Fate: Holistic Improvement

Man, you don't have to be sorry. It's 3 AM and you're a weapons shop. It would be ridiculous for me to expect you to be open. I'm not gonna walk in at 10 and say, "Hey, I came by at 3 and you guys were closed! Somebody owes me an apology."

     

Way, way too much playing since the last post. I'm starting to see the wooden corridors of Fate's cities in my dreams.

As I recounted last time, solving the Cavetrain quest opened up the wider world, but before I explored it, I had a few things to clear up in Larvin. First, I had to figure out what to do about the multiple characters I now had split over two parties. I ultimately decided to get rid of Marina for role-playing reasons (what kind of party puts a 13-year-old girl in danger?) and get my banshee, Dichara, back.

In doing so, I gave up the second party. The idea is fun, but managing two parties is too annoying logistically. Perhaps the most irksome thing is that when one party sleeps, you automatically switch to the other one. If you don't want to play the second party, you either have to wait around for the first party to wake up (45 minutes - 2 hours, depending on how long you slept), or you have to put the second party to bed. The problem with that option is that if you ever need the two parties to hook up, it's almost impossible to coordinate their schedules if one of them is sleeping, especially since the minimum rest period is 6 hours. This happened to me with Dichara. I had to basically let the computer run for a while while I worked to get to a point where both parties were awake at the same time.

Later, I found another quirk with parties when I accidentally recruited a ranger in another city. If you only have one member of a party, the game won't let you dismiss him, even if your intention is to disband the party. You have to transfer a wanted character to the unwanted party, dismiss the unwanted character, then transfer the wanted character back.

Thus, more nuisance than enjoyment, though I will say that if I had a co-player, like a roommate or brother, it would be a lot of fun for each player to run his own party and swap every time one party had to go to bed. Since everyone from all parties gets experience from every kill, it's not like most games where you'd be crippled by the end from the "stolen" character development.

My second bit of unfinished business had to do with the Alarian Vaults--a little section of Larvin's catacombs that I'd declined to explore previously because a sign had said not to do it without "permission." Of course, this little side-trip ended up being 6 levels and took longer than some entire games. A key puzzle in the vaults had to do with a switch that turned teleporters on and off. There was a row of corridors where I needed some teleporters on, to advance, and some off, so they wouldn't kick me back to the beginning. This was accomplished by--you guessed it--splitting the party. I had one character wait by the switch while the others minced forwards, switching back and forth about 20 times to get the teleporter sequence right.

In the end, it was worth it. The level culminated in some kind of altar, where visits by each character increased their attributes and significantly increased the number of abilities they could improve--like doubled them.
    

The best quest reward in the game so far.

    
So lets move on to said self-improvement. Every time you level up, you get "permission to improve" an ability, and spellcasters get a permission to acquire a new spell. Both are accomplished at guilds. As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter what guild you visit to acquire spells, except variances in how much they charge. Once you've acquired all the spells of a particular spellbook, you can pay to acquire a new spellbook.

I had been holding off visiting guilds because commenters told me that there are variances in how much they improve, which is true. For instance, the Guild of Dark Wizards in Larvin will improve your intelligence by 1, but the Guild of Dark Druids in Cassida will improve it by 2--all for the same improvement slot. Thus, to maximize the uses of your slots, you want to find the guilds that improve the skill the most, and that meant solving the Cavetrain quest first so I could leave Larvin. What I didn't realize was that I could have been acquiring new spells this entire time without any potential penalty. So when I finally went to improve, most of my spellcasters went from having 5 or 6 spells to 30-40 across multiple spellbooks.
    

This guild improves intelligence.

    
For the other types of improvement, there are guilds that improve each of the 7 attributes--strength, dexterity, intelligence, charisma, stamina, skill, and wisdom--as well as those that increase spell points and hit points, and those that increase your various magic resistances, such as to stone, poison, fire, infection, critical hits, and magic in general.
    

One of two pages of improvable statistics, almost all useful.

