Star Trail: Plunder and Lightning

 

The party has displeased the gods.

       

I've started a number of newer RPGs or quasi-RPGs over the last couple of years, all for the Xbox (I don't spend time playing PC RPGs that aren't for this blog), including both Pillars of Eternity games, Avowed, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and The Outer Worlds. The part I enjoy least are the first few hours, when you're still learning the game's conventions. I'm not talking about its controls, which are usually easy to figure out, but rather more subtle aspects of gameplay. 

 

One of these days, I'll try to organize a comprehensive list, but here are some of the things on my mind as the game begins:

 

• Do health and mana restore automatically, or do you need resources to restore them? How precious are those resources?

• How do you distinguish important NPCs from generic background characters?

• Is this the sort of game where every item has potential value, or are there too many items in the world to possibly grab them all? Is it the sort of game where a thorough player can find every bit of treasure, or would that be insane?

• Is this the sort of game where when you see a valuable item, you take it, or does it have an ownership/theft system? If the latter, what are the consequences for violating it?

       

Just a break in the rhetoric to note that by the end of this session, I did have the Salamander Stone.

       

• What kind of karma meter does the game have? What are its consequences?

• Does the game have fixed classes, or does the player build a character through skill selection? Which skills are most valuable? By the end of the game, will the player have amassed almost every skill, or only a small percent? Does the game offer a way to dump selected skills and start over? 

• Do dialogue options have plot consequences or are they just a means of gathering information?

• Will NPCs keep saying the same thing every time I talk to them, or do I only get one shot at each conversation? 

• How much freedom does the player have to explore the world, outside the current questline? 

• How much control does the player have over the inventories and actions of NPC followers?

       

That is a very small sample of questions whose answers only slowly become apparent, sometimes not until well into the game. Many of the most amusing moments in my personal RPG history have occurred when I thought I was playing one type of game and it turned out I was playing another. Imagine bringing the morality of Ultima IV when it comes to opening a town's treasure chests to, say, Phantasy Star. Imagine coming off of Bethesda's Dishonored, where loot is so limited that you actually get a score after each mission with the percentage that you managed to find, and then trying to scoop up every item that you see in Skyrim. Imagine trying to just tromp off in your own direction during the opening chapters of Kingdom Come.

      

Because your goddamned manual tells me to.

         

In most of the period that his blog has covered, the need to answer these questions has been less acute. Very few games of this era have offered complex enough systems for role-playing, economies, NPCs, crime-and-punishment, and other such themes. But some of them are getting close, and Star Trail is definitely one of them. In recent entries, continuing into this one, we've learned that this is the sort of game where you sometimes need to talk to NPCs multiple times about the same subject. We've also learned that it's the sort of game where having a large inventory of utility items matters, and in which you don't necessarily want to loot everything that you see.

   

You can say that the manual warned me about this or that, or that NPCs warned me about this or that, but that's disingenuous. Manuals are full of what we call dicta in the legal profession. They often give weight to mechanics that barely exist in the game itself or fail to mention important elements. The same manual that obliquely warns the player to click multiple times on the same keyword also emphasizes things that play little role in the game. NPCs are no better. Some of their words may seem prophetic in hindsight, but there is no RPG player that, lacking such hindsight or a hint, operationalizes everything he's told by an NPC.

      

Have I shown the full-party death screen before? If not, here it is.

       

So, yes, I guess I shouldn't have taken so much loot from the dungeon. In my defense a) it feels abandoned; b) I've been trained by 30 years of RPGs that when you find a chest in a dungeon, you open it; c) some amount of looting in the dungeon is 100% required to finish it. Also in my defense—I went back to check the screenshots on this—what Inradon Xermosch specifically says is that no one should "be tempted to desecrate the halls of the Supreme and Most Ancient of Gods by stealing from Ingra's legendary hoards of gold." He doesn't say not to steal anything, just gold. I didn't take the gold.

      

Okay, I did, but just to see what would happen. I reloaded.

      

As this session began, we were about halfway through the Dwarven Pit. We arrived on maybe the fourth or fifth level. In the first room, we found a structure surrounding a well or pool. The structure had four alcoves with gargoyles in them, and as we approached, the gargoyles came to life.

   

It took me four tries to win this battle with no party deaths. The first time, we were at half-strength, and death was inevitable. (I appreciate that the game lets you reload from within the middle of combat.) Even at full-strength, they were obnoxiously hard. When I finally won, the party was in such bad shape that I needed to rest for about 48 hours. Other than experience, I don't think the battle earned us anything. 

