No revisiting locations + no manual saves make for a frustrating combination

[foresterr]

The situation: my friend tried to visit the Withering Palace, but due to some confusion with camera control (m+k) she got confused in the canyon, ran out of health, and now is locked out of this location for the entire playthrough (which was pretty much only starting still). I wasn't even imagining something like that was possible, as I did not have trouble there (maybe the game controls more intuitively on a gamepad, I don't know). Seeing how the location was teased, she was hyped for it and is now on the verge of tossing the game altogether.

I think not being able to rewind back your progress somehow in a game of this length and complexity is really player-unfriendly. I get that revisiting locations might be not feasible even in cases like this (when the entire location was practically left untouched - by the way, I think it is a little bit out of character for Aliya to never try coming back ;) ) because it would be too hard keep the narrative consistent, so that's why I think some kind of save system other than single autosave would be a good alternative.

[inkle]

... wait, though, isn't that the one instance where you can go back down? After you get hoppered to safety, Six finds a way to take you hopper you to the main part of the site, unless you tell it you don't want to go back.

[Hyareil]

I'm the friend mentioned by foresterr.

After we got to safety, Six offered to explore the ruins in my stead, but I didn't think it was a good idea. It seemed anti-climatic... and I hoped that I might be able to see the Withering Palace myself.

When I almost died in the dust storm, I thought that maybe it's the game telling me I'm not ready for this area yet (so far I've avoided anything that looked like "main quest" and reminders to get back to Myari with news about Renba).

I thought I would be able to return there later, once I figured out what to do. I think the game should make it clear that you only get one chance to visit this location. (I mean, it kind of does, but only at the point you can't do anything about it.)

From my perspective, as a new player, the locations were either somewhere I could visit again or places I had no business returning to. The Withering Palace was a harsh lesson that there's also a third category: places I really want to go, but can't...

[inkle]

You might find all is not lost.

[Shimakaze]

I've had several similar experiences and It's getting incredibly frustrating.
I am currently on my second play-through and finally got to the Burned Tower I missed it in my first play-through because I accidentally got locked into the endgame before finding enough artifacts to find it's location (something the game should make more clear will happen when it does. (as in if you do this there's no going back)

When I finally got to the site 30 hours in this happened: I walked up to where the big book is, walked a couple of steps to far to one side in my usual method of seeing which prompts pop up (since the prompts are terrible with you having to stand in the exact right spot for them to show up at all) causing Aliya to walk up some stairs. Walking back down the floor collapsed, dropping the book down and forcing Aliya to jump. Then the robot teleported me back and informed me that I couldn't recover anything from the site and there was no air to go back. Now I have a LOT of issues with that just happened.

1: A single mistake that can be done that easily, with the game being terrible at showing you where you can walk freely and where is automated, robs you of possibly the most important piece of lore in the game.

2:Having spent 15 hours getting to that point, I now would have to keep playing until the end in order to do a NG+, then play for another 15 hours to get back to the same place, with no option to skip dialogue or cutscenes, just because I walked a foot in the wrong direction.
Not having any manual saves is bad enough, but combining that with such an unforgiving and clunky system is pure frustration. And then not being able to restart the game as a NG+ right away to at least save some hours...

3: It doesn't make any sense from a story standpoint. Aliya might not be able to go back down to the tower without air, but the robot still could. We see that multiple times through the game with random ruins. The whole system of being locked out of locations shouldn't be there at all, but it's especially frustrating in this case

I was also locked out of going into the excavation tent in my second playthrough. Presumably because I rescued the woman and she told me what was discovered there, but that shouldn't stop me from seeing for myself. Regardless, I have no option to go back there now.

One other thing I've found annoying through the whole game is with the translation mechanism. When you come across a longer phrase sometimes Aliya will say "I will never be able to translate this with what I know now" and you have no way to translate it since no combination of words will let you split up the sentence the right way. The problem is I have figured out the building stones of the language enough to know what it does say, but I'm not allowed to translate it because SHE doesn't know.

[cswiger]

You don't have to translate everything to make progress. Multiple playthroughs let you accumulate more words and you will be able to field many of the most complicated phrases.

If you obtain the big codex, you can read full versions of phrases. I'm not sure whether the book has everything, but even if not, that book still has new untranslated phrases available after ~90 hours of gameplay.

[Lorentz Transformation]

Ah, the accidental endgame lock. I rushed through the end and was like "oh, well, that means nothing to me, I hope it does when I get back there."

I really, really suggest manual saves. It's a pain in the butt, but its still far less frustrating than having to restart or do a NG+ because the game decided that it wanted to do X when you weren't expecting it.

