Dubious Poetry Quest (spoiler) and other thoughts

Alnath

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Hello, I'm new to the forums but I've been playing this fantastic game for a while now and I'm loving it. I cannot wait until the game is finished and all areas are explorable. It has such an amazing potential and it's looking really good so far. I'm glad I came across this jewel. Having said that, here are some of my thoughts regarding what could be improved.

First off, the quest Dubious Poetry, SPOILER ahead:
I generally like very much the quests and their twists but I got extremely disappointed by this one. There's one MAJOR flaw: it makes absolutely no sense at all that you hand those love letters BEFORE getting what you demanded from Lady Leanna, be it a passionate night or the 5000 gold coins. Imagine if some kidnapper released his prisoners before getting the ramson from the families of his victims. Who would ever pay him? The whole idea of extorting someone with something is that you have the power of inflicting some sort of damage to the victim, and in this case, all that power is gone once you hand the letters to her, so there's no reason for her to fulfill your demands anymore.

Secondly, although it is somewhat predictable that she will try to murder you somehow, it wouldn't be so bad if you could take some form of revenge or do some sort of justice afterwards. You just never see her again, stupidly hand the letters and end up with nothing but the assasins' loot.

I love the idea of this quest, I think it's very original but it could have been executed so much better in my opinion. How about being able to show the letters to the husband? I expected this to be an option from the beginning actually, but I think it's essential that this can be done. Be it even without demanding anything from her and spreading the letters/handing them to the husband directly or after your demands are not met as her plan of killing you fails. This could result in the royal historian leaving her or she getting some kind of punishment from the queen or at least humiliation as the whole town gets to know of her affair.

I really hope this quest gets revised.
Regarding hireable adventurers, I like the idea very much but I find them quite expensive and not worth it given that there's no way to heal them except by resting or using the recovery button. That means they will inevitably die pretty fast as soon as you get into a not-so-easy fight, which happens quite often. Also, they seem to be much more helpful early on as their level doesn't scale accordingly with your progress and so they end up losing relevance. It would also be nice to add some dialogue variance to their responses, maybe based on class and gender, and the possibility to give basic battle orders just as with companions, which would also add some tactical options. Finally, a ranged/archer class for them would be appreciated too, so a warrior could get some fire support from behind while engaging in combat.

As a graphic designer, I reckon that the game would benefit visually from a more appropiate font family. Dialogues, item descriptions, game log, etc are fine as they are I think, but at least the world map, menus and npc/creature names on screen would look better with a more medieval font. It needn't be one of those hard to understand fonts, though. For example, the game Mount and Blade Warband uses the font Mordred, which is highly legible while also having a medieval or ancient style. I believe it would add greatly to the atmosphere of the game and make it more visually appealing.

Finally, something that bothers me a little bit is that no helm is visible when worn by the player character, even though the sprites seem to be there as legionnaires have helmets and bandits hoods. It's a minor thing but I'd love to see my warrior with a helmet and my (future) rogue hooded, even if it is just one same sprite for every helmet and another one for every hood. I've read somewhere on this forum that the sprites are templates or something like thay so that's why they are limited, but as I said above, it's not that there's no helmet or hood sprite at all, it seems it just doesn't get applied to the player.

Thats all I can think of for now. I hope it's not too much reading and that the dev(s?) find my feedback helpful. I don't expect a detailed response but it'd be nice to know if you (the/a dev) happen to read this.

Cheers! :D
 

MikeB

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Alnath":ius6crh6 said:
Finally, something that bothers me a little bit is that no helm is visible when worn by the player character, even though the sprites seem to be there as legionnaires have helmets and bandits hoods. It's a minor thing but I'd love to see my warrior with a helmet and my (future) rogue hooded, even if it is just one same sprite for every helmet and another one for every hood. I've read somewhere on this forum that the sprites are templates or something like thay so that's why they are limited, but as I said above, it's not that there's no helmet or hood sprite at all, it seems it just doesn't get applied to the player.
I definitely agree upon that, there should be a helmet on your characters and companions heads, just for the sake of completeness.
 

Alan_SP

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This is already discussed in great lengths before.

2D graphics is much more memory intensive than 3D. Creating sprites for many permutations would kill game for most devices. Can't tell what device you should have to play game that includes all possible permutation (each permutation asks for own set of sprites), but it's possible it would ask for 3GB or more of RAM.

At the moment 1GB is requirement.

So, more or less we can safely assume there wouldn't be all permutations. But, maybe one with generic helm, that may happen, not sure.

And just to try to explain, in 2D game when you see someone with helm, this doesn't mean that there's helm 3D model available for use for all characters, it just means that this particular character is made with helm on.
 