    

Almost immediately thereafter, I ran into the level's second tough battle, against six undead dwarves wearing tattered leather clothes (this leather becomes important). After a couple of losses, I managed to win mostly by casting "Lightning" over and over. The spell, which blinds its target and makes him unable to attack or parry, seems to work against everybody. All three of my spellcasters can cast it. If there's a more useful spell in the game, I haven't mastered it yet.

       

My go-to strategy works again.

          

I still feel like I need some more experience with the battle system before I offer a detailed analysis. For now, I'll say:

   

• I generally like the number of tactics available, and the ability to do ranged things on the diagonal is a major improvement from Blade of Destiny.

• The axonometric view still makes it hard to see what's happening behind the figures, and it can make it hard to position characters in the right square. I wish there were functions to rotate and zoom, though I realize that's asking a lot from a 1994 game.

     

Try to parse anything going on in that cluster.

        

• I don't understand how the game determines the starting positions of characters and enemies. I wish there were more control over it.

• I wish there were a combined move/attack function. Clicking on an enemy ought to simply move the character next to him and attack with the primary weapon.

            

Auto-combat sometimes produces mysteriously horrific results, even with easy enemies.

       

I've experimented with auto-combat a few times. It's good when the party's success is 100% assured. But it doesn't make the best use of spells, in particular the aforementioned "Lightning." When victory is assured, I sometimes switch to the first type of computer control, where you actually see the characters and enemies acting on the battlefield. This can be turned off in an emergency. The few times I've tried the summary auto-combat, it's produced weird results with no explanation, such as my strongest party members mysteriously dead while my weaker ones are still alive, or one out of three spellcasters coming out with an empty mana bar while the other two never cast anything.

    

The battle with the undead dwarves gave us a Stone Medallion that turned out to be important. I think it was this level that had a giant wheel that we turned and produced "a gurgling sound" in the distance. I was never sure what this accomplished.

      

I assume this did something.

       

The next level had some rivulets of water. When I stumbled into one, the game said that the characters washed off the soot that they had acquired back on Level 1, restoring their charisma.

   

The next stairway went up rather than down, and we found ourselves in a new area of the earlier level. It had a walkway surrounding a deep pit, with stairways down. On the floor of the pit was a stone slab. The game gave me the option to try to lift it and then had the characters struggle in vain for three iterations of "do you want to try lifting the stone slab again?" before finally offering me the ability to use the crowbar I was carrying for just such a purpose.

   

If it's "no trouble," why not just offer me the crowbar option in the first place?

       

On the next level, we found another chest-that-I-was-not-supposed-to-loot, this one containing 3 Girdles of Might and a set of parchments that were key to solving an upcoming riddle, so I'm glad I looted it anyway. At this point, every single member of the party had a Girdle of Might, with one to spare.

   

I didn't record in which chests I found which parchments, but the totality of them suggested that Ingerimm had six apprentices, and those apprentices wore special leather boots, gloves, and jerkins. It was thus little surprise when I found a chest containing seven pairs of each. It had a plaque on the front that read: "Take the God's as long as you need it, though don't use it any longer than need demands."

        

Part of the clue that, I guess, I wasn't supposed to read.

       

Getting my party members clad in the attire took forever. I had to drop so much stuff that I nearly cried, including all my spare water skins (fortunately, the level had a fountain). The issue wasn't so much taking the leather pieces—I could have done that one at a time—so much as preserving my existing armor, pants, and boots for when I returned the leather pieces to the chest. (The game offers no option to temporarily drop items or store them in chests.) I thus had to clear at least 18 spaces. In the end, I think it was mostly unnecessary. The final area had no battles, so I could have split off one character and sent him ahead.

   

In fact, the game seemed to be hinting at that. After we donned the gear, we went down a corridor with a bunch of glowing floor plates, and a bunch of my characters peeled away from the party, not wanting to continue. I forced them back into formation.

     

I'm not sure I care what Gnomon prefers.

      

The corridor ended at a wall with a circular symbol. One of the bits of parchment had suggested that we hold up a torch to the symbol, and it was at this point that I discovered that I didn't have any torches. I had dropped them all after Lilii enchanted her wand to serve in the place of a torch.

        

I'm curious how anyone else solved this puzzle without opening any chests. Please comment.

