The only negative of your videos is that there aren't enough of them :)
@MauveButterfly4 күн бұрын
Thanks for that. I'll try to upload more regularly again this next week.
@nothin442676 күн бұрын
Nyan hit sound
@MauveButterfly6 күн бұрын
Not quite as bad as the Windows error sounds trap.
@mehmedmaloparic9 күн бұрын
I played this as a youngling....Watching this series now brings back waves of nostalgia. I remember being so afraid of the AI i would not dare venture south until I had an army of knights. I was afraid of losing units because humans are going extinct and any loss was critical! I rebuilt everything, colonized every corner of the map. Now I see that the writing is minimalist, but it was effective on the mind of a child I suppose. Thank you for recording and uploading this series.
@PonD0809-ug1dg9 күн бұрын
How to use holy wound of compunction ???
@MauveButterfly9 күн бұрын
It gets used automatically. You have to collect all three holy wounds and then go to The Bridge of the Three Calvaries.
@PonD0809-ug1dg9 күн бұрын
@@MauveButterfly Thank you ☺
@Galbitrix16 күн бұрын
The theme seems really interesting! I agree though having the translations provided immediately by mousing over feels a little excessive.. I think it would have been better if they didn't explicitly tell you what the words mean but instead only let you type your own entries?
@MauveButterfly15 күн бұрын
Especially since there are so few options that it really wouldn't take much time at all to just trial-and-error the journal to learn words. I guess the developers chose accessibility over immersion.
@Leylite17 күн бұрын
If you end up dropping this game, I'd understand that; this did turn out to be a real "slow burn" of a game, definitely not fast, snappy or particularly willing to explain itself in any way clearer than a Zendo game or a series of diagrams. I think there are more interesting audio logs and philosophical discussions sitting around in the game than what you've found so far, that you might also find more interesting, but it's also true that they're not just highlighted and out in the open. You have to be able to walk slowly and look around for little glowing rectangles, which is maybe vaguely interesting if you're passively doing it while looking around the environment but not much fun to go actively looking for on purpose. I certainly hope you stick with it and come up with a scientific approach that you feel comfortable with, but if you're just plain not enjoying the game then that's entirely reasonable. Ultimately my own feelings about the game are too complicated to stuff inside a KZread comment (well, I guess it took me an entire video series to really talk about them), but suffice to say there's parts of it I liked and parts of it I wish were done better or were more accessible or forgiving. Maybe if you watch an LP of the game (not necessarily mine although I'd appreciate it), some stuff might make sense with the benefit of hindsight, showing a different way of theorizing or disproving/supporting hypotheses, or just not needing to focus as much on navigation and gameplay. Maybe. Some hints about points of interest, if you want to keep going: When you arrived at the swamp by boat, it will turn out that you actually arrived at the "rear" of the swamp area. It may be instructive to find the "front" of that area since that's where the yellow-square tutorial is. I think it may be one of my more favorite "mechanical symbols on a puzzle panel" in the game for what kinds of puzzles it enables, but I definitely needed to see some specific examples before I understood it. There is another puzzle area slightly inside that beach section you walked through (to the east of the temple with those stairs and the environmental puzzle with the glowing path you activated, it is inside the forest/jungle). It contains puzzles with a different presentation to anything else you've seen so far, that don't involve the black-and-white dots. The house on the coastline (the far side of the mountain) that had that suspicious yellow trail on it, is another puzzle area, with more examples of the dots, if you want more dot puzzles to test theories on.
@goodjon622017 күн бұрын
Way to go you found a secret puzzle!! Not a lot of people just find that naturally
@goodjon622017 күн бұрын
So some tips that I think will make this less frustrating for you. 1, stay out of the town that area is the combination of every mechanic and has no tutorials. 2, if the puzzle doesn't give you feed back it's not the tutorial zone for that puzzle type. 3, go around the outside of the island and find a boat. It will have a map with symbols for each of the major puzzle types and their zones. Spoiler hint to follow on the black and white. Think less of going between each white and black and more about your line making a fence. The real rule is subtly different from what you are currently thinking but makes a difference when the white and black don't fill the whole puzzle.
@goodjon622017 күн бұрын
And you found the boat, I should wait and watch the whole episode before commenting
@MauveButterfly17 күн бұрын
While rewatching the footage for timestamp purposes, I think I figured out what might be going on with the treehouse section. My current guess is that I'm dividing the grid into segments that each contain exactly 2 stars.
@CZOM02719 күн бұрын
Hey its been out for a year, maybe you'll enjoy it now? The 3rd expansions is out too
@MauveButterfly19 күн бұрын
I'm currently trying to shift my channel over to more puzzle games, so I don't think I'll be going back to Age of Wonders on this channel. As a fan of the franchise I'll probably check out AoW5 or whatever spinoffs they make though. I am up-to-date on the expansions, but I don't see myself playing it any time soon.
@ouigaming872520 күн бұрын
The black and white rule is simple and you were supposed to understand it in the beginning of the game. Now you are going to be stuck every time you have to deal with it, so I think you should watch the solution because it shouldn't be so frustrating for you. Anyway I like to watch your videos at lunch and I hope you will enjoy the rest of the game, which is more straight forward in terms of "knowing what the pieces do" :)
@Leylite19 күн бұрын
Let him figure out the black-and-white on his own terms. It's enough that he's already acknowledged on-camera that he doesn't fully understand it yet, and it's more interesting if he figures it out on his own using his own methods.
@Leylite20 күн бұрын
Nice going on the shadow mazes area! Really powered through that. There were a couple aspects of that that tripped me up, so it's gratifying to see you not get stuck on them like I did. I do find the way this game plays with figure-and-ground, signal-and-noise, fascinating.
