The lack of a failure state is a bit jarring

[Chuck P]

Death aside it's a bit weird that you can sleep your way through the entire game, miss every important event, every major revelation, talk to absolutely no one, and still get to choose an ending if you follow the wild goose chase on the last day. On my first playthrough I saved everyone, completed almost all the objectives save for a couple minor ones, and picked the ending that felt less ♥♥♥♥♥♥. it wasn't a happy ending, but at least it felt earned. It was a satisfying conclusion to a gruelling journey.

...Then on my next playthrough I tried sleeping till day 11, just to see what happened. Barring a few minor changes in the dialogue, everyone acts as if you've been following the plot to the letter. No matter how badly you play nothing really changes. It kinda breaks the carefuly crafted illusion that your actions matter. Failed to create the panacea? no problem, Rubin does it for you, somehow. Missed your visit to the Abbatoir? no matter, Aglaya finds the source of the living blood on her own, no idea how. Hell, you may never even have talked to them before and still you wont miss a beat. So what is even the point of you?

I get that from a narrative perspective true victory is not just reaching the end, but understanding the full picture, and that by missing important developments you are failing to reach this understanding, and this is a failure state on its own. And in a weird way it almost makes sense that you can't derail the plot, as the meta-narrative implies that everyone is an actor following a script, coming up with the occasional improvisation to make up for your mistakes and that way keep the play going. So those half-assed course corrections are almost clever, in a way.

Still, it feels kinda cheap. Having a game where everything is stacked against you and you can't really win can be a great experience because it encourages to overcome the impossible, but it kinda loses its appeal if you can't really lose either. Especially if you look at the prologue, which is a callback to the bad ending of the original Pathologic, where the main character apparently ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up so royally everyone died. That's not really the case in the end. There isn't even a bad ending per se, the worst ending you can get is the one where you don't get an ending, but the play just stops because it assumes you lost interest. That's how inconsequential you are.

[Muscarine]

See, the fact that you consider saving everyone the "win condition" says a lot about what type of player you are - it's not an insult, but sometimes i wish less people would care less about optimised power gaming
What the best build ?
What's the best ending ?
Where's the wiki/reddit to tell me exactly what to do, what's meta, what's the tier list ?
Maybe i'm aging but to me that's becoming beyond tedious and unimaginative

In this game, it's "save" everyone is just one scenario among others

Conversely, a lose condition or game over would make no sense at all

As for the ending, without going into spoilers territory, don't forget you're pulling only one string
The play goes on, with or without you

[☼Arkonev☼]

There aren't easy solutions that also dont' require a ton of extra work for the dev teams. They tried to cover the important bits as best they hood.

The point is to effect the player's psychology not to make the experience itself ancessible. There are already stone walls the player can arrive it on their own. But there was little need to build hard walls into the experience itself.

That is my opinion

[Heikai]

Originally posted by Muscarine:

Where's the wiki/reddit to tell me exactly what to do, what's meta, what's the tier list ? Maybe i'm aging but to me that's becoming beyond tedious and unimaginative

Are accusing OP of using external guides/help? I saved pretty much everyone (except Big Vlad and Oyun) during my first playthrough and completed almost every quest without any external help. (Partly because saving people was a requirement for different endings in the original game.) I have also mixed feelings about the fact that you can sleep through the entire game and still get the same endings. I kind of wish the game would have told me that right from the beginning. I'm the type of player who enjoys difficult games and challenges so Patho 2 didn't feel all that hard to me. I was probably overly cautious the whole game.

[Muscarine]

Originally posted by Heikai:

Are accusing OP of using external guides/help? I saved pretty much everyone (except Big Vlad and Oyun) during my first playthrough and completed almost every quest without any external help. (Partly because saving people was a requirement for different endings in the original game.)