DavidBVal

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Commenting on graphical issues.

As Alan said, at this point I am trying not to add sprites that are not essential; the game memory footprint keeps increasing in terms of RAM, and I still need to add many more effects, sprites, etc.

Likely, there will be a moment at version 1.0 when I will implement graphical options enabling different settings for high/low RAM. At that moment, I might add not only helmets, but other armor pieces, differently colored boots, leggings, etc. but right now it's not one of my priorities.

Regarding fonts, I agree, if I haven't changed them already is simply because so many other things were higher in the list. But eventually they'll be improved.
 

Alnath

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24/11/2016
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Thanks for the replies. I'm glad to hear that the graphical issues will likely be addressed, as well as the ingame fonts. I imagined that the models for legionnaires were whole models, but what I meant is that the art for at least one helmet and one hood does exist. I understand it's not a priority, though.

Anyway, those were more of secondary thoughts. I'd like to hear your opinions on the other topics, particularly on the Dubious Poetry quest, which brought me to write the post in the first place.

Edit: I remembered one more thing I wanted to address and it's the one handed regular vs light weapon damage. I've been playing a warrior, currently level 17 and I've consistently found myself using light weapons because, even though my char has more strength than agi, my dps output has been almost always greater with light weapons than with regular ones. It seems to me that most of the time the increased damage done in each blow for one handers doesn't compensate for the lower speed compared to light ones. I believe I found many high tier weapons already, like the magma longsword, sword of falling stars and magma axe, but the primal icicle (a light weapon) is better than any of them, even after accounting for advantages against certain types of enemies in which the formers should excel and the latter underperform. The only situation where I switch to the magma axe is when fighting trolls just so they don't regenerate.

I'm not so sure about two handers but I suspect something similar may be going on there too, as I tried once to respec all my skills to excel at two handers and even though I ended up doing considerably more damage, it didn't compensate for the lost armor value and consecuential decreased survivability. Specifically I compared clearing the same area with one build against the other and with a light weapon and shield I would clear it out with much more remaining hp, but it was just one test so I can't tell for sure.
 

Sounkeng

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Alnath":3ukmn652 said:
I wanted to address and it's the one handed regular vs light weapon damage. I've been playing a warrior, currently level 17 and I've consistently found myself using light weapons because, even though my char has more strength than agi, my dps output has been almost always greater with light weapons than with regular ones. It seems to me that most of the time the increased damage done in each blow for one handers doesn't compensate for the lower speed compared to light ones.

One thing to take into account is that a higher base damage will mean more damage after the armor reduction (This really comes into play with 2-handed weapons)

However, I do agree that long swords are extremely underwhelming.
 

Alnath

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I don't really understand what you mean by that, could you please explain further?

Also, I insist, I'd really like to hear opinions on the mentioned quest. Someone?
 

Apeiros

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Sure, I'll bite. So here is how damage works.

Lets say you are going to do 100 damage. If you use a 2-hand weapon you might to 100 damage in 4 hits, so about 25 damage per swing. A target with 0 armor will take all 25 but a target with 18 armor and no shield will reduce each hit for 3-18. So each hit will only do 7 - 22 damage in reality. So on average the target will take around 15 damage per hit which translates to about 7 swings to get to 100 damage.

Switch for your 1-handed weapon and now you only do 10 damage per hit, 10 hits to get to 100 on a 0 armor target. If you fight the 18 armor target again your damage will be between 1 and 7, and skewed to the 1 side because most of the possible damage outcomes are at 1 or less (by the way 1 is the minimum damage you can do, unless you are hitting ab elemental with its damage type i.e. fire heals fire elementals.)

In summary, the bigger the damage number, the more actual damage goes through. This seems to be a nice balance to the fact that most damage increasing moves increase damage per hit. Damage per hit helps faster weapons more than slower weapons.
 

Alnath

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I think I understand now what you mean, but it seems to me that this advantage of two handed weapons may or may not apply depending on the enemy's armor value and base damage you do, so it's more of a situational advantage against heavily armored enemies I guess.

Thanks fot the explanation.
 

Sounkeng

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Alnath":oikximq8 said:
I think I understand now what you mean, but it seems to me that this advantage of two handed weapons may or may not apply depending on the enemy's armor value and base damage you do, so it's more of a situational advantage against heavily armored enemies I guess.

Thanks fot the explanation.

Low levels enemies usually have little if any armor. However, the high level enemies pretty much all have armor even the "lightly armored". You can still choose to use a light weapon, nothing wrong with that... There are some great ones in the game. However, heavy weapons are nothing to be scoffed at.
 

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