@goodjon622020 күн бұрын
Certain puzzles can be hard for lets players based on their settings
@goodjon622020 күн бұрын
You do not quite know the rule for black and white yet. If you keep looking around the environment there are large amount of hidden images that can only be viewed from certain angles, kind of like a neat little art surprise.
@Leylite22 күн бұрын
Obviously I don't want to go into too many details, but I think you might enjoy other areas' puzzles a bit more, in terms of the rules being easier to discover and the main development being trying to work with the known rules. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you that you'll see more puzzles in the vein of that "impossible" puzzle in front of that door near the starting area. I get the impression several people didn't like this desert temple area, for similar reasons to what you were talking about (too confusing to figure out the first puzzle, too repetitive, kind of annoying to find the right places to stand), so you're not alone. This game has a lot of beautiful environmental detail, but when starting out it can be hard to tell what's meaningful and what isn't. I think that's on purpose - I get the impression the designers wanted the player to be a little confused and a little frustrated sometimes, and be able to take a step back, be patient, and work things out. That is, for better or for worse, the theme they are trying to present. ...How well they implemented that is ultimately up to the player to judge.
@goodjon622022 күн бұрын
Try to stick with it and keep pn exploring everything. There are some things you are very close to without knowing what you are getting at. There were for me some very satisfying relizations late game. Also you will get the pieces together at some point and i think be pleasantly challenged to put them to use.
@goodjon622022 күн бұрын
I will say there are quite a lot of perspective puzzles. Moving around in every direction can be frustrating sometimes.
@WiiAndii23 күн бұрын
A neat little detail you may have missed, that would have hinted at a solution you found on your own: note that the pole of the panel at 15:45 is slightly twisted, indicating that it was originally supposed to be pointing at those rocks.
@MauveButterfly23 күн бұрын
When a game is using environmental clues, it's a good idea to have multiple ways to lead the player to the clue. Glad to hear that there's stuff like this in the game.
@JWP3t3r23 күн бұрын
The Solution for the SUN riddle was short to see at 16:39 look at the black marks on the red panel. For me the most difficult was the audio puzzle.
@goodjon622023 күн бұрын
Audio is great this episode. I think a lot of peoples' most disliked section is this sun section. The one you brute forced had a panel on the back that moved the front side out of the shadow.
@MauveButterfly23 күн бұрын
Glad to hear it gets better from here.
@ouigaming872526 күн бұрын
Nice video :)
@goodjon622026 күн бұрын
Also you will probably need to break out a note pad or screenshots at some point to solve some of these puzzles. No shame in that we all do it eventually.
@MauveButterfly26 күн бұрын
I don't mind doing that when playing on my own, but it's really awkward while recording since it's hard to show my notes. I'll look into having a separate scene with an image editor that I can switch to; that might work.
@Leylite26 күн бұрын
FYI, be a bit careful when making custom thumbnails, that they aren't too spoilery for puzzle solutions. This one is OK I think, but a bit borderline. I appreciate that people have been pretty good about that sort of thing for puzzle games like Void Stranger, Patrick's Parabox, etc. that I haven't gotten around to, so I don't get spoiled by their thumbnails showing up in my subscriptions (and don't have to unsubscribe from them). Having thumbnails show off the art and environment of the game (and identify which area the video is going to be covering) is usually pretty doable without being hinty. One sneaky thing I like to do for my thumbnails/titlecards for DROD or Into the Breach, for example, is to take screenshots from either when the player has just started a puzzle and has just started interacting with stuff but hasn't really done anything meaningful yet, or possibly more interestingly, taking a screenshot from a _wrong_ attempt or a run that got reset/restarted. 8:15 - On a more helpful note, there is also a subtitles option which can add subtitles when the audio logs are playing. I turned them on in my playthrough since I assumed viewers might prefer them to be present. 15:18 - I'm not personally getting vertigo by watching this but I'm pretty resilient towards it. You could maybe consider playing around with the Field Of View option and check to see whether that makes swinging the camera around feel better. You're doing fine and I'm enjoying watching you work this stuff out. Looking forward to the next part!
@MauveButterfly26 күн бұрын
I deliberately didn't include an image with a solution, and I think the one I used just snaps in place so it's a forced POV, but I agree that it could be an issue. I changed the thumbnail.
@goodjon622026 күн бұрын
Loving this series. Just a note the game audio seems a little high/ your voice is a little low.
@MauveButterfly26 күн бұрын
Am I missing an obvious setting somewhere? The game has graphics options but no sound options that I can see. I'll try adjusting my mic/OBS to boost my volume.
@MauveButterfly26 күн бұрын
Also, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate hearing about issues like this. When listening back to parts of my recording my voice volume seems to fluctuate quite a bit, so I'll also try to be more mindful of things like posture, distance from the mic, and not mumbling to myself.
@WiiAndii27 күн бұрын
There's something that I think is important to be aware of when playing this game, though the way you solved and understood the tree puzzles makes me feel like you may already be picking up on it faster than most. So I hope this won't spoil the experience too much, I think it's mostly just a small helpful thing to keep in mind: Occasionally, you might come across puzzles where you're convinced there's no way to solve them other than by pure guesswork, but that's almost never the case. Pretty much every puzzle in this game has a solution that can be deduced one way or another. Sometimes you'll need to go somewhere else first to gain the necessary understanding, other times you just need to take a closer look or think outside of the box a bit. The only possible exception are the tutorial puzzles, which do kind of rely on trial and error so you can figure out the rules.
@WiiAndii27 күн бұрын
I can't believe I just subscribed to you a few days ago when I found your Rabi-Ribi LP from years ago, and now you're playing another one of my favorite games
@MauveButterfly27 күн бұрын
Oh god. Rabi-Ribi was rough. I love that game and have been replaying it recently in anticipation of its upcoming addition to Archipelago as a randomiser, but I struggle with the bullet hell bosses. That LP is full of skill issue.
