Exp:Viking Is this going to get better??

Expeditions: Viking

Zloth

I smell a... wumpus!?
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This game is starting to get dull.

This game started out quite good but it's turning out to be seriously shallow. There are lots of skills but several aren't of much use. You'll probably get a lot of them anyway, though, because you'll find your characters maxing out weapon skills even before you first get on a boat. The turn based combat is good but, with the limited number of actions per weapon, even the battles are getting stale. You need to have new skills popping up from time to time to give the battles variety but that just isn't happening in this game.

The whole point of having an isometric game with little voice acting is so you can concentrate your efforts on developing the story and characters. But the story and quests in this game just aren't that interesting to me and they sure don't have much in the way of depth. The characters get good introductions to make them interesting but then they just… stop. Only two of them have gotten any further story at all and neither has been particularly good. There's barely any NPC banter.

Camping is an interesting new mechanic… or at least it was interesting at first. It was good stuff when I had only 5 low level characters and I really had to make decisions but, now that I have a dozen mid-level characters, some of whom specialize in camping skills (because honestly, what am I supposed to do with 12 characters in a game that only lets me play 5 at a time?), it's just a step I have to take (often multiple times) to get anywhere. There's some random events that can happen with the characters but, at least 20 hours in, I've only had one that was even mildly interesting - mostly because it didn't make a lot of sense.

Bugs were a big problem early on but I haven't had too much trouble with them. It's just the lack of depth that's killing me.
 
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Thanks for pointing this out. I stopped playing because of a major bug that stopped the game from continuing and I am waiting for patches, but i might not even bother now.
 
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@Zloth

No, if you don't like it already, it won't get better IMO. Apparently, bugs prevented all sorts of random encounters that include different chatter, but I don't think unlocking those through bugfixes will make any difference when it comes to depth. What depth are you trying to find? It's vikings, so burn, kill, pillage and loot. Murdering needs no depth, wars are not a romance.

Expeditions2 is not a masterpiece, said it already elsewhere. Some of us also discussed minmaxing, useless skills, etc in other posts. But I still love the game for what it is.
 
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It's one heck of a framework, it just needs a lot more of what it has. The NPC banter works pretty well, it just needs to happen a lot more. The actual characters are quite interesting and they do intervene from time to time to give their opinions, they just need to do it more so they can grow. The quests work out fine (now that the bugs have mostly been fixed), they just need more length so their stories can take some twists. Maybe drop a few of the less useful skills and then make the skill chains for the existing skills longer - long enough that players won't max out the most important ones until the last quarter of the game.

Basically: it needs more development hours!

Maybe they can do something like Harebrained pulled off with Shadowrun? Now that they've got the engine working well, use it to put together a whole lot more content in an expansion.
 
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I think it is good game; certainly above average and it's the style of CRPG I like; in terms of balance between dialogue, combat, and narrative / moral choices it really scratches an itch that few other RPGs scratch. The story isn't perfect or extremely original but I really like the characters and did the historically grounded setting.

However, I think it still needs some serious balance tweaks. Combat for the most part becomes trivial even on the highest difficulty and that you can max out the weapon & useful combat skills so early in the game is certainly a problem. And a lot of the greater difficulty in the early game comes from encounters where your squishy characters can be killed by archers before you can even move, which seems unfair. I am hoping they can address this in patches and possibly implement a new harder difficulty setting or make insane actually insanely hard.
 
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I certainly agree it needed more development time. I still enjoyed it but it fell short in many regards. It definitely needs more NPC banters, they were quite limited and worst of all, most of dialogues are "shared" - what I mean is, some of NPCs will say same line, it's just the matter of who says it first.
 
Combat tends to feel too same, becomes predictable (at least in early game versions: two bows party kicks arse, improve shield on protagonist), looting is basically turned into grinding "minigame", but everyting else IMO is as good as E1 or better.
 
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I haven't played Conquistador so I can't comment on that but I agree with joxer on combat. Gets pretty trivial and repetitive quick. I went with shield main in first tun, trying out spear this time. It seems even easier in the second run. Yeah and looting those kegs get so tedious... But you get a head start that way with the homestead.
 
I most definitely enjoyed Conquistador more. Vikings is a crashing bore, with shitty combat.
 
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The new patch is out (1.0.6), they are slowly addressing some of the issues. No ironman mode or higher difficulty setting yet though. I think it's kinda lazy for them to give modding tools to players to make their own random events (there aren't many varying scenarios in game) - it's like, we can't be bothered so you guys do it.
 
Well, on the other hand it's the only recent historical RPG that I can think of, so we should proably give it some slack.
 
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I took like a three month break from this game, I played maybe six hours on launch day and at that time it seemed to have just a huge amount of issues. When I went back to it after several major patches, it was much better.
 
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I thought Conquistadors was repetitive and lacking in content. Sorry to hear this one is as well to some degree.
 
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I will replay this one at some point, and I've already played the first one three times, completely. At launch Vikings was quite the mess, but the patches made it much better. On the other hand, I'd never replay Original Sin two, unless something changes drastically.
 
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I haven't played D:OS2 yet, but if it is similar to the first one then likely I will prefer Viking over it.
 
So is this game better than Conquistador or worse?

For me Viking is better. I like the whole concept more, stronger focus on RPG etc.
I think I would like Conquistador more if it would be done in style of Viking.
 
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