Dragonflight: The Glass Ceiling

The best that Andariel is ever going to get.

For about 40 hours, Dragonflight offered a middle-of-the-road, inoffensive game. It was sometimes slightly interesting, sometimes slightly boring, sometimes slightly annoying, sometimes slightly amusing. It was never on the extreme of anything. Then it did the one thing that is 100% guaranteed, in every circumstance, no matter how good the game, to absolutely enrage me.

Experience caps.

More specifically, experience caps that are set well below the level that you would expect to reach in a normal game.

Until I hit the cap, leveling in this game had been reasonably rewarding. It happens so subtly, and at different intervals for the different characters, that you often don't notice. Then, suddenly, you realize your character has 100 more hit points than before, or has an extra combat move. The combat moves were particularly welcome, making tough combats easier and easy combats faster. My archer capped at the highest move total, with 6 (9 with the "Speed" spell), and it's been fun to watch her take out 3 enemies in different rows with a move-shoot-move-shoot-move-shoot combo.

But now I won't get to experience that any more, and I still have four dungeons completely unexplored. The last dungeon--12 levels--took me almost another 8 hours. I might have as much as another 40 hours of gameplay where I won't experience any character development at all. Screw you, Dragonflight!

There are two primary reasons that I hate experience caps:

1. They remove the noble, age-old process of grinding as a mechanism to make the game easier. The earliest RPGs, starting with PLATO and extending into games like Wizardry and Might and Magic, reached an accord with players, offering two basic avenues for completing the main quest. You could embrace the difficulty, meet challenges head-on, and triumph through tactics and strategy (with a little bit of luck), or you could grind against Murphy's Ghosts and triumph through over-leveled characters. You could, in short, choose a path of intelligence or a path of brute force.

2. They make you feel like the game world is completely determinate. Obviously, the plot is going to end the same way (or in the same limited number of ways) for everyone. The only choice you have as a player is who your character is going to be when he gets there. Then, you run into a level cap and realize that every character is going to be pretty much the same. Any individual advancement you felt you were doing was illusory; any grinding you did was wasted.

I guess there won't be any more of this, either.

There are two ways to get around these concerns. The first is to implement a complex system of skills and abilities so that even if there's a cap, each character is unique at the endgame in his strengths and weaknesses. Experience caps still piss me off in such games, but it's slightly mitigated. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins are good examples of this mechanism.

The second is to ensure that the cap is so high that a character is unlikely to reach it in a regular game. This makes grinding a still-viable avenue. Quest for Glory, the Ultima games, and most of the Gold Box titles follow this option. Skyrim implements both solutions (and then effectively removes caps entirely with the "legendary" option starting in some recent patch).

Without either of these factors, experience caps mar good games (Pool of Radiance, Baldur's Gate), make average games bad (Dragonflight), and make bad games absolutely horrible (Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation, Don't Go Alone). In the case of Dragonflight, I don't even understand the reasoning. The experience cap is set to 20,000, so it's not like it was about to experience a stack overflow. (Is that the right term?) And why are there extra, unused 0s in front of both hit points and spell points if the experience cap was going to stop any further development in those stats?

Argh.

Okay, aside from the experience cap thing, I finally started to feel like I was making progress in the game. For the first three dozen hours, I felt I was just wandering around somewhat aimlessly, with no clues on the main quest to find out what happened to the dragons and restore magic to the world. But the last session was marked by the resolution of a number of side quests (or perhaps steps on the main quest) that offered a few pointers.

First, I found the two secret caves of "The Shadow" and recovered a couple of quest items. When I last blogged, I had just entered one of them in the dragon's tail. The other was at a bend in the dragon's neck. Based on that description, I started in the northernmost mountain square and determined to search my way southward, but I found the dungeon in literally the first square.

That was a freebee.

Both dungeons consisted of a long corridor with several rooms (the first one had a bunch of pit traps and teleporters, but it would be tedious to recount it) and an encounter with "The Shadow" in the final room. In both cases, "The Shadow" disappeared when I hit him one time, leaving his treasure unguarded. The first treasure was something called a "Staff of Stone" and the second was the magic sphere stolen from the elves, containing the souls of the elven high council.

I want to make fun of "The Shadow" for his pink cloak, but I'm not sure it's pink. Irene is away for the weekend.

With the sphere in hand, I returned to Nimraviel and gave it to the grateful queen, who rewarded me with another "Piece of Eltam" plus a magic bow for Andariel.

One side-quest solved in Brindil-Bun: I gave a few healing potions to a sick guy, and he rewarded me with yet another "Piece of Eltam."

My god, these people really have been deprived of magic.

The orc king wanted me to have the leaders of humans, elves, and dwarves sign his treaty. The elf queen and dwarf king signed it with no problem, but it took me a while before I realized the human leader was the king in Port Pylon. (I had expected it to be the town council in Pegana.)

With the treaty signed three times, I returned it to the grateful orc king, who loaded me up with gold.

After this, I stopped encountering orcs as wandering monsters. That was pretty cool.

