Wartales - turn-based mercenary band RPG by Northgard developer - now with Skelmar Invasion DLC

[fantadomat]

ded game already

More like the kodex is dead,there is hardly any real discussion of rpgs on it anymore. Outside of two hype trains.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it's not like this is some immortal masterpiece worthy of being discussed all the day. its heart is in the right place, but damn the actual realization is a disaster.

 

[ArchAngel]

holy shit, this game might have the worst interface i've ever seen. messy, unresponsive, convoluted, everything is tiny. just the act of saving is a pain: you usually start from a pause (which is also terrible because no instruction can be given during pause, and pausing breaks targeted commands), so you press esc and the first thing that happens is... pause off, so you now have to press esc again. save, double click on file does nothing. it's closest and faster to press enter on "do you want to overwrite?" prompts, but here it does nothing, so once you kicked yourself because muscle memory kept kicking in, you go back and finally click "overwrite". no quicksave on f5 either.
and this is not even the worst. the worst is once you start to have 8-10 men, with very awkward names, and have to place them on the battlefield while they all look the same.
vizzini would be shocked.

I think you can rename characters and give them names you want.

 

[ArchAngel]

Did anyone manage to kill the undead horde?

In Ludern? I saw it coming and just got out of its way. Later I could not find it anywhere.

 

[fantadomat]

Did anyone manage to kill the undead horde?

In Ludern? I saw it coming and just got out of its way. Later I could not find it anywhere.

It runs around the map.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

do you see what i mean when i say that its heart is in the right place but realization is a complete mess? the tradeskill system is a nice addition, but each profession gives a specific stat bonus, so anything which gives +str or +con on an archer is a complete waste. some benefit if there's multiple of them, but they're 9 in total (no, bard is just not implemented) and a 9 men team is already an army, and then it'd be cool to add some bears to tank and wolves to do damage, and at this point 4 ponies (why ponies? why retarded ponies and not proper horses or buffalos? and why no riding?) are mandatory to take along the food alone, you're quickly forced to have 20-25 elements, which is more than the second most powerful army in the world can field at once.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

alright, i've had enough. how long did it last? one week? that's about 5 days more than usual.
too much grind, too much repetition, too many half assed features.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

"maybe i've been too harsh, too hasty".
turns out this game has its saved games in its own folder, if you uninstall you lose everything.
holy fucking fuck of the fucked fuck of fuckery. not even retarded lobotomized baboons.

 

[Üstad]

Is it worth buying? I have good impression about the game but still not sure.

 

[Barbarian]

I'm still holding out on a full playthrough. Game is lots of fun but clearly unfinished. Developers are also in the habit of making several dlcs for their games.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I'm still slugging through it. The second and third regions both were pegged to the same level, so the game became very easy until I hit region four. Now I'm wondering if the last region will also be the same level range and be too easy.

Really should have played with level scaling as I don't see how you can reach level 12 at this rate, I've been killing everything and I'm barely level 8 with only one zone left.

Every region has at least one quest that has to be done for each side, for dumb reasons. In Arthes, even though I had picked the side with the legitimate heir, I had to do the mission attacking his tax collectors or the final quest won't trigger. In Vertruse even though I was supporting the broker I had to kidnap his fiancé to trigger the final battle, where they threaten to blackmail me with the kidnapping. No option to just talk to her and figure out who she is after nabbing her and bring her back to the broker. Very lame.

I suppose the idea is you're not picking a side, you're just stirring the pot to generate income for your merc band. Which is fine, but then don't bother me with fake choices, game (esp since some level of reactivity, 4-5 quests per zone, totally isolated from each other, should be easy.)

Another example, in Vertruse there's a main mission you have to take where some farmers pay you to attack plague victims they believe are responsible for blighting their crops, even though I had already learned the crop blight was caused by Alazar. No option to just tell these guys this and resolve the scenario. Dumb.

-No long term penalties for stealing skill books and just paying a small fine. In fact it is rewarded since you can unlock more bandit levels for your band and get access to assassination missions and the black market.

-Leveling the team ranks eventually gets you 2 oils per weapon, and the ability to respawn rat nests if you really want to farm them.

-In some areas there are multiple quest givers, each one has a separate quest limit. You can double up and get more rewards for doing fixed missions like rat lairs. Reminds me of Darklands actually.

