Summoner

Here is a thread for Summoner since I just found out, THO has finally taken down the Summoner page, so all links and files are lost.

I had a hell of a time finding the less common files they had linked, was able to find a site that currently is listing the most extensive downloads.

http://www.3ddownloads.com/volitionwatch/summoner

One of the most difficult to find and this maybe the only place left was the Single player Mod, which fixes text errors and makes balancing changes like making Long Swords 1 handed, here is the read me.

Features:

- Much more interesting and detailed item descriptions (where possible)
- A greater variety of items available for sale in shops, in all the towns and cities of the game. You can now buy
reasonably decent weapons and armour earlier on, and some interesting magic items, providing you've got the money!
- Tweaked item costs, armour protection, weapon damage/speed, damage types, etc, for improved balance.
- Plate armour and Orenian Bougou-Dou armour gives much more protection, to compensate for the fact that you can't wear leg armour with it
(previously, chainmail armour and chainmail leggings together provided more protection than any suit plate armour, despite being much cheaper)
- Longswords and maces are now one-handed and can be used with a shield. All katanas, battleaxes and claymore-type swords are now 2-handed.
- Magic items can only be worn by characters with the skills that they affect. E.g only Flece can wear the Thief's Torque, only Joseph and Rosalind
can wear the Elemental Necklace, and only Joseph can wear rings of summoning.
- New or modified textures for some items, such as spell scrolls and unique weapons (like the Fiery Falchion and Logaros Longsword).
for all unique weapons
- Most enemies have a much larger detection radius (if they can see you).
- Tweaked resistances and weaknesses for some enemies (e.g elemental creatures like Fire Imps are always immune to or healed by their element and vulnerable
to their opposite, and golems and skeletons are vulnerable to blunt weapons and resistant/immune to piercing).
- Enemies now drop "loot" such as weapons slightly more often, and drop a greater variety of items in some cases.
- Enabled a few previously "monster-only" weapons such as the Bone Sword, Kothudin Lance and Bacite Staff. They now have
descriptions, proper costs (i.e not 20gp) and slightly tweaked damage/speed for balancing purposes. They can be bought from
some merchants or picked up from the enemies that carry them (e.g Bone Servants and Bacite Shamans)
- Fixed a few minor typos/bugs with item names in shops.

http://www.3ddownloads.com/volitionw…9D0F47A5FF1753

And of course songs like So long, Wolong.
http://www.3ddownloads.com/volitionw…9D0F47A5FF1753

Do you have a link to the mod that helps speed up the first part of the game? It might help people trying it for the first time!!

Humm, honesty never heard or nor do I know anything about this mod.

Got any other info about it, what/how does it "speed up the first part"?
Is it a reference to skipping the first level, if so I guess you would be giving up the first 4 levels of so of point distribution?

I had the Summoner Mod 1.0 and was going to upload it to FileShack or something but found this page.

Summoner is an excellent RPG; highly recommended. I was disappointed they didn't do a Summoner II port, but I heard that it was way different from the original.

I hated it, didnt get too far in it tho, and dont really remember wht caused me to have such negative feelings regarding it. All the praise I keep hearing regarding it makes me want to revisit the game and see if my judgement was premature!

I was mixed about it, some very nice plot ideas, a rather persisting town, but too much random encounters.

I never understood why they made the sequel Playtation-exclusive.

"Lesson one: Make every gamer drool so much that they want a sequel of your PC game, and THEN release the sequel on a totally different platform."

I wasn't drooling much, but I really, really liked the idea of the sequel, then.
Since I don't own consoles, I've never played the sequel so far.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
"Lesson one: Make every gamer drool so much that they want a sequel of your PC game, and THEN release the sequel on a totally different platform."

But the original Summoner was also a Playstation game. It's just that the sequel didn't get ported.

Even if I hadn't enjoyed playing Summoner quite a bit despite the bugs and memory leaks, the music simply blew me away like very few games have ever been able to do and I would have been "forced" to continue to play if only to hear the music.

