The Pit

Yes, I am, it seems.

I hope they add female characters, too.

 

It's now out.

£7.99 base price. That makes it twice as expensive as Dredmor. Eeek.

 

I know they just released what they were hoping was to be the last beta, but I haven't seen it actually 'released' yet. Are you sure that's not a pre-order? Can you link to where you saw it?

I don't know what the price is/will be in American currency. But remember that Dredmor has been out now for a while now so pricing tends to drop with older games. But I do agree that the equivalent in American $$$, I would consider a bit steep as well. I like the game, but not the way I like Dredmor.

Even though I do agree with you, I just want to say that the game has come a long ways from the Alpha build that most people have seen, and Kerberos did announce that there WILL be a new free demo that is based on the release build. So at least you can give the (revised) game a try.

 

That's about $10-12 USD, I believe. And it's out on GamersGate at least.

 

Thanks. I checked the U.S. site, and it's listed as $8.99, so close enough. (Your estimate is a bit closer to what I was thinking).

It's not a lot, but yes, it's more than Dredmor. I think they are guessing that they already have a ready-made audience for it (unlike Dredmor, which seemed to come out of left-field). That's my guess as to why there's a difference in price.

I just think it's totally weird that it's on GamersGate, yet we just got a new beta version as of Tuesday morning (which although seems really good, does have a text issue -- it looks like they just added some new labels to the descriptions of items which can designate them as 'ingredients'. But the text kind of runs over other text so I would think they would want to fix that prior to release. It's nothing game-breaking, but just a matter of making the game not look polished.

 

http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=46653
It looks like the beta forums are totally gone, and it is (or will be) officially released today.

I'm actually in the middle of a game right now as I type. On level 5 as a level 5 Engineer on medium difficulty. I Just started to be worried that my pistol ammo was running out, when lo and behold, I managed to forage 30 more bullets. So I have not yet burned out on it, which is always a good sign.

 

FYI, I just got my 'official' serial number to download it from Gamer's Gate, and am downloading it as I type this. I can't guarantee that this demo is the same or different from the Alpha, but there is one available on the game page at Gamer's Gate here,

 

Ugh. Downloading demos from GamersGate is the biggest pain in the arse ever.

 

I got to floor 16 and crashed. Broke my heart. ;.(

I really like the way the game has progressed. Though I still feel like the game will become *better* when spoiled, right now about 75% of the ingredients I find are useless to me. Razorfists are the only useful non-food recipe I've found, and those never break.

 

I wish Kerberos would get Northstar off the backburner...

 

I had some spoilers from the beta forums, but they warned people about not posting them in the live forums. But there are other decent recipes (but you are correct, Razorfists are great). In any case, I like how crafting is done in the game, but I prefer the way recipes work in Dredmor more. In the Pit, you pretty much have to record things manually from game to game, since trying recipes haphazardly is a really horrible method, and getting readable coded recipe requires either a really good decryption skill or keeping detailed records of all the messages you find and piecing it all together manually. If that's the intended method of learning recipes, then they should have the decency of having the messages you find maintained from game to game.

I do think that the whole decryption method IN THEORY is pretty cool. But in practice, it forces people to want to use spoilers instead because nearly no one wants to store hundreds of partially decoded paragraphs.

I assume that floor 16 run is on easy difficulty. I also tried easy for my first run after the official release, and playing a Scout (think I'm up to level 9 atm). At least in the beta, playing on normal difficulty, almost every game went about the same, where I'd die on or around level 7 -- granted, not always the same way. But that always seemed to be the point where everything starts to fall apart.

 

It's belatedly arrived on Steam, and it's cheaper than the GamersGate version.

And I have still not yet seen a screenshot that 'proves' the Pilot is female.

 

Pilot was renamed to Scout (probably because it's more intuitive to her skillset). Pilot implies she's like the captain of a ship -- great if you had to figure out how to get to Alpha Centauri, not so great if you are wandering through tunnels with a pistol and a knife.

 

BTW, the scout is kind of a compromise between an engineer (all brains, not so great in a fight) and a Marine (great with just about any weapon, but not so great at technical stuff).

High Finesse means that she's better than the other two at using just about all ranged weaponry. Also, the autopistol is an awesome weapon to start with (duraknife also is not bad). Downside is that it will use up ammo faster than a normal pistol.

BTW, almost any shortcoming you can make up for, in time (if you live long enough, of course).

 

I like the Scout as a happy medium between the inability to do ANYTHING related to skill checks of a marine and the tendency to die to harder enemies early on as an engineer. It's probably the class I've had the most luck with so far. Still stubbornly trying to play as an engineer to Decipher messages and find recipes though.

 

The Marine also sucks and finding stuff. A forage skill of 10 means lots and lots of disappointment (for a while).

 

I see. *Chin rub*

I have a feeling I'm going to wait for a discount. Thanks for the screenie, Haldurson.

 

The marine isn't complete garbage - I daresay he's probably as good if not a bit better than the Scout for higher difficulties where having a very powerful weapon off the bat is practically required. You have to majorly game the system to get your foraging up to the point that you won't starve within the first six floors though.

 

I played a Marine last night and got to level 9ish (not sure if that was my level or the dungeon level). He starts with a really good melee skill (40?) so even if he runs out of guns and ammo, he's not necessarily screwed. But he should get those craftable fists (forget what they are called). In my case, I just got swarmed with robots and morigi thingies (some new spinning creature I never saw before) coming around every corner, ran out of ammo for my assault rifle, lost my auto-pistol early, from acid and so on.

One thing that struck me about him was that foraging does start going up pretty quickly with use (at least while it's low). It was probably up to about 35ish by the time I died, and that's not horrible. But there were other problems, such as even knowing some of my recipes, they would fail quite often due to insufficient skill (I'm not exactly sure which skill is required or brains, or what). You wouldn't happen to know what governs your success with known (or even unknown) recipes? It's one thing to try a recipe and find out it's wrong, quite another to find out it's right but have it fail anyway.

I also had some bad luck with unidentified mutation serums and weapon/armor mods. I considered waiting to find that device to identify them but I wasn't sure I'd ever find it (I've only ever seen it once on my engineer).

Question, in case you know the answer -- I've heard some people speculate that your forage skill determines not just whether you'll successfully find stuff, but also the quality of the stuff you find. You wouldn't happen to know the truth of that?

/edit BTW, I think I lost my autopistol to some kind of acid grenade from one of those crazed humans. They seem harmless but every now and again, they do that. So from now on, I shoot them on sight.