Skyrim: Drinking Past the Pain

Adventures in Skyrim - spoilers ahead! You can follow the rest of the story here!

 

Kinky. I mean. Jinkies. Like in Scooby Doo.

The key from the deep opened the locked room of the palace which contained one person: Maisi, the missing wife once thought to be skeever chow. Jarl Metellus had kept her up there and  doing all sorts of things for his own amusement. Now came a hard choice: If I freed the woman, or told her husband, then surely they would break the law by attacking the Jarl and everything would "end" once more.

I decided to leave her there and confront Metellus directly, but the old man laughed for he knew I could do nothing to him. Also, he let slip that since the Dwarven "Camera" if you will in that one room was broken, he worked out he could do whatever he liked there. Damn.

There was still another way to go though: Down into the radiated tunnels. The researchers had determined that if I assembled a full set of Immaculate Dwarven Armor it would protect me from the radiation, and I had all but one piece now (I'm very thorough when it comes to searching the dead). The unique chest piece was being worn by the paranoid psycho and there was no way to convince him to take it off. The guy even slept with it on (Yes I did an Edward Cullen and watched him while he slept, lol).

Despite him being a dick, I wasn't going to murder him just for that. Instead I opted to just enter the radiated chamber without it. Boy was that really painful, and I came near death constantly but finally I reached the dome at the bottom of that radioactive pit.

How?

Don't forget, this is me. My standard loadout in any game must include over 100 healing potions, the stronger the better. I just drank my way past the pain, like all true heroes do.

Gauntlet

This top down, four player co-op game sees a party of adventurers entering the titular Gauntlet of some really bored yet powerful being who enjoys watching blood sport. At least he's nice enough to leave a ton of gold and food (health) lying around as incentive to push forward into danger that scales slightly and has maps that also alter a tiny bit to keep you on your toes. Said gold is automatically shared among the party, regardless of who picks it up, which is a good system for co-op stuff. It can then be spent either on fluff items or a small selection of upgradable relics that can help in your adventures.

Those relics tie in to the rather different potion system in this game. Food is health and is consumed (or destroyed) as soon as it is touched. Potions you can carry around but they don't heal you. Instead they let you use the relics you are carrying. Got only one potion? Well, tough you can only use one of your two relics, once. Kinda annoying that you can't trade these sorts of things in game but if you have voice chat going (which I don't think is included in the game - big minus for me) it's easy enough to try organize.

Another thing you might need to organize is who plays what character at the start, as there can be no duplicates and all of them play very differently. I think the Wizard is the most powerful of the four, but is also the most complicated to play with all the spell juggling. He's very handy against the all too frequent "monster spawning stones" that appear though. Death on hard mode and above also requires a Skull Coin to pay for a revival. The only way to gain these is by killing a ton of monsters and since the Skull Coins are shared between the party there might be a lot of downtime for killed members since the levels are kinda on the long side.

Fortunately there are save points after every chapter (3 levels) so it immediately is better than Forced, which plays very similar to this complete with the annoying "shared screen" style. I'd personally prefer closer save points too but what can you do. All up it's a fun game for an already organized group to play. I give it three summoning pillars out of five.

MMO Design: Witcher Potion System

[Part of my MMO Design Folder.]

In my previous review of the Witcher 2, I mentioned that I quite like the potion system there and thought I would explore the notion of putting a similar thing in an MMO. Currently the most common types of consumables I've run into in MMOs are the ones that either give you a buff for -x- amount of time or the type that you drink for immediate bonus like restoring HP or Mana. Sometimes you can drink like there is no tomorrow, as fast as you can press a key. Sometimes there's an arbitrary cool down.

Personally, I'm the type that keeps over 100 health potions in my pack because there's simply no penalty in doing so, and no penalty for drinking them in quick succession when I need to in most games. Mabinogi does start giving you stat deductions in that event but it takes a LOT of drinking to get there.

The system in the Witcher is pretty simple. You have a "poison" bar that fills up based on the type of consumable you are taking - often with three being the maximum before suffering an overdose. All of them have an effect duration, even the "health" potion which just temporarily improves your regeneration rate. Most importantly, almost all of them have negative side effects. A potion of fire resistance might make you more susceptible to cold for example.

This would force people to think about what they are doing instead of chugging down every type of bonus they can. It also makes encounters more manageable from a design perspective because people are more limited with what they can field on the table, unlike trying to make a challenging fight for both non-dosed players and those who have access to every consumable in game.

On the down side this might reduce the "gold sink" nature of potions somewhat, if people when faced with uncertainty of what to get simply buy nothing. What do you think?