@WiiAndii27 күн бұрын
@@MauveButterfly Yeah, it's certainly a tough one^^ I picked it up again after a while, wanna get good enough to beat the highest difficulty and get all the achievements, but it's gonna take a while... I hadn't heard about it being added to Archipelago though, that's kind of awesome
@MauveButterfly27 күн бұрын
@@WiiAndii To be clear, the Archipelago implementation is still in development. It is already playable though as an unsupported game, so it's pretty far along. No idea when it will be officially added. I think they want to add some more features/options before publishing it, and randomisers always have logic bugs to iron out.
@ouigaming872528 күн бұрын
I was randomly looking for a The Witness gameplay and then I saw this video which was released today. Nice timing, I enjoyed the video !
@MauveButterfly27 күн бұрын
Serendipitous timing. I'll do my best to have the next video out in a couple of days, but the weekend is looking busy. Next week for sure if not before then.
@Waumboll28 күн бұрын
It's so funny to see someone play the witness, understand everything, but not separate all blacks and whites. Impossible. Clearly.
@MauveButterfly27 күн бұрын
I wonder if it will still be impossible next time I look at it. Sometimes you just need to step away and come back to a puzzle later.
@goodjon622028 күн бұрын
Oh man I am so hyped for this let's play. The witness is one of the all time greatest puzzle games and you are an amazing puzzle solver
@MauveButterfly27 күн бұрын
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I had only heard of this game because someone else I follow played it; I had no idea it was such a big deal.
@Leylite28 күн бұрын
Nice to see someone else taking up the challenge here. Overall I had a good experience playing through this game and taking in the sights, so I hope you get something out of it too. In hindsight, I can definitely see why this game was so influential.
@MauveButterfly28 күн бұрын
This is the guy! Anyone wanting another LP of this game from someone who is good at puzzles should check out Leylite's series.
@Leylite28 күн бұрын
I'll also take the opportunity to shout out @adiener / ThemsAllTook, who also did a good job playing through The Witness if you want yet another perspective on trying to figure out the same puzzles and systems. The nice thing about watching or re-watching an open-ended game like this is that people take different directions through it, so they arrive at places with different experiences behind them from the rest of the game.
@MauveButterfly27 күн бұрын
How did I not know that he also had a playthrough of this game? Thanks for the info. Two LPs to check out once I finish this playthrough.
@SentinelProxima28 күн бұрын
The third room in The Villa is accessed from Dugandy, I believe 1E but don't have the hold installed to check. Suburban Smitemastery is indeed awarded for returning to 1W after beating all 12 puzzle rooms. In hindsight, I should have put a scroll for this; it's something we may do if there is ever another update to the official holds, though right now this looks unlikely. Feel free to ask if you want any hints or outright spoilers for the remaining challenges.
@MauveButterfly28 күн бұрын
I suspect a bunch of them are for killing as many guards as possible in Dugandy (if I remember right I did the pacifist route before). I guess if I knew where to look for everything I could do a final wrap-up video. Hints would be appreciated at this point.
@SentinelProxima28 күн бұрын
@@MauveButterfly Okay! So, taking your missing challenges in alphabetical order, you will need to: * Find the last room of The Villa * Talk to the searching brother at the last possible time before the point of no return * Kill 8 Dugandy guards before the throne room to activate the hardest possible version of the throne room, then clear it. (This is easily done by restoring to Castle Dugan 2N, which conveniently has exactly 8 guards.) * Talk with Tendry (not sure why you don't have this one, but maybe you left the room before it activated?) * Kill all guards in the raft escape room (no need to go any further back) * Redo the last room of The Undercity * Get a guard to quote Hamlet. This one just needs a bit of patience.
@Munby129 күн бұрын
Congrats!
@MauveButterfly29 күн бұрын
Apologies for the audio. Game is a bit louder than I'd like. Thought I'd fixed the settings, but that was on my gog install, and I'm playing this hold on Steam.
@beltar2Ай бұрын
BTW Rogue class in AoW 3 is replacement for Dark Elves their base units like Succub and Shadow went there. AoW 3 introduced new mod system so they can be used combined and it was one of the most important things in the seria.
@beltar2Ай бұрын
The best and most improvement in diplomacy in AoW 3 was ability to set predefined teams without editing the map manually. Diplomacy with AI in AoW PF absolutelly annoing. AI constantly would send idiotic messages and acts really stupid anyway it can pay for peace and proclame war the next turn. And personality traits lead to stupid decisions. In AoW 1/2 you can choose good race then genocide other good race and you still will be good. X) That's rather strange logic. And Archons being pure good the same bastards as Undeads. They hate practically everybody. And yes Undeads as just pure evil race which likes goblins more than humans it's really strange. Deads are deads they equal in death. They should hate everybody living including orcs and goblins as fantasy undeads do or don't care about anybody. Many combat enchantments in AoW 3 are very strong and their effect lasts for several turns. They can't be unit enchantments as they were in AoW 1\2. Technically AoW 3 for now is the only game which doesn't allow permanently improve the units with spells or augmentations. Or there's mechanic of enchantment but it last for very few strategic turns and doesn't consume mana and not widely used in vanilla game. Technically it's possible to give permanent enchantment to the unit I saw it in some mods. I suppose this was made because AI in AoW 1\2 doesn't understood how to use the enchantments so human had huge advantage in units' stats at least for main armies. It takes time to enchant units one by one and it consumes all mana. AoW 3 suggests more strategic spells. And if you play AoW 2 on Win 10 you can get normal fps with HW acceleration. I see that all game videos are made with SW render. Press F9 to show fps. Load the scenario then press Ctrl-R to disable HW render. Then do it agian to anable it. This will increase fps about 2 times. Then Alt-Tab the game and restore this will give even more fps just don't touch the engine anymore. Races in AoW 3 are more developed than in AoW 2. The difference between SM and WT is huge. There're big changes in unit's stats some units moved f. e. unicorn and fairy from life magic were switched by their tiers. Many races have specifiec machines not only cannons. 2 Gates for each wall instead of 1. New structure in the cities. Flying range units have limited number of shots in SM which was huge problem before. But SM can run WT maps. So for now there's no need for WT except playing it's campaign.
