Expeditions: Viking - Review @ Old Man Mordaith
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Zloth
I smell a... wumpus!?
He should have waited a day. 1.0.3 went live last night, making it possible to turn off the timer if you want. (Though it will cost you achievements.)
Kordanor
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Still, it's not WAI with timers disabled.
Still not a sure which game he played as lots of things he wrote are just incorrect.
But there are several other skills which are basically useless. Among them pretty much everything which takes an action bus doesn't do damage. This actually includes healing. I threw my healer out of the combat party as healing in combat is useless. (It's needed outside of combat for threating wounds though).
When you get the quest you get told that there is a non-violent solution. And you keep searching and searching. But there isn't. The only way to solve it non-violent is if you took a different choice hours ago. But you will never know that if you don't look into forums. Instead you keep searching or just fighting them to get the Skillpoints and finish the quest.
Besides of the first hours the game basically has almost zero tactical value.
And a character cannot become complete waste, because you always have enough points to just train "everything". Just the stats hold them back. But you don't need more than 5-6 characters for combat anyways. So actually all other characters can be considered complete waste.
And no - refreshing someones attack is something which might somewhat sound good on paper until you realize that this is a full action and you could have shot 1-2 people in this turn instead.
Bonus: As German you also get more than 80 translation errors in 40h of gameplay.
Overall I don't think the review is very helpful. It's obvious he is fascinated about the choices and setting and that's fine. But you should be realistic and objective.
If he wanted to write a very positive review without focusing on the negative things I mentioned, he shouldn't have "made them good" but instead mention them shortly as issues and instead focus in the story and tons of options you have with decisions, even when losing fights.
The most time he actionally spent on a single thing was to describe the time factor, which could have been handled in 2 sentences.
Still not a sure which game he played as lots of things he wrote are just incorrect.
There are some skills which are plain useless. For example "additional attacks of opportunity". In 40 hours you have maybe 5 attacks of opportunity total. It won't happen more than once or twice in the game that this skill would have any effect. Probably it will never happen as the opponent tries to not trigger them.
But there are several other skills which are basically useless. Among them pretty much everything which takes an action bus doesn't do damage. This actually includes healing. I threw my healer out of the combat party as healing in combat is useless. (It's needed outside of combat for threating wounds though).
Good that he mentions this quest. And bad that he mentions it as positive example, as this is actually an example of bad quest design as mentioned in another thread.
When you get the quest you get told that there is a non-violent solution. And you keep searching and searching. But there isn't. The only way to solve it non-violent is if you took a different choice hours ago. But you will never know that if you don't look into forums. Instead you keep searching or just fighting them to get the Skillpoints and finish the quest.
No, food is never an issue. You can put an unlimited amount of people hunting, you will never run out of food. In fact I just sold 300 rations as they just piled up and had no use.
Besides of the first hours the game basically has almost zero tactical value.
And a character cannot become complete waste, because you always have enough points to just train "everything". Just the stats hold them back. But you don't need more than 5-6 characters for combat anyways. So actually all other characters can be considered complete waste.
And no - refreshing someones attack is something which might somewhat sound good on paper until you realize that this is a full action and you could have shot 1-2 people in this turn instead.
Uhm…no.
But there are tons of small ones. Glitches in quests (4 of them yet), doing crits even though you selected non-lethal mode, far too loud music, broken music controls, hunting ground not decreasing in quality, prices not dependent on demand/supply or "setting" at vendor though the game implies they should, you can buy/sell items at same vendor for profit, display bug with resources in building screen on map, crafting armor doesnt use special supply items, crafting armor can result in cursed items, broken timeline in faction view, autosaves when entering a camp are broken (enemy vanish after reloading).
Bonus: As German you also get more than 80 translation errors in 40h of gameplay.
Overall I don't think the review is very helpful. It's obvious he is fascinated about the choices and setting and that's fine. But you should be realistic and objective.
If he wanted to write a very positive review without focusing on the negative things I mentioned, he shouldn't have "made them good" but instead mention them shortly as issues and instead focus in the story and tons of options you have with decisions, even when losing fights.
The most time he actionally spent on a single thing was to describe the time factor, which could have been handled in 2 sentences.
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I disagree about healing. I use two healers in combat since skills are plentiful.
I also use poison and demoralise a lot due to the amount of enemy archers, so Roskva has been very useful to me. Also, her knife skill is OP. Stun someone and deathblow
About the inspire ability, it can be very useful, you just need to find the right opportunities.
For me it's been useful to ensure a last hit on an enemy that would otherwise have been able to punish me. It's also only a attack action, not a full action.
Most of your other points, I can agree with or understand.
