Brand new player, frustrated on very first mission (1000 year man)

[Jeffreyac]

Hi folks,

Just a clarification - not frustrated because I don't know how to proceed, but a little ticked my choice feels forced. Reading reviews on this, what sucked me in was the repeated comment about how you had a lot of choices in how to proceed, and your choices truly mattered - and I was intrigued.

(not going to label this as a spoiler, as the very first mission and I imagine everyone has seen it - but if for some reason you are a brand new player like me, and you don't want ANY info, here's your chance to stop reading!)

I'm still intrigued, but afraid I may have to lower my expectations a little... got through the first part, but after reading all the info, I decided my captain would honor the engineer's request and not wake him, as MUCH more than 50 years had passed. His family was long gone, it was a sad tale, and the best I could do was leave him to his sleep.

...except I couldn't find that as an option. I googled a little (I figured what the hell, there's a lot of gameplay here, I want to get the feel for it, so I'll look at a playthrough for the very first mission) and saw I could get 3 endings here: 1) Kill the engineer by starting the process, turning him into meat. 2) Wake the engineer, lie to him about how much time has passed and reset the computer. 3) Wake the engineer, be honest (or lie, but forget to reset the computer) causing him to get hostile.

Frankly, I hate all these choices. I don't want to kill the guy, I don't want to lie to him just to gain a crewmember, and don't want to wake him to tell the truth and have him pissed.

The end result is I feel like I'm railroaded into a choice to proceed, but don't like any of the options. I guess I was hoping for more of an RPG style open ended choice... I mean, would it be that hard to have an ending where you leave him alone?

(sigh)

OK, rant over. Maybe I'll go get my dice and randomly choose an ending on this one.

[1410c]

That was an interesting read - I think my take away is that you have a lot of choices (sometimes more than 4 and even then there's a lot of variation within the same outcome - but that'd be spoilers), but at the same time it's not a wishing well and you have to bend your choices around the world it takes place in - as it is in the real world.

Let's say you are the captain and you want to let him sleep - but the spare part you need is locked inside the freezer with the guy, as is the case here. You simply don't have the choice - not because the game prohibits you from that but because the world (in this case the game world) simply doesn't allow that to happen. It's basically a moral dilemma. If two friends want to meet me the same evening in different locations to talk privately I can't demand of my life that I can do both, I have to make a choice. And yes, one could argue that life railroads me there, but ... oh well, back to this case here:

As you said you have three options here. What would a "I don't wake him, it's really sad" Captain do? Opening it without power would kill the guy. Turning him into minced meat would kill the guy. A Captain that is so empathetic would probably pick neither. I also think a Captain like that would not lie to him - probably even tell him "hey, I didn't want to wake you, I needed that part, I'll refreeze you if you want to". So that leaves two options:

Be completely honest: This causes the engineer to ask for a suicide pill and if you don't give it to him he'll slump in the corner and you leave alone - BUT since you also re-enabled all the freezers energy and controls and fixed the solar panel he is absolutely capable to just get back in the freezer himself - which he is most likely to do, since he even said "I just want to keep sleeping should that happen", and from the dialogue it can be surmised that he didn't dream in cryo.

Lie to dampen the blow: It would be very understandable to in the beginning stutter and stumble around trying to argue that to keep the shock from him - even though Cap does a bad job of it. But since you wanted it to be spoiler free - if you lie to him and he finds out, it will in the end lead to a struggle where the Engineer gets re-frozen by cap - which is basically what the engineer wanted.

So actually I see two plausible causes of action of the kind of captain you proposed to play ... and thank you so much for sharing your thoughts :)

[Ze 🐊]

muito bom

[Super Captain America]

I suppose they should have written in the ability to end your game at any time via the suicide pill, and to refuse to continue the heroes journey and suffer death. So you could say, "I refuse to wake the engineer, even if it costs me my life," and then game over.

[Rosenkrantzer]

Interesting read indeed. I kind of agree with you Jeffreyac. We should have designed a forth option just to make the player feel he can choose to leave him alone. I look at our game now as people play it and I have hundreds of ideas and changes I would have loved to be in the game. But 6 years into the design process you kind of go blind on your own project. In hindsight, it would have been good to have some dedicated players who really took this game to heart to go over it a couple of times and share inputs, but it didnt happen for some reason. I also agree with 1410c, and I am sure this is how we reasoned back then, life doesn't always give you options that are fair or have a desired outcome. (and... it's a game. We had to limit the choices somewhere). I think we had regular point and click adventures in mind and thought this would be a nice step forward for the genre. So trust me, the Captain 2 (if it ever comes to be) will have addressed many of these issues. Again thank you all for sharing your opinions, it really helps. And Jeffrey ac, perhaps lower your expectations a little, just to avoid too much disappointment. I wish you would keep regular point and click adventure in mind when you judge this one on the open world aspect.

[Jeffreyac]

Thanks for the response - I appreciate it, and have gone on to enjoy The Captain very much.

I should say, too, that I think I kind of overestimated the scope of the game when I began (and if I recall, I typed this post originally very early in my playtime!). Or, more accurately, I think I misjudged the scope - I was thinking more along the lines of a complex RPG, and I think The Captain shines more as a 'choose your own adventure' style.

This isn't a slam on the game - I have enjoyed it very much! It's more just an admission that when I typed that I think I had a different and perhaps unfair view of what I thought the game was vs what the game actually was. Once I started looking at what WAS there, I found I got more enjoyment!