Enderal first time, impressions

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VexiiShoal
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This is a hilarious read. Can't wait to read more! :D
dyslexicfaser
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- Archmage Arantheal wants to rap with me when I get back.

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- I haven't even started talking to him, and he's already speaking cryptically in Capital Letters. It's going to be one of those conversations, I can just tell.
We have a bit of a walk and talk.
It looks like everything's getting a little Mass Effect in here. Not only is The End Coming, but the world of Enderal seems to be moving in cycles. Civilizations rise, then there's a big calamity, wizards rise up as gods, get thrown down by plucky heroes, and then shortly thereafter everything just fucking dies? And this has happened hundreds of times? That's rough.
Turns out I was right about having some Grand Destiny (I'm 'Prophet'), but it looks like I'm only one of many. He's one too ('Ruler'). That's cool. Long story short, I'm now in tight with the Big Religion of the land. But he wants to make this all official-like with the other Keepers, and makes me take an initiation test.

- Is it just me or is the Archmage's son probably the protagonist of the last game, the total conversion mod for Oblivion?
He just feels like a protagonist. Fighting for injustice and self-determination, befriending his enemies, killin' gods.

- While I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what this initiation is all about, I am left wishing the Archmage had a leetle more ultimate power. What's even the point of being in the Special Secret Capital Letter Club with him if he can't just appoint me to some high post? What a gyp.
So he sends me out to the Heartlands border to get this shit done with, but I decide to do a little sidequesting first.

- I've had a quest sitting in my journal for ages to go steal a bank key from a guy's druggie sister that takes me to Undercity. Normally I'm not one for the thief and Dark Brotherhood-like quests I expect to find down there, but I kind of want to check it out anyway.
Why are the thief guilds literally underground in games like this? Little on the nose about the class structure to actually find the deepest darkest hole you possibly could to toss the Pathless down into, don't you think?

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- I know I say this a lot, but Enderal is really pretty. Admittedly, it swiftly gets less pretty later on when I get into the slums and the 'fleshmaggot sufferers', which are like beggars but more tragic. This feels like Enderal in a nutshell.
An interesting bit of cultural difference I notice right away; up there with the 'sunchildren', the lady in the Dancing Nymph is called a prostitute. The lads down in Undercity just call them whores.
I think this is indicative of a serious class divide, and- what do you mean 'why is this the first thing I notice?' It just... I...

- Moving on, on the way to the other quest I run into a lady trying to score Red Vynroot to help ease the suffering of the guys with fleshmaggots and y'know what, that sounds like something I could get behind. I shell out 300 gold pennies, turn them in to her with a turnaround time of about 1 minute, and get a whole bunch of exp.
It would be pretty cool if there were fewer of these 'fleshmaggot sufferer' NPCs down here after this little quest, it would make me feel like I made a bit of a difference with my altruism. Well, not really altruism, I was mostly just in it for the exp, but y'know... it'd be nice.

- Anyway, I go work some Rhetoric on the lady, Sila, who instantly folds and tells me the location of the hidden key. In and out, I can dig it.
Unfortunately, the skillbook merchant is gone when I come back topside and a person's worth of blood is splashed everywhere. Only now, without easy access to skillbooks all in one merchant, do I realize my folly. What I had, now that it's gone.
Also when I return to check in with Sila I find a horrifying thing called an Aborted Pus Creature in her house. It's like an armored centipede as wide around as a small man. Is the hideous thing a guard creature? A pet? Do the people of Enderal make a habit of subjugating the most monstrous creatures on the continent? The last time I saw a creature this scary I was paying a man 25 pennies to ride it.
I admit, when I first walk in and get a faceful of green goo I assume someone heard about the bank key and put out a hit on Sila. And is using nightmarish monsters to assassinate people.

- Clues in the house lead me to a small, burned down fishing village. With a pile of burned-black corpses piled up on the pier like macabre driftwood.

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Milbert and Sila fled to the city years ago. Why are these still like this? Who even bothers to stack up the corpses of their victims into a funny pile like that?

- Also it appears that while I was traipsing around Ark and fighting her hideous pet pus beetle, Sila managed to abscond with her brother in broad daylight and drag him all the way out here. I took a Myrad, did they take a Myrad? Does the unconscious guy you have slung across your shoulders with a bloody knot on his head count as a passenger or baggage?
I will mention that up until this point Sila seemed bitter but not really dangerous, until she dragged her brother out here and locked him in a man-sized cage. Now, I know that feeling, I have a sibling myself, but I control my urges and so should she.
Does glimmerdust cause violent paranoia? That shit sounds dangerous.
Things... don't end well for Sila, and Milbert sounds a little broken up about it. I actually get to keep the key they were feuding over. Go figure.

