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Default Serpent in the Staglands-First Impressions

June 9th, 2015, 23:23
Originally Posted by Archangel View Post
Hey! Knights of the Chalice is a better game than 90% games I played!
If you took the combat system from it (and left everything else out) and combined it with Serpent in the Staglands, you'd get a game that would be better than 99% of games you've played! That hybrid right there would easily be better than Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2 and just about any AAA RPG like Witcher 3. Add in Wizardry 8's party building, Planescape: Torment's writing & unique setting and Fallout's reactivity&nonlinearity and we'd reach singularity.
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June 10th, 2015, 11:52
Originally Posted by 90sgamer View Post
If you took the combat system from it (and left everything else out) and combined it with Serpent in the Staglands, you'd get a game that would be better than 99% of games you've played! That hybrid right there would easily be better than Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2 and just about any AAA RPG like Witcher 3. Add in Wizardry 8's party building, Planescape: Torment's writing & unique setting and Fallout's reactivity&nonlinearity and we'd reach singularity.
Now you are daydreaming again
And why are you even mentioning WL2 or PoE when they are not even better than F1/2 or BG1/2.
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June 10th, 2015, 21:34
Mostly because they're both recent CRPGs which are intentionally trying to mimic classic CRPGs, just like Serpent does. I don't think that Serpent is better than the classics, but I did genuinely enjoy it more than WL2 and PoE, which had million dollar budgets and industry veterans working on them (though I still need to give both games a second try).
And I liked Poe and D:OS more than most of new Bioware games, Witcher etc. So you can extrapolate from that and reach the logical conculusion that if developers didn't have any money at all, they would make truly great games
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June 10th, 2015, 22:14
Originally Posted by 90sgamer View Post
And I liked Poe and D:OS more than most of new Bioware games, Witcher etc. So you can extrapolate from that and reach the logical conculusion that if developers didn't have any money at all, they would make truly great games
That is how most classics were made. Devs living on dreams and drinking their own sweat.
Now they have it too easy so games like WL2 and PoE are not as good.

BTW, I watched your SitS video review. Maybe you should make a new one now that 9 patches were made
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June 11th, 2015, 10:29
Hmm - Odd decision to start off as a God: Maybe one thing they *should* have taken from Darklands is to keep it simple. This makes the whole opening sequence stilted and implausible.

And if you don't have the writing skill to create decent dialogue it would be better not to create so much of it: The problem with everyone trying to copy Baldur's gate is that they just don't have the literary talent and timing to pull it off.
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June 11th, 2015, 10:44
There isn't that much writing once you leave the starting area. In fact you might feel the opposite after a while, that there isn't enough of quests and backstory. I think that criticism fits Pillars of Eternity far better than Serpent, I simply quit reading the walls of text you'd get by peeking into people's souls (or what ever it is that you do) as I never saw anything interesting in those. I haven't complete PoE as I lost my save when I had to reinstall windows, but from what I've seen from both games, I feel that SitS struck a much better balance (even though the writing doesn't likely reach the peak levels of PoE's writing). It's not great writing, but it kept me sufficiently interested in what was going around at the world. And you have to remember that SitS was made by just two people where as PoE must've had multiple dedicated writers, so who ever did the writing in this game also had to do code/art/design/QA as well.
Originally Posted by Archangel View Post
BTW, I watched your SitS video review. Maybe you should make a new one now that 9 patches were made
I'd like to put it out there that the developers have done a commendable job with the fast patching, but I don't think I have time for making another video on it right now. I'd have to start another playthrough and more importantly, I have many other videos, games and RL stuff on my backlog at the moment. By the time I'd get the voice over back from Hadriex, the video would likely be outdated by a few patches.
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June 11th, 2015, 12:06
Originally Posted by Roq View Post
Hmm - Odd decision to start off as a God: Maybe one thing they *should* have taken from Darklands is to keep it simple. This makes the whole opening sequence stilted and implausible.

And if you don't have the writing skill to create decent dialogue it would be better not to create so much of it: The problem with everyone trying to copy Baldur's gate is that they just don't have the literary talent and timing to pull it off.
I am not really sure what you found bad in that start. I found it original and cool.
Maybe you want to go into more details?
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June 12th, 2015, 15:59
I'm really struggling with the 80's graphics. Is there a good way to sharpen the picture but still keep the window big enough to tell what's going on? I can only play for about an hour before I get a headache. So far, I haven't found anything exciting in the game. Everything in here has been done before and far better. I guess we're supposed to be impressed that this was done by two people, but Vogel's games actually look better than these and he's just one guy. He isn't even really a programmer, yet his games look much crisper graphically. (I would have bet money that this sentence would have never come out of my brain about a Vogel game, huh).