@beltar2Ай бұрын
AoW 3 has 2 map layes for generated maps up to 3 layers on some campaign maps and I don't know how many layers on custom maps. I saw a couple of maps with 5 layers. In fact even 2 layers XL map is too huge. Planetfall suppose exploring planet surface but there are so many objects on the maps that there's no need for underground layer. AoW 3 has 6 minor races which have unique tech tree in their dwellings and AoW PF 7 minor races available for iteraction and hiring their units. AoW 1 combats system looks like attempt to improve combat system from Master of Magic which cumpletelly sucks. AoW 1 allows many more units in the battle and 2 strikes instead of one should make a battle faster and more reliable since there's no armor but only chance to hit. Yes it's better than in MoM but it sucks too. And low tier units useless. Action points and limited retalliation in AoW 2 made things better I think that AoW SM is the 1st mature game in the seria but compared to AoW 3 combats still suck. And noobs who can't deal with "fragile" units and whine suck too. With good skill AoW 3 allows to keep units from dying even better than in SM where random strong hit can be fatal. In AoW PF shooting is rather predictable since really low chances to hit like 40% or less are relatievelly rare unlike AoW 2 where shooting with 25-30% or couple of leprehauns unable to hit eache other were common things. AoW 4 changed the very base rule of armies entering battles from 7 armies aroud hex to up to 3 strongest armiesfrom both sides in the range of 3 hexes from the attacked. This doesn't allow attack 4 vs 3 anymore.
@kieranmillar5644Ай бұрын
Well done for beating it! The skeleton keys are entirely optional, the original plan was they would have an eventual payoff in the really long term if the hold was longer, you can beat this without spending either key. Because that long term payoff isn't there as I stopped developing this hold, it turns out getting both is not optimal, you want to skip the first skeleton key if optimising for the second scorepoint, as its cost is too punishing so early on. The doorwalking was bad if you were going to leave behind a key anyway, as it doesn't save you any keys and you end up full clearing the first half of the level before getting the shield, ultimately costing you a lot of health.
@kieranmillar5644Ай бұрын
You did get all the scorepoints, but you have to wait a turn after killing the boss in the water level to get it, but as you left the level on the same turn this appears to have desynched the caravelnet score spider and none of the scores that followed have registered. You couldn't grapple to the fist because it is a character you bump into to get the equipment. Having custom equipment on the floor is a 1.3 engjne addition and it seems azb didn't know about invisible characters with ghost image. But if you could have grappled, it's an accessory so you'd not be able to grapple back over the door anyway. The custom equipment is all dire, but the fist at least saves you about 120-ish HP, the cross only saved you about 40 (it's really bad).
@MauveButterflyАй бұрын
Thanks for letting me know. I'll try to run those checkpoints again on my own. The custom equipment really didn't seem that good. The cross only affected a few enemies on the floor where it is found, and those enemies are basically free anyway. I think the stick at least had some value, although given how high defence can get, it's probably not worth spending any keys on.
@RabscuttleRabbitАй бұрын
woo! This was originally an entry for the 3.0 elements showcase contest, so I was trying to make rooms that specifically used single-use plates.
@MauveButterflyАй бұрын
Did Elemental Showcase 3.0 never end up getting released? I actually didn't start playing DROD until the release of The Second Sky, so I don't know the early timeline.
@kieranmillar5644Ай бұрын
Thanks for playing! I can see how the name implies this is a tutorial hold, but it's not. This was originally going to be a much longer and larger hold, but the momentum was never there, and my efforts are focussed on RPG 2 now so I decided to just release what I had. Still, I like what's currently there. Some decisions like the skeleton keys were set up with a future payoff in mind that sadly never materialises because the hold abruptly ends.
@MauveButterflyАй бұрын
"Just get the dang thing published" is how my stuff tends to make it out into the world too. I'm definitely interested in finishing playing through this hold some time. There's a part of me that doesn't want to play favourites while the Deadlies is ongoing, but I suspect that it really doesn't matter in the end. If people know that I like some holds more than others it probably won't influence their votes in a significant way. I'm really excited to see what you've been doing with RPG 2! I'll definitely be playing it when it comes out.
@RabscuttleRabbitАй бұрын
The war holds often have multiple rooms that are variations on a theme
@RabscuttleRabbitАй бұрын
Or at least, copy the room and change a few things
@MauveButterflyАй бұрын
True. I guess I just wasn't expecting the rooms to be this similar. Fortunately it wasn't a long room, so replaying a similar room over and over wasn't too bad.
@MauveButterflyАй бұрын
Apparently I misinterpreted something and this scenario wasn't actually removed once the timer on the event expired, which means that there's not really any reason for this video to exist. Oh well.
@zephyreagle26 күн бұрын
You didn't misinterpret, Kuro just mislead in the way that they showed it on the events page. Simply a communication issue on their part
@Munby1Ай бұрын
Stuck with just 3n2e left. Great game but would love to finish this one off.
@MauveButterflyАй бұрын
3N2E is pretty bad. I'm going to solve it off-camera at this point and then just show my demo. Spent a bunch more time on it without any progress.
@Munby1Ай бұрын
good luck!
@Munby1Ай бұрын
Managed to finish this off yesterday. Can finally write this game off. If you'd like a hint let me know.