- Well, that's enough lazing around I guess. Time to go ... beat up some fellow initiates? I'm not sure how initiation into a religious order works.


The Takeaway:
As far as RPG scenarios go, 'save the world' is an old, old staple, but I admit I'm kind of interested to see where this is going. There being multiple Dragonborn equivalents is a great twist and makes me feel much better about my new pals than, say, the Blades from Skyrim.
The Divide and Conquer quest was a bit of a sour note. The characters feel kind of schizophrenic, and I still don't know what's up with that horror in Sila's room. Does she feed it the souls of door-to-door salesmen? Oh well, they can't all be gems.
Zuletzt geändert von dyslexicfaser am 17.12.2017 19:29, insgesamt 1-mal geändert.
badgesareus
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macguffin
Old saying, you learn something new every day. I learned a new word, even though I had to look it up after seeing it used here. Good show old chap (or chapess?)
But please don't take that as encouragement to dig through your thesaurus. :lol:

Seriously, this forum has been nearly dead for months and you've brought it back to life!
dyslexicfaser
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- I grab a Myrad and hook up with the leader of the initiation and the two initiates further northwest.
The level of snide I'm receiving is impressive even for Enderal, where hateful xenophobia is usually the default expression. Signet Leader Jorek's voice actor in particular does a great job of conveying his opinion of my general worthlessness as a human being.

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One of the initiates is nice, seems to be impressed at the way I took on an entire mercenary company and saved the day like a big damn hero the other day.
My knowledge of story structure suggests someone is going to die off before this quest is over. They're wearing bright red; they are literal red shirts. I just can't decide if it'll be the mean one (less visually interesting than the girl with the face tattoo) or the nice one (pathos), or even the boss and we have to fight our way out without him. And then the mean one would probably blame everything on me; he's kind of like that.

- It seems that the forest we're going into is home to a particular breed of giant mushroom that makes arcane fever worse.
Why is it always mushrooms around here?

- Now, you might look at the following screenshot and think 'how much wine did you have before setting out, dyslexicfaser?' but this is what visions look like.

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Right, so Arentheal explained what this is. Apparently as the Prophet I'm getting visions from previous cycles, which are basically Future Vision because the cycles are just that similar. Everything is the same. Predestination. Creepy.
Hypothetically the lines said by the mysterious voices will make sense only later in retrospect, but I'm sure I'll forget about them by then.

- Later, we meet a friend! He appears to be suffering from a bad case of pink-eye. He does a lot of chanting about 'She wanted to leave, she wanted to leave, now she'll never leave', and there's a corpse in a pine box he's building for her.

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- This is what Red Madness looks like: I'm not sure if it's named for the color of the eyes, the caked blood around the mouth, or the general transformation into murderous psychopath.
Dunwar (mean initiate) blows him away with a lightning bolt, and it's kind of hard to fault him for it.
The bossman faults the hell out of him for it, though, saying some apothecarius would give their left arms for a chance to study a live victim of the disease. You'd think they'd be warier given the way Yero (possibly not a victim of Red Madness, but they don't know that) exploded and killed 30 people.
I almost feel bad for the novice, but I'm sure he'll say something that annoys me the next time he opens his mouth.

- So we get to the sacred spot, and the bossman drops the fact that the gods are all dead. I knew this already, and most of the non-Enderal world believes it too, but this is news to the initiates. Dunwar flips his shit so hard I'm half surprised the ruin doesn't land upside down.
He blames the nice initiate for being a witch, the bossman for being drunk, the order for taking in Pathless like us two assholes (me and the nice one), and the world for being pointless and meaningless now that the gods are dead. Bossman shouts him down in proper drill sergeant style, but I almost have to be impressed by the size and shine of this stupid kid's brass balls.

- There's a kind of suspicious stammer in the bossman's voice when he tells us to drink down our [Strange Potions] that sets off warning bells in my head.
My vague worries are immediately proven prescient when I hit the deck and my vision fuzzes out.

- I wake up in a prison cell. I'm actually kind of surprised this hasn't happened to me before, you know? It's just been that kind of week.
At this point I'm about evenly split between 'Is this a vision quest?' and 'Is the Signet Leader trading in nubile young Keeper initiate flesh?'

