KickStarter Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones - a Lovecraftian Computer RPG

[Silva]

Even the patch notes contain spelling errors.

Wait for the update to fix the patch notes.

 

[Alienman]

The looting system... you do get more loot by looting during combat right? When combat is over I always seem to get such meager rewards. Haven't experimented too much with it yet since busy killing the enemies instead.

 

[Van-d-all]

The looting system... you do get more loot by looting during combat right? When combat is over I always seem to get such meager rewards. Haven't experimented too much with it yet since busy killing the enemies instead.

It's also glitched, you can often click on bodies after the final loot screen appears...

 

[Alienman]

The looting system... you do get more loot by looting during combat right? When combat is over I always seem to get such meager rewards. Haven't experimented too much with it yet since busy killing the enemies instead.

It's also glitched, you can often click on bodies after the final loot screen appears...

Heh, yeah, I have tried that but look so glitchy I'm afraid the UI will lock up or something.

 

[Beggar]

Looting after the fight? After the fight all the bodies disappeared for me, I was looting only in battle

 

[veevoir]

Yeah, 1.0.3 just came out and right off the bat, if you create an aristocrat character, the butler is broken and doesn't follow you. Funnily enough I was just about to test how viable is it to get him killed early on.

That did it for me, wanted to have a less fucked play-through than my previous test character - bug on start.

Will wait a month of patches, I guess.

 

[Egosphere]

house of spectres

Spoiler

where do i learn answer to question about spectres given name? Must have missed some clue

The penultimate answer is

Spoiler

I don't know

, but the final answer can be obtained if you

Spoiler

buy the book about the folklore and read it

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Zombra]

The looting system... you do get more loot by looting during combat right? When combat is over I always seem to get such meager rewards. Haven't experimented too much with it yet since busy killing the enemies instead.

I think it's supposed to work that if you loot during combat and then run, you keep what you looted, but if you exterminate the enemy you get all the loot automatically. That's the impression I got from the loading screen tips or wherever I read that. Exterminating everything and looting in combat isn't supposed to give you extra stuff. At least I hope not.

 

[V_K]

maybe I need to do so after encountering final stabber killing?

Yes.
This quest is a bit annoying TBH - I really like the concept, but the connection of clues to answers is a mess.

 

[Egosphere]

house of spectres

Spoiler

where do i learn answer to question about spectres given name? Must have missed some clue

The penultimate answer is

Spoiler

I don't know

, but the final answer can be obtained if you

Spoiler

buy the book about the folklore and read it

yeah i do mean final answer, interestingly enough i did read that book, maybe I need to do so after encountering final stabber killing? Will give it a try

Only works after you talk to Keelan, yeah

 

[Fedora Master]

Where does the game keep its saves? Not the game folder, not AppData.

 

[Van-d-all]

Where does the game keep its saves? Not the game folder, not AppData.

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Cultic Games

 

[Alienman]

The looting system... you do get more loot by looting during combat right? When combat is over I always seem to get such meager rewards. Haven't experimented too much with it yet since busy killing the enemies instead.

I think it's supposed to work that if you loot during combat and then run, you keep what you looted, but if you exterminate the enemy you get all the loot automatically. That's the impression I got from the loading screen tips or wherever I read that. Exterminating everything and looting in combat isn't supposed to give you extra stuff. At least I hope not.

Yeah, I think so too, but at times, when I have mistaken picked to loot during combat I see all this loot on the body, but then later when the fight is over I get like one key or something for loot. Just a bit confused on how it works, but it kinda looks like you should loot during combat regardless if you are gonna flee or not, could be wrong of course.

 

[Prime Junta]

...

I'm really not sold on the combat. Melee is just plain better than guns or spells, at least early on, and has no resource cost. Combat also drags on way too long, everybody has a ton of HP and can happily eat a half-dozen bullets before keeling over. This badly needs a whack with Josh's balance stick.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Van-d-all]

...

I'm really not sold on the combat. Melee is just plain better than guns or spells, at least early on, and has no resource cost. Combat also drags on way too long, everybody has a ton of HP and can happily eat a half-dozen bullets before keeling over. This badly needs a whack with Josh's balance stick.

There's a certain skewed balancing in this. Melee is character expansive, as it requires decent physical stats/skills, which are obviously not too useful in a Lovecraftian game. Ranged is resource expansive as it requires bullets, but hit chances seem to be higher? for wimpy characters. And spells seem to be the only real choice for brainiacs, because it's the only kind of combat based on a universally useful skill, occultism; plus sanity isn't that hard to replenish, given dialogue, books, socializing and few other methods. I don't like it still, but that's how I see it.

 

[Grotesque]

what progressive SJW wrote this game?
and this is not the first time the game is educating me

and where is the option where I say "yes because that's proper"

 

[Xunwael]

what progressive SJW wrote this game?
and this is not the first time the game is educating me

and where is the option where I say "yes because that's proper"

It is pretty annoying how it's impossible to play stern or dignified characters in RPGs, but you get used to it after a while.