   
With so many options, and a couple of dozen improvement slots for each character, I was paralyzed by indecision at first. Ultimately, I decided to go around cataloging each guild, and in the process spending at least one slot on the character who most needed it. As we'll see, I got through Larvin, Laronnes, Perdida, and Cassida, but I still have several cities (I think) left to go.

Intelligence, wisdom, and dexterity are all improvable by getting "help" from NPCs, at least up to 40, so it seems a waste to spend self-improvement slots on these attributes until I've reached 40. (Commenters have said that some NPCs improve skill, but I've yet to see it happen in hundreds of NPC contacts.) On the other hand, it takes a long time to do it this way. Later in this session, I started to find potions that effect permanent improvements on some skills.

Anyway, all of this self-improvement was done in the context of exploring some of the rest of the game world, which started by boarding the Cavetrain in one of its many stations. I knew the locations of 4 in the starting area: Halo Station and Park Station in Larvin, Lake Edge in Laronnes, and Moonfield Station in the wildnerness east of Larvin. I later discovered that the Cavetrain makes a continuous circuit through 16 stations.
   

   
Riding the Cavetrain is about as much fun as riding a subway in real life. First, you have to go up to a ticket window and buy tickets for each character. The game has some fun with this by giving you 8 ticket window options and a chance that any of them will have a clerk who's on lunch break, on strike, or just doesn't want to help. (This is a joke that I guess translates well across multiple countries.) You can buy several types of tickets for different time periods.
    

    
Then you go to the platform, where you're told how long the train will take to arrive. If you wait for it,  you actually have to wait. Not in real-time, but still. Then you board, and again you have to wait while the train goes between stations. That's a couple of minutes just staring at the screen and listening to the chugga-chugga of the wheels. If you're going between 4 or 5 stations, you could be on the screen for 10 minutes.

Rude ticket counter clerks, a guy with a severed limb next to a puddle of vomit, a woman being accosted by a bear, and coming up on "Park Station"...someone rode the T in Boston in the early 1990s.

You can't just go to the bathroom during this part because the game kicks you off at each station and you have to re-board. Also, a "ticket inspector" periodically shows up and kills you if you don't have a ticket. Even if you do have a ticket, you have to manually acknowledge his screens. Still, I suppose it beats walking the whole way.
    

That punishment is both cruel and unusual.

     
I settled into a pattern of getting off at each new stop and mapping a little of the area. I still haven't decided if I'm going to map the wildnerness--it's a 400 x 400 area--but I did try to map a little of the road network and area around the stations.

Some stations emerge in the wilderness; others emerge in cities. You can't tell by the names. When a train emerged in a city, I mapped it. Perdida was relatively easy, occupying a 25 x 30 area, roughly. Cassida took hours and hours--it was as big as Larvin and seemed bigger. It had a lot of shops only open during the midnight hours, so I had to make several rounds.
     

The huge city of Cassida.

     
During all of this, of course, I was keeping an ear to the ground on the next quest. In Perdida, someone told me that "something strange has happened to the citizens of Cassida," and boy was he right. Every NPC in Cassida was hilariously rude, responding to my greetings, flattery, jokes, alms, and requests for assistance with anger and insults. They didn't attack or anything; they were just uncivil. Here's a sample conversation:

Me: [Introduce] "Hi, my name is Jeanie! How do you do?"
Wizard: "Worse! I'd feel better if you leave me alone!"
Me: [Adulate] "You're able to cast great spells, I suppose!"

Wizard: "I am, but you're not!"

Me: [Enchant]

Wizard: "Stop trying to charm me, sucker!"

Me: [Joke]

Wizard: "Golly! I've never heard anyone stupider!"

Me: [Brag] "I'm a master of all trades!"

Wizard: "Gosh! You're the greatest fool I've ever met!"

Me: [Tell Fibs] "I'm looking for the end of the world!"
Wizard: "Then you should better do it and leave me alone, fool!"

Me: [Give alms]

Wizard: "Keep your lousy money, sucker!"

