Grimwing and the Knight With Needs quest

[Gregorovitch]

To complete this quest apparently I have to cut down "the tallest tree", a willow which I have located. At the moment the only lead I have is Barzahl told me I need an axe infused with water energy. I can find no information on line where I might find such a thing, online resources for this RPG are appallingly bad.

Can someone tell me where to find one (or some other way to complete this quest) please?

[tritonicallyorbital]

The only axe, to my knowledge, is in Benerii-Uss Shaping, on the north side, in a barrel. It's called a herringbone hatchet.
Fair warning, trying to chop the tree results in a fight, but AFAIK it's also the end of the quest after you return to Grimwing. I don't remember the enemies, they might be tricky, but if you buff or shape, etc. before clicking it / maybe try repositioning if you die, you should be good.

[Edit] Also, the Geneforge 2 - Infestation boards on the Spiderweb Software forums have indexes of quests and item locations among lots of other stuff. There's a megathread[spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com] pinned there. CTRL+F is useful there, if you decide to check it out :)

[Gregorovitch]

Thanks.

There's about two or three megathreads on the Spiderweb board. They are extremely difficult to read when you are after information about a specific quest. There's also one old style text dump "walkthrough" of the sort that pre-dates Steam and Youtube. Again it's very difficult to find anything in it.

Basically they all have bits of info about Grimwing scattered all over the place. They probably have an entry for this hatchet somewhere but unless you know it's name in advance you'd never find it since it's not indexed against either the quest name or Grimwing. I know 'cos I checked before posting here.

None of the info in these resources is index/collated against the quests which is really annoying. It's a huge time waster. Back in the day there were nothing like as many games produced as there are now so folk who were into cRPGs like this could be expected to spend hundreds of hours searching for items/ figuring out stuff like this. They might not get another decent RPG to play for months.

Today not so much. I've got a long list of them I want to schedule therefore I resent time wasting like this. Looking endlessly for things you need that have no clues as to their whereabouts is really not fun, it's more like work. There's lots of things like this in the game, books and so on. It's just boring, frustrating and time consuming. Not fun, just boring. This game needs a much better set of guide resources to compensate for its archaic design.

[tritonicallyorbital]

Well, the original set of games was made in the late 90s, IIRC. These games are just remasters - audio and graphics updates, new quests, reworked mechanics for the most part, but a lot of the old jank remains in the form of old quests, items and the base mechanics.

I agree they can definitely be really annoying. But I'd say lots of players either find the jank/goofy mechanics endearing/entertaining, or are there for the lore. I'm kind of in both camps. Played the OGs and have a natural soft spot for the remasters, but I don't play a lot of other similar games nowadays.

I definitely wouldn't care half as much about the games if it weren't for the storytelling. I've tried a few of Jeff's other games, but they just never caught on for me, because they lacked the pull of the Shaping plot device. Like, Avernum feels like just a D&D campaign set in a big cave; there's no real interest there for me, despite there being a big looming evil government on the surface to rebel against. The ethical dilemmas with the serviles and creations, though, that's peak to me. I love a good open-ended moral test of a game, probably thanks to the original games, lol.

[Gregorovitch]

Yeah the story and the moral dilemmas in GF2 are absolutely top notch, no question. The fetch quests, well, maybe not so much.