 

[Zombra]

Turns out no flappers in the 20s behaved in ways that conservatives found shocking.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I do wonder what HPL would have thought had he known that Turks would be making something inspired by his stories. The man had issues

From Lovecraft's The Shadow out of Time:
I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world.

 

[the mole]

I'll add to the above comment by saying that the combat is quite primitive, from my experience. I haven't yet finished the game, so take it with grain of salt.

Even though I've been playing a spell-caster, there is very little variation in the system. There are many guns, but they all do the same type of damage. There are many melee weapons, but they also do the same type of damage. You can knock enemies down, but they get up in the same turn. You can stack 3 bleeding wounds, but they amount to just -1 damage for each wound, each turn. The guns have a penalty to point blank shots, but you can freely step away from nearby enemies without any 'opportunity' attacks. I haven't tried crafting grenades or molotovs, but my guess is that they'll do similar damage and perhaps give another 'fire' status which will be mechanically equivalent to bleeding.

The spells break up the monotony, but they limited in number and share certain similarities with other weapons. Your first attack-minded spell will simply deal damage relative to your mind level. You'll then acquire a couple of spells that can turn enemies into stone (basically a stun spell, with the caveat that enemies can be shattered when ossified) or deal sanity damage. That's all good and well, but once you buff your original spell to having an area of effect, there's little reason to use anything else, especially since the spell can be cast on any tile. So far, I've steam-rolled every combat encounter simply by rearranging my party to get the enemies serried in front of me, then having 2 occultists spam their damage-over-six-tiles spell. There's very little tactics involved.

Compare this to something like AoD. You have bows (ie. guns), you have throwables, you have nets (ie. stun spell), but you also have an assortment of melee weapons which drastically alter the fight. You can use a shield to knock someone away from you, a spear to keep them at bay, axes to cleave through groups, hammers to bash their armour etc. There's decisions to be made regarding what armour you should wear, weather to block or dodge, where to position yourself in a fight, whether to hit quickly or slowly and powerfully etc. Or Underrail, which is just on a different planet altogether when it comes to complexity of the combat system, with the myriad of damage types, armours, spells, items etc. Even Arcanum, which could be won with nothing other than the Harm spell, had mountains of (badly implemented) combat mechanics. Maybe I'm missing something, but so far the scope of opportunities in combat has been pretty restricted in this game

You can take cover in stygian, your positioning is more important, aod is just throwing yourself into a blender if you don't max combat every level, and hoping to God you can find a tile where you aren't surrounded, the tactical depth isn't there, which is boring, what's the point in playing an rpg if you can only experience 1/10th of it, since vendors never restock you're just out of luck when it comes to utility

 

[RegionalHobo]

...

I'm really not sold on the combat. Melee is just plain better than guns or spells, at least early on, and has no resource cost. Combat also drags on way too long, everybody has a ton of HP and can happily eat a half-dozen bullets before keeling over. This badly needs a whack with Josh's balance stick.

melee gets a lot of hype but guns appear to get many upgrades as you progress while melee is stagnant(im close to lvl6 now).

In general Im not too happy with curent save system - but not due to save scumming. I just like to experience various branches and then go back.
As stealthy/talkative character I dotn recall a single situation when there was some chest gated behind combat and it was worth getting.
As such I wish I was into guns instead on my main character and on those rare encounters i would just spray all my love with a shotgun.

guns are shit until really near the end of the game ( 6 + ) and even then they are mediocre. melee does not require that much because you use it in companions. talking about companions they get ABSURD companions perks, do not get angst, do not get random conditions that make you skip turns like schizo, do not have to put points in other skills beyond combat most of the time since you can t use them in checks.

as such there s zero doubt companions are many times stronger than the MC. as a matter of fact, the buttler with a ripper knife and punches could easily solo the game without even using drugs. with drugs he s just borderline cheating

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Turns out no flappers in the 20s behaved in ways that conservatives found shocking.

You can't go back far enough for conservatives. "Ok at what date did women have absolutely NO power or autonomy because THAT's the ticket for ME!"

(also lol at flappers in the 20s being more forward-thinking than dweebs at the Codex in 2019)

 

[V_K]

The problem with Stygian combat, I think, is that the systems are there but they are underutilized. Like, there are actually three damage types - physical, mental (sanity) and supernatural. But most of the characters can only do physical, and occultists can do supernatural. Which makes sense - it's not like humans can drive eldritch abominations mad. Maybe the damage types are more important for playing defensive? Like, you can't deal them to the enemies, but you have to be able to defend against them? That would also make sense both in the setting - since humans can only hope to survive an encounter with cosmic horrors, not go on the offensive - and mechanically, given the "progressive escape" system. But the problem here is - what kind of defensive abilities do you get exactly? I can think of two spells, one against physical damage, the other against conditions. That's it. And then there's the question of difficulty - personally, every time I had the progressive escape tiles open, there was no point to use if because I could finish off the remaining enemies within one round.
There's a skeleton of a good horror-themed combat in there, but to make it work they need to introduce more defensive abilities - of various kinds - and make enemies harder to kill.