I'm not, this is a general observation about power gaming, although it's a possibility
OP made it clear they played the first Pathologic so i'm assuming that's where it comes from
I don't mind it, after all the game even has a logic for save scumming
I'm only saying people should stop limiting themselves doing optimal only, especially in a game like this
Which i understand is complicated because the gruelling setting kinda reinforces you into this mindset

I put "save" everyone in quotes but i could also put "everyone" in quotes

If both Vlads are alive, it ends poorly for the Kins

Also the first infection roll is very RNG if you don't know exactly how and where to get your first shmowder, it's very possible to lose one of the Stamatin brothers before you get a chance to do anything about it.

Assuming you even know what a shmowder is, which you likely don't if it's your first Pathologic game. so you aren't hunting stashes and will most likely not tell yourself i need to drop all i have for this 35 item i have no idea what it is

And this random component isn't poor design, it just means that's how the prompt goes this time

Either way, you're both saying it's your first playthrough, but in fact it's not, since you played the first game.

Even Mark Immortell acknowledges the first game exists

I have also mixed feelings about the fact that you can sleep through the entire game and still get the same endings. I kind of wish the game would have told me that right from the beginning. I'm the type of player who enjoys difficult games and challenges so Patho 2 didn't feel all that hard to me. I was probably overly cautious the whole game.

You shouldn't, that's an overarching theme independent of your own role.
It's central to the game's philosophy. You are, after all, just one actor, or whatever you'd like to call it.

I wouldn't call the game that hard either, first of all you get a lot of warnings, and second the only real difficulty is the entry barrier of understanding the fundamental mechanics.
But it does an awesome job instilling the dread.
Like i said in another thread, i personally get to the point i need to take a break because i end up feeling sleep deprived and high on a caffeinated fuelled frenzy myself. Not everyone will of course.

Funnily enough i think what prepared me the best to play the management portion of Pathologic 2 are mods such as Misery and Dead Air for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. COP

edit - Also this thread should really be marked as spoiler

[Chuck P]

Originally posted by Muscarine:

You shouldn't, that's an overarching theme independent of your own role.
It's central to the game's philosophy. You are, after all, just one actor, or whatever you'd like to call it.

I would argue in some ways it runs contrary to the game's philosophy, as it goes to great lengths to let you know that YOU, the player, are the centerpiece of it all. That while the role you play is that of a cog in the machine, it is your interpretation that gives meaning to the story. And while it's true that what matters is what you take away from the game and not how much you accomplished within it, it's hard to feel as involved as before when you realize how little input you really have on the experience.

You're kinda right about that power gaming mentality though, sometimes it is tempting to judge games based on how much you can accomplish in them rather than the ideas and feelings it evokes. But how can you blame us? writing in videogames tends to be so braindead it's no wonder most gamers have developed a mentality where the value derives from the stuff that can be measured, like scores, completion, expediency, etc. Games that take advantage of the medium to deliver a strong narrative like Pathologic are few and far between.

But anyway, I wanted to save the characters because I liked them, not for the sake of completion. But whether you save them or not is not the point. The fact that the game railroads you into succeeding just doesn't make much sense to me. If it was something that was unrelated to your actions it would be one thing, but the problem is that they are things integral to your character: Only the Haruspex could've made the panacea , and only he could've found out about the blood under the abattoir and nature of the soil . Those events are crucial to the story and the fate of the town hinges on them happening, so the fact that the game handwaves them away just so you can make your final decision on day 11 without any inconvenience instead of punishing you for failing them kinda cheapens it, in my opinion. You no longer earn that choice, it's just given to you for free.

[Muscarine]

That's interesting, i just simply didn't live it like that.
I'm not pretending there's a correct answer because i don't feel smart enough to understand all the implications behind the game's direction.
But to me what makes Artemy special is that unlike everyone else, he's filled with a player, not with cotton.
Then there are many other layers on top of that but at or near the top, the fact that he's (or you, or the media) still bound to a script. It's obviously very meta, but hence why there are so many references to fate.

