Dragon's Dogma

Haha, I was genuinely surprised when all of a sudden I was being attacked by a Hydra. Anyway I'm in Gran Soren and have bought a new bow, hopefully now I won't feel so weak.

Fighting huge monsters is what the game does best.

Oh, and incidentally I'm currently...

Spoiler:

EDIT: You'll still likely feel weak until your levels hit the thirties. At that point you can deal with most anything the game can throw at you; even in the twenties, some high tier monsters pose a very real threat, and the onset of night brings out things like Direwolves in huge numbers. Night time in this game is genuinely quite terrifying at early levels.

SimianWonder wrote:

Fighting huge monsters is what the game does best.

Until the camera suffers a nervous breakdown at least.

Spoiler:

Holy shit.

Spoiler:

Well I decided I'd played enough to make a decision finally, I just bought it. It's been pretty enjoyable so far, but now that I'm suddenly in Gran Soren I don't know what to do with myself, since that was my goal that whole time. Guess I'll just explore shit for now.

Quest markers(which you can prioritize in the Quest menu) are your friends.

But yes, take the time to explore now, because there are a few interesting quests to do at that part before progressing with the main one. Just look around the city for people with the green icons above their heads and have fun.

@Skip

Be a little careful when exploring - the enemies in the game don't scale to level, so if you're just starting out, you can run the risk of encountering foes meant for characters fiteen to twenty levels above you. As the Pawns are quite happy to remind you, there's no shame in picking up your skirt and running the hell away.

Oh, and until you're familiar with the landscape, try only exploring during the daytime. As mentioned previously, during the nightime the enemies increase in frequency and ferocity, and it gets very dark. You can use a lantern to light your way, sure, but it also means that anything for miles around can see you too.

tl:dr exploring fun but dangerous. Save often.

Sora wrote:

Spoiler:

Where does one acquire these items?

Spoiler:

Yeah, I'm certain I got nothing. I checked all around the corpse, but couldn't find anything.

You don't get the weapons by the corpse. It's where all the wakestones popped up.

Really? Odd. I picked up everything I could see, but didn't see a weapon. Unless, as you say, one of my pawns picked it up and I just dumped it in storage without realising. Hmm. I'll check when I'm next back on.

Oh, and I'm now skint again. I had around 4.5million in the bank, but found a vendor in one of the Everfall chambers selling some risiculously powerful weapons and armour. So I bought as many as I could... some were around 1.4m a piece, so my bank is now down to around 100k again. Sigh.

Hah, my bad. Volant White, in the hands of one of my hired pawns.

Also, Bloodlust. Holy effing hell. The description says "augments strength", but strength not being my focus I've ignored it so far. Thought I'd give it a whirl to see if it helps my daggers at all, and... yeah. My magic shot up from 900 to over 1500. So it affects not just your physical strength, but your magical strength as well. Jesus. No wonder people rave about how OP assassin is.

And not just for its own augments, but because of the culmination of them and the other ones from Fighter and Warrior as well. The combination is deadly.

I don't have anything from fighter or warrior yet, because I've been opting for a magic oriented character for my arisen. To be honest, with my magic daggers hitting for this kind of damage, I see no need to opt for the physical classes. Mystic Knight is going to be a damn wrecking machine with those Great Cannons now.

Yes, you'll do perfectly fine now anyway. Despite you not getting much strength augments, I assume you've been getting magic ones. If so, the result of your magic and strength added together when you use enchanted weapons would be about the same as if you went with the more physical vocation route.

Yes, been taking the magic augments. I just checked my Sorceror build - equipped with the best archistaff available (the one from the everfall vendor), my magic is something in the region of 2200. Essentially, a vanilla High Ingle now hits with the same wallop as an early game Bolide.

SimianWonder wrote:

@Skip

Be a little careful when exploring - the enemies in the game don't scale to level, so if you're just starting out, you can run the risk of encountering foes meant for characters fiteen to twenty levels above you. As the Pawns are quite happy to remind you, there's no shame in picking up your skirt and running the hell away.

Oh, and until you're familiar with the landscape, try only exploring during the daytime. As mentioned previously, during the nightime the enemies increase in frequency and ferocity, and it gets very dark. You can use a lantern to light your way, sure, but it also means that anything for miles around can see you too.

tl:dr exploring fun but dangerous. Save often.

Ahh yes, that's a lesson I learned quite early on, on my first attempt to get to Gran Soren before the story wanted me to.

Dammit, should've heeded my own advice. Just lost about an hour of tedious grinding because I wasn't paying attention and got killed by a Hellhound.

Wow. Again.

Spoiler:

I think I'm going to cry. Fired up the xbox this morning and the game asked me to set the contrast ratio. "Odd," I thought, "it's not done that since the first time I played it," and so it proved.

My saved game is gone. 65 odd hours of it, all my progress, gone. And no, I've no idea why. Didn't even get a message about corrupted data, it's just gone.

I'm going to cry.

That sucks man, do you know if it's a problem with the XBL profile thing or something?

That's bullshit, man. You think you may have accidentally quit the game while it was still saving? That's usually the cause for people's corruptions as there's no "save bug" or anything game-breaking, not that i've heard of anyway.

The save system really is annoying, though. They should have an option to switch auto-save off and have multiple files. This is why I back-up regularly.

Profile is loaded correctly, just went and checked my save data and it shows the save data account as being created today, rather than the two weeks ago I actually started. I'm not sure I can be bothered to do it all again now, especially as I'm off on holiday in two days.

I'd spent a good chunk of time grinding for money and vocation levels, and the thought of doing it all again so soon... sigh.

Yeah, all I can think of is that I turned it off while it was still auto saving. Rest assured, I shall be backing up my save game with Cloud from this point on.