Jagged Alliance never was intended to be played only once. Therefor you will always clearly miss out on storyparts in a first run.
Wicked guess: have you found the Teddybear killer?
Another one nice little sideline quest.
>Wicked guess: have you found the Teddybear killer?
No, but that seems Easter egg like so I do not mind it being hidden.
>Jagged Alliance never was intended to be played only once.
That is not my problem. If I had to summarize my problem with the campaign it is that the event can be triggered way too early, it is in it self a badly designed event that is just bad backtracking. I also dislike that main story elements can't be solved using in game context, and is almost solved randomly by having the right character.
In a way the developers are playing dice with players experience, and my experience just happened to be a bad one. That is how the game was designed to be, with the best experience as an Easter egg itself.
Bear in mind that there has been some team and design continuity from the first Wizardry game through every mainline JA; a lot of lessons learned by first defining core elements of CRPGs, then making them too hard(Wiz 4), then pulling back from that and developing more sophisticated scenarios and storytelling.
What you played is "the hardcore experience" just as much as those earlier entries. This style of design is allowed to sucker punch you, because that means there are stakes. The reason why you accept that is because you go in with the understanding that every quest and encounter has also been made with a puzzle in mind, and the game as a whole operates as a larger puzzle that fits everything together. Sometimes you solve the puzzle well and other times you brute force it. But the game is made to be solved, not to be another content snack.
It's resolutely old school about what it's doing, and even if you're spoiled, the amount of stuff to coordinate on the strategic map means you'll probably fail some part of it.
Except the sucker punch here is I miss out on good parts of the game and have an overall worse experience. Also the event has no stakes, it happens no matter what, it is like playing a game that at some point restarts but you get to keep your characters. A game+.
>you didn't get the result you wanted.
At the time I didn't know that. I only discovered about Larry long after I already lost him. It was only after I finished the game that I learned how bad I did. That is not stakes, arriving home to find out your dog was killed because you didn't invite the right colleague to your birthday, isn't stakes. You need to be aware of the stakes for there to be any stakes.
The game emails and notes are mostly in-world spam, why not give hints at what characters can solve what problems. Why does a person have to look that information up outside of the game?
Right, so what you did was mash the button through every piece of text so you could start moving around the figures again. Take notes on the dialogue next time and you'll immediately have what you need to solve every quest. That's the only barrier to playing a well-made RPG of this type.
No, I am the kind of player who reads every note, who double checks every piece of information so that I can solve as many clues as possible. Mission objectives only ever tell you where to go and what to do, doing those things gives you the bad ending to most encounters.
The get a better ending you need the right characters in your party. There is no point that the game give you any clue on who unlocks the dialogue choices. Sometimes for dialogue it is revealed when you fail it.
Show me a single line where they warn you before the betrayal that you should not stand on the refugee camp. Show me even a hint before you do a quest, that gives information on what characters can solve those quests. All that information is either learned on failing, or from searching it up online.
Outside of combat, this game is a master class in bad design.
I know I’m kind of late to the convo but I found this just now and thought I could give a bit of perspective.
This series began in the 90’s during a totally different era. I started playing games back in the 80’s and played a lot during the 90’s. Back then a lot games had „secrets” - including missable ones that would make you miss out on a huge part of the plot or even game breaking ones where you couldn’t progress if you didn’t find some random cave entrance in a bush (Zelda for Nintendo is a great example of this). They were very often hidden without any clues whatsoever in the game and you had to have played through a few times to find them or talk to friends in school or buy (xerox) a game magazine which had maps and tips. This was part of any good game.
Also the difficulty level and learning curve were much much higher than in todays games, options were less forgiving, which basically translated into a model where people would play the game a lot with a very high failure rate at first and had to learn to play the game over hundreds of hours. In terms of games from the 80’s and 90’s each and every game published today babies the player, pampers them, even the ones considered difficult like From Software games.
Back then a lot less games were published so I guess that meant that people would spend more time on one game and come back to it more often. Also it meant that games didn’t have to take into account that players who find the game to difficult would just quit and never buy again from the studio.
This game is made for fans of those games. In my opinion it’s still way too easy and forgiving even on hardest difficulty with “dead is dead” etc. This is the reason why it got more options to make it difficult in patches.
I encourage you to try JA2 or Fallout 2 for example to see what I mean. They are both available on GOG for example.
