*Slight Spoilers* Electrodynamic Cenobium

[Altair1243]

No offense but can we seriously stop with having maps with two paths and one leading to plot, the other towards NPC's that if you kill early you can't figure something out? It's really annoying that I accidentally killed those priests THEN found the Interrogator and now I have to look up the answer because I'm not guessing from like 3-5 choices on 3 different inputs

Not sure how someone let this pass QA, cause it's kinda braindead in that it's really easy to screw yourself over here and I'm not reloading a save over something so trivial that it probably shouldn't have passed through into the full release anyways (not in this state, surely). There should at least be a hint or something to lead you in the correct direction first

[Cutlass Jack]

You have to kill those priests no matter which way you go. And when you run into they're bosses later they're very apologetic about it.

They don't provide any answers to the puzzles or conversations.

[Altair1243]

Originally posted by Cutlass Jack:

You have to kill those priests no matter which way you go. And when you run into they're bosses later they're very apologetic about it.

They don't provide any answers to the puzzles or conversations.

Yeah, I guess I just realized that. Very confusing and, honestly, entirely unnecessary. The whole situation could be better designed IMO

Edit: And when I say I "realized" it I mean I looked up the answer because I still couldn't get the "password" for the cogitator and there were a bunch of other people who were also confused. Again, really poorly implemented from a logical standpoint

[Cutlass Jack]

I tried really hard to avoid killing them. But unfortunately their ambush is right where you need to go.

The clues to the computer thing is super obscure. Honestly just looking up the answer is the best call.

[corisai]

Priests you'd killed - are unimportant (either corrupt ones or friendly fire issues). Real priests are blocked behind quest-locked door so you can't bypass them. So in fact location is one-sided, just preted to have two routes available to you.

[Altair1243]

Yeah, I'm just gonna take a break for a day or two at this point. Really annoying that when you walk into the trapped area on the left (facing from the entrance) there's an ambush which culminates in a Chaos enemy at the end of the hallway. Honestly, the fight isn't difficult but the trap is extremely frustrating to navigate around

Just really hating this area overall now. Started off on a bad footing with a confusing puzzle and enemy placement, now just essentially insta-gib traps that are more of a fight than the actual fight

Edit: Honestly, if this game was a 4.5/5, probably a bit generous, this fight alone probably takes at least .5 of a star away. Really thought we had learned about annoying encounter design by now but it keeps getting shoe-horned in (The vague puzzles were bad enough TBH)

[Cutlass Jack]

Here's a tip for that electro puzzle. The floor has burn marks where the lightning hits. Make sure your people are standing on a non burned spot at the end of each combat turn and you wont get hit. Makes the whole thing less frustrating.

Outside of the fight you're best off moving your team one at a time through that area. The timing isn't too hard to keep track of if you're not herding them all at once.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Cutlass Jack:

Outside of the fight you're best off moving your team one at a time through that area. The timing isn't too hard to keep track of if you're not herding them all at once.

I would say that using a Pause (spacebar by default) - it's easy to move a whole herd at once. Just make sure place them close to next trap (but not INTO it of course).

[Purple]

I just talked to the mummified priest hiding in the wall, told him I was shanking heretics, and got a swanky party buff for ~90% energy resist. Made the traps a lot less agitating to fight in.

Made the Tech-Priest ambush even more one-sidedly dumb, but nobody said these guys were smart.

[Moffin Bovin]

there is no clue for that puzzle. you have to either brute force it or look up a guide.

Its dumb

[Aranador]

Or, be a massive WH40K nerd and know the answer - I was 2/3 nerd and could get the first two parts, and took 2 tries for the third.

[Pixie1001]

Yeah honestly, Owlcat puzzles are always needlessly vague and complicated. For this one you need to pass through the entire level looking at random innocuous lore snippets the game gives you about the various machines and consoles scattered about the place, and then use those to guess what the rite might be based on whether you saw those adjectives come up in the otherwise unrelated lore snippets that you probably only glossed over.

You probably wouldn't even think to write down or memorise the clues until you'd exhausted every other option in the level, but the 'clues' don't look anything like clues until you do write them down and notice some of the words appearing in the options.

It's a really unintuitive and metagamey solution that would never work in real life where dialogue isn't presented as a canned list of multiple choice options.

Some people really enjoy working through puzzles like this, combing through the level for anything of relevance until they figure it out, and I think it's cool that Owlcat adds content to cater to them, but if you're not that type of person I wouldn't even bother attempting most of them unless you have a pretty good idea just from looking at it - just look up a guide.

[REhorror]

I honestly thought these guys are chaos because they look so freaky LOL (not into AdMech infantry lore).

Imagine my surprise when I find out that's how they are supposed to look like.