I also use poison and demoralise a lot due to the amount of enemy archers, so Roskva has been very useful to me. Also, her knife skill is OP. Stun someone and deathblow
About the inspire ability, it can be very useful, you just need to find the right opportunities.
For me it's been useful to ensure a last hit on an enemy that would otherwise have been able to punish me. It's also only a attack action, not a full action.
Most of your other points, I can agree with or understand.
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I also disagree with Kordanor about healing, but for those who'll read this, I set the difficulty on normal while he was playing on insane. Also, I won all fights, he… Couldn't do that. Which doesn't mean he should, the game knows certain fights are near impossible and there is combat lose scenario (as it's just one battle not the whole war).
Some skills are definetly useless, have to agree on that, but not all nondamage are useless. Stun a hard-to-kill trashmob with shield (no damage) and they can't deflect your arrows during that turn. Or stun a trashmob who's scripted as temporarily invincible.
The kids quest also I'd always add as a positive example. You had three choices, which are forgiveness, execution or exile. You took the first one, well, kids will suffer for it later. Due to a bug, KOing them would count as a murder but for all I know it's now fixed.
The rest, I agree. The review is not an example of quality.
Some skills are definetly useless, have to agree on that, but not all nondamage are useless. Stun a hard-to-kill trashmob with shield (no damage) and they can't deflect your arrows during that turn. Or stun a trashmob who's scripted as temporarily invincible.
The kids quest also I'd always add as a positive example. You had three choices, which are forgiveness, execution or exile. You took the first one, well, kids will suffer for it later. Due to a bug, KOing them would count as a murder but for all I know it's now fixed.
The rest, I agree. The review is not an example of quality.
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Kordanor
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Well, I also won all fights (but needed some attempts for the one I posted in another thread which you arent supposed to win), and I agree that stun and removing the shield are useful. But there are lots of other skills like kick, all the buffs or even feint.
And while you can have healing ofc because you have almost unlimited points anyways, if you have to decide between healing or a weapon skill, healing would be the worst option. Just have healing as additional skill on a maxed out fighter is a decent addition ofc even you will hardly use it.
On insane basically everone without a shield either dies by:
1 Shot or 1 charge attack
2 Shots or 2 attacks
with the exception of shield dudes which require:
3-4 attacks or 1 removing shield/stun + 2 attacks/shots
And I guess on easier dificulties they will die even faster.
And of course if you are dual wielding weapons or using a bow you can do these 2 attacks with one character per turn.
And enemies who are dead cannot hurt you. So normally you will not require a healer, because you won't take damage. If you replace a DD with a healer, you necessarily take more damage.
And in the beginning your armor won't be perfect. And the same rules apply to you: 1-2 attacks and your character is dead (on insane difficulty). So even healing doesn't prevent them from going down (of course you can also resurrect with max skill).
Funny thing: When I used Röskva in my party for healing, guess who was always attacked first and died. And that's even with taking the "less likely to be attacked" skill, which almost felt more than a taunt.
Speaking of taunt. Another skill which isn't really usefull. You could kill the opponent instead of taunting, or instead if increasing your party members resistance.
The best thing you can do regarding to tanking is always to build a front row of two guys with shields, blocking the LOS between enemy archers and your archers. While there isn't a LOS break on own characters there is one on enemy characters. So they can't shoot past your characters, but you can shoot past your front row.
And while you can have healing ofc because you have almost unlimited points anyways, if you have to decide between healing or a weapon skill, healing would be the worst option. Just have healing as additional skill on a maxed out fighter is a decent addition ofc even you will hardly use it.
On insane basically everone without a shield either dies by:
1 Shot or 1 charge attack
2 Shots or 2 attacks
with the exception of shield dudes which require:
3-4 attacks or 1 removing shield/stun + 2 attacks/shots
And I guess on easier dificulties they will die even faster.
And of course if you are dual wielding weapons or using a bow you can do these 2 attacks with one character per turn.
And enemies who are dead cannot hurt you. So normally you will not require a healer, because you won't take damage. If you replace a DD with a healer, you necessarily take more damage.
And in the beginning your armor won't be perfect. And the same rules apply to you: 1-2 attacks and your character is dead (on insane difficulty). So even healing doesn't prevent them from going down (of course you can also resurrect with max skill).
Funny thing: When I used Röskva in my party for healing, guess who was always attacked first and died. And that's even with taking the "less likely to be attacked" skill, which almost felt more than a taunt.
Speaking of taunt. Another skill which isn't really usefull. You could kill the opponent instead of taunting, or instead if increasing your party members resistance.
The best thing you can do regarding to tanking is always to build a front row of two guys with shields, blocking the LOS between enemy archers and your archers. While there isn't a LOS break on own characters there is one on enemy characters. So they can't shoot past your characters, but you can shoot past your front row.
- Joined
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