Me: [Ask for Profession] "What's your business"
Wizard: "My job! There's no reason to answer a dirty guy like you!"

Me: [Help] "Are you able to help me?"

Wizard: "Give me one reason to do that!"

Me: [Hints] "Do you know any secret hints?"

Wizard: "I don't think that you're worthy of my help!"

Me: "Sorry, I have to go. Bye!"

Wizard: "Get out of here, skunk. I want a breath of fresh air."

    

To be fair, "Winwood" is a pretty stupid name.

    
This went on and on with every single NPC. I tried to do the same things multiple times, tried being rude (curse, threaten, etc.), and everything else I could think of, but nothing broke the cycle. I'm wondering if I need someone with super-powered charisma to pierce the barrier.

Oddly, no one in the shops or guilds treated me any differently. Winwood was unable to get hints at any of the taverns, though.
   

    
In a square in the center of town, there was some kind of weird statue that seemed to have everyone's attention, and my characters remarked that it felt alive and it seemed we could hear weeping, but I couldn't find anything productive to do with it. Winwood kept piping up that we should talk to mages, but all the mages in Cassida were just rude and wouldn't give me any hints, so perhaps all of this is a later quest and I should go to other cities first.
     

    
I do have one other hint that I'll find a "medley of the oddest fellows I've ever seen" in the city of Valvice, so perhaps I'll head there next.
   

This might be a pot/kettle situation, though.

   
Miscellaneous notes:

• All of this self-improvement barely made a dent in my finances. I still have nearly 700,000 "piaster."

• But if later in the game, I complain about not having enough money, someone remind me that I have nearly 100,000 in investment accounts in the Calisto Bank in Cassida.

• I haven't covered retreating in combat. When you choose the option to run away, the game knocks you back to your previous square and puts you in "flee" mode for a few rounds, during which you can't interact with the environment, or re-encounter the same enemy party (although it might follow you). This has a couple of weird consequences for teleportation squares. First, if you're in fleeing mode, you won't trip the teleporter. Second, if you encountered the monsters just on the other side of a teleporter, fleeing will send you back through the teleporter to your previous square, even though it shouldn't be possible. Both quirks could have gotten me past the switch/teleporter puzzle in the Alarian Vaults if I'd had the patience.

• Neither "listening" nor "scuffle" ever accomplishes anything at the tavern.

• And "trade" never accomplishes anything with NPCs.

If you didn't finish programming the option, don't leave the option in the game.

    

• Each city has an awful lot of churches where you can go to pay to absolve your sins. Given this, it's a bit odd that I don't have any sins. Does this become a game element later, or do a lot of players just go around indiscriminately slaughtering friendly NPCs?

• The new cities featured both new NPC types--including pirates, master thieves, lord wizards, grue witches, and Zool wizards--and new portraits for some existing NPC types. 

    

Footpads in Larvin looked very different.

    

• If you cast the "Flare" spell outdoors during nighttime, it creates a weird red effect that you can see in the first screen of this post.

• I really wish there was a mode in which you could just walk from one place to another in a city without encountering any NPCs. Even if you immediately say goodbye, there's an annoying pause while the game re-seeds the position of the NPC you just dismissed.

• I love the names of some of the shops, taverns, and churches. For banks, we have the confidence-inspiring Random Bank, Shadow Bank, and Bank of Chaos. The Forgotten Mage Store sits off a back alley. Bottom of the Pit is a dive bar. The Greeting Club is a tavern near the entrance of town. Midnight Healers is a chapel only open from 23:00 to 01:00. Even the Cavetrain stops could be pulled off a real city's underground: Moonlake, Lanoux Station, Cheltic Square, Crying Fields, Desert Falls, Lake Edge.

   

This is my favorite. You could imagine them franchised all over the south.

     
So: a dungeon, some guilds, two new cities, and a small bit of wilderness area, and we've added 11 hours to an already-long game. But I like it and I've settled into a groove, so we'll see where it goes next. Time to start practicing all these new spells.

Time so far: 78 hours