- I'm locked in with a new guy named Aixon. At first his ramblings sound like it's the latter and I'm going to have to go it slave gladiator style for a while, but then I add another possibility to the pile: 'Is Aixon one of my past selves, or a past Prophet, or something like that?' because he is talking kind of mystical and like this always happens, in between whimpering about somebody called the Suppressor.
He posits a kind of interesting idea: he says that I died a week ago, sunk to the bottom of the ocean tied to my old peasant buddy. This whole thing has been a fever dream. Magic shit, you know?
I don't think that's actually true, but

- I'm not entirely sure how I get out of the cell. Like, the wall actually changed into a door for me.
Aixon is just as confused as I am, and I'm really impressed with his voice actor right around this part. He absolutely nails a voice half 'stunned like a poleaxed cow' and half 'dare I hope?' with a touch of 'why couldn't I do that?' thrown in for good measure.
Right around when instead of fighting prison guards I'm stabbing ghosts, I'm going with 'Vision quest thanks to a dodgy potion' but I'm not entirely dismissing 'Temporarily dead (will probably get better).'

- I'm reduced to a knife and a hunk of Endralean Crusty Bread (just like old times!) but the prison didn't remove my ability to summon a fire elemental that one-shots the ghosts.
There's corpses and ghosts and hanged people and traps. No Suppressor, though. I die once to a spiked ball trap, but otherwise this segment is a little spooky but not very hard. I find a skull labeled 'Regret' which I have no idea what to do with. I end up dropping it in a minute, when the exit door sends us right back into our prison cell. My knife disappears.

- Aixon starts pouting just because we're probably going to be tortured or whatever for trying to escape, like a baby.
I decide to catch some shut eye while we waited for the Suppressor, but three days later still nothing happened. Afterrubbing my face against every wall, clicking on everything in the room and sleeping in Aixon's bed, I decide to punch Aixon in the face.

- Apparently, that advances the quest.
Aixon isn't sure if I figured it out or just got pissy, but he drops the act. He's me - somehow. All the little whimpering, scared, stupid feelings I'm keeping deep down inside while I play the big hero outside.
Okay.

- I wake up, and Jespar is waiting for me. That's nice.
Except I swiftly deduce we're entering Inception territory, right around when Jespar's voice changes, other characters start teleporting into the room, everyone turns into beings of pure red air, and the room gets all... like this:

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- I'm still dreaming, but it's pretty obvious something's hijacked the dream. And it is not impressed with me.
Which, duh. I walked face first into a spiky ball trap like a minute ago and died. I die to wild animal attacks all the time.

- They namedrop The Cleansing, which is probably just The End of The World in smoke person speak.

- Then I actually wake up! Calia (the nice initiate) greets me.
This has been one hell of a ride, Calia. One hell of a ride.

- You can get into her backstory (she killed the family that took her in too, maybe! We're like murder sisters!), but I'm still processing main quest stuff right now and have no time for Calia.
Also, Dunwar's probably not going to wake up. Ever. Probably bossman's fault for laying that 'the gods are dead' bit on him before making him fight his inner demons.
Bummer, I guess, but mostly at this point I'm just glad it's him and not me.


The Takeaway:
Enderal's weird dream game is strong. No idea where this is going now; there's been a few leads dropped here and there. Peghast, Signet Stone, these new smoke people. Who knows? First things first, probably go meet up with Arantheal again. Maybe yell at him some, for not filling me in on having to fight evil smoke monsters from beyond our reality.
At the moment though, I'm just going to have Calia take me on a tour of the sun temple and try not to think about how my insecurities are apparently a cringing white guy with an emotive voice.
Zuletzt geändert von dyslexicfaser am 17.12.2017 19:31, insgesamt 1-mal geändert.
dyslexicfaser
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- Arantheal also had the weird smoke monster dream, and agrees that they're connected to the Cycle. And also are assholes.
I also get into some of his backstory, what being locked up for years,then getting out just in time to dive into this End Of The World nonsense is like. He's of the opinion that 'What would I go do instead? A life as a fisherman?'
He's a rock, this guy.

- Constantine is also still awesome. His mouth speaks the words that are in my heart.