Fortunately, they've added a confirm button to leaving the moon, which will hopefully let new players avoid some of the hair-pulling frustration.

EDIT to add: and now I'm going back an hour because of a mistake and both the save and backup save were created at the same time. But I'm only going back an hour, not the whole game, so I'm clearly much happier this time around.

[kgrace142]

Wanted to add a +1 to this thread, after ragequitting for the nth time over yet another convo I borked, knowing if I want to see the alternatives, I'll have to go through another whole NG+. On my first playthrough I too stumbled into the accidental endgame lock, and had to NG+ just to see all the locations. I'm on my 3rd NG+ and still running into this!

The autosave is so aggressive it's infuriating, and Alt-F4 isn't always fast enough to reverse my mis-clicks. My kingdom for a manual save slot! Or even just checkpoints I can reload from, or... idk, a limited rewind function like some visual novels do. My crops are dying and this game has me stressssssed lol

[Lorentz Transformation]

Originally posted by kgrace142:

Wanted to add a +1 to this thread, after ragequitting for the nth time over yet another convo I borked, knowing if I want to see the alternatives, I'll have to go through another whole NG+. On my first playthrough I too stumbled into the accidental endgame lock, and had to NG+ just to see all the locations. I'm on my 3rd NG+ and still running into this!

The autosave is so aggressive it's infuriating, and Alt-F4 isn't always fast enough to reverse my mis-clicks. My kingdom for a manual save slot! Or even just checkpoints I can reload from, or... idk, a limited rewind function like some visual novels do. My crops are dying and this game has me stressssssed lol

I really, really suggest heading into AppData and making manual saves. It's a little more work, but I have one save per folder to avoid renaming the actual files and when things go pear shaped, I just copy from my saves. I've got 18 of them so far for my second time 'round, and I wish I had done this the first time to avoid the abrupt ending.

I don't know if the devs can or even want (maybe it's a design choice that I don't agree with) to change the save game method, but I know there's a workaround that makes the game infinitely less frustrating for me.

[Zima]

Plus one. I missclicked and left Elboreth just after arrival and now cannot go back and meet Ori.

[worstcase11]

@Zima: Elboreth is one of the two places you can revisit as mzuch as you like - just chose Iox as a destination and sail a bit to it and then change the destination back to Elboreth.

[HL]

Similar problem: I was in the middle of exploring the Ancient Forest Moon and I saw the point that said "Activate the hopper". I thought it was referring to the hopper on the Water Goddess statue so I walked straight to it, only to find it was for LEAVING. And then there was no confirmation dialogue like on other moons so I had no option but to leave.
Really annoyed by that lack of confirmation dialogue. It had been on every single moon before, why not here?

[luthienanwamane]

I've just been hit with a similar issue - on a New Game Plus playthrough and was desperately looking forward to translating the book from the burned tower on the higher difficulty, given how many lines of text there were to translate on the original difficulty. Unfortunately, like Shimakaze, I went up the stairs without looking at the book and got the cutscene of realising the design on the floor was a map, which I hadn't gotten on my original game save, but then coming back down the stairs they collapsed, but I guess not having examined the book first, Six doesn't pick it up for you.

This is super disappointing, to the point where I think I'm done - I was really enjoying the increased difficulty of the advanced translations, but to miss out on that much text because of a simple sequencing mistake and the prospect of having to play the whole way through again to get to that point on NG++ is just not appealing at this stage. This is one of my favourite games of the last year, and I'm sad to be leaving it on such a sour note :(

[Susurrus]

Definitely the most glaring issue, playing through for the first time.

It stands out as very questionable design and comes off as an unfortunate oversight.

[AquariaMoon]

I'm going to add one more to this thread!

Just arrived at the garden palace which is such a gorgeous location! I finally found a way across the waters (ignoring a branching path I wanted to get to later) which triggered some dialogue with Six. I thought I was just choosing an option that was being nice and validating their anxiety- only for them to hopper me away from the moon. No confirm dialogue, nothing! And no option to return.

I was looking forwards to exploring the rest of that site, it's incredibly discouraging to suddenly be locked out like that. And it actually makes me less likely to want to re-play the game after I'm done with a first playthrough.

[Torchiest]

Adding my frustration to this thread, even though I know it's pointless. I also got locked out of the burned tower right before I was able to examine the giant book because I was running out of oxygen. I've been loving this game, but now I'm so depressed because I've spent a couple dozen hours getting to this point and don't get any satisfaction. I already decided against restarting to redo a choice when I was at the five-hour mark because I didn't want to lose so much progress, but this is far worse.