Geneforge 5 Musings

[Student of Trinity]

Also, you're playing on Torment. That screws with the canonical difficulty gradient.

[Kelandon]

Made a visit to the Dera Lost Vault (after figuring out that you're supposed to attack the golems before they come to life, when they're still neutral, not when they become hostile), and I've wandered around a bit more. (Notably, I killed the Eye guarding the west pass between the north area and the south.) I lost my last Wingbolt in the process and replaced it with another Rotdhizon, so now I have three Rots and two War Tralls. This seems fine except when a monster has strong melee resistance (the Eye in the southeast of the Dera Lost Vault, for whom I had to shape a Drayk just to do damage after he switched immunities).

 

At that point, I dealt with the second stage of the attack on Gazaki-Uss by sneaking around the northeast, killing the lab drakon and servants, and then charming drakons as much as possible in the main exit. It took a few tries to get the first drakon charmed, but once I managed that, I ended up with three or four drakons on my side at any given time while I sent Rots and War Tralls to take out the Gazers.

 

I'm now at Inner Gazaki-Uss, which seems a little nuts for the time being, so I may go wander around and try to deal with optional areas. I can't immediately tell if I jumped the gun on getting to the endgame; I don't have the bandit quest from Taygen, which seems to slow down my ability to access certain areas. My next step will be to figure out if I can do anything worthwhile to build up further strength. I'm at level 45; just one or two more would help me a fair bit.

 

I also can't get into those corner locked doors in Inner Gazaki-Uss, where reinforcement creations are supposed to be. I don't have enough living tools (they're asking for about 4 apiece, even when I toss on my infiltrator wear), and at this point, I'm contemplating going to stores and buying more, because I don't know what else to do.

 

All in all, I'm pretty surprised that I've managed to get this far on Torment on a first playthrough, not really knowing what I was doing.

[Kelandon]

School kind of got in the way, but I resumed yesterday.

 

Went through the Sea Caves sequence — oddly easy at this point in the game, no potions or anything — and gained another level. I could make another Rot if I felt like it. Not sure if I will. Got a whole bunch of additional living tools and got to the assistance at the corners of Inner Gazaki-Uss. Still can't do much against the drakons and eyebeast along the north and south walls, though... they appear to be immune to mental effects, which pretty much negates everything that I was doing in the last zone.

 

I can't back out and do more quests, though, because I don't think I can access the final expert area (don't have the relevant crystals, can't seem to get them), and I've cleared everywhere else. So I pretty much have to go on. I'm level 46 at this point, with a ton of gear, so I'm probably set.

 

Maybe I'll make another Rot and try again.

[Kelandon]

Finished GF5 yesterday. I tried making another Rot, but it didn't really help. Instead, I drew the southern wall foes (two drakons, one eye) away from the southern wall one-by-one, so that the three friendly casters in the west could help me destroy them. Then I ran around to the east, threw the bomb, came back, and entered the final charge. The final charge was a little crazy: all of my creations died, but the last War Trall fell right as I reduced Ghaldring's health to basically 0, and my other allies managed to kill him at that point.

 

I don't know about GF5. It was fun, I suppose, but it kept promising things that either never materialized or materialized really slowly. I mentioned drawing focus above. In plot terms, I kept expecting more clues about who the PC was prior to the memory-wipe. We got sniffs, but there was no revelation, not even serious hints, just a sense that the PC used the Geneforge or lots of canisters (probably), did some bad stuff, got really powerful, and then lost everything.

 

I kind of assumed that we were going to find out that the PC was the PC from GF4, but it never happened.

 

Anyway, if this weren't going to be a solvable mystery, why keep dropping the "I know who you are and might tell you someday" dialogue options? Several different NPCs say this. It set up a big reveal that didn't happen.

 

As far as game mechanics, I'm pretty sure I played on the wrong difficulty setting. If I play GF5 again, I'll play on Hard, not Torment. You have to do some really specific things to powergame GF5, and I think I didn't quite manage them, although, um, I guess I did well enough to win on Torment.

 

So, GF5. Fun, but not one of Spiderweb's best. To be fair, the bar is pretty high for SW, but... I don't know. Everything just slightly missed. The storyline never quite reached its potential. The game mechanics were such that combats were always just a little too much of a slog. The continual bouncing around from region to region looking for the right combats was a bit unfulfilling. Everything was almost really great but never quite got to really great, at least on the first playthrough.

