World of Aden: Thunderscape - anyone played it?

[newtmonkey]

I've got this game in my GOG library but have never really given it much attention. I'm in the mood for a turn-based blobber that's not a Wizardry, Bard's Tale, or Might & Magic game, and this game seems like it's hardly ever discussed outside of the GOG forum.

Anyone here played/completed this? Any important info I should know before starting this, specifically any gotchas that could get me stuck halfway through the game?

 

[CryptRat]

Lonely Vazdru

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

I remember a lot of brown. and a lot of bugs.
You can make a full custom party so that is nice.
Always save before going into a new level. Sometimes for no reason at all your levels become un-passable and had to redo it from an old save. I played an un-patched version circulating way back on a potato during my kid days. The bugs/crashes may be fixed in gog. I dunno.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Anyone here played/completed this? Any important info I should know before starting this, specifically any gotchas that could get me stuck halfway through the game?

I think you can pretty much go blind. There are not that many things to know beforehand, the game is not too difficut (combatwise) so any party is viable.

Some "tips" off the top of my head :

Useless skills : Fast talking (lets you skip combat via bribing the enemies with a successful check), merchant (there are only three merchant in the entire game and apart from the first they don't sell anything useful), pickpocket (same as merchant), acrobatics (only used in the rare "falling off a cliff" instances).

Things to know : automap is pretty unreadable and useless (particularly on maps with different terrain heights).

Ranged weapons are mostly used in close range (you hardly get a volley of shots or two before enemies close in) where they are quite viable but less so than melee weapons. So forget about making a ranged fighting party à la M&M. Too bad considering the steampunk aspect of the game and the firearms and steam weapons.

Some NPCs join your team for a definite amount of times only and nothing lets you know which ones and when they will leave. For info, the first one leaves at dungeon level 4 for instance. Most will stay for the entire game though.

Difficulty slider is a bitch. I could never manage to get it right. In the blink of a pixel it goes from "too easy" to "too hard", mostly for initiative reasons.

Some skills like "See secrets" or "Lockpicking" are used by the selected party member, so try to make a "leader" party member (see secrets, lockpick) and always have him selected when moving around. That way you'll see what secrets there are and open locked doors without having to constantly switch between party members.

INVEST AT LEAST SOME POINTS IN "CAST SPELLS" FOR EVERYONE AND PICK HEALING. Also, try to get "Aid" spell ASAP for at least one of your party members. Even at its lowest casting cost it will remove adverse conditions (poison, acid, disease) for the whole party.

EDIT : Feel free to ask any questions as you go, I'm not the Lilura of Thunderscape, but I guess I'm authoritative enough.

 

[newtmonkey]

Thank you Lonely Vazdru !

I will probably start this game tomorrow. I'll have a leader character per your suggestion with exploration skills, and be sure to give everyone points in Cast Spells.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Oh, and listen to that fucking awesome music at MAXIMUM VOLUME ! If only to counterbalance those infuriating thunder noises.

Btw, those are the only sources of info/walkthroughs I know. They are enough to finish the game and more or less know what the fuck to do, but barely.

http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/SSI/thunderscape.1.html

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/199006-thunderscape/faqs/2094

 

[V_K]

The one thing I remember, aside from a lot of brown pixels, is the ventriloquism skill that lets casters cast while silenced. For some reason I found it extremely funny.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

The one thing I remember, aside from a lot of brown pixels, is the ventriloquism skill that lets casters cast while silenced. For some reason I found it extremely funny.

You probably misremember, as there is no such skill, nor is there a "silenced" condition.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Also, newtmonkey I forgot, very important : DEX and INT are major stats, they determine the amount of skill points you get at level up. DEX for combat skills, INT for other skills.

The hints in the second link I posted above are pretty useful, except the one about merchant.

 

[V_K]

The one thing I remember, aside from a lot of brown pixels, is the ventriloquism skill that lets casters cast while silenced. For some reason I found it extremely funny.

You probably misremember, as there is no such skill, nor is there a "silenced" condition.

Shit, you're right. Whoops. Must have mixed it up with xenology.
But now I have no clue where I did see the ventriloquism skill. I couldn't have made it up.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Maybe "Entomorph", the other "World of Aden" game ? I hardly played it since it's more of an adventure game.

Xenology is a cool skill, not that useful given the "easyness" of the enemies, but it's still nice to know more and more about their stats/immunities/attacks as the skill progresses.

 

[V_K]

Maybe "Entomorph", the other "World of Aden" game ? I hardly played it since it's more of an adventure game.

Yeah, entomorph doesn't have any chardev.

 

[Sinatar]

I beat it 5 months ago. My pro tips:

- Blunt/Maces are by *far* the best weapons in the game, fast piercing weapons like daggers/rapiers and ranged weapons like bows/guns are completely and utterly useless
- The game is very sensitive to CPU speed, some jumping puzzles (yes there's platforming in this party based dungeon crawler *sigh*) and some other navigational puzzles involving flowing water are impossible with high CPU speed. On the plus side you can glitch the jumps and jump super high with really high cycles in dosbox allowing you to bypass some annoying bullshit

The game is really quite easy so you can do whatever really. The real difficulty is overcoming the endless tedium of the overly large and empty areas.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

I beat it 5 months ago.