-My hammer guy still totally rape with the relic weapon that hits three times in a large semicircle, and the relic mace that deals double damage and auto-crits on every hit, along with the armor-destroying passives and boosts (less impressive against animals). Axe doods are good with their big first hit and their AoE pull but after that they are kinda lame (to be fair few battles go past round 2).

-Spears are meh. Found 1h swords better than 2h since the shield allows for a potential fourth attack. Archers are okay with the right weapon but lack follow-ups. Rangers are quite nasty but rely on flanking; I wish there was an ability that allowed characters to engage more than one enemy.

At this point I'll play through and finish it for the sake of completionism and probably never touch it again. Very much a consoom product game.

 

[ArchAngel]

I got bored around lvl 9 (out of 12) while doing second to last region in my playthrough. The gameplay it too samey and too grindy.

 

[flushfire]

Going into this mostly blind, how is the difficulty when choosing region locked? I hate level scaling, but I do want a bit of challenge every now and then. Just not all the time that it becomes tiresome. Would Hard Combat, Hard Simulation make region locked somewhat less casual?

 

[Fargus]

Region lock is more tedium which i hate, but i guess more challenge early on. I just kept my party down to 10 men and played with level scalling so the fights wont take forever like in BB.

 

[flushfire]

I see. Because of having to grind before moving on to a new region? Is it not possible to overlevel or recruit a lot so that the next region would be a cakewalk?

 

[Fargus]

Yes, seemed to me like it involved more grinding and limited your exploration speed, which for an already long game like this ends up with you getting tired of playing. I wouldn't expect to finish every region in one go and some of them have better lore and storylines than the others.

I myself don't have much experience with region locked mode and only played it during early access, but not for long. So i'll just quote rusty_shackleford from rpghq:

And the progress is completely out of whack for fixed-region. You level way too slow, I assume partly due to XP being divided evenly, that you're severely under-leveled by the time you get to the city province, and you'll get maybe 1 or 1.5 levels there not quite catching up, then move on to the next province with an even bigger level gap. Highest level person in my party was a premade character with a backstory I found in a prison at Ludern, I recruited at level 8 when my entire team was level 6. By the time I finished Ludern + Grimneer, she was level 9. Next province, enemies range from level 12-14.
I stopped at the jail in the next province, and there's two pre-made NPCs you can recruit… who are level 12(!) The massive majority of my party was now level 8. Everything I did for the past ~70 hours was worth less than just picking these two recruitable characters up from a jail cell. I was actually fine with the level gap because of the added difficulty, but felt like I was being slapped with the prison NPCs.

Overall my personal conclusion that this is a fun game but needs work. Try level scalling with hard combat if you dont like it switch to region locked.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

how is the difficulty when choosing region locked?

Region locked makes it too easy to level past the curve, I'm not sure if playing on hard will make much of a difference. In fact I'm not sure it's possible for this game to be hard.

Play without enemy turn order highlighted and maybe it will be tougher.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Fargus]

Nice!

 

[ArchAngel]

There is nothing nice about it. The whole idea of regions that have zero effect on each other is busted and makes for a boring game. Each region is almost like the one before but a bit higher levels. Instead it should have been one big seamless world and they should put in more features that let you influence things on bigger scale than same quests in every region.
How about wars between regions and everyone wants to hire mercenaries to fight for them?
The game is just one big glorified bandit clearing and fetch quests shit. You cannot even become a bandit lord or something.

 

[copebot]

Picked this game up the other day and put it on normal plus non-scaling. Really enjoying it so far in every respect except the elite encounters, which are sort of baffling. Enjoying the crafting systems and the combat so far.

 

[Barbarian]

"Extreme" difficulty mode coming in Q3 and new DLC coming Q4.

I will play this in 2024 then, it is settled.

 

[Shrimp]

I completely forgot about this game lol
Honestly it was probably for the better, I played through two and a half regions and the game evidently still needed some more time in the oven

 

[Barbarian]

I wonder about the new class.

I remember the devs talking about a "brawler" class that used wolverine claws gloves or similarly stupid shit. Really hope it is not the case. Crossbowman/Gunner(the setting has black powder) class would be much more fitting.

 

[lukaszek]

I wonder about the new class.

I remember the devs talking about a "brawler" class that used wolverine claws gloves or similarly stupid shit

helmets are coming for a reason. Its gonna be brand new class headbutting enemies