For fighting gods? Sounds interesting but also complicated. Like another layer of game such as devotions were when first implemented.
I also am not sure if our guy/girl has anything to do with ascended or anything resembling.
We are a “taken”. An info we get from a guy who seems to just know things (the ascended ulgrim). So in my opinion we are an odd occurance.
Think about the fact that we can tap into the powers of any deity, can restore any shrine and benefit from it (including eldritch ). It’s almost like the character we play is a celestial “universal man”. A bridge between all, a piece that can fit anywhere.
I don’t understand this either as Crate has from the very start shown that they consistently produce more content than expected from the initial plans…GD should have finished in the middle of act 3…as that was the original plan and look how much bigger that’s got and each act has ended up way larger than originally planned.
Personally I do hope for a bounty system redo. 5 per session can stay, but let us pick the sequence, so we won’t get bamboozled by a kill X hero bounty with whom we already dealt with on the way to kill Y boss on an earlier bounty.
Jaknet is right though. No matter how you wanna twist to something else, it is a story about survival. Aetherials and Chthonians are nigh endless and they will never stop coming.
In AoM, you destroy one of the biggest sources of aetherial presence and Creed himself say they will retaliate. Implying taking back one the biggest cities in the empire from the Aetherials is just a minor setback to them. He also says, in his own words, that their numbers are nigh limitless.
Basically, you can’t cure the disease in this game. You can only cure specific symptoms, but they will always come back. Meaning the Aetherials and Chthonians will never be destroyed, so there’s never gonna be a happy ending. If you don’t like that, that’s your problem.
But it isn’t anymore. If this was about survival, then Chthonian and Aetherial forces would have retaliated faster and with more consequences, resulting in far heavier losses. This isn’t the case here.
For example, where the hell is Ulto Krieg in the times when most of the cult destroyed and major blow was done via killing Log? Nowhere to be found. Or Aetherials. Again, Malmouth was liberated, THREE Aetherials turned traitors. Absolutely nothing seems to be done about this either. It’s just slaughter after slaughter, advance after advance. People are already talking about liberating fucking Erulan, yet you are talking about survival? Very funny.
Nowhere near it was implied as a minor setback. The Surgeon was a high ranking general, his loss is not trivial. Not to mention, it was he, who supplied Aetherials with the material for the army.
That’s just an assumption. There are countless ways to counter Aetherial and Chthonian presence in Cairn without sabotaging the ending in the process. Some of which I described a long time ago, but you people seem to hellbent about same things over and over.
Also, my main gripe with the story was that Jaknet called it a story where there is no chosen heroes. That’s outright wrong, considering the nature of Malmouth. We ARE the chosen one. Becoming an Ascendant? Check. Helping everyone left and right, while killing high class enemies? Check. Going on dangerous missions, having hopes of humans around us? Fucking check.
Except you are forgetting that the story spans probably in a matter of days. The Aetherials and Chtonians are not just gonna send an huge army out of nowhere, it takes a while to mobilize such a big army. Proof that they only sent a single Colossus to Devil’s Crossing and even then, it went through much pain to pass through the circle of salt. What do you think would happen to weaker Aetherials? Not to mention they are more preoccupied with finishing their plans than retaliate.
Taking back Malmouth is a minor setback to the Aetherials. Several lore notes saying their plans were undone by you and yet, they just know they have much bigger plans than those. Allostria herself says everything thing you done so far, every plan undone, were just small potatoes compared to what they can do. A freaking traitor in their ranks giving information to the enemy is of minor concern to them.
You also forget that Aetherials can come back anytime they want, Krieg is proof of this. Theodin can easily return if he just possesses another body.
And even if you character does the major things, he/she is not alone. Several people and even factions help you constantly. Without them, you couldn’t do half of the things you have accomplished.
To me personally, the “defeating the main bad guy and they just disappear leading to a happy ending” is cliched, boring and predictable.
You realize that this sounds even more ridiculous, right? If the story happens across several days… then humanity is a fucking mosnter. Across SEVERAL days they managed to retake Malmouth and kill a fucking Chthonian demigod. Holy shit, if humans are this strong, why did they lose the war? Ah, of course, Ascendants, silly me, how could I forget.
Assumption. I can easily just say that no one sent colossus, because, well, he was chasing the poor girl? Or, I don’t know, he could simply stumble upon Devil’s Crossing?
Then Aetherials are plot devices, nothing more. We do not know about their ultimate goals, we do not know the Circle (yet), yet losing of their prominent generals is a minor setback? This is how they drag a bad-written story. With foggy goals and introducing a minor antagonist to prolong the narrative. If liberating Malmouth didn’t accomplish anything… why liberate it at all? Why bother playing, if our actions in the game are meaningless and literally do not matter?
Except this is not the case. Aetherials are something of a hivemind, with the ruling council serving as Kings and Queens. Imagine if a bee worker suddenly drops one hive and goes to another. Unprecedented, right? Here we have not one, but THREE traitors, who went against the hivemind will and wanted to aid humanity.
This takes time, though. And even then it can still be countered.
It doesn’t matter if some factions help him. Every single major victory, every single major kill was done by the character, alone. No one helped him with Theodin and Krieg. Ulgrim is arguably the only one, but even then, we sent Log to the Void only by ourselves.
Look, man, I would hate the boring happy ending as well, but there ARE ways to make it bittersweet without destroying the essense.
Not really ridiculous considering it’s just a small group of people. It’s much faster to mobilize, infiltrate and take out specific enemies.
