Roadwarden [Fantasy/RPG Elements/Pixel Art] [DEMO]

[Jubal]

For me it varies: I wouldn't have wanted my first (or indeed any actual) playthrough of Roadwarden to have narration, but listening to a good narrator stream bits of it for 90 mins on a Wednesday is nice background and a nice reminder of the world, it's just a different experience to actually playing the game. In general narration in games I feel slows things down when I'm playing, but voice acting I often like if it's done well and is keyed to specific characters well. It can be important for, say, a Witcher or Dragon Age game where the world is meant to be high visual/auditory detail and character personalities and drama in the immediate circle around the player are quite key to what's going on.

I've not played Disco Elysium either! It looks interesting but I dunno how much I'd really enjoy it.

[Aure]

Is there anything specific that stops you from testing DE?
From what I can tell it may be many things for many different people. Personally, I find a lot of worldbuilding descriptions very unengaging, so there are bits I simply skim over them or even jump through them, but there's a lot that I really enjoy.

While playing Witcher games or Dragon Age without voice acting would be kind of pointless, since the writing itself was built around its voice lines, I usually feel like such games tend to have much weaker writing as well. Games that are allowed to have narration, or text-oriented dialogues, tend to (in my head, at least) flow much smoother.

[Jubal]

I'm not sure I agree that those games have weaker writing for my taste, though I'd agree that it's harder to make voice-acted dialogues work well. I think some games (Witcher 3 most notably, also Hades) manage it really well overall, and things like Dragon Age use it to land some pretty good cutscenes and set-pieces even if their run of the mill storytelling isn't always presented to full effect. I guess probably my top tier of games if I only consider how effective I find the narrative is a mix though one that leans more towards mostly-written narratives: Hades, Wildermyth, Roadwarden, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Fallen London, DA: Origins, Witcher 3, and maybe Planescape: Torment would be my immediate thoughts for such a list.

I think with DE... partly not getting round to it and other things being higher up my list, partly that I'm not sure if I'd enjoy the themes and style of the game all that much, the pitch of amnesiac fantasy communist cop drama is one that interests me but doesn't compel me. I worry with games that lean hard into ideological positioning that I'll get frustrated with them routing me down what I feel are false choices to fit into their faction/ideology list, too, which is a massive frustration to me in games. I think maybe it's also been almost too hyped for me, it's the sort of game where I've heard a ton of "oh, great game, made by geniuses" type talk but I've not heard many specifics that pushed me towards it. But I'll probably get round to it sometime.

[Aure]

I'd say that nothing about DE's premise is inherently interesting for me, but it lures me in with its tools of expression and its deep layers of humanism. Like I said, I'm not devoutly interested in everything it has to offer, but so far I'd say there isn't a moment where I feel it was overhyped  for me.

[Jubal]

Fair enough - a recommendation from you probably shifts it a place or two upwards on the "To Play" list

[Aure]

Hah! One thing I can say is that while the game gets better with hours put into it (you understand the world more, you get the grip of the systems), you should be able to decide if you enjoy it in the first 90 minutes or so, so quickly enough to refund it. : P

[Jubal]

I really need to start a Roadwarden wiki at some point, some of the late-game stuff is tricky: on V's run we're really struggling to work out how on earth one gains enough trust from Thyrsus. Even after dealing with Glaucia his trust still seems locked and it's not at all obvious why.

I saw somewhere online you were saying that nicer meals can boost his favour - can you effectively grind that upwards given enough time?

[Aure]

I'm sorry you hit a roadblock. Yes, you can buy his friendship by offering him food rations or even better meals, I expect you probably selected dialogue options he was not especially happy with. : P I actually think Thyrsus could use at least one small quest, I hope to fix it in the future.

[Jubal]

OK, that's great - V is playing on no-time-limits so that's very do-able, I'll recommend that they do an offscreen fish supplies grind between streams until the options light up

And yeah, I feel like White Marshes in general is one of the hardest places to work out/easiest places for it not to be clear how to progress in Roadwarden, I failed on it horribly in my main run a few months ago. It's such an interesting location, I'd love to have a little bit more there.

