Mechalibur

I never went through with the bad end, but I found these text files in the game folder, if you're curious what happens:

106 = "Redbeard says, _Your survival comes at a price. There is a debt that needs to be paid for your defiance of me._";

110 = "Sevilin, your once-loyal companion, is taken away to be executed. He looks at you one final time and says, _My people learn from birth of the sacredness of the law. I will submit to it now, and with dignity._ He is taken away.";

111 = "Shima Threespear, brave warrior of Holklanda, is taken away to be executed. Before he is dragged off, he says, _It was an honor to fight by your side. In the end, my sacred duties compelled me. I have no regrets._ He is taken away.";

112 = "Jenell, shaman of the Wyldrylm, is taken away to be executed. Before she leaves, she bows her head. _I have no apologies for anything. I fought for what is best for my people. I have but one request. I want to die in the garden, near nature._ Her wish is granted.";

113 = "Nathalie, young and ambitious sorceress of the Kellem, is taken away to be executed. In her final hour, she looks terribly young. She tries to speak, but can only choke back a sob. When she faints, the guards carry her away and carry out the sentence with merciful speed.";

114 = "Since none of your companions joined you in your final, futile battle, none of them are subjected to a final, gruesome punishment. You can at least feel pleased about that."

Would it be possible to change magic resistance to be called energy resistance instead? It seems odd that attack spells list the damage type as Energy (like with Lightning Wind or Dark Bolt), but the defense type has a different name. This gets especially weird with abilities like Path of the Shield, which say they provide magic resist, but actually boost magic (energy), fire, and cold.

Yeah that makes sense. People don't usually open the abilities list just to close it right away.

In the inventory, pressing a button that opens the window now closes the window. (So pressing 'g' twice opens then closes inventory. Same with 'i'.) I resisted this change for a long time because Escape is always the default Back Out button, but it's been requested so many times.

- Jeff Vogel

Awesome! When showing the items on the ground, will it skip g and i on the item list on the ground (in other words, will the shortcut to pick up items go a/b/c/d/e/f/h/j?) Same with abilities; will the list of abilities just start with b?

Huh, I actually remember doing that on my first playthrough. I killed Eass as part of the story, killed Barzahl because he was a jerk, and killed Zakary at the end because he was complicit in everything. I would have let Pinner live, but I accidentally left a stash of goods in her office, then blew up the magus complex.

Is that ending significantly different than a regular loyalist ending? I remember in that one

Another Aodare ending would definitely have been great. And a fitting way to end the series, too.

What's the Aodare ending? I remember he was in G2, but I thought he didn't really have much significance.

Definitely did it in support of all of them; the game hint in Avadon 2 made it pretty clear that it was in your best interest to help them out. The only ones I hesitated on were Khalida and Alcander.

I really felt bad for Khalida, but I wasn't entirely sure about murdering the leader of a town to get revenge.

I'm okay with doing all the sidequests making you overpowered... in normal difficulty. Being at optimal power should be borderline mandatory for torment, I think.

That may very well end up like the "run away" endings in G1 and G2.

Which I have no issue with. Not all endings have to be good endings... which has been made very clear in the series

It would be cool if, instead of just increasing your level in shaping different creations, you learn increasingly powerful mutations for them at the cost of essence. For example, you could upgrade your artila to become plated, increasing evasion and hp, or instead learn how to make them searing, improving their acid damage. Late game you could even make inferno worms, although I suppose that has the potential to get extremely overpowered.

After playing through G3, I'm starting to think it could really benefit from a 3rd faction, or perhaps a way to escape the Ashen Isles without joining either side. Both the shapers and rebels have some serious problems, and being forced to join one of them got a little annoying.

That's unfortunate. It seems kind of early for the game to lock me into a specific faction.

I'm not against more frequent autosaves, but only if it's still easy enough to access the save on zone change. In other words, 2 auto save slots would be preferable, but honestly I'd still be happy with 1.

I did a quick search here and in the gamefaqs guide, but couldn't find anything. If you sided with the rebels in Illya Province, is there any way to get a pass into the shaper camp in the Fens? My reputation is very strongly pro-rebel (and for RP reasons I'm not going to change that).

Huh, that is significantly worse. Might have to try getting that ending sometime

Just finished my rebel run, with no canisters used, then finished it again, but with 7 canisters. The only difference was about a paragraph of text saying the character felt more powerful, and the fact that she went berserk when the Shapers restrained her. Other than that, it was almost identical.

I'm guessing the consequences of canister usage are worse for a pro shaper run?

Rainer wouldn't kiss me back

Maybe he realized I was just in it for the medal.