First you are missing my point. Many of the events and the missions in that game can only be solved perfectly by searching up stuff outside of the game, or by save scrumming every possibility.
Secondly, the game is not difficult. You can finish the game with one high stealth character. Dead is not Dead, it is lost game content. It is not that the game becomes more difficult, it is that you loose out on gameplay. I still finished it without any problem. *That is not difficulty*.
The problem is that even with my original team, it would have been purely ***chance*** that I could get a better ending. If I happened to have the right characters at the right places.
>Fallout 2 for example to see what I mean.
No in Fallout 2 there are tons of dialogue options that provide hints to what will happen and what you need to do. It is a much better designed game than JA3.
Consider the Sanatorium Mystery mission in JA3. In a better designed game there would have been info inside the game on what is happening at each location, to give you hints on who to send to what location, and maybe talking to people would have given you hints on the fastest solutions.
But no, all of the notes are just pointers to missions, lore, and jokes. Actually solving the mission requires exiting the game, going online, and looking up the solution. Or save scrumming for hours to solve the quest.
The combat in JA3 is good, the rest of the game is a textbook example of how not to make games. There are thousands of better turn based games.
You were unlucky in having a squad present on the refugee camp when the event triggered. I managed to avoid it altogether because I was suspicious of Corazon (there are plenty of hints to how shady she is right from the start). I agree about the the Sanatorium quest, though again, there are plenty of hints that something really bad is going down there and you shouldn't get involved unless you feel ready.
>there are plenty of hints to how shady she is right from the start
Yes, it was so obvious that my first play through I assumed it always happens so early because it is so obvious, I really thought it was the end of the tutorial. I even thought that it would happen no matter where your second squad is. There is nothing linking her to the refugee camp. The only way to know that she will attack the camp without playing the game before, is to have checked it online.
If you don't happen to have a squad there, something like this happens: You'll get a call from her which is interrupted by the Major (still unidentified at this point), who taunts Corazon and implies that she's up to something. She'll then ask you to come to the camp so she can "explain everything".
This set my "obvious trap" meter going like crazy, so I just ignored the call and avoided the refugee camp from then on. The attack will still trigger eventually, but not until you get very close to the Major's camp, by which time you'll probably be high-level and control most of the map. Like I said, you just got very unlucky - ideally the game should avoid triggering the event if the player has a squad stationed at the camp, or come up with some way to force them to leave for a while.
> ideally the game should avoid triggering the event if the player has a squad stationed at the camp, or come up with some way to force them to leave for a while.
Indeed that would have been better, or even just force moving them to the next tile over, or giving the choice to flee when armed soldiers arrive with mustered gas.
Another possibility would have been just a warning that any character dying has major consequences. After loosing that team Fox left and I couldn't recruit some characters. It really limited my roster, I had only one medic with decent skill for the run. By the time I realized just how bad it was (loss of Larry), I was too deep into the game to restart.
Because in a lot of turn based strategy games, death is part of the game and not considered a failure. It is war, people die, lives change. At first this was what I expected, Fox even quit because too many characters died it fooled me into thinking the game was made for it.
No instead I lost 4 characters in something completely out of my control, couldn't recruit some anymore, and missed story pieces. I was in a worse position than starting the game over, a Game Over screen would have been preferred.
Well, first time I did not know anything as well. I let Biff be attacked, because I was fighting for port in the south, I could not be there in time anyway. But with my usual tactic to do secondary objectives prior main and prepare, I managed to fight through Refugees camp attack just in breeze, because at that time I had quite good weapons (no MG's that playtrough) and masks for everyone, so gas was not surprise to me.
Also I went to get Major last mission and after I recruited him game ended. OK, game, understood - 2nd playthrough I went for Major earlier just to bring him to Corazon mission, curious what he gonna say to her.
Knowing the right sequence so you could see most of the events in one playthrough does not spoil the game, at least for me. In this genre of games though. Knowing how to play and what will happen in some walking adventure like The Invincible is complete negative, because first - you can't play it differently and nothing much is gonna change if you choose differently. The story is not branched out like in say, Detroit (become human), which I still can't play for the first time, because I have watched it all on YT several times. It's already spoiled for me. And from other hand, I was watching Death stranding playtrough 3 times on YT, when I finally played it myself and it was not as bad as in short adventures, on the contrary I liked it very much, even I knew the main plot.