[Aure]

Thank you for spreading the news about my work!
I wonder if the reason why it's so difficult to get to Orentius is somehow connected to the fact is much easier to join forces with Thais and get to him this way... : )

[Jubal]

I think that's one of the other things, actually, that has possibly been tricky with V's run: if you bypass Thais early, then discover the problems with her (which is exactly what happened), and thus effectively fail to work much through the core Howler's questline, she sort of half-gates a bunch of other stuff. I guess some players tend to have a reaction of "I now know this person is bad so I don't want to help them" when Roadwarden sort of expects for its best outcomes that actually you need to get some not-very-savoury characters' trust even if you're then going to use it against them.

(I guess this is also an issue with streaming the game: a streamer is going to want things to work and hit the story beats the way they want in one run, whereas Roadwarden is in part designed around being tight for time and you probably having an incomplete and imperfect set of resolutions to things).

And no problem! Roadwarden has definitely become one of my core Games To Recommend To People in the last year or so

[Aure]

Oh dear! Just so I understand better - were some plotlines blocked for V even though they didn't really confront Thais or do anything to harm her?

[Jubal]

I'll give more details in tag, it hasn't been anything hugely major but just worth noting how things played out:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So I think V tentatively accepted Thais' first quest despite not really wanting to do it, then pretty much ignored her quests etc for most of the game until today. This didn't create many issues, but it did create one or two.

• It of course never becomes obvious how to remove the rockfall if you never get past the spying phase. V assumed this was what the Tool Of Destruction was for then was a bit frustrated by lack of option there (for most of the time I've been trying not to backseat-game for them).
• Some things can end up feeling very out of order: you can still inform Thais about the Old Pagossian plague even well after you went and cured it and had that confrontation with her, so it felt odd to still be able to inform her, like, today, when it's probably ten plus hours of gameplay after Old Pagos got cured. Also that's parly why Thais got bypassed for so long, because V was like "Well Thais clearly hates me now and probably won't talk to me anyway" and then they discovered about Steep House and then no longer wanted to talk to Thais.
• V wanted to help White Marshes right from the start, and I'm not even sure that Howler's Dell rallying people against White Marshes gets raised as an option until later in Thais' line so you don't know that that's even a possibility to work towards (not that a "good" warden would trust Thais to do it once they know about Steep House). So if you bypass that then it's no longer obvious that Thais is an easier option, and you end up staring at Thyrsus going PLEASE TRUST ME to little avail.
• I think (I may be wrong) that you probably need to get at least as far as clearing the rockfall to have helped Howler's enough to get the druids' support, I'm not sure what the locking points are there? And V hadn't even reported the plague until today because they hadn't realised they needed to and were being confused & frustrated at how to progress the Howler's + Steep House plot, because you're just wandering by going "I now know you're evil but I don't have any idea how to get support against you."

So I think the issue is that if you take some other plots too far, it's no longer at all obvious that the gating feature for a major possible solution is "you need to go back and talk to Thais" because it feels like those things have gone past the point where you'd want to do that? Or because you didn't talk to her to start with those options never really open, so you're left with a reduced palette of more difficult options where it's much less obvious how to achieve them, which can make a player hit a bit of a late-game wall. I'm not at all sure how one would fix any of that or indeed if it's a problem that needs fixing rather than just a problem of some people bringing behaviour codes into the game that it wasn't intended to encompass - maybe in one or two places an extra pointer or two in the journal might help?

[Aure]

Thank you, that's very helpful. : ) I'll definitely consider what I could change about it. I don't know if I want to rewrite the fisher's hamlet completely to fit into a potential thais-less run, but I should still add it to my list of potential upgrades for the game.

[Jubal]

Here's a text moment that feels a bit out-of-order as well, with the combination of discussing the event that's already happened and being given the option to inform the character about it, which due to other circumstances they clearly already know:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)