Drakensang Finished, have questions. (Spoilers)

human_male

Math and girls is hard.
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What was the reason for being able to buy a ship, and did anyone actually managed to scrape together one thousand ducets?

Why did the story not bring you back to Ferdoc to complete the (I counted three) quests that you could only do after completing Tallon? The story takes you to Tallon, then the dwarf city, and it keeps going to the game's climax and the rather abrupt ending. Ok, you can return to Ferdoc any time but that totally disrupts the impetus of the story.

Prince Arom "Hurry, dragon thingies are swarming down the mountain! My father has gone ahead to stop them but he can't hold for long. We must travel to Drakensang peak to aid him!" Me "Ah, sure but could you just hold on for... about a week or so? I've just got to run home to tie up a few things, buy a few more potions and drop off all this stuff."
 
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What was the reason for being able to buy a ship, and did anyone actually managed to scrape together one thousand ducets?

Why did the story not bring you back to Ferdoc to complete the (I counted three) quests that you could only do after completing Tallon? The story takes you to Tallon, then the dwarf city, and it keeps going to the game's climax and the rather abrupt ending. Ok, you can return to Ferdoc any time but that totally disrupts the impetus of the story.

Prince Arom "Hurry, dragon thingies are swarming down the mountain! My father has gone ahead to stop them but he can't hold for long. We must travel to Drakensang peak to aid him!" Me "Ah, sure but could you just hold on for... about a week or so? I've just got to run home to tie up a few things, buy a few more potions and drop off all this stuff."

But that is the issue with side quests in many games: if you want to make the completion of side quests independent of the main quest, you can not require the main quest story to bring you to every location with the correct timing for that side quest. Otherwise you get those boring sidequests like in Diablo (Edit: I meant Diablo II here) or Dungeon Siege, where you know that you can solve nearly every side quest by simply doing everything you stumble acrross during your main quest. I personally would critisie exactly this as being boringly linear.

I personally like it, if side quests require you to go to locations not connected to the main quest or to go back to locations which belong to past parts of the main quest.

You are right that it may be immersion breaking, if you have a very urgent part of the main quest and decide to do some side questing in the meantime. I think of Baldurs's gate, where you had to collect 10000 gold before going on to save the world, which is also a weak apology for "do some sidequesting first".

But you can also create this immersion for yourself: Your home is in Ferdok,so you have good reasons to go there to talk to those companions waiting there, to craft bettter equipment etc.

With regard to the ship sidequest you could speculate that having the ship might help you to fight the evil better in some way...

For me the ship sidequest was very funny...do you really want a spoiler?
 
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Please spoil me (and don't forget to use spoiler tags).

Ok:

You really need to have 1000 ducs (near the end of the game you shouldn't have a problem with this if you allways collected everything). You can then buy the ship, but the guy has cheated, because you get a small rowing boat (which you can see behidn the guy below the real ship). Then he runs away and you have to find him to get your money back. One situation where good non-combat skills are useful.

I like the side quest, because the guy reminded me of "Flink Mc Winter", a funny thief character in Spellforce, which I love.
 
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Sounds nice :)
I don't think I had much money left later. I bought some really expensive armor in Murolosh.

Ok, the economy in Drakensang is balanced better then in many comparable games, where you have way too much money after half of the game.

(Gothic 2 was good in the beginning: earning the 1000 gold and the sheep to get into the mage guild was hard - but later on you had too much money...)

But the methods to get enough money in Drakensang are the same as elsewhere: Collect everything, craft expensive things instead of buying them, sell everything you don't need - but only after making sure you don't need it.

I skilled only those sidekicks i didn't use during my journeys in crafting. So I could max the others with respect tp collecting herbs and animal parts, while crafting was done at home - my regular group had no crafting skills at all. You can do similar things for other skills, like lockpicking: First win the fights in an area with your normal crew and go lockping afterwards - however thatmay get boring,while doing the crafting at home is no time loss since you need to store all the stuff you find, at home anyways.

I also bought some expensive stuff (for the dwarf) in the dwarf town, but only after making sure, that I had more than enough money

May be this is a good goal for the second playthrough (may first goal for the second playthrough was to kill mother rat as early as possible in spite of being a low level character)?

By the way I found that you will always find new little sidequests or different ways of solving things in further playthroughs. Or new lines spoken by the townspeople (mainly in ferdok) in reaction to you latest adventures (really hillarious after some of them, e. g. the one with the fake hero stealing the credit for your deeds).

The only thing preventing me from starting a fourth playthrough is that I get bored during the tutorial part, in spite of knowing that everything gets better in town. there should be a way of skipping the tutorial area, which is not really possible, because you need the quests done during the tutorial to be able to go on.
 
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I wish Radon Labs would release a patch with a "skip tutorial" option. It's possible. Simply give you more points for character generation and let you start in Ferdok, with some better equipment.

I like the way you managed crafting. However I felt that I had enough points to have my travelling party acquire crafting skills. Also, being a mage, I wanted my PC to create potions herself. It was part of my roleplaying.

I only played Drakensang once. I don't think that I will play it again, too many other games, too little time. I am very much looking forward to River of Time, though.
 
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Also, being a mage, I wanted my PC to create potions herself. It was part of my roleplaying.
Of course roleplaying should be more important than min-maxing.
For me it was ok because I happened to roleplay a lazy guy who had several hard-working friends. :biggrin:
 
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I usually never play a game I've finished (RPGs of course), very few exceptions to see alternate endings. In the case of Drakensang, it may happen after reading about that fix pack/mod someone posted. It changes a lot of stuff in the game so I'm thinking it might provide a different enough experience to warrant a second playthrough.
 
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But that is the issue with side quests in many games: if you want to make the completion of side quests independent of the main quest, you can not require the main quest story to bring you to every location with the correct timing for that side quest. Otherwise you get those boring sidequests like in Diablo (Edit: I meant Diablo II here) or Dungeon Siege, where you know that you can solve nearly every side quest by simply doing everything you stumble acrross during your main quest. I personally would critisie exactly this as being boringly linear.

I personally like it, if side quests require you to go to locations not connected to the main quest or to go back to locations which belong to past parts of the main quest.

Good point.
 
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