Am i the only one who thinks their augments kind of suck? They are not that good, at least compared to Anasteria and they are not better than the Coven’s augments.
I do like there’s finally a good moral choice with choosing to side or kill a faction, because with Anasteria it was way too easy to side with her. Besides she having awesome augments, she was actually siding with humanity.
I’m actually pretty fond of Ravager’s Eye, even for non-pet builds it’s still a fairly decent chunk of DA (and health too, I guess). I’d rather have that than the tiny damage boosts a lot of other augments offer.
ITT: People who dislike consequences.
For those wondering, not siding with Barrowholm results in another dungeon and a Nemesis with its own MIs, both of which can give you a good chance at a Wendigo Spirit.
Nope. The % HP one is nice, but you so rarely have a slot for it after covering up resists. But yes, in theorycrafting I try to make my chars choice-independent in terms of augments, so I can choose KC/ODV and to be an enemy/ally of Barrowholm just based on my personal preference. Always side with Outcast, though. :rolleyes:
I sided with Barrowholm three times to get each incarnation of Ravager up and running for when I get a group together that wants a helm, and other than that the cannibals will be buried deeper than the Mouldering Mound.
Except that this is a game, not real life, and material gains make a difference to gameplay while moral choices do not.
In real life, if you kill someone to gain access to their money, you go to jail.
In Grim Dawn, if you side with the cannibals, you get stuff that you dont get otherwise and… thats it. A couple of npcs look at you funny.
It is not an actual moral choice when it exists in a game. Especially when you can’t opt out of it after you find out the truth.
Wait you are not serious? Did you pay attention to what they done to captive people and what was their leader? If not I’m not going to spoil :^)
You’re entitled to your opinion of course, but the thread specifically exists because other people feel otherwise.
We’re all aware it’s not reality. It’s role-playing.
Personally, I completely reject the idea that moral choices don’t affect “gameplay” (which is a pretty useless term as far as I’m concerned). The game’s value is everything you experience while playing it. Grim Dawn would not be the same experience if it was mechanically identical but the visuals and audio were abstracted out to simple shapes moving across an untextured field to sine-wave beeps and boops. It would not be the same experience if it was mechanically identical but you were a mass-murderer killing innocent people rather than a liberating hero killing monsters. The things a game depicts matter. And here, the game depicts a situation where you can choose to side with a horrible group of people for material gain - or not.
It’s nice to think that in all such choices, there’s a reward for the good guys that’s just as good. But, you know, sometimes there just isn’t. If being good just was as materially rewarding as not, frankly, we’d be living in a very different world; the fact that this choice appears to grant more material reward to those who choose to screw over innocent people lends it an authenticity that many games’ moral choices lack.
As for “after you find out the truth”, well, two things. First, yeah, some mechanic through which you can decide “actually nope, you guys are crazy, this was a mistake, I’m out” would be a nice addition (if indeed it’s not there already; I haven’t looked for one myself). I’m not here to say this is the most well-developed bit of role-playing in the world, because no, it’s not. But I have to say, if someone’s character went straight in and agreed to join up without wandering around, noticing any of the weird atmosphere about the place, the odd comments from townsfolk, the notes, the screams by the cellar, then that level of uncritical engagement leading to, uh, unpleasant outcomes is itself part of the authenticity.
So on a number of levels, I think Barrowholm is a nice, if not amazingly deep, subversion of certain kinds of typical RPG behaviour.
Come on, have you played Witcher 3? Some of the choices I made there really haunt me still :). Just choose to side with them with your conjurer/cabalist or similiar kind of character and go hostile with some kind of caster/tank. Story in Grim Dawn is okay, but it’s definitely peripheral to the gameplay.
As I said; you can say whatever you like. The RPG element of the game gets detracted from by inclusion of a choice that weakens your character, because you effectively cannot choose it unless you don’t care about character strength.
For Barrowholm vs. no Barrowholm to be a choice, there needs to be a downside to picking it. Whatever form this takes is fine, but it cannot be “rpgzzz ur a bad guy now”. It’s functionally meaningless. “Sometimes there just isn’t” is a ridiculous argument to support the opposing view to this. There is no reason why this should be the case. The fact that in real life choosing to be bad to benefit yourself works out for some people is not the same thing, because in a game (especially one where your actions affect only npcs, not other people), there is zero chance for an unexpected outcome to occur.
Doing selfish things in real life puts you in some form of sustained risk. You are always at risk of being caught, being ostracized, being jailed, being harmed or killed as a result of your actions. This is simply not the case in a video game such as grim dawn. There is no downside to the moral dilemma presented that doesn’t rely on suspension of disbelief from the player. After the first person sided with Barrowholm and didn’t get instantly disowned by most other factions in the game (any, in fact), we have all known that siding with Barrowholm is unilaterally good for the player and has no functional downside. Ergo, it becomes a choice and a dilemma only if you pretend it is.
Barrowholm is the opposite of a nice subversion of “typical rpg behavior”. It is a failure to understand why typical rpg behavior is the way that it is; rpgs that feature preconceived responses from npcs require balanced outcomes to maintain any sort of actual choice. Choices that rely on suspension of disbelief to work as such simply don’t. The only way you don’t pick barrowholm is if you play make believe that it somehow matters. This is not good for an rpg.
I mean, its still a better moral choice than anasteria, where the game screams at you shes with the good guys and you lose a ton of useful augments stuff for doing the stupid thing and killing her.