It's possible the adaptive or emergent experience you're looking for will get a better spotlight with Clara's playthrough, i for one can't wait for her release.
But i wouldn't get my hopes too high in that direction either, in my opinion Pathologic is still, at its core, a solipsistic reflexion on video games as a medium itself.

[Chuck P]

Originally posted by Muscarine:

It's possible the adaptive or emergent experience you're looking for will get a better spotlight with Clara's playthrough, i for one can't wait for her release.
But i wouldn't get my hopes too high in that direction either, in my opinion Pathologic is still, at its core, a solipsistic reflexion on video games as a medium itself.

You know, sometimes I feel like that very reflection, even though it's the most important part, also ends up hurting the overarching narrative. Like, the world of Pathologic is so interesting on its own, did it need a meta-narrative to overshadow it? it makes it harder to care when the characters are not characters, but actors playing their parts. But I guess without it Pathologic would've just been another run of the mill game, one better written and weirder than most, but not one that raised any lasting questions

there's a pretty cool quote from the artbook which I guess is the director's vision of the whole thing:

There are the events taking place in the town, which are real. And there is their stage
adaptation, which is also real. There are the actors who play the protagonists and
reenact the events of their lives (since upon loading, you’re reliving that short—or not
so short—stretch of their deathbound journey. The actor walks out into the town, looking for inspiration, “walking the hero’s paths”.

And there’s a fluid ambiguity in not having a clear way of telling who you are right
now: the real Haruspex or Bachelor, living his life, about to die—or an actor playing his
part and thus getting a chance to go back to the past?

So I guess it's up to you which narrative line you wanna get invested in, but there's no denying that sometimes they can get in each other's way, but then you never know how much of it was intentional and how much just came from the difficulty of writing something like that. It's never gonna be perfect after all.

[Muscarine]

Well from my point of view what makes it so impactful is that it makes me care about all the layers (that i'm aware of)
I don't necessarily give priority to one narrative perspective over another, but ultimately i think they also try hard enough to break the 4th wall that you also have to feel like you're behind that screen

That's why i can't wait for Clara's Pathologic 2, to me Artemy and Daniil have that distinct bound-by-rules protagonist aura but from diametrically opposed narrative origins, whereas she's the exploit, basically the cheater, so the icing on the meta cake
And i'm on the expectation because i'm just barely finishing my first playthrough of Pathologic 2 and i can now definitely understand why it's 2, and not remaster or remake.
So i have hopes Bachelor and Changeling routes will go further in the experiment, especially considering how they decided to use Haruspex as the entry this time around.

Either way i can totally understand why you're conflicted by the result and you bring a lot of good points, i agree it's not perfect, for instance myself too i don't think they quite managed to supersede power gaming and in fact promoted it in some respects (although for much better reasons than the regular shallow ones as you mentioned)

Still a fascinating and bold creation which in an ideal world would get a lot more recognition for what it accomplishes
Then again its uniqueness also makes it so special

[kalevatar]

I don't think it's fair to expect from the devs to create an entirely separate ending for the player who decided, out of their own curiosity, to simply not engage with the core of the game's mechanics. I mean, it's a fun excercise for sure, to try and see how much one can break the game by missing all the important bits, buuuut it's only that - an excercise that only a small handful of players will do.Not the best use of resources.
As for the fact that if you fail some important tasks someone else will do them for you - I appreciate that the story is, to some extent, self-healing because most of the players who will miss these events will do that because they were activelly struggling for survival at the time. It's a lot more difficult to simply stay alive in P2 comparing to P1 - with harsher survival mechanics, death penalties, limited save points and so on - and I think that it was a good design choice to allow ALL players who survived till the 11th day to reach an ending. And it's resonating with the P2 core theme, after all - it's about struggling despite your failures and about willingness to stick around to the bitter end. Pairing that message with "uhm no, actually, we're going to lock you out of a satisfying ending because you failed some of the tasks we were warning you you're probably going to fail" wouldn't work.

