Reply To: Revisiting Albion

[DavidN]

#6892

I’ve now gone through the game’s first significant dungeon! I remember this being a huge roadblock to me when I first played the game, but it really isn’t anywhere near as bad as I remember. Perhaps spending gold on combat training made all the difference – I had a couple of points where more powerful enemies knocked Rainer out cold immediately, but I had enough healing items to keep going, occasionally going back to the world map and resting. The 3D view doesn’t really do the game any favours, though – it’s so hard to swivel round and see where you’re going even when you have a torch lit (and it’s nice that putting Drirr in the lead raises the light level more as well!) I find myself bringing up the map after just about every movement to make sure I’m going where I think I am.

But what is it with PC RPGs and the comically low hit rate in combat? Typical fights have both sides just flailing around uselessly and only occasionally landing a hit, a frustration that I remember from the Eye of the Beholder games. It makes me feel that my characters are less effective than they actually are, because in most other game genres, missing this much would be a serious problem! It seems that enemies suffer from the same, though.

The gun is an incredible advantage, more than I had remembered – I thought that it would suffer from the same hit rate as the close range weapons did, but it really makes a huge difference when you can take so many hit points off the bigger enemies at once. The way that they need to stay still during a turn for it to hit them is a bit of a disadvantage, but not enough to balance out the massive damage it can do.

Having completed the dungeon, I find myself not really sure what to do now – I think Drirr mentioned talking to Frill again but he seems unmoved by us having found Argim as well as the ex-murderer. I’ll ask around.