Drayk Armitage

Jeff has said they take less time.  See, again, N:R for an extreme example.

Most of the steps take the same amount of time, but there are extra steps -- creating the scenario, drawing all the maps, and writing all the dialogue -- which are a large amount of work.  Touching up and updating these things simply does not take as long as creating them out of whole cloth.

On 5/25/2024 at 9:58 AM, Drayk Armitage said:

Work on different games isn't completely separated, and the timeline doesn't show seasons, so you can't specifically see which games took more work here, but Jeff has stated in the past that remakes take less work.

The data doesn't show that.  See my post above that you already incorrectly summarized.  I'm not arguing with shadows anymore.

You're completely ignoring the difference between a remake and a fresh game created from scratch.

Ah, good call on the codex entry.  Given the hundreds-of-years timeframe that most creation types have existed, "recently" could really mean anything, but yeah.

All we truly know about Stalkthorns is that they weren't on Sucia.  Maybe they aren't actually a brand new creation type, just one that didn't exist when Sucia was shut down.  That would explain why they aren't news and even the various plant-focused shapers in the Drypeak area don't have anything to say about them.

This is a 3 year old topic, so the "new player" probably isn't new anymore :-)  Let's close this up.

Alhoon, you know very well that we have lots of lurkers, lots of casual players who google questions about the game and end up here.  It is misleading at best to talk about things you can hack into the game as if it's something you can do in normal play.  This shouldn't require an argument.

(And yes, if you are editing game files directly, you are "hacking."  It's not a dirty word, and it's a very widely used word in modding communities on the internet, so if you don't like that, your argument is with the rest of the internet and not us :-)

Note for casual readers: Most people finish the game somewhere around levels 19-23, what's described here is not sane.

Via Pigeon on discord, looks like it is in fact possible to hit level 29 without any cheating.  Steps:

1. Reach level 26 by killing the Door Golem repeatedly.  Note that this will take somewhere around 2500 kills, so "tedious" doesn't even begin to describe it.

2. Kill all exceptionally high-level targets that won't anger the Servants or Barzites.  This includes the denizens of Gazak-Uss and other high level zones, as well as all the Takers, Learned Thani, etc.

3. Learn each creation type besides the fyora; read all codexes; turn in all Shaper Records and all Iron Bars; complete Zensital's quest.  (You need to have not done any of those things previously.)

4. Finally, kill Zakary, Barzahl, and anyone else you had to leave alive.

Steps 2 through 4 provide enough XP to go from level 26 to to level 29.  If you kill literally everything there's even a little wiggle room.

As an additional point of amusement, if you do this, it's possible to shape a level 50 creation, specifically an Eyebeast.  You need to be a Shaper will all skill points put into Magic Shaping, Shaper Robe equipped, with all 5 points of Create Gazer, and purchase all the augments for said Eyebeast:

You don't.

Alhoon likes to discuss things you can do by hacking or modding (or that the developer could obviously change) as if they are things any player could do.

Per usual, if you initiate combat via a conversation option, the rest of the zone doesn't turn hostile.  That option does exist here... it just doesn't appear unless you've completed the Emissary's quests.  In this case, it looks like this was done so that the option can be witty.

Attacking a friendly creature in combat mode normally turns the whole zone hostile, so that's not really a surprise.

do any characters in any geneforge game actually refer to Fire, Magic, or Battle shaping in dialogue?  I'm not sure, but I can't think of any.  it's certainly not a distinction many shapers appear to be at all concerned with.

I'm curious about editing scenarios to fix bugs and compatibility.  It seems like, with so many scenarios, if there are compatibility issues, it would make more sense to just fix them on the engine end?  Even if it's in a clunky way that's equivalent to patching changes on every scenario.  That seems like it would be a lot less work, and it sidesteps any questions/effort about getting in touch with authors, keeping original versions available, etc etc.  But maybe I'm misunderstanding what's in play here.

Well, if they really wanted to stop the chaos, they would have needed to destroy the vial.  Giving it to Thrackerzod would be more negligent than leaving it with Yu-La IMO.  Frankly he seems even less capable of hanging on to it than she did.

Alhoon, you played 15-year-old games in backwards order and expected everyone else to cater their independent conversations around you.  Frankly, it was ridiculous, and bringing that up definitely does not support the argument for avoiding spoilers.

you are welcome to look it up yourself if you don't believe me.

in fact that would be a lot more helpful than just asking "are you sure?" all the time and expecting somebody else to put in the effort.

(but yes, i am sure.)

Unfortunately, the Helix Ring and Frosted Annulet upgrades are completely hardcoded, so there's no way to mod those.  (At most, I could have the anvil replace them with non-hardcoded versions, but that would remove any chance of using their unique effects, which are the only interesting things about them.)

OG1 training was uncapped -- remember you could max out Luck with Dig? -- and skill point costs were fixed, so there was not actually any way for canisters (or anything else) to affect it.

I have a vague memory of maxing out Parry during the OG2 tutorial so that the free point from Shanti would be worth the most skill points, so maybe that was a thing in OG2 after all.

I agree with alhoon, at least to a degree.  The Takers are not around after G2, and while obviously they are the direct predecessor of the Rebels, there's very little direct cultural continuity between the Takers and the Rebels.  Also, neither group is particularly monolithic.

Astoria doesn't really represent Awakened ideals.  She represents pragmatism.  Obviously she's the G5 faction that the Awakened would find least repugnant, but she's not an idealist.

(Re spoilers, although I'm sympathetic to people who want to avoid spoilers, G5 came out 15 years ago, and these forums are full of posts that spoil things about later games in the series, because they have 20+ years of posts on them.  If you want to avoid spoilers, this forum is a bad place to be, and that's hard to change.)

Oo, interesting.  Yeah, Easss doesn't actually mention "vial" or "goo," but he clearly says he stole the Geneforge sample from Yu-La, good call.

A correction though -- the G1 PC does not retrieve the sample for Yu-La, the PC is simply a courier who brings it from Yu-La to Thrackerzod.  And since in canon G2, Yu-La takes it off the island and the Takers steal it from her, it seems that the G1 PC did not perform that task and actually has nothing to do with that vial making it to the Takers.  If the PC had had more concern for the Sholai and/or the inutile, they might have prevented it, though.  (Also, it's red, not orange.)

(It's also not clear that Yu-La knows it's a sample of the Geneforge -- if she had, then as a greedy trader, presumably she would have bargained for a lot more in exchange for it.)

Really glad you enjoyed it Lorn!

Thanks for the suggested additions.

FWIW, your points 1, 2, and 3 have absolutely nothing to do with this mod.

Point 5, and your drayk confusion, would be addressed by reading the codex.  It's a little weird to complain about things, where you have refused (repeatedly!) to read the mod's own explanation of how it works.  I don't really know what to tell you.

Point 4 -- Thornstalker's quests are absolutely completable.  I've actually gotten a lot of positive feedback about them.  They definitely do require exploring all over the place to find enough thorns.  There are 4 separate thorn quests (all listed in the text log, as I have now pointed you to three times ) plus a final reward for completing all of them.

I don't think canisters ever factored into skill point cost in any version of Geneforge, did they?

That's deliberately left for the player to figure out.  Minor spoiler:

Sometimes in games you have to put 2 + 2 together, rather than having somebody give you a quest marker.

AFAIK there's exactly one reference to the vial of goo in G2, and it's extremely vague and gives zero context to anything.  Am I missing something too?

"I am not a Taker!"

"I will probably script my character" because I don't like the options the game gives me...

*looks at Easss*