5th
Holy Fucking Shit
You guys will not believe this. A CHOICE.
I am completely unprepared for this. Instead of one button to push there are two! I am blogging this LIVE as I proceed with this completely unforeseen turn of events.
UPDATE: FITE!
I fought the boss and beat him! He dropped two items that have identical icons but I have never seen either before! The Large Bloodstone of Belund sure sounds like a quest item or maybe a pretty bitching thing to put in the pommel of my sword. The Comb sounds useful. Scroll down to see what these items autosell for!
Not very much at all even alongside two other items I forgot I had already gotten since they were so damn mediocre and generic.
So somehow in the course of exploring (rolling a random die to kill a kobold / solve a maze) a side area (exactly the same as the regular area except the background picture is different and the level range) I fought a boss. Not at the last level of the exploration, nope I have 18 left. There are 20 total. Somehow there was a boss on the second level. A level 3 boss. I’m shocked in equal amounts by the fact that boss encounters even exist in this game and that they choose them to be exactly the same as every other combat except for one additional button click. Scratch that, only one of those things is shocking. The monster image is identical to every other Kobold. The loot was exactly as worthless. I have finished an exploration on a different character with no boss creatures at all but this one has one at the second explore? Part of me wants to open a bug report and say “Oh hey I was doing this exploration and I encountered the boss on my second encounter instead of at the end” but somehow “you encounter bosses at completely and totally random intervals” seems too much in tune with the rest of the game for this to be a bug instead of a horribly horrifying gameplay decision. In fact, fuck it. I’m gonna get to the bottom of this dungeon and then I’m bug reporting this baby. If its not a bug it damn well oughta be. In fact every time I encounter something so mind-bogglingly stupid that it should never have made it into a game I will again assume it is a bug and report it. I mean a real person has to read those at some point right? And any sane person who reads that would have to look at it and go wait, why is the boss on a totally random level or sometimes not there at all? They’ll sort through the design notes (both of ‘em) and realize that well hey no one did that on purpose but someone wrote that Fight! or Flee! bit of text there and so it needed using. Really I’m just at a total loss at this point. How long must we endure this before they admit its an incredibly cruel April Fool’s Joke?
PISSING UPWIND IN A FIRESTORM!
I said I would do it and I’m going to. My decision to flee is based entirely on my journalistic integrity and has nothing to do with him being 6 level higher than me and purportedly boss-type. Here goes.
I fled (successfully apparently) and it still counted as an exploration. This game has finally succeeded in a way progress quest could not. It allowed me to move ahead not only by doing nothing but by doing something most games consider actively bad. And somehow in this case success was measured merely in my ability to click the “Flee!” button not in any sort of dice roll. *I* am back in the driver’s seat here.
