played it martial classes were OP in comparison to casters which made the combat pretty mindless.
I did end up dropping it after Horryn, maybe it got better in later chapters. It's very much a style over substance game. The artwork and atmosphere of the game might be exceptional, but that alone can't make it great. Maybe mid is too harsh, but it certainly isn't great.

I reckon that's pretty fair tbh, I love the game but it's definitely all about the atmosphere, style and excellent pacing.

That said, I did enjoy combat too, but it definitely improves significantly after Horryn, when you get more abilities.

Low level D&D is always a bit pedestrian, hence why I think BG2 will always remain towards the top of the pile. Being thrown into an adventure at level 8 instead of level 1 just gets to the meat and tatties sooner.

 

[thesheeep]

That said, I did enjoy combat too, but it definitely improves significantly after Horryn, when you get more abilities.

Definitely this.

I did enjoy my playthrough.
Except for the ending. The ending can go do one.

spoiler not about the story itself, but the nature of the ending

Yes, I get it, can't have a happy endings in cosmic horror settings.
But maybe an ending would've been possible that doesn't invalidate everything you do and connections you make other than "surviving to the end of the story"?
It's all quite the nothingburger and left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth. Maybe videogames - you know, where you actually achieve things and not just watch them - should not adhere to every cosmic horror cliché, especially ending-wise.

 

[MjKorz]

That said, I did enjoy combat too, but it definitely improves significantly after Horryn, when you get more abilities.

Definitely this.

I did enjoy my playthrough.
Except for the ending. The ending can go do one.

spoiler not about the story itself, but the nature of the ending

Yes, I get it, can't have a happy endings in cosmic horror settings.
But maybe an ending would've been possible that doesn't invalidate everything you do and connections you make other than "surviving to the end of the story"?
It's all quite the nothingburger and left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth. Maybe videogames - you know, where you actually achieve things and not just watch them - should not adhere to every cosmic horror cliché, especially ending-wise.

We did get a happy ending, though.

Spoiler

The Navigator is the only one who can battle something on the scale of the Dragon and the party was instrumental in waking him up. From the ending we know that the Navigator's ship takes flight and the Empire does not experience any cataclysmic events with the exception of the Outer Isles being lost. Whether or not the "time loop" continues is arguable, because the ending does not show any hints of it being thus. In fact, the very idea of a "time loop" is not actually supported in the game, it's what people assume is happening, but all we have is the information that the delivery of Embla's body to the anti-womb needed to wake the Navigator has happened in the past, which raises possibilities other than a time loop. It might've been so that a single Embla's body was not enough to wake the navigator and he needed multiple lifeforce infusions, meaning that all the previous Emblas (and all the other characters EXCEPT Iben and Roland) that have reached the Navigator before were clones/reincarnations that share genetic/ancestral/soul memory, which in turn imparts meaningfulness to the ending as every single sacrifice carried out before was essential to eventually waking the Navigator.

Iben's case is especially interesting as his exploratory dissection shows that he was an unexpected anomaly on the ship. It is also not known whether Roland has ever been part of the previous iterations of this journey, but there is no in-game proof that he was, as neither Roland nor Iben experience any flashbacks or deja vu. This further supports the idea that the repetition of events occurs not through a time loop, but through some sort of reincarnation mechanism as the events that occur and the characters that reach the end of the journey are not always the same.

 

[thesheeep]

We did get a happy ending, though.

We may have slightly diverging definitions of "happy"

 

[MjKorz]

We did get a happy ending, though.

We may have slightly diverging definitions of "happy"

Spoiler

Saving the world at the cost of personal sacrifice is happy enough for these kind of settings. Moreover, we don't even know the ultimate fate of the MC. Maybe he/she left with the Navigator on the ship.

 

[thesheeep]

We did get a happy ending, though.

We may have slightly diverging definitions of "happy"

Spoiler

Saving the world at the cost of personal sacrifice is happy enough for these kind of settings. Moreover, we don't even know the ultimate fate of the MC. Maybe he/she left with the Navigator on the ship.

Spoiler

I'm not really talking about that part. Sure, sacrifice to save world, all well and good.
But at the same time, it invalidates or makes irrelevant everything that you did prior. Saving the locations, people, your companions, side quests, any decision throughout the story - none of it matters, as all goes up in smoke anyway or dies horribly on the ship.

It's just bad storytelling, really - at least for a game.
Strongly reminded me of the ME3 ending, which completely invalidated practically everything you achieved up to that point and made only the very last fraction of the game important. There is a reason that game's ending is still overwhelmingly hated by the players.
"That thing that you did? Didn't matter." is a horrible thing to tell a player after they spent who knows how many hours on something.

 

[MjKorz]

We did get a happy ending, though.

We may have slightly diverging definitions of "happy"

Spoiler

Saving the world at the cost of personal sacrifice is happy enough for these kind of settings. Moreover, we don't even know the ultimate fate of the MC. Maybe he/she left with the Navigator on the ship.

Spoiler

I'm not really talking about that part. Sure, sacrifice to save world, all well and good.
But at the same time, it invalidates or makes irrelevant everything that you did prior. Saving the locations, people, your companions, side quests, any decision throughout the story - none of it matters, as all goes up in smoke anyway or dies horribly on the ship.

It's just bad storytelling, really - at least for a game.
Strongly reminded me of the ME3 ending, which completely invalidated practically everything you achieved up to that point and made only the very last fraction of the game important. There is a reason that game's ending is still overwhelmingly hated by the players.
"That thing that you did? Didn't matter." is a horrible thing to tell a player after they spent who knows how many hours on something.

Yeah, the ending could've been more respectful towards player choices, however, the entire journey of the player and the party did matter and achieved a meaningful result.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

This is a good game, not mid. It achieves at the heart of the matter. Good exploration, enjoyable tactical combat, a decent story, competent writing, and lots of atmosphere. Charm and authenticity count. Character building is straight-forward and succinct, which I appreciate. With some more iteration it could be great. There are lots of skills checks, which is major incline. The game gets a bit unbalanced by Chapter 5 when the player is flush with everything from crafting and thieving. Those could use some tweaks. AI can always be improved, but I think the late game enemy drudgery has more to do with enemies not having many abilities. Adding a few spell-like abilities or enemy casters would improve the second-half challenge.

 

[Castozor]

I finished it yesterday and liked it well enough. Impressive showing for such a small developer. Not a big fan of the ending either and that coupled with how linear the game is means I probably wont be replaying this any time soon though. Combat was fun enough but maybe don't make an entire (optional) area almost completely immune to most things. Class balance also seems out of whack but the game isn't that hard so you can probably make everything work.