[Nim]

So, GF5. Fun, but not one of Spiderweb's best. To be fair, the bar is pretty high for SW, but... I don't know. Everything just slightly missed. The storyline never quite reached its potential.

There was a storyline in G5 ? I wonder what it was about

The game mechanics were such that combats were always just a little too much of a slog.

Weakening of Speed, HP bloat and HPs going up on higher difficulties ? At least that is what bothers me most, and ofc the abundance of poison and acid, ugh.

[Triumph]

This provokes me to try to get around to finishing G4. I was in Burwood Province back December...and then got distracted and never finished off the game. Hmm. I think that in itself says something about how interesting G4 was.

[Kelandon]

Weakening of Speed, HP bloat and HPs going up on higher difficulties ? At least that is what bothers me most, and ofc the abundance of poison and acid, ugh.

The poison and acid wouldn't have been as much of an issue if curing spells hadn't been nerfed also. I suppose there was pretty egregious HP bloat on Torment, although I didn't realize that was an issue at the time. I think what I didn't like — and this is totally unfair of me — is that Jeff managed to balance a game so that there was no unreasonably good path through it. There are ways to become vastly overpowered in Avernum 1/2, GF2, and Avadon, at the very least. GF5 on Torment is pretty darn balanced.

This provokes me to try to get around to finishing G4. I was in Burwood Province back December...and then got distracted and never finished off the game. Hmm. I think that in itself says something about how interesting G4 was.

I liked GF4 all the way through. It's worth finishing.

[Student of Trinity]

How much of the weakness of G5 is fixed by playing on Hard instead of Torment? For me, actually, I think that the answer could well be, quite a lot.

 

Difficulty settings seem to have been a royal pain for Jeff all along. The best thing about his games is the story, so ideally everybody should play through easily enough to relax and appreciate the setting, characters, and plot. But some people want difficult battles. They may be masochistic wackos, but they are an over-represented class among CRPG customers. So the games need a Torment setting. The problem is that lots of people who don't actually enjoy all the grinding and reloading and un-intuitive optimization, which you really need for Torment, feel obliged to play the games on that setting, just because they can. They won't like it, because they are not masochistic wackos, but they know they can, and so they'll feel bad if they don't.

 

This whole issue did use to be mitigated by the fact that Jeff's combat engines had some really wicked exploits. Among his relatively small pool of customers, knowledge of the tricks got around, and people could cope with Torment by learning them. This was fun in a way, and for some of us, it was part of what Spiderweb games were about. But it was sort of silly, too. It messed with the story, really, that you could turn badass bosses into idiotic patsies by ducking round corners and double-tapping 'F'. Jeff has gradually tightened up on the exploits, but that has made the difficulty issue more acute.

 

If only people were more willing to play the games on a difficulty setting that's actually enjoyable for them, I think a lot of things that really detract from a game like G5 would become much less problematic, and so the good things would shine much better.

 

Jeff is well aware of this problem, and used to mention it often to beta testers. I think I was the one who suggested he relabel 'easy' as 'casual', so that people would feel more comfortable in actually using it. I think he should probably take this further, and re-name Torment something even more discouraging, like 'Masochistic', so that everyone but the truly hard-core would feel comfortable in passing it up. 'Hard' could be re-named 'Torment', to make it sound quite hard enough for sane people, and 'Normal' could just be called 'Challenge', as opposed to 'Casual'.

 

I think this is very reasonable because, as many people have always observed, Jeff's games don't really get harder in any interesting way on higher difficulties. His game engines just aren't that sophisticated; that's not what Spiderweb is about. All he can do is crank monster health and damage up and down. This works to make the casual game much more forgiving, but at the high end, it always ends up merely forcing tedious tactics, or game-breaking exploits. I don't think this is a flaw in Jeff's execution. It's inherent in the nature of what he's doing, and the best solution is for most people not to play his games on the hardest setting.

[Lilith]

A lot of commercial games nowadays just flat-out don't let you play on the highest difficulty until you've already won the game on a lower difficulty. It's annoying for players who prefer the higher difficulty, but I can see the logic behind it. You'd think it wouldn't be necessary for SW games, considering you can already switch difficulties at any time during play if you picked one harder than you really want, but...