The only reason is just a single person doing most of the killing is because the game is made this way. It’s you fighting horde of enemies. If they wanted to make it more “realistic”, they would have just it a strategy game where you control an army.
We also don’t even know the scope of the Aetherials and the Chthonians. The Aetherials literally conquer entire REALITIES, as stated by Anasteria. Our reality could literally be just a very small cog in an huge machine. Same with the Chthonians, we don’t know how big the Void is. It could be thousand of times bigger than our reality. Same with their numbers.
The only thing you do is kill the big monsters. How you get to them, most of the time, is with the help of other people. Also, Ulgrim was the one who permanently killed Log.
The point is being the strength of these enemies. You see, without our character they wouldn’t be able to trash Log, because their powerlevel was insufficient. Which takes us back to how the character, again, is actually the chosen one, who accomplishes everything alone.
But anyway, back to the powerlevel. If these enemies are dealt this swiftly in the span of the several days, then that speaks only of two things - either these enemies were not strong enough in the first place, or humanity, with the aided hero, becomes absolutely ridiculous. The first option debases humanity as a strong contender in powerlevels, which fits the narrative, BUT at the same time makes the character… somewhat MarySuish. The second options debases both Chthonians and Aetherials as enemies. That’s the core of the problem.
Yes, I agree, that’s why the character is slowly morphing into a chosen hero to fit the setting more. Even then, after all is said and done by him\her, I think it’s silly to keep the survival rhethoric, because our character simply brashes it off virtually being the countermechanism to it.
Don’t you think that this makes Crate a little bit overambitious? Perhaps they bited more than they can chew? I mean, it’s fine to have a strong narrative along with excellent lore, but when things get out of hand you lose the scope of what to do in the mean time.
Take te description, for example. They say it’s still the survival story, but when you look at Malmouth, it’s simply not. Humanity pushes offense after offense, even liberating entire cities already. Who they were in the beginning and who they are now? Two different things. The scope has changed. So it essentialy creates a dissonance within what developers wanted to achieve, but what created in the result.
Those big monsters ARE the focus of all things considered. The fact that your character can kill them or exile them ALONE is already a huge testament to humanity’s prowess, which again, creates ripples in the narrative.
To be fair, i haven’t played an ARPG where your character isn’t a Gary Stu/Mary Sue. It’s pretty hard to write your character as not one when you can kill hordes of enemies and major powerful enemies single-handed.
A majority of the Aetherials are just corpses reanimated with aetherial energy. Most of them can barely walk and attack, making it easy to be dispatched. Yes, it diminishes their power a bit. But i think the fact they literally caused the apocalypse and killed millions in the process make them seem like a big threat.
I guess Crate just wanted to have them as these huge, overpowering enemies that seem endless, making it hopeless to completely wipe them out for good.
I still don’t think it makes it less of a survival story just because you took back two forts and one of the major cities in the empire (when there’s probably a lot more major cities) from the Aetherials. There’s most likely things far stronger than the Loghorrean and Theodin.
Oh yeah…I’m sure the final boss would have been an absolute blast to also have 100 NPCs in there with you fighting…
There are some things that are for story, and then there are concessions for the purposes of gameplay. If everything authentically matched the story, then you’d be constantly surrounded by an army fighting alongside you through the entirety of Malmouth, which would make for some rather poor ARPG gameplay.
While it’s true, in GD, in my opinion, this concept clashes with the story too much. Maybe they should correlate the gameplay and story to match each other in a more profound way.
In this case they made a pretty good backstory with cities being filled to the brim with corruption and infiltrating King’s mind, causing overall collapse throughout the whole coutry. This was done very well and justifies the whole sudden invasion shtick in GD.
Yes, this is my main gripe with the story, actually. I see that an actual ending, whatever it may be, bittersweet or happy, is miles better than having no ending at all, while adding more factually useless antagonists, who exist only to prolong the gameplay, from which standpoint the story suffers instead. I hope they ACTUALLY finish it one day, even though I also don’t like the policy of accumulating the cliffhangers and unresolved plot points even more than dissonance between gameplay and narrative.
Why yes, it would have been absolutely fucking amazing, leading an army to enemy’s stronghold and taking him down with the combined effort. Still, I know why it wasn’t implemented.
Everything doesn’t need to match the story in terms of gameplay, Big Z. But some things I mentioned above still would need some corrections, mainly because it clashes too much between each other.
And even then, that wasn’t my main point, as I describe above.
You guys are overthinking this really. It all comes down to that we are playing an ARPG - aka when you single handendly must erradicate hordes upon hordes of powerfull adversaries in order to have fun.
The setting is about survival and it continues to be so - you take back a ruined city left with a few dozen survivors. The Black Legion probably numbers in the hundreds not more. Most other factions are like dozens of people not thousands.
Humanity is extinct - everything in the game world depicts it like that.
The PC victories do not turn the tables in any significant way - you just win some breathing space in the world for what is left out of mankind. But aetherials and chtonics are endless and they will continue to pour from outside our world.
I can see the PC in the end of XP3 or XP4 (here is hope) carves with a tons of losses from all allies a semi-secure spare in the world where humanity will still struggle to survive - they wont be able to rebuild the entire civilization since everyone is dead already, all the infrastructure is destroyed, there are no resources, no industry etc.
So even if we kill in the end X God/Ascended - humanity wont be saved, the world wont be saved as its already a DEAD world - you just win to try to survive a bit longer.
Then maybe you have simply got the wrong game, as while that might be amazing for you, it’s not what GD was ever marketed as, and if it had been then I sure as hell wouldn’t have spent a single penny on the game.
This story finishes when your “hero” dies either in combat or of old age.
