Boreas Colussus feedback [spoilers]

Okay, finally got around to the Boreas Colussus and the lens it contains and I have to say that the area is a microcosm for what I feel is wrong with the game.

Instead of a consistent theme, the area is a mixture of random puzzles. It was like one of that '101 puzzles' you see for a buck at the supermarket. Unlike Kiln, which was a maze build around valve puzzles, we have word games, riddles, invisible walls, block puzzles, and chess puzzles. Most of these could have been a solid concept for an entire scene, or maybe two together, but all mixed together it feels haphazard and, like much of SOTA, like Port just slapped together a bunch of random bits and bobs.

For specific feedback:

• The ghost corpion is a jerk move, the area it is found in is setup so modestly high level characters can fight their way through, but the ghost corpion requires a much higher level implying that you should run by it, but it isn't clear that you can unless you already know the scene layout.
• The pit of doom can be defeated by angling the camera to look down it, corpses on one side and a hole on the other give it away.
• The poorly textured sphinx will reject correct answers if you capitalize the first letter, it also didn't cause my cursor to change color to indicate an NPC I could talk to, though it might just be the size of the model.
• The orientation of the chessboard isn't entirely clear when to step onto it, which is important for the first puzzle, since the direction pawns are moving is important. It wouldn't have hurt to have a large version of your 'opponent' glaring down from the opposite side.

 

I would like to know how it fits with the story. There are ways to spin it but I didn't see it the first time I went through. Hopefully, more detph has been added.

Seemed like a trickster's paradise more than the approach to a Titan of Truth. A while back I brought up that there was no indication as to why the Colossi exist in the first place. I hope something has been added to explain that.... and why the lenses would be scattered there... and.. and... and...

 

I agree as with most scenes that have new tech, puzzles etc in the and look pretty cool, they are missing indicators telling what the scene is about. It is meaningless to walk into these areas. Cool puzzles don't make up for not knowing why the scene exists or for us to find reasons to be there besides those puzzles. What is happening in this scene for example?

Also me and a friend visited a new scene yesterday and ran around looking at the fish hatchery and the whole scene and thought the scene was cool but again no indications of what has happened here or why come here was totally missing. We are not mind readers. What is up with that? Unless we will have things that show us and give reasons to be there are coming later. If a quest we don't know about brings us to an area but we don't have that quest then the scene tells us nothing. No NPCs were barking about what's happening, no narrations is telling us anything. I have said this many times scenes need to stand on their own merit. Not everyone will do quests and run through areas in a proper order. This game was developed out of order.

@DarkStarr please can we get more evidence of why a scene is there. Such as notes, narrations, NPC occasional comments, quests found on dead bodies, notes on dead bodies or laying around but more, more, more to tell us what the area is. Sometimes we just drop in to an area and no quest has lead us there. It is a bit of emptiness that can greet us if nothing is telling of the scenes lore and purpose. That is what I mean by a scene standing on it's own merit. Reason to visit is already there and reason to revisit is already there.

edited

 

I concur with Majoria.

I can add though... that I have been pleasantly surprised with the wee adventure that starts off in Yew and then branches off to the Plate Boots of Courage. It gave me reasons to visit a couple of scenes. I just wish it might be easier to locate a few of the other start points for some of those armor pieces, though.

 

Spoiler

Helms - Outskirts areas.
Chest armor - Solania, Storms Reach, Jaanaford
Gloves - random encounters (corpion)
Boots - Yew, Sunless Barrens, South Dracvald Spur
Legs - Ardoris, Harvest, Jaanaford

 

The ghost corpion is consistent with the fact the devs design many areas to actually cause you unavoidable death at least once in many many areas.

They stopped us all from griefing but we pay them to grief us!

 

There was a sphinx?

 

Spoiler

Given that he's dead, and they didn't really explain why or how it seems entirely in keeping with the rest of the nonsensical path

.

 

Having just worked my way through this scene, I have to agree with much that's been said. OK, I could go with the initial Mysterious Monk test and also the pit of doom fits into the Titan of Truth mythos, but the chess puzzle only works if you know chess and the Ghost Scorpion is just plain nasty!

 

If it asks riddles found on the back of cereal boxes, it's a sphinx, regardless of how reptilian it appears.

 

Spoiler

I guess it's a depth of sotry issue. If you aren't going to explain something as fundamental to the story as the death of the character you seek, then really anything goes.

 

Spoiler

The whole thing is terrible, honestly. Presumably it was Notus? Did he actually kill Boreas, or was death the result of wearing the crown too long? Hephaestus supposedly made the crown. But Boreas hired him... for something? To make bonesteel? That doesn't seem like something Boreas would do. Unless, maybe, it was the crown's influence. But then, he can't hire Hephaestus to make the thing that would eventually make him hire Hephaestus. I suppose that Boreas could have hired him for some as-yet-explained reason, then Notus convinced him (Hephaestus) to make bonesteel, and the crown to keep Boreas from interfering. But if that's the story, the game doesn't even come close to explaining that. And it still doesn't clear up exactly how Boreas died. I can understand that maybe they wanted you to only get part of the story now, and more in episode 2, but if that's the case, you have to at least be able to make sense out of the part they gave you. And was the whole Artifice part of Boreas' plans, or soemthing Notus grafted on later? What was the original purpose then? I tried to pay close attention the second time through this quest, to make sure I didn't skip anything, but I came away just as confused the second time.

 

I admit that I didn't go through the story yet, so I don't know if I'm missing something, but the first thing I thought about when going into the Boreas Colossus scene was "why are these puzzles here?" So... there's no real explanation at all?

I don't know, there are different approaches to things like this, but the first thing I was advised when I was learning to DM was to always ask "why is this here?" because DMs would often put random traps or magic locks or whatever in dungeons without any explanation, and if your approach to DMing is to be a storyteller, things need explanations.

I do like the concept of a puzzle labyrinth though; I posted about it at the time , but I agree story stuff needs some background and foundation.

 

This was because you could attack him. I assume its still the case, though I haven't visited him since they took the imps out. I would end up attacking him accidentally when fighting imps. And other players would go in the scene just to farm camp the poor dragon, which would be very annoying in Multiplayer if you went into that scene and the dragon was either gone or aggro'd on you because other players decided to kill him.

 

Not sure if it is possible any more, I couldn't target him as I approached him.