@MauveButterflyАй бұрын
@@Munby1 Considering that I've been procrastinating on this and looking for other stuff to record, it's probably best to just get a hint and get this over with. Please tell me that there's a better approach than just hitting the tar mother, adjusting the cuts slightly, and repeating until you get something that happens to be cuttable.
@Munby1Ай бұрын
@@MauveButterfly Makes the room much easier if you time the tar growth to cover the bottom left corner wall when the builders are still trying to build the walls up. They will cover the rest of the room so the eyes can't get you, but won't be able to bring them down since tar is blocking the last one. Then you're free to trim the tar down. Pretty easy to make it cuttable when you don't have other constraints. Once you clear the tar the room becomes easy because the eyes are blocked anyway.
@ImperatorofNonsenseАй бұрын
In new DLC AoW4 now also has shadow realm. It's called umbral abyss.
@SentinelProxima2 ай бұрын
3N2E was the one room I never managed to beat; and now I don't have a player file with access to it. Maybe one day....
@MauveButterfly2 ай бұрын
Oh no. I hope it isn't too miserable next time I try it.
@NecronomnomnomZ-xz4qs2 ай бұрын
"ne-fi-te-se" ne-fi-mo-te-se-ato
@peyerspatch2 ай бұрын
Thank you for these playthroughs! Sometimes we need to consult a guide hehe
@MauveButterfly2 ай бұрын
DROD is hard. Advanced Concepts really demonstrates just how much random stuff you can be expected to know at this point. Every interaction in Advanced Concepts has probably been used in a puzzle without any forewarning in some custom hold somewhere.
@Rtheghost2 ай бұрын
Glad to see other people playing this game more recently
Пікірлер
SPOILER Check the silver mine
Oh man a video every night? You are spoiling me
The only negative of your videos is that there aren't enough of them :)
Thanks for that. I'll try to upload more regularly again this next week.
Nyan hit sound
Not quite as bad as the Windows error sounds trap.
I played this as a youngling....Watching this series now brings back waves of nostalgia. I remember being so afraid of the AI i would not dare venture south until I had an army of knights. I was afraid of losing units because humans are going extinct and any loss was critical! I rebuilt everything, colonized every corner of the map. Now I see that the writing is minimalist, but it was effective on the mind of a child I suppose. Thank you for recording and uploading this series.
How to use holy wound of compunction ???
It gets used automatically. You have to collect all three holy wounds and then go to The Bridge of the Three Calvaries.
@@MauveButterfly Thank you ☺
The theme seems really interesting! I agree though having the translations provided immediately by mousing over feels a little excessive.. I think it would have been better if they didn't explicitly tell you what the words mean but instead only let you type your own entries?
Especially since there are so few options that it really wouldn't take much time at all to just trial-and-error the journal to learn words. I guess the developers chose accessibility over immersion.
If you end up dropping this game, I'd understand that; this did turn out to be a real "slow burn" of a game, definitely not fast, snappy or particularly willing to explain itself in any way clearer than a Zendo game or a series of diagrams. I think there are more interesting audio logs and philosophical discussions sitting around in the game than what you've found so far, that you might also find more interesting, but it's also true that they're not just highlighted and out in the open. You have to be able to walk slowly and look around for little glowing rectangles, which is maybe vaguely interesting if you're passively doing it while looking around the environment but not much fun to go actively looking for on purpose. I certainly hope you stick with it and come up with a scientific approach that you feel comfortable with, but if you're just plain not enjoying the game then that's entirely reasonable. Ultimately my own feelings about the game are too complicated to stuff inside a KZread comment (well, I guess it took me an entire video series to really talk about them), but suffice to say there's parts of it I liked and parts of it I wish were done better or were more accessible or forgiving. Maybe if you watch an LP of the game (not necessarily mine although I'd appreciate it), some stuff might make sense with the benefit of hindsight, showing a different way of theorizing or disproving/supporting hypotheses, or just not needing to focus as much on navigation and gameplay. Maybe. Some hints about points of interest, if you want to keep going: When you arrived at the swamp by boat, it will turn out that you actually arrived at the "rear" of the swamp area. It may be instructive to find the "front" of that area since that's where the yellow-square tutorial is. I think it may be one of my more favorite "mechanical symbols on a puzzle panel" in the game for what kinds of puzzles it enables, but I definitely needed to see some specific examples before I understood it. There is another puzzle area slightly inside that beach section you walked through (to the east of the temple with those stairs and the environmental puzzle with the glowing path you activated, it is inside the forest/jungle). It contains puzzles with a different presentation to anything else you've seen so far, that don't involve the black-and-white dots. The house on the coastline (the far side of the mountain) that had that suspicious yellow trail on it, is another puzzle area, with more examples of the dots, if you want more dot puzzles to test theories on.
Way to go you found a secret puzzle!! Not a lot of people just find that naturally
So some tips that I think will make this less frustrating for you. 1, stay out of the town that area is the combination of every mechanic and has no tutorials. 2, if the puzzle doesn't give you feed back it's not the tutorial zone for that puzzle type. 3, go around the outside of the island and find a boat. It will have a map with symbols for each of the major puzzle types and their zones. Spoiler hint to follow on the black and white. Think less of going between each white and black and more about your line making a fence. The real rule is subtly different from what you are currently thinking but makes a difference when the white and black don't fill the whole puzzle.
And you found the boat, I should wait and watch the whole episode before commenting
While rewatching the footage for timestamp purposes, I think I figured out what might be going on with the treehouse section. My current guess is that I'm dividing the grid into segments that each contain exactly 2 stars.
Hey its been out for a year, maybe you'll enjoy it now? The 3rd expansions is out too
I'm currently trying to shift my channel over to more puzzle games, so I don't think I'll be going back to Age of Wonders on this channel. As a fan of the franchise I'll probably check out AoW5 or whatever spinoffs they make though. I am up-to-date on the expansions, but I don't see myself playing it any time soon.