Maybe I'm playing wrong. Very beginning spoilers abound below so stop reading if you haven't played the first two areas!

Okay so I create my avatar and two others. I take light weapons and better crits. I make a mage that puts both points into occult and also take the +1 occult class. The other guy takes some ranged skills. There is almost no weapons or armor in the first building. I pick up the other 2 and explore the area. Find a bandit den and a fairy ring that I can't seem to kill/release the fairy. I guess I need the 2nd level spell, but it is impossible to have that spell at this point.

Really? That's how they open the game with a teeny tiny little bit to do as you start. What's the point? How long do you play before getting to something interesting? The interface is horrible too. I still haven't figured out if the melee skills are all passive or if I'm supposed to be clicking on these skills during combat. The manual is horrible and their excuse is we want you to figure out how the game plays on your own. The vague purple highlight and really fuzzy hand and skill icons are just really amateur. This game plays like something out of the C64 Run magazine so far. Good ole Basic.
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June 12th, 2015, 16:08
Originally Posted by crpgnut View Post
The interface is horrible too. I still haven't figured out if the melee skills are all passive or if I'm supposed to be clicking on these skills during combat. The manual is horrible and their excuse is we want you to figure out how the game plays on your own.
So far it has worked for the Watch & Codex crowd. "This game doesn't hold your hand!" You could sell people the most counter-intuitive interface and obscure quests with that line, as long as you say it's oldschool.

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June 12th, 2015, 16:24
Originally Posted by crpgnut View Post
I'm really struggling with the 80's graphics. Is there a good way to sharpen the picture but still keep the window big enough to tell what's going on? I can only play for about an hour before I get a headache. So far, I haven't found anything exciting in the game. Everything in here has been done before and far better. I guess we're supposed to be impressed that this was done by two people, but Vogel's games actually look better than these and he's just one guy. He isn't even really a programmer, yet his games look much crisper graphically. (I would have bet money that this sentence would have never come out of my brain about a Vogel game, huh).
Graphics are on purpose like that. I find them charming and I didn't play RPGs before BG1/Fallout 1.
Would I prefer better ones? Yes. But it is not automatic negative for me.
Everything here has not been done between Bg1 and now. Maybe older players have seen this stuff in older games. Like Cursing people by writing curse combinations by yourself in the Invocation book.
Okay so I create my avatar and two others. I take light weapons and better crits. I make a mage that puts both points into occult and also take the +1 occult class. The other guy takes some ranged skills. There is almost no weapons or armor in the first building. I pick up the other 2 and explore the area. Find a bandit den and a fairy ring that I can't seem to kill/release the fairy. I guess I need the 2nd level spell, but it is impossible to have that spell at this point.
You can buy Awls from shopkeeper and there is a mace or something but it is expensive (you have to come back later when you got more emeralds to buy that one).
I didn't create any additional avatars, just took two NPCs. Both come with some equipment and you can give all armor to the girl and use her as tank until you can get more stuff.
There are multiple way to go there, bandits are only on one part of the map(I went another way and found a possessed child).
As for fairly, I don't know yet but maybe you need to examine stuff with Aptitudes or your don't have the correct ones. As we said the game does not hold your hand. If you cannot figure it out, move on. There is no requirement to finish all quests.
Really? That's how they open the game with a teeny tiny little bit to do as you start. What's the point? How long do you play before getting to something interesting? The interface is horrible too. I still haven't figured out if the melee skills are all passive or if I'm supposed to be clicking on these skills during combat. The manual is horrible and their excuse is we want you to figure out how the game plays on your own. The vague purple highlight and really fuzzy hand and skill icons are just really amateur. This game plays like something out of the C64 Run magazine so far. Good ole Basic.
When you leave the first map you got a whole Fallout 1/2 like map to explore. Devs on purpose didn't put in simple and stupid fetch quests.
Melee skills are all passive. You choose the 3 you want to have active at any moment.
Spells are all active.

I don't agree with your conclusion
Last edited by Archangel; June 12th, 2015 at 17:59.
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June 12th, 2015, 17:45
My conclusion is still to be made. I've been playing it, I just don't like some of their decisions. I didn't grab the awls because I was doing more damage with my bare fists than they did. I'm okay with old school and I've been playing crpgs since they started making them. I'm old

To me, the aptitudes should just work when you click on something, if you have enough points in them. You shouldn't have to go into a menu, change your hand icon to an attribute icon and then click. It's just busy work, not something that you need to figure out. I haven't figured out why linguistics has anything to do with lock-picking either. That's another logic oops in the game. You wanna pick someone's pocket? Whip out your knowledge of languages and go at it.

