Hello, I'm new here...

[HiddenX]

Greetings from RPGWatch.com

LoX looks great already ->
2014: the return of classic CRPGs

[Anubis]

Welcome Hidden. We try to keep things opinionated and also relatively respectful here, so feel free to express your thoughts What kind of party will you start the game with?

Glad to hear about your impressions. A lot of passion went into the Lords of Xulima trailer; countless hours put into it by technicians and artists, then it was polished taking in account feedback from various gamer contributors. There were even French & German subtitles added, as a courtesy for the support we've received from RPGFrance.com & dedicated German contributors who have done so much for the game.

Have you had a chance to try out the game? Steam actually helps game devs make various decisions by keeping track of things like Players Per Country and # of current Wishlists. It's a bit like chasing Level Ups in a meta-game

[HiddenX]

Just installed the game today and tried the default party to get into the game mechanics and character classes
I'll create a party of my own after testing a few hours.
The english localisation is very well done!

[Julie]

Yay!! Welcome, HiddenX.

Let us know what your custom group you decide on!

[HiddenX]

First impressions by Fantasm:

I'm having a lot of fun with this one. I found it pretty easy to put down the Wasteland 2 beta, as well as the D:OS beta, and wait for the final products, but I am so far unable to do that with this beta. I just turned level 3, and it's taken me quite a while to get here (6-8 hours?), but I'd say I've only mapped out about half the first map (and this first map is just a fraction of the overall world map. This game's going to be nice and chunky in size, I think).

The overworld map activity kind of reminds me of King's Bounty; when you see a pack of monsters, you can right-click on them and it will show how many groups there are, and give a determination as to the combat difficulty ("Balanced", "Troublesome", "Challenging", "Difficult", "Impossible", etc), so you can choose to engage or move on. And the constant harvesting of herbs and food and containers and corpses gives me the same King's Bounty vibe (along with that constant pull of wanting to take just a few more steps and see what else is ahead). Of course, the time and food factor is new here, with each step ticking the clock a minute, and thus consuming a bit of your food.

Food is measured in days, but this goes beyond the M&M games, where it's just a number that you need to keep high. They added some realism that one day's food is much cheaper to obtain than, say, 7 days' food (supposedly because it needs to be specially prepared to last that long). So one days' food will cost you 75gp, but two days' food will cost 200gp, and 3 days' food will cost 350gp, etc, all the way up to 6 days' food costing 1,000gp. Because gold is pretty scarce and valuable, there's an incentive to keep one's food stocked up for only 1-2 days' at a time, which means you'll be back at town fairly often. This is offset by the food you can find while exploring new areas, and for the most part my expeditions into new unexplored areas have been able to keep pace with my food consumption (fortunately the food you find adds to your food stores no matter how much you have).

It's when you do any backtracking (like, say, going back to town to heal/revive/remove status effects), that you'll really feel the impact of food because you're consuming it but not finding any. Overall, the food mechanic will probably be controversial with some folks; it's a fairly harsh mechanic that affects a lot of what you do (ie, it does things like prevent you from going overboard on spell usage in combat, because resting all the time will consume food). Personally, I think it does a good job of keeping you on your toes, and really consider many of the actions you take while out exploring and fighting. But I can see this game suffering the wrath of mainstream reviewers because of this….

The game is hard, but not unfairly so, I don't think. I'm playing on classic difficulty, and I've done a lot of saving and loading, but things got a bit easier after I finished the first dungeon/cave, and spent about 1500 of the 2000 gold I'd amassed on equipment (you start the game with every character naked except for a basic weapon). Once I got my front line's defenses up, I was defending a lot more attacks, and was having much more success with longer battles against larger numbers of enemies.

The death mechanic is pretty costly, but not enough so that it's an automatic reload if one of your party members goes down. Your characters don't actually die, instead they get "fatally wounded". All it takes to revive them is 24 hours' rest, which of course brings food back into the picture. More likely, you'll head to town and revive them at the healer or rest at the inn. Reviving a character at the healer currently costs ~40gp (goes up with level, I think), while resting at an inn costs ~80gp (this is the option if 2 or more characters are down, obviously), neither of which exactly breaks the bank. But the inconvenience of backtracking to town, or using a days' worth of food out in the field, makes death pretty meaningful overall.

I definitely wouldn't call the combat boring. There are many things to consider besides damage, with lots of status effects you can give and receive. Swords and daggers cause bleeding (recurring) damage, axes and bows cause wounds (reduce combat effectiveness), while maces and polearms cause stunning, which knocks you a few seconds further back in the combat order. The weapons you find/buy will have enchantments that increase any of these effects, as well as stat increases, but might also do other things like cause burning or poison damage.

Character progression doesn't look too deep; there aren't a ton of skills, but you'll be having each character focus on a few skills anyway. The equipment you can find/buy looks much more interesting, with lots of different bonuses possible to stats, status effects, and resistances.

The story and exposition at the beginning is kind of cheesy, but I don't mind. It sets the stage well enough, and explains why you're here exploring a new land and killing anything that moves.

Some might not like that one of your characters is pre-made with no changes possible, but I think this is an innovative compromise between having a known character that a story can be built around, and allowing customization in your other 5 party members.

Overall, this game is exactly what I was hoping it would be, and that's a good thing. For those who backed it, I would recommend that you play this beta for a bit, because the odds are that you WILL want to restart it anyway after getting familiar with the game mechanics. I already have some changes planned in my party composition when I go through the final game.

Thumbs up here…

http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1061267134&postcount=13

[crpgnut]

Add me as someone who came here because of RPGWatch. Our fearless news poster CouchPotatoe has been keeping us apprised of all that goes on in the land of Xulima. RPGWatch has a good blend of enthusiasts from all over the world. It's like a smaller, but less harsh, RPGCodex