[Heikai]

Patho is a story focused game so I guess it's fine that it will not gatekeep you from a "proper" ending. The mechanics are quite rich and work well together with the story, but they are not robust or deep enough to make a good game without the story. By this logic, I guess it's fine to just give the endings to the player. But at the same time, people seem to enjoy branching storylines that Patho doesn't really have.

[Mikeavelli]

Originally posted by Chuck P:

. If it was something that was unrelated to your actions it would be one thing, but the problem is that they are things integral to your character: Only the Haruspex could've made the panacea , and only he could've found out about the blood under the abattoir and nature of the soil . Those events are crucial to the story and the fate of the town hinges on them happening, so the fact that the game handwaves them away just so you can make your final decision on day 11 without any inconvenience instead of punishing you for failing them kinda cheapens it, in my opinion. You no longer earn that choice, it's just given to you for free.

The game foreshadows both of those points pretty well. When you go to protect Rubin from the kin at night, it's because he's working on the Panacea. He successfully makes one from Simon Kain's blood. We're left a little hanging here because this was fully explained in the Bachelor's Route of P1, and we dont have the Bachelor route in P2 yet. Aglaya finding the living blood is foreshadowed when we meet her inside the Termitary. She's actively investigating the Kin for the source of the plague and a possible cure, she just ends up finding the answer later than the Haruspex does.

All in all I think you misread the narrative of the game. Pathologic 2 is a living world, and life would carry on without you there to fix everything. More people will die, especially people you care about, but that's part of the incentive for you to make sure that doesn't happen.

[Chuck P]

Originally posted by kalevatar:

I don't think it's fair to expect from the devs to create an entirely separate ending for the player who decided, out of their own curiosity, to simply not engage with the core of the game's mechanics. I mean, it's a fun excercise for sure, to try and see how much one can break the game by missing all the important bits, buuuut it's only that - an excercise that only a small handful of players will do.Not the best use of resources.
As for the fact that if you fail some important tasks someone else will do them for you - I appreciate that the story is, to some extent, self-healing because most of the players who will miss these events will do that because they were activelly struggling for survival at the time. It's a lot more difficult to simply stay alive in P2 comparing to P1 - with harsher survival mechanics, death penalties, limited save points and so on - and I think that it was a good design choice to allow ALL players who survived till the 11th day to reach an ending. And it's resonating with the P2 core theme, after all - it's about struggling despite your failures and about willingness to stick around to the bitter end. Pairing that message with "uhm no, actually, we're going to lock you out of a satisfying ending because you failed some of the tasks we were warning you you're probably going to fail" wouldn't work.

Originally posted by Heikai:

Patho is a story focused game so I guess it's fine that it will not gatekeep you from a "proper" ending. The mechanics are quite rich and work well together with the story, but they are not robust or deep enough to make a good game without the story. By this logic, I guess it's fine to just give the endings to the player. But at the same time, people seem to enjoy branching storylines that Patho doesn't really have.

I don't know, I think it's more of a compromise brought about by lack of time than an actual design decision. Just look at Patho 1 for instance. Fail any single main objective there on any given day and the town is doomed. Why? because none of the characters has the influence or knowledge to impose a solution, which results in a stalemate and the plague consuming everything. That game was much easier gameplay-wise, but story-wise it wasn't afraid to punish you for failing.

Now in the sequel, which is writen and directed by the same people, all the mechanics are way harder; intentionally, unfairly hard, even. Making it so that there are no consequences for failure kind of defeats the whole point of making a hard game, doesn't it? why would a game that advertises itself as cruel and unforgiving just give victory away like that? it undermines its core foundation.

Originally posted by Mikeavelli:

All in all I think you misread the narrative of the game. Pathologic 2 is a living world, and life would carry on without you there to fix everything. More people will die, especially people you care about, but that's part of the incentive for you to make sure that doesn't happen.