Ah, that's too bad. Having all the text would be awesome.

In any case, it seems like if canister usage affected that non-Loyalist endings in G2, then they were minor changes, right? From what I'm hearing, it's a pretty big impact in G3, so I think I'll do a low-canister run on my rebel playthrough and shaper playthrough.

Thanks everyone!

In both G2 and G3 (and G4 for that matter), using more than a certain number of canisters affects the ending. This is independent of what faction you join. In G2, if you use 10 or more canisters, it affects the ending, regardless of your faction choice. I don't remember the canister threshhold for G3 or G4, but I know if you hit it, it affects your ending no matter your faction.

Hm, are you sure about that? I had multiple saves in G2, and only in the Loyalist ending did anything seem to be affected by canister usage.

Regardless, thanks for the G3 info.

I've been having trouble finding this information, sorry if it's been asked before. I read that the number of canisters you use affects the ending of Geneforge 3 (6 or more, apparently). Is this regardless of which faction you join, or is it like Geneforge 2 where it only matters if you join a specific faction?

Thanks!

This is a great comic; it pretty accurately describes how I play most games.

Title: Sidequests

 

—Alorael, who's still favorably inclined towards your doodling.

The more depressing interpretation is that they all died

I never felt like the first game encouraged you not to use the Geneforge; it just presented it in front of you and waiting to see what you would do with it. Stealing those gloves, and tricking T-man (I'm bad with names) into using the damaged ones, then taking ultimate power for yourself? What a great ending. Well, except the part where you go power-crazy and murder everyone who stands in your way.

* Quick Use and Ability Preset Buttons

 

I am strongly considering changing to 3 Quick Use buttons and 5 Ability Preset buttons. Feedback welcome.

No strong feelings here. I'm weird and never bothered with the quick use slots, I just open up the list manually every time.

* Difficulty

 

My games have long dealt with difficulty by making foes have more health and do more damage. I want to handle this in a smarter way.

 

I am strongly considering having area of effect spells do friendly fire damage on Hard and Torment level. I want combat positioning in my games to make a difference, and this will be a key part of that. I will also make the more nasty foe abilities (like charm and fear) be more common on higher difficulties.

 

Feedback welcome.

This sounds good to me. Increasing enemy stats never really felt appropriate for increasing difficulty. This should require new strategies and make positioning more important.

* Skill Tree

 

Will be completely redone. There will be three separate trees instead of three inter-connected trees, and skill prerequisites will be massively cut back. This will allow a lot more freedom in character builds and less spending skill points on things you don't want.

 

I am also massively tweaking abilities for all classes and adding new abilities. If a particular ability has proved to be utterly useless or way overpowered, I'd like to know.

Awesome. One of my biggest issues has been all the prerequisites when navigating the old trees. As for underpowered abilities, I would include basically any abilities that scale of strange attributes (like earthquake and the pots). Also spells that do physical damage (earthquake, steel wind); because of how much armor enemies tend to have in comparison to elemental resistances, these spells end up doing pretty crappy damage. Steel Wind is supposed to be the upgrade to Lightning Spray, but it consistently does less damage and costs more fatigue/cooldown. Only reason to use it is if the enemy is immune to lightning. Ice Bolt on sorcerer also feels kind of weak (although it isn't useless); it does marginally more damage than their autoattack, but on a 6 turn cooldown with a fatigue cost, it's extremely underwhelming. I've also found charm to be near useless, as it seems to miss around 90% of the time, even with heavy investment into the skill; although that may be an issue of how enemy defenses work.

* Tinkermage Balance

 

I don't usually care too much about balancing character classes against each other. This isn't a PVP game. If shamans are tougher than shadowwalkers, or whatever, that isn't a big deal.

 

However, it is a problem when one class is so much tougher than the others that it makes it impossible to balance the game. In this spirit, tinkermages will be getting a mild nerfing.

Completely agree. It's also really annoying when I'm searching the boards for advice for certain fights, and half the advice is tinkermage specific and all the best strategies require one (or two)... no class should be that out of control power-wise. The damage output and durability of the turrets/pylons should be looked at; specifically, I think that the turrets should be rather fragile, requiring important positioning.

* Right-Clicking

 

I will be implementing better right-click functionality and making it work on Macs too.

Sounds good to me!

I mean, I guess if you count killing him as helping him... but otherwise, no.

I usually don't count killing people as helping them, but that's just me, I guess.

There's actually something that always bothered me: is there anything you can do to help Pyrn? It seems the best thing you can do is leave him to his work, but the demon he's trying to control never goes away.

Thanks for the correction, updated (yes, that took me a while)