I mean her quest losing rep with black legion is nonsensical as all her quest composed of sabataging literally everything from Aetherials down to killing a top ranking Aetherial General.
Because of this She can eventually stablise the situation in Malmouth
BUT DOESNT MATTER ANYWAY because F U FOR CHOOSING HER EVEN THOUGH CLEARLY SHE IS BENIFICAL. :rolleyes:
I don’t really mind paying for a ‘good’ choice to be honest but I’d like it to be acknowledged even a little bit.
The Barrowholm starts you of by freeing some captives from the cannibals. But if you go hostile you can’t get that quest.
I think still having that quest but having those captives go to any other safe location is a good way of showing you made a ‘good’ choice. They don’t even need to be vendors or anything. Just them showing up, populating the town a bit more and talking about how the roads are safer now.
The Witches should probably also notice the fact that a major Wendigo infestation just went away…
First post to the forum and a great suggestion
+1 to the OP’s suggestion
It’s heavily implied (more like stated out loud) that the captives were eaten by the Barrowholm people because they are cannibals.
There is no good, just varying degrees of evil 
Just think: Cruel to be kind
Idk, Bourbon and Creed seem like pretty straight arrows. But this IS a grimdarkish setting, so…
Cairn is definitely not a black and white world, more grey and gray.
When I first encountered Barrowholm, I ended up choosing the ‘fight’ option. I really appreciate that Grim Dawn has a few ‘moral’ decisions where the most obvious or ‘generic’ course of action (usually one that plays into a classic RPG cliche while purposefully being absurdly out-of-place for the context) turns out to be a trap that can be discovered beforehand by carefully picking clues out of the nearby environment—such as the encounter with Balog’Nath.
So yeah, when I first went into Barrowholm, I carefully poked around and found the journal entry, then I discovered the locked entrance of the completely-innocent-totally-not-a-suspicious-murder-dungeon cellar:rolleyes:. At the point where I finally met with Mr. Scorv Egdenor, who was wearing a smile that would rank somewhere between “Snake oil salesman” and “Registered Offender” on the trustworthiness scale, I figured there was definitely something off about the town. I was afraid siding with Barrowholm would result in being asked to fight or wipe out the Ugdenbog coven further down the line, so I chose to fight. The moment Scorv flat-out transformed into a wendigo ghost at the start of combat, I felt satisfied: I thought I had ‘solved’ the puzzle by discovering the hints so meticulously and painstakingly left around the town to reach the right conclusion.
Now, reading over this thread and learning that fighting Barrowholm actually locks out a whole lot of content, I’m starting to feel like I’ve fallen to a bait-and-switch. Even in Anasteria’s case, there’s the potential to get a unique item from killing her in particular. Unless there’s some sort of similar Monster-Infrequent that’s specific to Barrowholm’s cellar, I get the feeling that the game is unduly rewarding the player for what is clearly meant to be the morally ‘wrong’ choice.
Even in terms of ‘Enemy of my Enemy’ logic, I get the impression that The Ravager’s only real objective is to keep luring people in so his town-cult will eat them and produce more wendigos, rather than any particular concern with humanity’s survival. Although, I’m saying this from a position of ignorance, as I have not actually gone through the Barrowholm questline myself—it’s possible that Scorv or The Ravager provide a more sympathetic spin to their side of the story. (For instance, I initially thought of Kymon’s Chosen as being just as bad as the Cult of Ch’thon until I heard Kymon’s own rationale at the end of his questline.)
Umm, did you actually read the lore?
Chthon was clearly betrayed by his children and his blood was used to fuel creation. Every time something containing his blood suffers he too suffers, imagine feeling the suffering of nearly every mortal in creation at the same instant. I mean the torture was so bad that he went insane and literally forgot his original name.
It seems pretty logical to me that he is just trying to get his blood back. How the heck is that bad?
While Kymon himself isn’t evil, the entity he worships most likely is.
Lastly, the Boss of the cellar should indeed drop some MI to reward those who go against Barrowholm
EDIT:
I mean I agree that people against Barrowholm should be rewarded with an MI (other than the Reaper of course)
Yes, yes. I appreciate that, on the grand cosmological scale, Ch’thon is really the victim here—heck, if my kids disembowled me just so they could make balloon animals out of my intestines, I’d be pretty bummed out too.
However, speaking from the point of view of one of those little balloon animals that presumably appreciates being given its own life to lead, a survival instinct, and most notably, a personal soul/spirit and afterlife to think about, I’d presumably prefer the course of action that doesn’t include a gratuitously painful death.
What I was saying was that my initial, uneducated, point of view was that I initially saw Kymon’s Chosen and the Cult of Ch’thon as sharing a few problematic similarities: They both gave the impression of being bands of unreasonable zealots that envision an ‘ideal’ future in which they’ve slaughtered everyone that disagrees with their dogma (or in Ch’thon’s case: slaughtering literally everything, period.) However, my points of view on both factions have become more nuanced as I’ve spent time learning about their appropriate backstories, and I was speculating if the Barrowholm’s wendigo situation would reveal a similarly nuanced explanation.
I’m glad to hear that going against Barrowholm has some connected MIs though—the boss was certainly easier to fight than Anasteria was, that’s for sure.
No it doesn’t
I meant I agree with your opinion that an MI should be given as a reward