This was good because it was clear I needed to buy a new ship. Three unfortunate things about traveling by ship in this game:

• Depending on where you charter the ship, the crew will only go so far.
• If you walk too far away from the boat, you have to give it up. There's no way to get back to Pegana, for instance, while retaining your ship.
• If you crash it into land three times, the crew mutinies.

I had crashed into land twice, and I was getting sick of having to reload every time it happened a third time. More important, I needed to explore the continent to the east, Dorithannon.

I grew up in an orphanage in a landlocked city. Why are you letting me navigate at all?

I chartered a more expensive ship in Scatterbone and headed east, stopping at the antarctic continent on the way, but unable to get into the dungeon because I lacked the password (see below). Dorithannon was surrounded by impassable smaller islands, but I found a landing spot on the north next to a temple. While I was there, I decided to try the "Temple Teleport" spell, which I had recently acquired. You have to stand on a temple to cast it, and it will take you to another temple, as long as you know the name. I tried visiting one called FAROUT which I hadn't otherwise discovered. It worked, and I found out why I hadn't found it: it was on an island in a lake, along with a little city named Sotul. (There's no way to cross inland waterways in this game.) I figured something major would be there, but the only thing of interest was a store selling magic chain. I bought a couple of sets.

It's good they have this shop to sell armor and protect the inhabitants against all those enemies who have no way to get here.

  

Regrettably, I saved after this, and I returned to the temple on Dorithannon to find that the crew had sailed my 8,000-gold-piece ship off into the sunset.

There was a dungeon in the area, but I couldn't get in for reasons I'll describe below. So I explored south and found myself funneled into a narrow passage between the mountains with what looked like some kind of hut.

  
The moment I stepped on the hut, I got the "game over" screen with absolutely no explanation.

I guess that was like Sonny Corleone's toll plaza.

Okay. Using "Temple Teleport," I returned to the mainland near Nimraviel, walked from there to Scatterbone, and spent pretty much all the money I had left on another ship. This time I managed to find a way to the southern part of Dorithannon, to a city called Bagnol. There, the "mogul" gave me a magic crystal sword and two magic chainmails in exchange for 4 diamonds. I'm glad I hadn't sold all the diamonds because the crystal sword ended up being important.

I had two other missions in Bagnol. One was to deliver a letter to a guy named Grednak. He took it and gave me a package to return to Sonok in Luthag. The second was to visit Ostul at House #5 for a map piece. No matter how many times I banged on the door, though, no one would answer.

Yes, I tried moving around and coming back. Repeatedly.

At this point, I had almost run out of ideas. Aside from returning the package to Luthag, I didn't know where else to go. I had one note to give a poison potion to a woman in "Negame," but I hadn't found that town yet and didn't know where it was.

My problem with five dungeons.

There were five dungeons I hadn't explored because all of them wanted some kind of password right at the entrance:

• In the desert on the main continent
• On an island to the south of the main continent
• On the antarctic island
• In the mountains on Dorithannon
• In a swamp on Dorithannon

I didn't know where I'm supposed to get this information. I'd been to every town I could find, knocked on every door I could find, solved every quest I could find, and I didn't have a single clue. I reviewed the documentation and all my notes to no avail.
  
I had just finished typing up a posting, ending with a call for hints. (Yes, I know the site that's been linked several times already has the passwords. I didn't want to know the passwords; I wanted to know how to get the passwords.) Just before I hit "publish," I decided to make one last quick scan of my inventory, and what do you know, I had something called "Note Dungeons" that had every single one of the passwords. I think perhaps it came from the elf queen; there was something in her speech about giving me "a list of the names of the old schools of magic," which I guess these "dungeons" are supposed to be.

Well, hell.

With this in hand, I decided to try a swamp dungeon on Dorithannon, and I ended up spending about eight hours there. It was 12 levels with lots of secret doors and teleporters to confound navigation. One level consisted entirely of logic riddles in the "one always lies, one always tells the truth" tradition, though I thought they were a bit too easy.

Imagine how easy the justice system would be if everyone either always lied or always told the truth.

The dungeon presented me with an enemy I hadn't fought before: a statue. Although the game indicated that it was taking damage from my attacks, no amount of damage I could do was enough. It just wouldn't die.

Previous experience with the "Staff of Stone" suggested that it was a missile weapon, but I couldn't get it to work. Fiddling around with it, I figured out that the staff has to be "loaded" with precious stones like rubies, emeralds, and opals (thankfully, I hadn't sold all of them), which it shoots like missiles. So charged, it was capable of taking out the statue in one blow.

Anyway, the entire dungeon only had a single unique treasure: a "Dragonring." It seems to act as a high-level ring of protection, but other than that, I don't know if it has a unique use. It was about this time that I noticed the experience cap, so I was pretty miffed during my long slog back to the surface. (Supposedly, there's a "Leave Dungeon" spell, but I haven't found it yet.)

Starbucks ought to adopt this classification: small, medium, large, dragon.

   
Back on the surface, I wasn't eager to go into another dungeon again, so I returned to Luthag and delivered the package to Sonok. He, in turn, asked me to go to Franklin in Scatterbone. I did. My "reward" was just a bunch of prattle about magic mushrooms in a nearby dungeon I hadn't yet explored.