Hmmm, I really should give it another spin one of these days.

The game itself was pretty good, but it had wayyy too much walking.

It wasn't perfect but I really enjoyed it; great story at the time.

Corwin, I still haven't found anything yet on this but if your intrested I do have a Save Game Editor for v1.03 link, which will work sort-of work with v1.4.
It's about half way down the page at this nice French trainer site.

One thing though since most people like the story to some degree or another skipping the first part would casue you to miss much of the story setup.

http://www.trainerscity.com/cheatss….t=asc&page=900

xSamhainx
" I hated it, didn’t get too far in it though, and don’t really remember…."
Well the game had a lot going for it, it was the first US RPG ever to debut on the PS2, the story was very original (at least in the game industry) and it had an innovative combat system, which was based on twitch but if it was uncomfortable had an Auto Chaining system built-in.
The Auto Chaining system in no way degraded the game, as a matter of fact it had the opposite effect in that it allow more people to enjoy the game, due to including a basic choice manual or auto.
This combat model was so good, in the sense of offering a choice, it has even be brought up recently as a possible solution to the RPG games like The Witcher, which is heavily combat orinated, as away of allowing those people not interested in twitch based combat an option.
It is a huge game and I am guessing you could easily put in 40 + hours if you do all the side quest, that being said it's easy to get overwhelmed with running around, as Gorath mentioned.

As an example without giving spoilers, there are specialized pieces of wearable equipment items which are optional but they are very valuable and well worth the time adventuring for them, imo.
However there is a random generation of maps for Random Encounters necessary to find these items, though this isn't important until at least 20+ hours into the game.
So if you think you would be frustrated with that kind of randomness then, I would suggest looking at a walkthrough to find the item's map location and saving your game before entering the World Map where Random Encounters occur.
This way if you need to find a Night-time version of a Mountainous region or a Day-time Forest you can at least be more focused.

Alrik Fassbauer
"I really, really liked the idea of the sequel, then. Since I don't own consoles, I've never played the sequel so far."
Yes, it was very frustrating, even though I have heard the sequel was a disappointment ( the reason it wasn't ported, afaik) I would have still bought it out of interested in the franchise.

Not sure if many know about Drakan since it was an Action game but it suffered the same fate, it was very well received by PC gamers.
Surreal turned around and made a poorly received sequel on the console without the least consideration of a port for the PC.
Mostly I am guessing it was the publisher’s decision but the idea that some Devs won't/can't stand up for a minimum port in their contracts is very annoying and damaging to the industry.

minor non story spoiler-


the glass sword quest was easily my favourite "item" sidequest in an rpg ever.

Played that one..great game..story is the best I've seen in an RPG and second in all(after Legacy of Kain)..I never played the sequel too but I heard it's about the other god Laharah with a totally different character..kinda lame, I hoped it was abt Joseph, whatever I wouldn't have played it either anyways

I remembered wrong, I just played it through again and only spent about 20 hours, but I only took specific random encounters I knew that were either quest or special item based.

You may only spend 30 hours if your taking every random encounter you get, though that lead to frustration and boredom.

How's the ps2 version? Better, worse? Is the pc version recommended. Also, if I played the ps2 version, I'd play it on my 50 inch widescreen sony lcd with logitech z5500s setup. So the pc version has to be way better hehe.

Haven't played the PS2, you could play Summoner 2 since it's PS2 only, though it didn't get nearly as good reviews.
Also couldn't you just run the PC game into your 50 screen, you could get much better picture than a console, i.e. higher resolutions.

Update: Considering another play through and found Timeslip (Fallout and Elder Scrolls modder) has made a patch for Summoner.

And not too far off topic: PCSX2 1.0.0 Playstation Emulator.. Now we can play Summoner 2 and Drakan 2 Ancient Gates, among others!
Both originally started as PC games but shifted to console only.