Wintermind said:
It's also a fucking sidequest, no? As in, optional. The game doesn't have to gear every quest to be beaten by as many playstyles as possible, just the main game. That's like getting pissed that there isn't a peaceful solution to collect in on bounties.
Actually, no.
#1. Though it is a side quest, when to accept it you're TRAPPED in it. -1 for design there.
#2. Why are you trapped? Because your vision is blurred like they smeared Valvoline across the bloody screen until completion. The upshot is that you can't merely walk away and do something more exciting or even abandon the bloody thing without reloading a past save.
#3. They give you NO indication that you'll be stuck in this fashion when accepting the quest. It is BAD design to force the player to reload a previous save merely to abandon a quest (and, further, to not give any indication you'll be in a state which inhibits gameplay and/or fun). .
#4. The height of the quest is my biggest complaint. The battle is done in an entirely artificially manner (a magick ring of fire emerges that blocks you in like a wall). However, It's not even the forced combat I have a problem with (or the fact the creature isn't persistent and teleports into the zone after you've walked into it), it's the fact it forces you into a very narrow set of strategic parameters that I find abhorrent. The fight would have been difficult enough without the artificial cage-match twist -- a twist that doesn't make sense in either presentation or precedent.
Oh, and for the record, my character is level 35 and over 80% in most skills (90%+ in every skill I desire)
and I have the holorifle from Dead Money (a faaaaar superior DLC).
#5. The "theme" of the mission is that you're on a vision quest of sorts. It's even directly stated that you will uncover deeper understanding of yourself and/or your future.. However, upon completion, you get some paltry rewards and an XP increase... that's it. They could have at least stolen the schtick of that fortune telling kid from Outpost 188 in the main-game. Instead, we get little to nothing in the way of flavor to round out the experience (or, well, disguise the obvious fetch quest nature of it).
Come on, how the hell can you defend such blatantly bad design?
Lexx said:
In worst case, you open up your pipboy map and check out the location, instead of blindly running into questarrow direction.
I did. See below..
To the person who gave me directions.. I suggest you look at the map again and see if it's so obvious without the metaknowledge. I actually had to look the path up because I wasn't about to search around the base of a huge plateau with crap smeared all over my screen. Further, even when I found the ledge, the game routinely glitches in allowing you to get over the last little hump (you have to push and jump several times till the avatar walks up the final stretch of the hill). I actually tried this before looking it up and assumed it was yet another invisible wall like in the maingame and kept searching.
Bad, bad design.. even if you had fun with it (masochist, I presume), you have to admit the design choices weren't stellar in the least.
All this said, I don't want to be spoon fed. However, it makes sense that I could have asked this tribe where I was supposed to be going... and if the path was accessible through only one hard to manage/find approach, then they should have at least pulled a Morrowind and given me landmark based directions (I miss this in RPGs). It's not like the character's wouldn't know, given the setup of the story.
A further complaint which illustrates Obsidian's half assed approach to this DLC involves the final missions: Once you accept it you actually unlock several missions but only the mandatory one is enabled in your quest book. *NO* exposition is given about the other missions and the only way to uncover them is to open your quest log and see that they magically appeared. I was actually a bit disoriented when the game teleported me and my final companion to an arbitrary location on the map without giving me any frame of reference for what I was to be doing, aside from a quick commentary from that aforementioned companion. After guessing the quest marker was indeed where I was to venture, I fought my way across the map only to discover I missed the two other opportunities and then had to backtrack across vast distances.
It just wasn't presented well, engaging or fun...
Edit, I found an image.
Sadly, I can't doctor it in paint or photoshop to show the path which seemed logical to me vs the path you actually have to take, but if you go north from the fishing lodge and go into the narrow passage to the left of the next location indicator (looks like a mountain resting on waves) you'll see where the Ghost Bear spawns. Per the map it looks like you can take many paths up to that region but, in actuality, most of that "grayer than the water" landmass is sheer cliff. You have to access it on the far left hand most portion of that area and it's a very narrow pinch.