But it was what happened between Luthag and Scatterbone that made me think the game might be finally coming near an end. At some point, I had discovered that going off the edge of the map would wrap me around to the other side. The shortest passage from Luthag to Scatterbone was this way, but I was surprised to find an island in between. (It's in a dark part of the world map.) The island turned out to be the Dragon's Vale mentioned in the back story.

An NPC finally has something useful to say.

It was on this island that I finally found the city of Negame, where I'd had a longstanding side quest regarding a woman named Cynthia who dabbles in poisons. I had a stack of poison potions I had no idea what to do with (you can't poison weapons or throw them). When I showed one to her, she was delighted, and she finally gave me some information on the main quest:

I'm aware of your great interest in the long-lost dragons! Yes, of course, you are! Listen: Should you be foolish enough to actually want to visit The Dragon Valley, the unicorn will block your way. Yes, of course I know myself that unicorns are the symbol for sweetness and beauty, you young fools! It's still beautiful, this unicorn, but it's condemned, corrupted by the Shadow's magic. A giant spellcrystal was necessary to change a unicorn into the valley's devil, but the Shadow managed it! And the only chance to free this unicorn and to get into the valley of the dragons is to destroy the crystal! So go and don't try to fight the unicorn, but displace the work of evil.

Great! Well, how do I do that? The answer seemed to come from a wandering NPC: "did you know that crystal destroys crystal?" No, I didn't! Thanks!

Thinking that the endgame might be near, I wandered west from Negame and found myself at the entrance to the Valley. I was taken to combat with a "banned unicorn" and a giant crystal. I figured all I had to do was maneuver Bladus, with his crystal sword, over to the crystal and attack it. Unfortunately, that didn't work. He couldn't get close enough, and the blade didn't work like a ranged weapon.

And that's where I am now. I figure there must be some mechanic that will allow me to destroy the crystal with the crystal blade, but I haven't found it yet.

In the meantime, I have four dungeons unexplored and several outstanding mysteries:

• What are these Pieces of Eltam? I have three of them (out of four, according to the elf queen). If I look at them or try to "use" them, I just get a message saying that it's incomplete.

• Does the dragon ring have a special function?

• Which is more important: the dragon ring or the pieces of Eltam? I ask this because there's a guy in Negame who wants to trade me a dragon ring for a piece.

• Why can't I get into House #5 in Bagnol? There's supposed to be a guy named Ostul with a map piece there.

• Where are the rest of those map pieces? For a while, I was recovering a couple per dungeon, but they all dried up. I still have six to go.

• What is the use of all these "common" spells like "Heal a Tree"? The game hasn't called upon them once.

• In a city called Trolian, there's a long maze through water--the locals call it their "water garden"--that culminates at a house where a guy won't speak to me because he only "sees adventurers with an open mind." What does he mean? Do all of my characters have to be neutral in their magic position (e.g., not leaning towards black or white)? If so, I need to find some black spells for three of them.

Hey! I've been pro-gay marriage since the 90s!

I'll take light hints--not spoilers!--on any of the above. In the meantime, here are some other miscellaneous notes:

• I didn't realize until hours after I had it that Dobranur's magic "battlehatchet" is a missile weapon as well as a melee weapon. This would have saved a lot of time.

• In my descriptions of cities, I'm eliding a lot of time spent knocking on doors and being greeted by NPCs who simply say things like, "Welcome, adventurers! What do you want?" or "You should visit the blacksmith!"

Every city has a bunch of houses like this.

• Bagnol had another "tribute statue," this time to fantasy illustrator Rodney Matthews. 

• A lot of doors in the dungeons seem designed specifically to waste keys. You unlock them (sacrificing a key) and there's literally nothing on the other side. The 12-level dungeon near Bagnol required so many keys that I eventually had to "key scum"--reloading if I found nothing useful on the other side--so I wouldn't have to leave the dungeon to go buy more.

• Creatures incapable of swimming or flying sometimes spawn in the middle of the ocean.

Poor bear. He must be tired out.

Though not too tired to climb onto the boat and attack us, I see.

• I haven't talked much about potions. So far, I've found nine types: healing, magic restoration, imbue a non-magic weapon with magic, strength, spirits, wine, holy water, poison, and dispel magic (the latter seems to be a unique item for that one imp quest). You can theoretically mix them together, but I don't see how that really improves anything. I hardly ever use them anyway. It's easy enough just to wait in place to restore hit points and spell points, and enemies stopped being difficult enough to require strength potions a long time ago. They'd all be more useful if you could use them in combat.

• I also find that I rely very little on magic, with the exception of "Dispel Undead" (pretty much the only way Rinakles gets experience), "Light," and "Healing." Offensive spells in combat like "Magic Arrow" just deplete spell points for little benefit over a regular attack. I haven't found a single use for all these "utility" spells yet (e.g., "Heal a Tree," "Moulded Stones," "Glowing Stone," "Stone Hardening").

Maybe a little more Fallthru while I wait to see if hints come in. If not, I still have four more dungeons to try.