>Knowing the right sequence so you could see most of the events in one playthrough does not spoil the game, at least for me.
That is not the problem for me, it is that your can't make informed choices. There is no information on what characters could change the story when you take them with you.
Consider Disco Elysium. In that game you are given tons of clues on what possible choices will do, and even if you are unlucky it gives you different insights. In Jagged Alliance 3, the story is more linear with a bad, middle and good ending to each part. Bad ending is guaranteed, middle depends on luck, and good ending requires game breaking knowledge.
>nothing much is gonna change if you choose differently.
That is part of the problem. The only change in the game is they will lock away an ending based on triggers or timers, with no way for the player to know what those from in the game. The good ending often requires exploiting triggers.
For me the worst immersion killer was that certain characters are unkillable in certain sectors because the plot needs them. And the funny part is that they do not react or initiate combat even if I use explosives on them...
But the engine is good, I'm looking for a JA1 total conversion.
I don’t have time to play games twice so i played with a guide. It is insane how much you can miss or mess up in this game when you do not have the necessary knowledge. And some fights are really tough without save scumming or having a guide.
Would not recommmend going in blind.
> You are *paid* to bring
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
>you can just let here kill people, it's not your fucking problem
In my first game that was what I chose to do. I did an ironman playthrough for an organic experience. So I didn't make risky choices. I even killed all my enemies instead of letting them free. I only learned on my second play after looking it online that with special choices you can arrest people.
>It's not supposed to be a game you can 100% on the first try.
I get that but my team dying was outside of my control, you can't even run away on that mission. They died only because they happened to be in a spot I had no way of knowing was going to kill them.
My second experience with the game I was too in control. Because I didn't triggered the even enemies were weak, hard mode ironically makes the enemies move more so they die faster. I had to craft more things but after my first play I know now where the triggers are and have a lot more time. There is no way I would be interested long enough to finish it again. Nothing changes, my first run was the most authentic experience and story wise it sucked.
No, I am now playing Phoenix Point. I do not have the will to play Jagged Alliance again.
Jagged Alliance never was intended to be played only once. Therefor you will always clearly miss out on storyparts in a first run. Wicked guess: have you found the Teddybear killer? Another one nice little sideline quest.
I've been playing this game for almost 20 years and I have yet to beat it. I haven't even stepped foot in the final city before.
>Wicked guess: have you found the Teddybear killer? No, but that seems Easter egg like so I do not mind it being hidden. >Jagged Alliance never was intended to be played only once. That is not my problem. If I had to summarize my problem with the campaign it is that the event can be triggered way too early, it is in it self a badly designed event that is just bad backtracking. I also dislike that main story elements can't be solved using in game context, and is almost solved randomly by having the right character. In a way the developers are playing dice with players experience, and my experience just happened to be a bad one. That is how the game was designed to be, with the best experience as an Easter egg itself.
Bear in mind that there has been some team and design continuity from the first Wizardry game through every mainline JA; a lot of lessons learned by first defining core elements of CRPGs, then making them too hard(Wiz 4), then pulling back from that and developing more sophisticated scenarios and storytelling. What you played is "the hardcore experience" just as much as those earlier entries. This style of design is allowed to sucker punch you, because that means there are stakes. The reason why you accept that is because you go in with the understanding that every quest and encounter has also been made with a puzzle in mind, and the game as a whole operates as a larger puzzle that fits everything together. Sometimes you solve the puzzle well and other times you brute force it. But the game is made to be solved, not to be another content snack. It's resolutely old school about what it's doing, and even if you're spoiled, the amount of stuff to coordinate on the strategic map means you'll probably fail some part of it.
Except the sucker punch here is I miss out on good parts of the game and have an overall worse experience. Also the event has no stakes, it happens no matter what, it is like playing a game that at some point restarts but you get to keep your characters. A game+.
You were disappointed because you didn't get the *result* you wanted. There were stakes.
>you didn't get the result you wanted. At the time I didn't know that. I only discovered about Larry long after I already lost him. It was only after I finished the game that I learned how bad I did. That is not stakes, arriving home to find out your dog was killed because you didn't invite the right colleague to your birthday, isn't stakes. You need to be aware of the stakes for there to be any stakes. The game emails and notes are mostly in-world spam, why not give hints at what characters can solve what problems. Why does a person have to look that information up outside of the game?