       

Fortunately, I remembered a place on Level 1 where some torches and other gear were stashed in a corner, so I went back up there, grabbed one, and returned.

   

Holding the torch up to the symbol opened the way into a forge. We woke up a golem who asked for a "pledge." I assumed he was talking about the Stone Medallion, and I was right. A cinematic showed the golem tossing the medallion into a pool of lava and then operating the forge for a while. In the meantime, we could converse with him, and he had a bit to say about the Salamander Stone.

     

Part of the cinematic showing the golem forging a weapon that I didn't get to keep.

       

When he finished his work, he presented us with a magical sword made out of "asthenil." I was happy for about 30 seconds, and then it became clear that the game expected me to trade the sword for the Salamander Stone. Bastards.

    

I did the honorable thing. Not that it mattered.

     

A chest next to the one with the Salamander Stone was "filled almost to the brim with jewelry, gems, and coins." I had the option to take it or add some of my own coins to the collection. I did neither in the "real" game. On a reload, I looted the chest and got 5,000 gold pieces as well as a bunch of gems and jewels, but the doorway leading out of the area closed and wouldn't open again. Since the party shares all wealth, I think maybe you could steal the money by sending a single character into the area, looting the chest, and letting him die, but for role-playing reasons, I didn't try.

   

Back outside the forge, we returned the leathers and then made our way back to the surface. I didn't find the alternate exit that some commenters mentioned, but I needed to return the key to Xermosch anyway. When we emerged in the dwarven town, we found a very different situation than when we entered. Dwarves refused us entry to their houses and shops and openly threatened us on the street. Xermosch wouldn't come to the door and told me to "put the key on the hook." Clearly, even though it was necessary to take some items from some chests, I must have taken at least one item from a chest I wasn't supposed to loot. I hope it doesn't have any long-term consequences.

       

I got this message several times, but no one actually attacked me.

      

We hustled out of town and hit the road for Lowangen. Almost immediately, we ran into the priestess who we saved from orcs at the beginning of the game. She praised our progress but warned us that there were more challenging tasks ahead. She told us we could keep the experience and levels we had been granted previously—I didn't even know that was a question—but said that we'd eventually have to do things that "the goddess" wouldn't approve of, apparently in the name of ends that the goddess would approve of.

       

Your goddess needs a philosophy 101 course.

      

The next few days were fraught. We completely ran out of food on our third day out of the dwarven town, so we had to rely on nightly hunting, which I often had to try three or four times. Something kept sniffing around our backpacks in the middle of the night. Someone seemed to be stalking us on the road. Characters got diseased several times for no apparent reason. As we passed a crag, a mysterious stranger yelled at us to "take it to Lowangen!" A couple of parties of orcs attacked us.

        

This happened several times.

      

A large dwarf named Hagebar, son of Haralda, accosted us as we rounded a bend. He warned us that an Orcish army was camped on the east bank of the Svellt River, just outside Lowangen.

      

Eventually, we reached the (menu) town of Yrramis, on the Svellt River, south of Lowangen. It had a Temple of Tsa and an inn. The innkeeper, Haldara Alberg (probably Hagebar's mother, though a slightly different spelling), told us that Lowangen was completely besieged by orcs. We stayed a couple of nights in a suite, ate a couple of decent meals, and moved on.

     

"Young Svellt" sounds like a teen magazine.

                   

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• I want to emphasize again how good the automap is. It annotates doors, chests, stairways, and special encounters more clearly than any previous automap I can remember. It also lets you fast-travel on the surface. You'd think after all that praise, I'd have a picture of the automap to show you, but I forgot to take one, and my party is now in the wilderness. Next time.

• Commenters wanted me to mention the journal. I agree that it's cool. It records texts and major milestones so that the player doesn't have to. The player can enter his own notes in the journal, but the utility is limited since the game doesn't index the terms in custom entries.

      

I apparently did anyway.

       

• Gnomon, the dwarf, reached Level 3 at the end of the last session. No one joined him during this session.

• I thought Lyra was insulting the other party members every time I asked her to treat their diseases, but apparently there is a disease called "Numbskull." I don't know why they keep getting it.  

         

"Stop calling me that!"

         

I crossed the Svellt, hoping to travel up the west side before entering the city, but I don't know if it's going to be possible. The map shows Lowangen mostly on the east side of the river. We'll see. I'm anxious to be rid of this Salamander Stone and to see what the next phase of the game will bring.

    

Time so far: 23 hours