[Nim]

Maybe I'm an exception but I have no problem playing G5 on normal/partially easy even though I play all the other Geneforges on Torment. Same in A5 where I switch to easy for select fights and then somewhere past azure gallery for the rest of the game. I wonder how many of Jeffs customers are really that stubborn that they don't change difficulties even when they are suffering.

[Randomizer]

I find the difference between normal and torment is that you can't make as many mistakes on harder difficulties. Forgetting to buff before going into a fight on normal isn't going to automatically kill off the party.

 

Slarty pointed out during a Geneforge 3 debate that what works for normal won't always work for torment.

 

I play torment so I can say I did it even though it is a grind. Same with singleton games. Although playing a singleton in Avadon's beta testing did disclose an interesting bug where Jennell appeared as an invisible character that could only trigger dialogue nodes and specials.

[Kelandon]

I don't know. I had issues with the plot of GF5, too, not just the game mechanics, and I suspect that unless I dropped all the way to Casual, I wouldn't be able to avoid bouncing around enough that my feelings about the structure would change.

 

I typically want to beat the games on their highest difficulty level at least once, and I knew I was going to play GF5 exactly once, so I figured I might as well get the Torment playthrough out of the way. I'm going to start Avadon 2 on Hard, probably. I'm playing Avernum 6 on Hard, too.

[Hawat]

G5 is probably my favorite game ever, and I loved that there wasn't a single over-powered path. There are a wide variety of approaches that can succeed on Torment, but each of them has its own learning curve (I still can't make Agents work, but I know other players have had great success with them). I also liked the ambiguity of the story, and the fact that a bunch of interested parties claimed knowledge of the PC's past but never shared it/had it to begin with. The NPCs had their own agendas and their interest in the PC extended to what they could get out of him (or her). Rawal had no clue who you were, but is a manipulative jerk who judged that information on the PC's past would be a powerful carrot to hold out. The few who seemed to actually know who you were all seem to have had reason not to tell you. I'm ok with that.

[NamelessOne]

I always liked these games and they have a lot of cool ideas and one of the most original stories you could imagine. My biggest gripe with them is the constant idea that you need so much stuff for all characters that you don't really know as a user. In Avernum that is present but less so. In Avernum 1-6, its fairly straightforward what fighters, rangers, and spellcasters need. But in Geneforge, you've got the same thing with leadership and mechanics added and forced onto the player. I think it would have been nice is if it wasn't FORCED to getting the those skills. I could see getting mechanics at least a little, but how is it a rpg when you don't have to get leadership and whatever, but you are punished if you do not put at least a little.

 

I think Jeff really needs to think about this is if he remakes these games and make new games in general.

[Student of Trinity]

This is definitely difficulty-related. On lower difficulties, it's not a big deal to waste a bunch of skill points on useless things. It's only on Torment that you really have to know the optimal path and follow it closely.

[Kelandon]

It would be nice if the spell and skill descriptions were a little more precise. And accurate. I'd take one or the other, but both would be really great. That way, I wouldn't have to go on here to figure out what the proper builds are before starting a game. Or at least I could have a reasonable guess as to what the heck I'm doing and could just verify here.

 

My point being, I guess, that this would reduce the problems with trying to play on higher difficulty levels casually.

[Student of Trinity]

Yeah, Jeff's in-game documentation has been brutally lacking for a long time. A lot of things sounds awesome but were actually nerfed two games ago, or sound lame but are actually deadly if pumped. It would be easy to revise these.

 

I wonder whether this is where Jeff would actually use and appreciate a fan-made contribution. I have a sort of hunch that he just hates writing these in-game descriptions, for whatever reason. I bet that if we here put together some kind of 'missing manual' for the games, Jeff might well take them over, and edit them in to the next updates, and say Thanks.

[Randomizer]

I'm not sure if Jeff would do it. I've had a few corrections to documentation that never got entered to the final release version from beta testing.

[Kelandon]

I wouldn't be surprised if the issue is just that the code is kind of a mess and it's hard for him to verify that we're right about what stuff does. That seems to have been an issue whenever he's open-sourced stuff before (BoE, BoA Editor).