The black and white rule is simple and you were supposed to understand it in the beginning of the game. Now you are going to be stuck every time you have to deal with it, so I think you should watch the solution because it shouldn't be so frustrating for you. Anyway I like to watch your videos at lunch and I hope you will enjoy the rest of the game, which is more straight forward in terms of "knowing what the pieces do" :)
Let him figure out the black-and-white on his own terms. It's enough that he's already acknowledged on-camera that he doesn't fully understand it yet, and it's more interesting if he figures it out on his own using his own methods.
Nice going on the shadow mazes area! Really powered through that. There were a couple aspects of that that tripped me up, so it's gratifying to see you not get stuck on them like I did. I do find the way this game plays with figure-and-ground, signal-and-noise, fascinating.
Certain puzzles can be hard for lets players based on their settings
You do not quite know the rule for black and white yet. If you keep looking around the environment there are large amount of hidden images that can only be viewed from certain angles, kind of like a neat little art surprise.
Obviously I don't want to go into too many details, but I think you might enjoy other areas' puzzles a bit more, in terms of the rules being easier to discover and the main development being trying to work with the known rules. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you that you'll see more puzzles in the vein of that "impossible" puzzle in front of that door near the starting area. I get the impression several people didn't like this desert temple area, for similar reasons to what you were talking about (too confusing to figure out the first puzzle, too repetitive, kind of annoying to find the right places to stand), so you're not alone. This game has a lot of beautiful environmental detail, but when starting out it can be hard to tell what's meaningful and what isn't. I think that's on purpose - I get the impression the designers wanted the player to be a little confused and a little frustrated sometimes, and be able to take a step back, be patient, and work things out. That is, for better or for worse, the theme they are trying to present. ...How well they implemented that is ultimately up to the player to judge.
Try to stick with it and keep pn exploring everything. There are some things you are very close to without knowing what you are getting at. There were for me some very satisfying relizations late game. Also you will get the pieces together at some point and i think be pleasantly challenged to put them to use.
I will say there are quite a lot of perspective puzzles. Moving around in every direction can be frustrating sometimes.
A neat little detail you may have missed, that would have hinted at a solution you found on your own: note that the pole of the panel at 15:45 is slightly twisted, indicating that it was originally supposed to be pointing at those rocks.
When a game is using environmental clues, it's a good idea to have multiple ways to lead the player to the clue. Glad to hear that there's stuff like this in the game.
The Solution for the SUN riddle was short to see at 16:39 look at the black marks on the red panel. For me the most difficult was the audio puzzle.
Audio is great this episode. I think a lot of peoples' most disliked section is this sun section. The one you brute forced had a panel on the back that moved the front side out of the shadow.
Glad to hear it gets better from here.
Nice video :)
Also you will probably need to break out a note pad or screenshots at some point to solve some of these puzzles. No shame in that we all do it eventually.
I don't mind doing that when playing on my own, but it's really awkward while recording since it's hard to show my notes. I'll look into having a separate scene with an image editor that I can switch to; that might work.
FYI, be a bit careful when making custom thumbnails, that they aren't too spoilery for puzzle solutions. This one is OK I think, but a bit borderline. I appreciate that people have been pretty good about that sort of thing for puzzle games like Void Stranger, Patrick's Parabox, etc. that I haven't gotten around to, so I don't get spoiled by their thumbnails showing up in my subscriptions (and don't have to unsubscribe from them). Having thumbnails show off the art and environment of the game (and identify which area the video is going to be covering) is usually pretty doable without being hinty. One sneaky thing I like to do for my thumbnails/titlecards for DROD or Into the Breach, for example, is to take screenshots from either when the player has just started a puzzle and has just started interacting with stuff but hasn't really done anything meaningful yet, or possibly more interestingly, taking a screenshot from a _wrong_ attempt or a run that got reset/restarted. 8:15 - On a more helpful note, there is also a subtitles option which can add subtitles when the audio logs are playing. I turned them on in my playthrough since I assumed viewers might prefer them to be present. 15:18 - I'm not personally getting vertigo by watching this but I'm pretty resilient towards it. You could maybe consider playing around with the Field Of View option and check to see whether that makes swinging the camera around feel better. You're doing fine and I'm enjoying watching you work this stuff out. Looking forward to the next part!
I deliberately didn't include an image with a solution, and I think the one I used just snaps in place so it's a forced POV, but I agree that it could be an issue. I changed the thumbnail.
Loving this series. Just a note the game audio seems a little high/ your voice is a little low.
Am I missing an obvious setting somewhere? The game has graphics options but no sound options that I can see. I'll try adjusting my mic/OBS to boost my volume.
Also, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate hearing about issues like this. When listening back to parts of my recording my voice volume seems to fluctuate quite a bit, so I'll also try to be more mindful of things like posture, distance from the mic, and not mumbling to myself.
There's something that I think is important to be aware of when playing this game, though the way you solved and understood the tree puzzles makes me feel like you may already be picking up on it faster than most. So I hope this won't spoil the experience too much, I think it's mostly just a small helpful thing to keep in mind: Occasionally, you might come across puzzles where you're convinced there's no way to solve them other than by pure guesswork, but that's almost never the case. Pretty much every puzzle in this game has a solution that can be deduced one way or another. Sometimes you'll need to go somewhere else first to gain the necessary understanding, other times you just need to take a closer look or think outside of the box a bit. The only possible exception are the tutorial puzzles, which do kind of rely on trial and error so you can figure out the rules.