So you made it through the sewers then. Impressive.

 

[Sinatar]

I beat it 5 months ago.

So you made it through the sewers then. Impressive.

Yea the sewers were shit, but I think the worst was the dwarven mines which are just waaaaaay too fucking big.

 

[newtmonkey]

Thanks everyone for the posts esp. Lonely Vazdru and Sinatar !

I don't like how DOSBOX runs this game (need to play around with cycles to get it just right, music and sound effects are harsh and unbalanced), so I spent all Sunday getting PCem up and running emulating a Pentium 100 (I also set up a 486DX33 so I can play older speed-dependent games). I was annoyed to find that GOG doesn't provide an image of the original game CD for Thunderscape, but instead provides a cue/bin file with all the music tracks as compressed OGG files in a separate folder in the game directory. I had to find a copy of the original CD on internet archive, but now I have the game running at correct speed with CD audio playing and it's great. Sound effects are a LOT less harsh than in the GOG Dosbox install, and music is balanced properly as well.

Now time to read the Thunderscape manual and make my party!

 

[Grampy_Bone]

The music is ridiculous or ridiculously AWESOME, depending on your tastes.

But yes, awful brown world/interface, bugs, somewhat interesting M&M style combat, clunky dungeon exploration and layouts. I only made it through the first or second level before quitting.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

I hope you like the game newtmonkey it's a flawed gem... zircon.
You'll soon see if you like it or not since the "troll caves" will test your mettle almost immediately. If you make it through those, then maybe...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I finally received another piece to the old Aden puzzle. I wanted this for decades.

Old bucket lists getting knocked off. WEG had some others in its d6 setting

First off is
The Masterbook System.
The MasterDeck

Then you have settings:
The world of Aden (done)
The World of BloodShadows
The World of Indiana Jones
The World of Shatterzone
The World of Species
The World of Tales From the Crypt
The World of Tank Girl.


Hmmmm..... yeah addition to the list I guess.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I just realized this era was incomplete. There is a trilogy of novels and a Prima's Guide to Thunderscape. I had to scour NobleKnight, Amazon, and Ebay but they are ordered. Here's hoping the conditions are as good as they described. You know some hard novels to get are Bardstale.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

There is a trilogy of novels

As a matter of fact, I actually own the first of these novels (bought it back in the day) and I'm currently re-reading it, some 25 years later.

Coincidence ? You decide.

 

[Bricker]

Thunderscape is actually a very nice campaign setting. I've played in it a few times and I would say it's balanced to Paizo.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Badda BOOM!

Now I have to track down this shit.... Special offer Fantasy Adventure World of Aden cards.

 

[Horton]

Great collection!

 

[Spukrian]

So I just finished Thunderscape: World of Aden.

The game is only diffcult in the beginning, the first quarter of the game (my estimate). I made only one character at the start, only relying on party members I could find. When I got the the last keep level (level 5?) I realized that I need more help, read some walkthroughs and I backtracked, went to the factory level and got the golem, then went back to the Keep and somehow finished it. After that I just powered through. Late in the game I replaced that one character I made with Ashak. Maybe not the best choice as the character I had made was the only one with had good scores in Lockpick. Oh well, I got Tophet to pick up the slack by increasing Lockpick. So I finished the game with Ashak, Golem, Bert, Drazil, Arghaan and Tophet.

The "upgrade" to the Golem was more of a downgrade, it lowered it's HP, removed Axe/Mace skill and gave it Bows, Guns and Martial Arts. What a ripoff.

The engine is quite advanced, way ahead of the Doom Engine and the Build Engine. There's Room Over Room and level architecture can make stuff like tables, bridges, etc. If the source code was realeased and someone made a source port of this... but that's probably not going to happen.

The jumping in this game is somehow worse than even the jumping in the Ultima Underworld games.

The game has somewhat good level design, but it suffers due to lack of variety in textures and lack of "decoration". As I understand it, this is partially due to technical limitations, the game crashes if there are too many sprites in one place.

The game suffers from a lot of bugs unfortunately. Levels and save games can easily get corrupted. I played through the Catacombs level and only after backtracking later in the game did I realize that the Catacombs level had been corrupted.

The combat... uhh. I wish there was some more tactics to it. It's just choose the best attack and reapeat untill the enemies are dead. The only difficult enemies are those that instakill your party members, I feel it would be better if we had more protection spells (is "hard counters" the correct term?) and more enemies would do attacks that are difficult.

Basically the respawn rate of enemies get insane in the last quarter of the game and it's just tedious, the combat isn't diffcult, it's just incredibly tedious, annoying and boring.

Oh well, in conclusion... is it a good game? I don't know. But it certainly had the potential to be a great game.