Xenodave

I am nearly done with the game, and I wanted to know why a room in the castle is still locked. I have compelted all of the Darkside loyalist quests, but the room in the castle just north of the room with the goodies I got from defeating the leader of the darkside loyalists is still locked. It is on the second floor, on the north side of the castle. When I click on the door, I get the 'the door is locked and you cannot pick the lock' message. What do I need to do to open the door? Thanks. David

I am about half way through A4 for my first time with a pretty standard 4 character party (2 slith pollarm users, a human mage and a human priest, and my mage is also a (low skilled) archer and (high skilled) lockpicker, and am thinking of starting a second party. I am looking for advice from other A4 fans. Any ideas for another party? I am looking for interesting combinations, especially with archers. Any recomendations? Note I am not planning on trying to solo this game; I save and restart enough as it is. :-)

This side quest looked really boring, so I skipped it at first. Now I am at the Tower Colony, and have done all the rest of the tasks up to and including at that point, and thought I would go back and take care of this one. I found 20 bags of meal, and now I need to find 20 bottles of wine. Its driving me nuts. I have 7 bottles, and thought I would be good with 7 bottles of wine and 13 bottles of ale, but no go. Could you recommend some places where I can find wine so I do not have to go looking all over the map???? thanks very much in advance. David

A IV is a little jerky on my computer (a three year old Mac running 10.4) too. It would be nice if that was fixed. I'd like there to be ways to bulk up on EXP without having to go the the next part of the game, if a player wanted. I really like the side quests and the quest boards in each town. I like the monsters that you fight. It would be cool to see a list of all the kinds of monsters in A IV and their subtypes online.

What is the difference between the easy/med/hard settings? I like to breeze through games without getting my rear end handed to me, so I usually play them on easy. I have been playing A IV or easy, and switched to med, and the fights seemed a little harder (my characters we not doing as much damange and they seemed to be taking more damage) but nothing dramatic. Do my characters get any more experience when I play medium than when I play easy? Are there more enemies to fight at the harder skill levels? Are there any other differences? Thanks.

>>He probably means EA's sports games. Though it's hard to tell, because of the other 2.1 million EA games. And there are many people who would disagree with you on A4 being "sweet". << You get bonuses in the first metal of honor game for PS2 [the saving private ryan one] if there were other EA saves on your memory card. I haven't played that many other EA games. My brother in law is a college football nut, and he showed me the feature with bringing players and teams from old EA games to the latest new one. As for RPG... I've played several RPGs, and A4 is the only one that *doesn't* have "random" monster fights in one form or another. [including having to leave an area and coming back and all the monsters are back.] Personally, I like that ability to gain the exp and power up without being forced on to the next part of the game.

>>Importing characters would be a problem because each game starts you at level 1 and builds up. The game would be trivial if you started with a character who could tear through everything.<< -Thou Shalt TS- I disagree. I love powering up and blowing everything away when I play RPGs. But I know that some people like started up from level 1. In addition to letting people skip the powering up aspect of a future game, importing characters from other games would also making it more likely future game buyers go back and buy previous titles, and would be a reward repeat customers. EA does this all the time in their PS2 games. you can import teams from previous titles to new ones, and you get bonuses starting new games if you have saved files from other EA games on the same saved game card. They are not the only company that does this. Its a smart idea. >>Did you mean "and" instead of "or"? I hope that in A5 we won't see so detailed "reason" of the growth of creature populaton.<< -Ford Prefect I mean "or". It would depend on ths situation- if you had a cave full of goblines, they could keep showing up on repeat visits until their "chieftin" was killed. Slimes or lizards or other creatures could have a "slime mother" or "Lizard Queen" in the same way; once the specific creature was killed, the monsters would no longer show up in that area, but if the player liked being able to kill more creatures to buff up, they could stick around a certian area and get exp without having to move forward in the game. If the creatures annoyed another player who did not like having creatures in areas they had already killed, they could just kill the mother/queen/chieftin etc and the creatures would no longer show up. Mr. Vogel, is a very creative guy and could probably come up with all kinds of interesting features for the new game, these are two that I would enjoy. Obviously, A4 is already pretty sweet. These are just ideas to throw out there.

Oh yeah... Being able to import characters from A1-4 into A5 would be super sweet. :-) Or having some kind of bonus in A5 (stats, gold, armor/weapons, etc.) if you have characters from registered copies of A1-4 or the GF series, etc. would be cool too.

What I would like to see in A5 (which is probably a few years away) are some places with autogenerated wandering creatures, where I could build up on exp. The way I play games, I like to max out my stats as much as possible. I am about 1/3rd of the way through A4 right now, and I think it is cool how creatures stay dead after you kill them, but it would be nice to have some places where monsters lived and would come back. There could be a Chieftin or a breeder creature or something that you could kill that would end the spawning of the creatures in the area, but it would be nice to be able to walk around and level up. My 2 cents. This is such an awesome game, by the way- much more fun than most of the stuff on my PS2. Dave