I can't believe I just subscribed to you a few days ago when I found your Rabi-Ribi LP from years ago, and now you're playing another one of my favorite games
Oh god. Rabi-Ribi was rough. I love that game and have been replaying it recently in anticipation of its upcoming addition to Archipelago as a randomiser, but I struggle with the bullet hell bosses. That LP is full of skill issue.
@@MauveButterfly Yeah, it's certainly a tough one^^ I picked it up again after a while, wanna get good enough to beat the highest difficulty and get all the achievements, but it's gonna take a while... I hadn't heard about it being added to Archipelago though, that's kind of awesome
@@WiiAndii To be clear, the Archipelago implementation is still in development. It is already playable though as an unsupported game, so it's pretty far along. No idea when it will be officially added. I think they want to add some more features/options before publishing it, and randomisers always have logic bugs to iron out.
I was randomly looking for a The Witness gameplay and then I saw this video which was released today. Nice timing, I enjoyed the video !
Serendipitous timing. I'll do my best to have the next video out in a couple of days, but the weekend is looking busy. Next week for sure if not before then.
It's so funny to see someone play the witness, understand everything, but not separate all blacks and whites. Impossible. Clearly.
I wonder if it will still be impossible next time I look at it. Sometimes you just need to step away and come back to a puzzle later.
Oh man I am so hyped for this let's play. The witness is one of the all time greatest puzzle games and you are an amazing puzzle solver
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I had only heard of this game because someone else I follow played it; I had no idea it was such a big deal.
Nice to see someone else taking up the challenge here. Overall I had a good experience playing through this game and taking in the sights, so I hope you get something out of it too. In hindsight, I can definitely see why this game was so influential.
This is the guy! Anyone wanting another LP of this game from someone who is good at puzzles should check out Leylite's series.
I'll also take the opportunity to shout out @adiener / ThemsAllTook, who also did a good job playing through The Witness if you want yet another perspective on trying to figure out the same puzzles and systems. The nice thing about watching or re-watching an open-ended game like this is that people take different directions through it, so they arrive at places with different experiences behind them from the rest of the game.
How did I not know that he also had a playthrough of this game? Thanks for the info. Two LPs to check out once I finish this playthrough.
The third room in The Villa is accessed from Dugandy, I believe 1E but don't have the hold installed to check. Suburban Smitemastery is indeed awarded for returning to 1W after beating all 12 puzzle rooms. In hindsight, I should have put a scroll for this; it's something we may do if there is ever another update to the official holds, though right now this looks unlikely. Feel free to ask if you want any hints or outright spoilers for the remaining challenges.
I suspect a bunch of them are for killing as many guards as possible in Dugandy (if I remember right I did the pacifist route before). I guess if I knew where to look for everything I could do a final wrap-up video. Hints would be appreciated at this point.
@@MauveButterfly Okay! So, taking your missing challenges in alphabetical order, you will need to: * Find the last room of The Villa * Talk to the searching brother at the last possible time before the point of no return * Kill 8 Dugandy guards before the throne room to activate the hardest possible version of the throne room, then clear it. (This is easily done by restoring to Castle Dugan 2N, which conveniently has exactly 8 guards.) * Talk with Tendry (not sure why you don't have this one, but maybe you left the room before it activated?) * Kill all guards in the raft escape room (no need to go any further back) * Redo the last room of The Undercity * Get a guard to quote Hamlet. This one just needs a bit of patience.
Congrats!
Apologies for the audio. Game is a bit louder than I'd like. Thought I'd fixed the settings, but that was on my gog install, and I'm playing this hold on Steam.
BTW Rogue class in AoW 3 is replacement for Dark Elves their base units like Succub and Shadow went there. AoW 3 introduced new mod system so they can be used combined and it was one of the most important things in the seria.
The best and most improvement in diplomacy in AoW 3 was ability to set predefined teams without editing the map manually. Diplomacy with AI in AoW PF absolutelly annoing. AI constantly would send idiotic messages and acts really stupid anyway it can pay for peace and proclame war the next turn. And personality traits lead to stupid decisions. In AoW 1/2 you can choose good race then genocide other good race and you still will be good. X) That's rather strange logic. And Archons being pure good the same bastards as Undeads. They hate practically everybody. And yes Undeads as just pure evil race which likes goblins more than humans it's really strange. Deads are deads they equal in death. They should hate everybody living including orcs and goblins as fantasy undeads do or don't care about anybody. Many combat enchantments in AoW 3 are very strong and their effect lasts for several turns. They can't be unit enchantments as they were in AoW 1\2. Technically AoW 3 for now is the only game which doesn't allow permanently improve the units with spells or augmentations. Or there's mechanic of enchantment but it last for very few strategic turns and doesn't consume mana and not widely used in vanilla game. Technically it's possible to give permanent enchantment to the unit I saw it in some mods. I suppose this was made because AI in AoW 1\2 doesn't understood how to use the enchantments so human had huge advantage in units' stats at least for main armies. It takes time to enchant units one by one and it consumes all mana. AoW 3 suggests more strategic spells. And if you play AoW 2 on Win 10 you can get normal fps with HW acceleration. I see that all game videos are made with SW render. Press F9 to show fps. Load the scenario then press Ctrl-R to disable HW render. Then do it agian to anable it. This will increase fps about 2 times. Then Alt-Tab the game and restore this will give even more fps just don't touch the engine anymore. Races in AoW 3 are more developed than in AoW 2. The difference between SM and WT is huge. There're big changes in unit's stats some units moved f. e. unicorn and fairy from life magic were switched by their tiers. Many races have specifiec machines not only cannons. 2 Gates for each wall instead of 1. New structure in the cities. Flying range units have limited number of shots in SM which was huge problem before. But SM can run WT maps. So for now there's no need for WT except playing it's campaign.
