[SPOILER] Playing with the Devil quest help.

[Heri]

I'm working on "Playing with the Devil" mission and I don't want to kill those woodcutters, they can kill the women, what should I do? I always end up with dead woodcutters and alive women.

[[x] Navity]

You can pickpocket the witch potion from them before they smear it on their fannys. Or scare them off before they reach the place.

[Azmael]

Originally posted by x Taan:

You can pickpocket the witch potion from them before they smear it on their fannys. Or scare them off before they reach the place.

Then your quest won't get completed / get failed.

Only solution right now is kill woodcutters / let them kill "witches". No good ending afaik.

[Heri]

How do I do that " let them kill witches" thing? They always keep coming at me..

[Azmael]

You need to watch them from distance and do nothing even if the quest updates and tell you to stop them.

[Heri]

I follow them from a distance and when cutscene begins around the fire, Henry step forwards and gets involved.

[Azmael]

Then try bigger distance. I was so far i almost didn't saw what's going on.

If you are far enough, the cutscene won't trigger.

[freddebw2]

Problem is that the game wont let you finish quests in any other way than the "intended" way or ways, and if you somehow still manages to do it cut scenes or dialogue will not appropriately reflect your actions, wich kind of makes me sad.

Before I got this game, I was given the impression you could solve quests anyway you wanted, with freedom of choice, but that is sadly not the case. Almost all quests have either an optimal or a few approved solutions. When I say optimal or approved solutions, I don't necessarily refer to rewards, but an actual appropriate conclusion.

On this specific quest I tried unarmed attacks, thinking I should be able to save everyone, but ofc I couldnt as usual. The women would cower and the bandits would run away over and over for ever, instead of surrendering or anything like that, and the quest wouldn't update unless I actually killed them. I don't remember if I could leave the place, but atleast waiting in place didn't fix it.

I hope most of this stuff is bugrelated and wont stick in the "final game", due to linearity or cut scene limitations, because I'd like to think I have different choices while playing and that my choices actually matter or that I atleast get the appropriate dialogue after completion etc.

I have about 200 hours in this game, I'd say about 100 hours are replays due to different bugs, be they gamebreaking, graphical, unapropriate quest endings or stuff like chests suddenly not being targetable, forcing a restart of the game. I'm lucky I've had alot of time to play recently, but most people don't have that and wasted hours replaying actually matters alot.


The game and world is beutiful and runs OK on hig/very high for me, wich is extremely important to me. 60 fps is crucial and I got it most of the time, except ofc when there are many npcs running around, especially with torches, causing fps to drop down in the 40s. The problem is even though it says 40 or even 50+, anything less of 58ish looks like 5-10 fps . I tried locking at 30fps, thinking it would be smoother if there was no variation in fps, but 30 is just not smooth enough at all, although alot smoother than 45dips when locked at 60. My guess its not live fps, but an average that is shown.

I've seen alot of claims of the game not being optimized, I don't know if that is justified or not, since the game is more detailed and beautiful than any other game I've played so far.

All negativity aside, I really enjoy the game and believe it can be one of the greatest games I've ever got my hands on, atleast for me. Now if they could just release the patch so I can enjoy some random encounters on my second playthrough (=

[Heri]

Thank you for the long reply and yeah, I didn't like the way that quest ended, in my opinion there should be both good and bad endings for quests with multiple endings. You want to give freedom to players? Then let them decide if they want to be good or evil right? I tried attacking them fists aswell, didn't work. So both endings of this is kinda like a stick with shi.t on both ends.

[freddebw2]

It was a bit longer than initially planned, and sorry for going a bit off topic, couldn't help myself :)

[MEGADORI]

I tried to do this quest in a way so that I can still get both the virgin and the merciful achievements.
Sadly I am too dumb for pickpocketing, so I tried watching from a distance and not disturb the ritual, thinking that this could maybe fail the whole quest, which would be ok for me.

To my surprise, and probably to Henry's horror, after midnight the two devils appeared and started attacking the women. I repeat, I only watched from a distance, so the whole cutscene with Henry getting the ointment smeared in his face and all the things that follow didn't happen, so he was completely sound and sober when he really did see two devils, complete with furry satyr feet, attack the women.
So of course he had to intervene at that moment. With bare fists he knocked both guys out, and saw that they were some kind of bandits. Strangely they can't be plundered, so he couldn't take the weapons off them.
One woke up very quickly, so Henry knocked him down again, and while that happened, the second one woke up, saw the fight, and decided to beat it (I don't have the perk, so it must have been luck). The other one, after waking up again, attacked again, so afterwards Henry carried the body away from the clearing. Upon waking up, the devil WARPED back to his original position and attacked, again. After knocking him out another time, I carried him even further away, and then when he woke he finally ran away, which triggered the automatic wait until morning.
I somehow had the hope to have found a happy end for the quest, BUT when Henry returned to the clearing, the women lay dead.

So here is what Henry must think happened:
The ointment didn't work as it should have, and the women did something wrong so their incantation did not summon Lucifer, but some minor violent devils. The women were overcome by fear and stood there petrified. Henry came to their rescue and fought tagainst the devils heroically. He could not take their clubs as they were probably under some hellish spell. But he succeeded to chase the devils away, then he fell unconcious from exhaustion. But the poor women had in the meantime died from the fright.

And what probably really happened:
The scumbags had heard the rumors about the women going into the woods alone, or had watched them on an earlier occasion. They disguised themselves as devils in order to either scare or sleep with the women, but then decided they would rather attack, probably to r**e and then kill them just to be safe. When Henry intervened, the cowards ran. But having been hit on the head with a club a few times, he passed out, and when he woke in the morning, the women had died from a combination of stress and the side effects of the ointment (or maybe overdose).

The end.

[BossStompTV]

Agree with what's been said here re: being railroaded into certain endings. This quest and the first time you meet Father Drunkass were two of the most agency-jacking immersion breaking expereinces for me in over 20 years of playing video games. I had to quit immediately when I realized that my one button press to have a drink meant my character was going to fly off into a mad bender without my further input.

Terrible quest design.

[Heri]

Wait a second, are they bandits? I thought their clothings were Henry's imagination, because when I kill them and fall asleep, I wake up with two poor woodcutters corpse, this one is a small but important detail, if they are just some poor fellas who wanted to kill some witches, I wouldn't kill them but if they are something else, bandit etc. I'd go save the women.

[Ori]

the corpses say bandits, so they are bandits , yet for whatever reason its killing "innocent" woodcutters who attack me

[zerstorer335]

Originally posted by HeriKuriKeri:

I'm working on "Playing with the Devil" mission and I don't want to kill those woodcutters, they can kill the women, what should I do? I always end up with dead woodcutters and alive women.

The way to keep woodcutters alive is to cut and run, yourself. Run far enough away and you'll be on your "different kind of trip" and wake up to the aftermath.

I tried it, recently (after who knows how many updates and patches) tried a "duke it out with the woodcutters long enough to let the women escape" approach. But it turned out that the women just died in the village. As I was getting back to Uzhitz, people were calling for the guard and saying "there's a corpse, there!" and I followed the guards to Zlata's dead body in her living room.

So it seems there's no way to keep both parties alive. But, as some have said in other places, this isn't a straight-up RPG. There's a significant storyline that we follow. So some of these quests are us playing through a set plotline or maybe vignettes meant to tell a story about some historical aspect.

[Drakzen]

I do like how not every quest lets you have a good ending where nothing bad happens though.

Don't take strange drugs from forest witches kids!