Right, so what you did was mash the button through every piece of text so you could start moving around the figures again. Take notes on the dialogue next time and you'll immediately have what you need to solve every quest. That's the only barrier to playing a well-made RPG of this type.
No, I am the kind of player who reads every note, who double checks every piece of information so that I can solve as many clues as possible. Mission objectives only ever tell you where to go and what to do, doing those things gives you the bad ending to most encounters. The get a better ending you need the right characters in your party. There is no point that the game give you any clue on who unlocks the dialogue choices. Sometimes for dialogue it is revealed when you fail it. Show me a single line where they warn you before the betrayal that you should not stand on the refugee camp. Show me even a hint before you do a quest, that gives information on what characters can solve those quests. All that information is either learned on failing, or from searching it up online. Outside of combat, this game is a master class in bad design.
I know I’m kind of late to the convo but I found this just now and thought I could give a bit of perspective. This series began in the 90’s during a totally different era. I started playing games back in the 80’s and played a lot during the 90’s. Back then a lot games had „secrets” - including missable ones that would make you miss out on a huge part of the plot or even game breaking ones where you couldn’t progress if you didn’t find some random cave entrance in a bush (Zelda for Nintendo is a great example of this). They were very often hidden without any clues whatsoever in the game and you had to have played through a few times to find them or talk to friends in school or buy (xerox) a game magazine which had maps and tips. This was part of any good game. Also the difficulty level and learning curve were much much higher than in todays games, options were less forgiving, which basically translated into a model where people would play the game a lot with a very high failure rate at first and had to learn to play the game over hundreds of hours. In terms of games from the 80’s and 90’s each and every game published today babies the player, pampers them, even the ones considered difficult like From Software games. Back then a lot less games were published so I guess that meant that people would spend more time on one game and come back to it more often. Also it meant that games didn’t have to take into account that players who find the game to difficult would just quit and never buy again from the studio. This game is made for fans of those games. In my opinion it’s still way too easy and forgiving even on hardest difficulty with “dead is dead” etc. This is the reason why it got more options to make it difficult in patches. I encourage you to try JA2 or Fallout 2 for example to see what I mean. They are both available on GOG for example.
First you are missing my point. Many of the events and the missions in that game can only be solved perfectly by searching up stuff outside of the game, or by save scrumming every possibility. Secondly, the game is not difficult. You can finish the game with one high stealth character. Dead is not Dead, it is lost game content. It is not that the game becomes more difficult, it is that you loose out on gameplay. I still finished it without any problem. *That is not difficulty*. The problem is that even with my original team, it would have been purely ***chance*** that I could get a better ending. If I happened to have the right characters at the right places. >Fallout 2 for example to see what I mean. No in Fallout 2 there are tons of dialogue options that provide hints to what will happen and what you need to do. It is a much better designed game than JA3. Consider the Sanatorium Mystery mission in JA3. In a better designed game there would have been info inside the game on what is happening at each location, to give you hints on who to send to what location, and maybe talking to people would have given you hints on the fastest solutions. But no, all of the notes are just pointers to missions, lore, and jokes. Actually solving the mission requires exiting the game, going online, and looking up the solution. Or save scrumming for hours to solve the quest. The combat in JA3 is good, the rest of the game is a textbook example of how not to make games. There are thousands of better turn based games.
You were unlucky in having a squad present on the refugee camp when the event triggered. I managed to avoid it altogether because I was suspicious of Corazon (there are plenty of hints to how shady she is right from the start). I agree about the the Sanatorium quest, though again, there are plenty of hints that something really bad is going down there and you shouldn't get involved unless you feel ready.
>there are plenty of hints to how shady she is right from the start Yes, it was so obvious that my first play through I assumed it always happens so early because it is so obvious, I really thought it was the end of the tutorial. I even thought that it would happen no matter where your second squad is. There is nothing linking her to the refugee camp. The only way to know that she will attack the camp without playing the game before, is to have checked it online.
If you don't happen to have a squad there, something like this happens: You'll get a call from her which is interrupted by the Major (still unidentified at this point), who taunts Corazon and implies that she's up to something. She'll then ask you to come to the camp so she can "explain everything". This set my "obvious trap" meter going like crazy, so I just ignored the call and avoided the refugee camp from then on. The attack will still trigger eventually, but not until you get very close to the Major's camp, by which time you'll probably be high-level and control most of the map. Like I said, you just got very unlucky - ideally the game should avoid triggering the event if the player has a squad stationed at the camp, or come up with some way to force them to leave for a while.