AoW 3 has 2 map layes for generated maps up to 3 layers on some campaign maps and I don't know how many layers on custom maps. I saw a couple of maps with 5 layers. In fact even 2 layers XL map is too huge. Planetfall suppose exploring planet surface but there are so many objects on the maps that there's no need for underground layer. AoW 3 has 6 minor races which have unique tech tree in their dwellings and AoW PF 7 minor races available for iteraction and hiring their units. AoW 1 combats system looks like attempt to improve combat system from Master of Magic which cumpletelly sucks. AoW 1 allows many more units in the battle and 2 strikes instead of one should make a battle faster and more reliable since there's no armor but only chance to hit. Yes it's better than in MoM but it sucks too. And low tier units useless. Action points and limited retalliation in AoW 2 made things better I think that AoW SM is the 1st mature game in the seria but compared to AoW 3 combats still suck. And noobs who can't deal with "fragile" units and whine suck too. With good skill AoW 3 allows to keep units from dying even better than in SM where random strong hit can be fatal. In AoW PF shooting is rather predictable since really low chances to hit like 40% or less are relatievelly rare unlike AoW 2 where shooting with 25-30% or couple of leprehauns unable to hit eache other were common things. AoW 4 changed the very base rule of armies entering battles from 7 armies aroud hex to up to 3 strongest armiesfrom both sides in the range of 3 hexes from the attacked. This doesn't allow attack 4 vs 3 anymore.
Well done for beating it! The skeleton keys are entirely optional, the original plan was they would have an eventual payoff in the really long term if the hold was longer, you can beat this without spending either key. Because that long term payoff isn't there as I stopped developing this hold, it turns out getting both is not optimal, you want to skip the first skeleton key if optimising for the second scorepoint, as its cost is too punishing so early on. The doorwalking was bad if you were going to leave behind a key anyway, as it doesn't save you any keys and you end up full clearing the first half of the level before getting the shield, ultimately costing you a lot of health.
You did get all the scorepoints, but you have to wait a turn after killing the boss in the water level to get it, but as you left the level on the same turn this appears to have desynched the caravelnet score spider and none of the scores that followed have registered. You couldn't grapple to the fist because it is a character you bump into to get the equipment. Having custom equipment on the floor is a 1.3 engjne addition and it seems azb didn't know about invisible characters with ghost image. But if you could have grappled, it's an accessory so you'd not be able to grapple back over the door anyway. The custom equipment is all dire, but the fist at least saves you about 120-ish HP, the cross only saved you about 40 (it's really bad).
Thanks for letting me know. I'll try to run those checkpoints again on my own. The custom equipment really didn't seem that good. The cross only affected a few enemies on the floor where it is found, and those enemies are basically free anyway. I think the stick at least had some value, although given how high defence can get, it's probably not worth spending any keys on.
woo! This was originally an entry for the 3.0 elements showcase contest, so I was trying to make rooms that specifically used single-use plates.
Did Elemental Showcase 3.0 never end up getting released? I actually didn't start playing DROD until the release of The Second Sky, so I don't know the early timeline.
Thanks for playing! I can see how the name implies this is a tutorial hold, but it's not. This was originally going to be a much longer and larger hold, but the momentum was never there, and my efforts are focussed on RPG 2 now so I decided to just release what I had. Still, I like what's currently there. Some decisions like the skeleton keys were set up with a future payoff in mind that sadly never materialises because the hold abruptly ends.
"Just get the dang thing published" is how my stuff tends to make it out into the world too. I'm definitely interested in finishing playing through this hold some time. There's a part of me that doesn't want to play favourites while the Deadlies is ongoing, but I suspect that it really doesn't matter in the end. If people know that I like some holds more than others it probably won't influence their votes in a significant way. I'm really excited to see what you've been doing with RPG 2! I'll definitely be playing it when it comes out.
The war holds often have multiple rooms that are variations on a theme
Or at least, copy the room and change a few things
True. I guess I just wasn't expecting the rooms to be this similar. Fortunately it wasn't a long room, so replaying a similar room over and over wasn't too bad.
Apparently I misinterpreted something and this scenario wasn't actually removed once the timer on the event expired, which means that there's not really any reason for this video to exist. Oh well.
You didn't misinterpret, Kuro just mislead in the way that they showed it on the events page. Simply a communication issue on their part
Stuck with just 3n2e left. Great game but would love to finish this one off.
3N2E is pretty bad. I'm going to solve it off-camera at this point and then just show my demo. Spent a bunch more time on it without any progress.
good luck!
Managed to finish this off yesterday. Can finally write this game off. If you'd like a hint let me know.
@@Munby1 Considering that I've been procrastinating on this and looking for other stuff to record, it's probably best to just get a hint and get this over with. Please tell me that there's a better approach than just hitting the tar mother, adjusting the cuts slightly, and repeating until you get something that happens to be cuttable.
@@MauveButterfly Makes the room much easier if you time the tar growth to cover the bottom left corner wall when the builders are still trying to build the walls up. They will cover the rest of the room so the eyes can't get you, but won't be able to bring them down since tar is blocking the last one. Then you're free to trim the tar down. Pretty easy to make it cuttable when you don't have other constraints. Once you clear the tar the room becomes easy because the eyes are blocked anyway.
In new DLC AoW4 now also has shadow realm. It's called umbral abyss.
3N2E was the one room I never managed to beat; and now I don't have a player file with access to it. Maybe one day....
Oh no. I hope it isn't too miserable next time I try it.
"ne-fi-te-se" ne-fi-mo-te-se-ato
Thank you for these playthroughs! Sometimes we need to consult a guide hehe
DROD is hard. Advanced Concepts really demonstrates just how much random stuff you can be expected to know at this point. Every interaction in Advanced Concepts has probably been used in a puzzle without any forewarning in some custom hold somewhere.
Glad to see other people playing this game more recently
thank, you had trouble with 2n 2w