The Phantom of Eldberg - My Most Hated Quest

[Zorro]

[rant]The conclusion to the Phantom of Eldberg quest is one of the most poorly written quests in the game. If you do this quest before King's Gambit, you're forced into losing a fist fight by a hard coded knockout resulting in Jorund getting killed. So they give you the dissatisfaction of watching yourself getting knocked out via a forced cinematic camera angle and then give you no cinematic satisfaction when you gut the bastards who did it - instead you're forced to watch a cinematic of Jorund dieing. What the hell?! I absolutely abhor forced fails in open ended RPGs. I hated the starting quest for the Heartfire expansion for that exact same reason (forced to lose a fight). It's lazy storytelling that breaks the game's own mechanics. I'd love to give a knockout to whoever wrote that quest.[/rant]

[Zorro]

Originally posted by BuzzardBee:

Jorund dying is scripted. It will happen no matter when you do the quest, whatever choices you make. He's going to die. You cannot prevent it.

It's not a forced fail. Sometimes we are powerless to change or prevent things. That's just life. You'll see that later on during the Battle of Kaer Morhen with yet another scripted death you will be powerless to prevent.

When I mean forced fails I'm not talking about "quest fails" - I mean fails where the game forces you to lose a fight or make a mistake even though you could have avoided the loss with your skill in the game's combat mechanics or knew by intuition someone was tricking you or what not. I don't mind scripted deaths per se (I've played through W3 twice so know what death you're talking about [won't mention for spoilers]); but in that case Gerelt wasn't even present (Ciri was) so I'm OK with it. I just get pissed when a stupid thug knocks me out in-game despite the fact I'm properly using all of the game's combat mechanics and could kill him with zero effort (even in deathmarch which is what mode I play in). Assassin's Creed is notorious for that type of assinine force-fed storytelling that makes you fail in combat or make really stupid choices (Black Flag being the worst culprit I've found in the series) but I've come to expect it since it's Ubisoft and I don't consider those open-ended RPGs where you can make choices (though I hear that's changing in Odyessy). Witcher 3 has such good storytelling that there's no reason they should force you outside of their own combat mechanics for a stupid thug in a tavern; it's lazy storytelling when they do that. If you put me in a fist fight or sword fight, let me fricken fight! Don't make me trip, fail to block, or fail to hear some dumbass guard with a crossbow behind me (you know what quest that is, right? [Patricia should have let me kill him for being an idiot]). Let me play the game using the mechanics you gave me to play it with, especially when it's not a boss fight.

[Zorro]

Originally posted by BuzzardBee:

Well, I'm not really sure what your skills have to do with it. It's scripted so that no matter what you do, he's going to die.

That's the point. I don't like it when the game scripts me to mess up. The guy punches me and knocks me out during the cut scene. It starts off by letting me "fight" and then decides "Screw that! We want you to fight but only so we can force you to get knocked out in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1..." That is not acceptable for an open-ended RPG where the entire game is supposed to be character and choice-driven. I can maybe accept it in a boss fight, but a thug in a tavern in a side quest? Sorry. That is not an acceptable mechanic. In fact to make matters worse, I always hated how lame the game forces you to fist fight. Remember when you gotta first fight those two bandits raiding the painter's house? You have two swords on your back.... But noooo... You gotta use fists only and we'll negate all your decoctions while we're at it. I take issue with that. But it's even worse when they force me into a fist fight and then change the rules half way in after they do a force-fed scripted knockout. Jorund may be scripted to die as part of the story, but don't script me to get knocked out as the trigger. Either let me friggen fight using the game's mechanics or do a full cut scene. But half-@$$ed combinations of the two isn't acceptable. The boss fight scenes aren't even that fragmented. That is not "playing" a game. That is not "fighting". That is lame @$$ story telling.

[v0]

Z you havent played tabletop d&d i see :) sometimes you must take one for story because dm says so (otherwise it'd be boring outcome). same here.

[Goran]

Originally posted by BuzzardBee:

Jorund dying is scripted. It will happen no matter when you do the quest, whatever choices you make. He's going to die. You cannot prevent it.

It's not a forced fail. Sometimes we are powerless to change or prevent things. That's just life. You'll see that later on during the Battle of Kaer Morhen with yet another scripted death you will be powerless to prevent.

Nope, it is not scripted. I did the quest without Jorud dying but I dont remember how. I think if you chose to beat the ♥♥♥♥ out of Lugos at the party in a fistfight, all this Skelige guys respect you so much that they dont attack you.... But beating Lugos is hard because he is a much higher Lvl than you are then.

[cosminchifan]

Jorund can live if you finish the quest before speaking with him, when you got the quest, go to lighthouse and talk with the guy from that house, don't go to jorund first, as the quest log told you, also you can do this quest after the quest of chose the king for island, but this mean you will not have the quest for cave of dreams, those guys i think are not alive anymore, at least this way i saved jorun in one of my playthrough.