Pahologic 2 is not a living world, and life does not carry on without you, or at the very least that assumption is put under the microscope and never taken for granted, that's kind of the whole point. Even at the shallowest narrative level you're just puppets playing out a kids' game, while on a deeper level you're just actors playing out a role. Your role which is to take a direct hand in the fate of the town. But if other people accomplish your tasks for you, and they are YOUR tasks, then you don't really have a role, do you?

Also Rubin was working on a vaccine, not the panacea. It is stated that Simon's cells are not enough to make a cure. And even if it was you can tell it's just handwaving.

[kalevatar]

Originally posted by Chuck P:

I don't know, I think it's more of a compromise brought about by lack of time than an actual design decision. Just look at Patho 1 for instance. Fail any single main objective there on any given day and the town is doomed. Why? because none of the characters has the influence or knowledge to impose a solution, which results in a stalemate and the plague consuming everything. That game was much easier gameplay-wise, but story-wise it wasn't afraid to punish you for failing.

Now in the sequel, which is writen and directed by the same people, all the mechanics are way harder; intentionally, unfairly hard, even. Making it so that there are no consequences for failure kind of defeats the whole point of making a hard game, doesn't it? why would a game that advertises itself as cruel and unforgiving just give victory away like that? it undermines its core foundation.

I think you're vastly overestimating the importance of some of the P1 main quests. How was Bachelor trying to find the fake Executor that vital task that no one else was able to do it and that failing it should lock one out of the good ending? Or speaking of, why should you be able to make the final choice only if your adherents are healthy? From the story point it doesn't make sense - the fact that Sticky or Murky or Anna Angel are alive should matter to Aglaya and Block how exactly? It's just an artificial gameplay obstacle.

I kind of understand that the lack of a clearly articuated fail state might be dissapointing if you expect to see in P2 the same rigid structure P1 has - with one clearly defined Main Quest each day, with knowing which task is important and which is secondary and so on. But P2 isn't structured that way - you aren't persuading anyone at the end because all decisions are made by the people more important than you, and the best you can do about it is to try and make sure you'll get your preferable outcome. You don't need your bound alive for that. And you can fail - if you f*** around for too long that day.

Now I'm sure that some things were cut out because of time/money issues, and that it would be nice if the story would react to the player's choices more in some parts - I'd like to see the story acknowledge Artemy that refuses to take his inheritance, for instance, or have one of the twins react to the other one being infected/dead. Should the player skip both the panacea and abattoir, there should be some dialogues to reflect that this Artemy sucks XD But I don't see how slapping a bad ending on that would make it a better game.

[Mikeavelli]

Pathologic 2 clearly is a living world that moves on without you if you do nothing. That's just a factual description of the game. The fact that it does this is what you're complaining about.


In terms of Pathologic 2 as a stage play, Rubin is taking the role of your understudy. He's not as good as you, his solution doesn't work as well as yours, and he dies in the process. That's your punishment for failing. I've never actually failed to get the living blood, but if Aglaya gets it I imagine you don't get the panaceas you need to cure the children on the last day, and most of them would die. That would be your punishment.

You don't need a game over screen to know you failed. The big red X at midnight should be enough, and then you have to keep going despite that.

[Heikai]

Originally posted by Chuck P:

Just look at Patho 1 for instance. Fail any single main objective there on any given day and the town is doomed. Why? because none of the characters has the influence or knowledge to impose a solution, which results in a stalemate and the plague consuming everything.

This is not true though? If you fail a main objective, one of your adherents/bound becomes sick because they had to take care of your unfinished business. (This is how it's explained in the game I think.) Other than that everything continues as normal. Granted, having additional sick people can lock you out of an ending if you don't have enough cures.

Originally posted by kalevatar:

Or speaking of, why should you be able to make the final choice only if your adherents are healthy? From the story point it doesn't make sense - the fact that Sticky or Murky or Anna Angel are alive should matter to Aglaya and Block how exactly? It's just an artificial gameplay obstacle.

It's because you need to have enough people that can vouch for you and your solution. (I think this is how it's explained in the game.)