It is hilarious that someone who isn't old-school chastises someone who really is, but I don't mind. I don't have rose-tinted glasses that forgives everything if someone says, "Hey we're indie and old-school". Most of the time it means they don't have decent programming skills but still hope to make money. In 5 decades you kinda learn to smell BS from a distance.

I still hope to get some enjoyment from the title. I do like the small basements and other tiny dungeons. Those make logical sense to me. I also like the polymorph mechanic and wish it was used more in other games. In fact, that might be my favorite "trick" of this game so far.
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June 12th, 2015, 18:24
I don't mind extra clicks. I didn't mind inventory management in BG or Diablo and I didnt mind extra clicks to use skills in WL2.
I prefer that I need to figure out what skill to use instead of the game doing it for me. It sets it up so I can miss stuff on first play and find it on second or later play.

I do find strange that they set up rogue skills as part of curse system. Why cannot characters just pickpocket the standard way.
But Curse system is cool. Linguistics is so you have skill to use powerful Curses. Pickpocketing Curse is just one of the uses. You detect traps with Woodwise I think.
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June 12th, 2015, 18:32
Following W2, D:OS, POE, … we know (roughly) now what it takes to make an old school ISO RPG, by reasonably pro teams to a reasonable standard. i.e. it takes a team of circa 20 people around 3 years (circa $5m). And even then you can see that those games could have benefited from more time/money. I don't think small teams should try to compete. Just think up something more original that doesn't require so many assets, viz Darkest Dungeon, Witchmarsh etc. I won't be supporting this kind of project on KS again.
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June 12th, 2015, 18:36
Originally Posted by Roq View Post
Following W2, D:OS, POE, … we know (roughly) now what it takes to make an old school ISO RPG, by reasonably pro teams to a reasonable standard. i.e. it takes a team of circa 20 people around 3 years (circa $5m). And even then you can see that those games could have benefited from more time/money. I don't think small teams should try to compete. Just think up something more original that doesn't require so many assets, viz Darkest Dungeon, Witchmarsh etc. I won't be supporting this kind of project on KS again.
Old school as in 1998 or later.
This one was being marketed as Darklands inspired which was released in 1992.

And they still managed to put some stuff from Baldur's Gate into it while also making overland exploration like Fallout 1/2.

I don't see a problem in supporting similar stuff.
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June 12th, 2015, 18:43
Originally Posted by Archangel View Post
Old school as in 1998 or later.
This one was being marketed as Darklands inspired which was released in 1992.

And they still managed to put some stuff from Baldur's Gate into it while also making overland exploration like Fallout 1/2.

I don't see a problem in supporting similar stuff.
Darklands was a really good game, a bit of a cult classic, with a totally different premise, (even if it was very buggy on release): The idea in Darklands is that it refers to an historical time period, but one where the superstitions of the populace were real - great idea, very immersive and very well written. One of my favourite games of all time. If 2 people could do something like that I'd sure back it in an instant. But, Serpents isn't it - and Microprose was not a 2 man band.

EDIT: Oh and BTW if you want a game that is truely inspired by Darklands, look at Legends Of Eisenwald - they have struggled against the odds with a tiny budget, but the game is looking quite good and due for release next month I think!
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June 12th, 2015, 19:18
I like to support all these little guys, but only once. So far, I wouldn't back a sequel of this, but I may change my tune if it turns out to be deeper than it is looking. The piss-poor graphics is really a shame as it turns all but the most niche of folks away. There is an expectation to reach an acceptable level of technology for most folks I think.
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June 13th, 2015, 23:57
More I play more I am enjoying it. Lvl 1 gameplay seems to be weakest. It does not even have fun spells like SLeep like in BG1 but the game opens up very nicely after that.
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June 15th, 2015, 13:48
I'm bouncing between this, Elminage Gothic, and Paper Sorcerer. Paper Sorcerer is getting the bulk of the playing time, but I think it's a fairly short game. I also picked up the Bard's Tale, to remind myself what I hated about it when it came out
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June 15th, 2015, 13:55
I played paper sorcerer for about 10h. It got repetitive and boring after that.
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June 16th, 2015, 22:23
There was patch v11 released today with UI improvements and some more bug fixes.
The game is really improving with each patch.

If anyone is waiting to play, the game is more than playable and they need more people to play it and talk about it since it seems all reviews sites ignored them

The game is a mix of Baldur's Gate 1 and Fallout 1 with many of its own stuff as well.
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