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- The Order needs some time to get a fancy ceremony together. Fingers crossed for getting to put on a pretty dress and dance with all the boys, but given what I know of this religious order it's probably going to be a bunch of solemn chanting about how superior they are to the shitty Pathless, and the less said about those foreign dogs the better.
If this ends with me becoming a werewolf, I'm gonna be pissed.

- Jespar also sends a note saying he'd like to see me again, and to meet him at night in a deserted watchtower on the outskirts of Ark for what, I am sure, are perfectly innocent reasons.
It is not night time, and Enderal doesn't let you just fast forward time with 'T', so I wander about on my own for a while. There are a lot of farms and windmills and things around Ark, so I decide to check those out.

- I wander around for a few minutes. A flyer told me I could find fantastical adventure! if I went out to a little island in Ark's bay, but that turned out to be a bust. Highwaymen, you know how it is. Usually a mugging isn't the peak of excitement, but, well. Enderal.
I'm a little sad I didn't get to go on the adventure, though. Whoever wrote that flyer seemed like the type to Talk In All Caps and be Constantly Excited About Everything.

- I wandered into a cute little farming village. Hay everywhere, goats and cows and... farm things.
A particular door declared itself to be 'Lower Haystacks.' I open it up without giving it another thought, thinking it might be a granary or a saloon or something.
It is nothing like that thing I just thought.

- I am immediately beset by a Vatyr and his two 'Mad Rat' companions. I've run into Mad Rats once before, when I wandered into a vault in the sun temple that I'm probably supposed to visit for a quest thing at some point, and they are surprisingly dangerous. With preparation, I can fight two at once; blindsided, and with a Vatyr too? I know what move to make here.
I run, screaming, for the door only to emerge into bright sunlight with the Vatyr on my tail and at a fraction of health. I die.
Then the game reloads, and I die again.
Exiting a building auto-saves the game, natch.
Third time's the charm, though, and I manage to pop a potion and start life-draining the Vatyr until it's him, not me on the ground.

- Well, I figure once my heartrate slows down, might as well investigate since I'm here. The place is absolutely covered in mushrooms. I find 20 of one kind, and a handful of other types. If I was an alchemist type, I would probably be excited right now.
A hidden trapdoor drops me into a fight with two more Vatyr, and some kind of boss Vatyr with heavy armor on. His armor is one of those magical set pieces, boosting two-handed weapons for Vandal types. More potions and life-draining, plus fire elemental backup, pulls me through on this one but it's a close thing. Then a couple more Vatyr, a little wandering around and Vatyr again, before I pop up out of an inauspicious manhole into the Farmer's Coast. More idyllic countryside and scenic farms.
... Did I stumble into a quest halfway through? What the heck is going on here? Why are there a dozen goatman monsters camped out in some random farm? One that's obviously still in use? Are they, like, Vatyr sympathizers? Are the Vatyr noble rebels, unfairly discriminated against by the surface worlders?!
I'd totally join their secret club if they didn't keep trying to violently murder me every time I show up.

- I still have more time to kill until evening when Jespar's quest becomes available, and I see there's a lighthouse and a mine nearby, so I make for them.
The lighthouse is abandoned. And is set on a river, not any kind of ocean, which kind of defeats the purpose? I don't know, who am I to tell people they can't build lighthouses wherever they want to.
There's a trapdoor with a slightly soggy vault beneath it.
Inside is what is apparently the new evolution of the Lost Ones; this zombie guy is a mage. He's throwing fire around everywhere and he's got some serious HP, but he gets into a slugging match with my elemental so I'm free to jab him in the buttocks repeatedly until he dies.

- The mine is covered in highwaymen. There must be at least six to eight of them just hanging around the entrance, shooting the shit.
This is the second or third time this has happened. Are there even any mines still controlled by the government, or non-evil mining consortiums, or anything? Considering this mine is a silver and gold mine, why are these blokes still highwaymen and not wealthy landowners by now?
Maybe they don't want to sell out and are staying real, I don't know. OG highwaymen.

- Putting down an elemental and watching from cover like a pussy, I'm reminded that this game has a neat little mechanic where if a bandit goes down, sometimes their buddies will have a line like, 'That was my friend, you bitch! I'll kill you!' or something like that.
That's cool. I always felt like in Skyrim the bandits weren't properly recognizing me for the blood-stained god of war that I am, even after I turn 15 of their 18 man bandit camp into gently steaming corpses with lightning or whatever.
Aside from my elemental reminding me that her fireball ability has knockback by interacting weirdly with the game physics and launching a highwayman twenty feet across the room and onto a balcony, the other notable thing here is the guy sitting on the gold vein:
A Marauder.
This guy is clearly a next gen bandit. Decked out in steel armor, shield and rune mace, and with his inferior buddy distracting my elemental, he reminds me of the first hour of the game when Enderalean banditos were the stuff of nightmares.
I have to break out my old standby of 'backpedal while power attacking and life-tapping' and he still comes within a hair of taking me out with just a couple swings of that mace.

