Annoying HoS "underground drug factory" battle, and what it says about W3
I'm in the underground drug factory sidequest (manned by some religious guys gone bad), where you end up in the following scenario:
To make it worse, of course, the W3's tooth-grindingly-long loading times combined with the annoyingly lengthy and interactive dialog that you are forced into following loading make every retry at the battle very annoying (45 seconds of dialog, 30 seconds getting killed, 5 minutes loading, 45 seconds dialog... ><)
I understand, challenging battle, I gotta man up and just do it, yada yada, great, but I think this isn't just my poor battle skills, it also reflects somewhat badly on the W3 game design and implementation:
Don't get me wrong, I really like W3's combat (and W3) generally, but it most certainly isn't perfect....
[Sadly I know full well that none of this stuff will get fixed anytime soon, so I'll have to grit my teeth and spend an hour trying and reloading and trying and reloading and ... >< ]
I'm in the underground drug factory sidequest (manned by some religious guys gone bad), where you end up in the following scenario:
- Long dialog with interactions and many speech segments you need to skip individually if you want to skip.
- ... followed by unescapable transition into battle
- ... where you're surrounded by a lot of fairly hefty enemies
- ... and you have very little room to maneuver...
- ... especially as there are many obstacles and vertical stuff (ladders, platforms, etc)
- ... which are impossible to handle in battle mode (you can't climb or jump)
- ... and in the W3 it's impossible to disengage battle mode
- ... unless you run away
- ... which you can't do, as you're trapped in an underground space
- ... which you can't escape unless you exit battle mode
- ... which you can't do (repeat ad nauseum)
To make it worse, of course, the W3's tooth-grindingly-long loading times combined with the annoyingly lengthy and interactive dialog that you are forced into following loading make every retry at the battle very annoying (45 seconds of dialog, 30 seconds getting killed, 5 minutes loading, 45 seconds dialog... ><)
I understand, challenging battle, I gotta man up and just do it, yada yada, great, but I think this isn't just my poor battle skills, it also reflects somewhat badly on the W3 game design and implementation:
- There should always be a savepoint or a way to save between a long dialog and a battle.
- W3 load times are way, way, too long (ok, everybody already knows this). I'm sure it's technically challenging to make load times shorter generally, but in this sort of restricted scenario, maybe there could be some sort of fast specialized save/load that makes the common case of retrying a battle multiple times less insane.
- There should be some way of disengaging from combat if you just want to run away, without forcing you to do combat rolls 3km down the road or trapping you in battles like this case.
- There should at least be some way of handling ladders, jumping, etc, while in battle; maybe a forced disengage would be enough, but a simple "jump while in combat" ability would also be welcome.
Don't get me wrong, I really like W3's combat (and W3) generally, but it most certainly isn't perfect....
[Sadly I know full well that none of this stuff will get fixed anytime soon, so I'll have to grit my teeth and spend an hour trying and reloading and trying and reloading and ... >< ]