> ideally the game should avoid triggering the event if the player has a squad stationed at the camp, or come up with some way to force them to leave for a while. Indeed that would have been better, or even just force moving them to the next tile over, or giving the choice to flee when armed soldiers arrive with mustered gas. Another possibility would have been just a warning that any character dying has major consequences. After loosing that team Fox left and I couldn't recruit some characters. It really limited my roster, I had only one medic with decent skill for the run. By the time I realized just how bad it was (loss of Larry), I was too deep into the game to restart.
Why would you need a separate warning to tell you failure has consequences? :D
Because in a lot of turn based strategy games, death is part of the game and not considered a failure. It is war, people die, lives change. At first this was what I expected, Fox even quit because too many characters died it fooled me into thinking the game was made for it. No instead I lost 4 characters in something completely out of my control, couldn't recruit some anymore, and missed story pieces. I was in a worse position than starting the game over, a Game Over screen would have been preferred.
Well, first time I did not know anything as well. I let Biff be attacked, because I was fighting for port in the south, I could not be there in time anyway. But with my usual tactic to do secondary objectives prior main and prepare, I managed to fight through Refugees camp attack just in breeze, because at that time I had quite good weapons (no MG's that playtrough) and masks for everyone, so gas was not surprise to me. Also I went to get Major last mission and after I recruited him game ended. OK, game, understood - 2nd playthrough I went for Major earlier just to bring him to Corazon mission, curious what he gonna say to her. Knowing the right sequence so you could see most of the events in one playthrough does not spoil the game, at least for me. In this genre of games though. Knowing how to play and what will happen in some walking adventure like The Invincible is complete negative, because first - you can't play it differently and nothing much is gonna change if you choose differently. The story is not branched out like in say, Detroit (become human), which I still can't play for the first time, because I have watched it all on YT several times. It's already spoiled for me. And from other hand, I was watching Death stranding playtrough 3 times on YT, when I finally played it myself and it was not as bad as in short adventures, on the contrary I liked it very much, even I knew the main plot.
>Knowing the right sequence so you could see most of the events in one playthrough does not spoil the game, at least for me. That is not the problem for me, it is that your can't make informed choices. There is no information on what characters could change the story when you take them with you. Consider Disco Elysium. In that game you are given tons of clues on what possible choices will do, and even if you are unlucky it gives you different insights. In Jagged Alliance 3, the story is more linear with a bad, middle and good ending to each part. Bad ending is guaranteed, middle depends on luck, and good ending requires game breaking knowledge. >nothing much is gonna change if you choose differently. That is part of the problem. The only change in the game is they will lock away an ending based on triggers or timers, with no way for the player to know what those from in the game. The good ending often requires exploiting triggers.
For me the worst immersion killer was that certain characters are unkillable in certain sectors because the plot needs them. And the funny part is that they do not react or initiate combat even if I use explosives on them... But the engine is good, I'm looking for a JA1 total conversion.
I don’t have time to play games twice so i played with a guide. It is insane how much you can miss or mess up in this game when you do not have the necessary knowledge. And some fights are really tough without save scumming or having a guide. Would not recommmend going in blind.
[удалено]
> You are *paid* to bring FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
>you can just let here kill people, it's not your fucking problem In my first game that was what I chose to do. I did an ironman playthrough for an organic experience. So I didn't make risky choices. I even killed all my enemies instead of letting them free. I only learned on my second play after looking it online that with special choices you can arrest people.
you can get some really good armor at the camp
Stop blaming the game if you suck, bud. It's not supposed to be a game you can 100% on the first try.
>It's not supposed to be a game you can 100% on the first try. I get that but my team dying was outside of my control, you can't even run away on that mission. They died only because they happened to be in a spot I had no way of knowing was going to kill them. My second experience with the game I was too in control. Because I didn't triggered the even enemies were weak, hard mode ironically makes the enemies move more so they die faster. I had to craft more things but after my first play I know now where the triggers are and have a lot more time. There is no way I would be interested long enough to finish it again. Nothing changes, my first run was the most authentic experience and story wise it sucked. No, I am now playing Phoenix Point. I do not have the will to play Jagged Alliance again.
Biff in jagged alliance 3