[Altair1243]

Originally posted by Cutlass Jack:

Here's a tip for that electro puzzle. The floor has burn marks where the lightning hits. Make sure your people are standing on a non burned spot at the end of each combat turn and you wont get hit. Makes the whole thing less frustrating.

Outside of the fight you're best off moving your team one at a time through that area. The timing isn't too hard to keep track of if you're not herding them all at once.

Which is all well and good until you realize, as I later discovered, that those enemies at the back are upping veil degradation somehow (I didn't really look at their abilities TBH) which culminates in a chance to spawn a Chaos Entity (IIRC that's the name but the large monster). Now, admittedly, I don't have any issues with this on paper since they're cultists and otherwise abysmally weak but on the other hand that "trap" is already kinda annoying

I just happened to get lucky with my timing on starting the battle and it was a non-issue which, again, kinda speaks to the design of this IMO. It's pretty much either a massive problem or a non-issue and this is predicated on (A) timing which you sort of have control over at the start of battle but it only seems to stay in one "section" for ~3 rounds (B) the damage is kinda insane + applies wounds/trauma and if you mis-time/forget you can start a turn in the trap zone, which then hits you for every hex you travel inside of it - It just feels like a cheap way to gimp your character, both for the mission duration and for that combat, due to one misplay.

I'd probably feel better about it if it was either or but my thoughts aren't decided about it and I'm not a developer. Just pointing out my thoughts after clearing that section and, honestly, I may be a bit biased in my assessment due to the rather confusing introduction to the area

[Altair1243]

Originally posted by Aranador:

Or, be a massive WH40K nerd and know the answer - I was 2/3 nerd and could get the first two parts, and took 2 tries for the third.

Not certain since I haven't tested, but there was that one Logic(?) check in the trapped area when jumping over some crates IIRC that mentioned something similar. It may be that bypassing that gives you the "correct" choices, but if true having no options to learn the correct choices is really bad design. I'm sorta into 40k and my first choice was correct (maybe the second as well, not sure) but really they're all close enough that you could kind of argue for just about any of them when in a vacuum. That, and most people aren't going to shuffle through (probably) literal filing cabinets worth of 40k lore to search for an answer. They're just going to spam every option in sequence until it's correctly guessed or google the answer so just save some time really

Side note: Pasqal's chagrin at not knowing the rite is hilariously in-line with my image of the Adeptus Mechanicus, so kudos for that chuckle and the party comments at the end of Act 1 during the boss fight (Trust me, take Heinrix for that fight if you can - It's pretty good)

On a tangent, Owlcat has a real hard-on for overly-cryptic puzzles and it's like 50-50 whether they are a welcome surprise or have overstayed their welcome. Devs, if you read this, just dial it back like 15-20% or something and ask yourselves "If I didn't design this, would I know how to solve it" or better yet have someone blind test it if possible and see how long/how many breaks it takes to solve it. Unless you're really into puzzles, it's otherwise really annoying to have actually zero idea what to do - especially if it appears the puzzle is mandatory/hiding something really valuable/desirable

[Altair1243]

Originally posted by Pixie1001:

Yeah honestly, Owlcat puzzles are always needlessly vague and complicated. For this one you need to pass through the entire level looking at random innocuous lore snippets the game gives you about the various machines and consoles scattered about the place, and then use those to guess what the rite might be based on whether you saw those adjectives come up in the otherwise unrelated lore snippets that you probably only glossed over.

You probably wouldn't even think to write down or memorise the clues until you'd exhausted every other option in the level, but the 'clues' don't look anything like clues until you do write them down and notice some of the words appearing in the options.

It's a really unintuitive and metagamey solution that would never work in real life where dialogue isn't presented as a canned list of multiple choice options.

Some people really enjoy working through puzzles like this, combing through the level for anything of relevance until they figure it out, and I think it's cool that Owlcat adds content to cater to them, but if you're not that type of person I wouldn't even bother attempting most of them unless you have a pretty good idea just from looking at it - just look up a guide.

Honestly, this but also it's not a puzzle game. Not saying anything other than puzzle games can't have difficult puzzles but I figured this might be the case and it's so frustratingly obtuse as to be insufferable at times. If you want difficult puzzles, then play an actual puzzle game or at least advertise that on the box so people who are uninterested turn away and don't rant on your game

I like Owlcat as a company, though their games could stand to be less game-breakingly buggy on launch if I'm perfectly honest, but even I get routinely sick of the mind-games. Like the colored portrait puzzle in WOTR, it's extremely unlikely you happen to notice that and it blocks of something really nice that I missed in my first and second runs, which somewhat mercifully were both bugged beyond hell so I had to restart after like 40+ hours anyways