... I think I'm going to go sell off all this stuff, visit Jespar, and then never go wandering again. If the picturesque farms are this dangerous, what am I going to do when I have to actually fight the End Of The World? The smoke monster guys are probably going to show up on fire-breathing dragons.


The Takeaway:
I must have hit a new plateau in levels or something, because the game is clearly stepping up its, well, game. Sometimes it'll throw weakling highwaymen at me, but sometimes now it's magical skeletons or bandits armed to the teeth and trying to beat me like a pinata.
Possibly the game thinks I was able to buy skill books for the 30+ unused skill points I've accumulated and is strengthening its enemies accordingly, but I don't know how that would be possible. Adept skillbooks (the ones that get you up to 50 in a skill) are expensive as hell. I pick up and sell everything and make gear to sell for extra cash when I find the ingots and spare parts, and I'm still broke as a joke.
Zuletzt geändert von dyslexicfaser am 17.12.2017 19:32, insgesamt 1-mal geändert.
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25.05.2017 23:58dyslexicfaser hat geschrieben:
I must have hit a new plateau in levels or something, because the game is clearly stepping up its, well, game. Sometimes it'll throw weakling highwaymen at me, but sometimes now it's magical skeletons or bandits armed to the teeth and trying to beat me like a pinata.
There is no levelscaling in Enderal, so the opponents are not adapted to your level/skill, and depending on where you go, you may not be able to defeat them. In this case just run and come back later when you're strong enough :wink:
badgesareus
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Just curious, dyslexicfaser , what path(s) you have pursued using your memory points. Also, you might consider the side quests which you probably have in your journal such as the egg collecting & wanted bounties to gain gold. And some of the best weapons and equipment can be found in dungeons which are not quest-related; there are many dozens of those. Some are at your fingertips, such as the crypt accessible at the Ark cemetery.
dyslexicfaser
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26.05.2017 17:38badgesareus hat geschrieben:
Just curious, dyslexicfaser , what path(s) you have pursued using your memory points.
I started out in Keeper for the heavy armor stuff. The early Vandal and Blade Dancer memories specify a type of weapon (sword/mace/axe I think), and I wasn't sure what I'd find, so it seemed like a waste.
I had vague plans to aim for light magic as a side thing. That didn't survive contact with the game.
Then when I noticed how great summoning was, I went in hard for Sinistrope. Still haven't found any of the damage-self-to-hurt-others or psionic spells, I just do summoning.

I'm at level 15, with a roughly even split between Sinistrope and Keeper.

I'll probably dip into Blade Dancer at some point, once I've gotten all the 'makes stuff hurt less' perks in Keeper.
Also, you might consider the side quests which you probably have in your journal such as the egg collecting & wanted bounties to gain gold.
I have some side quests in my journal, but mostly just stuff I run into on the way to the main quest.
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Hmm, I've done 3 playthroughs but I've never tried those disciplines. Seems like you have to be a shield/block type to get the most out of keeper, not my thing. I've read some players say that bound (summoned) weapons can be powerful, but if you summon creatures probably not much left to summon weapons -- I don't even know if you could summon both at the same time. Get loot, sell loot, buy skill books -- piece of cake! :wink:
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27.05.2017 00:57badgesareus hat geschrieben:
Hmm, I've done 3 playthroughs but I've never tried those disciplines. Seems like you have to be a shield/block type to get the most out of keeper, not my thing.
I have had to waste at least 1 memory point on blocking, maybe two. But I figure Rocksolid (block 75% of damage every 6 seconds) should make up for it somewhat. I also took the point that is supposed to reflect all melee damage back at the enemy who deals it to you, but I think what actually happens there is they take an equal amount of damage as me, since I still get my ass kicked when it's on.
I've read some players say that bound (summoned) weapons can be powerful, but if you summon creatures probably not much left to summon weapons -- I don't even know if you could summon both at the same time.
I can and have, but I haven't found a good Bound Sword spell in a while, so I haven't been. If that makes sense.
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