Part 3: & Snakes
Update 003: & SnakesSkipping a bunch of repetitive travel screenshots, I swim the party up to the back entrance and under the rusty gate.
Just a brief swim and we're back on dry land facing the back entrance "airlock" of the Snake Temple.
As appropriate for the service entrance, no one's immediately standing by to hassle us, probably expecting that we're just here to deliver pizzas or something. Also before we get started, yes, the screenshots of this place will show an incredibly confusing layout, and that's because this place is incredibly confusing. I can't show you guys a coherent map because I can't even show myself a coherent map.
This is because when you've got a 3D space and an automapper, you mostly have three options.
#1: A single 3D map that can be rotated. Neither Wizardry 8 or W&W did this.
#2: A seen-from-above map that's completely impenetrable the moment two corridors or other spaces overlap each other. Wizardry 8 did this.
#3: A seen-from-above map sectioned into levels, but you can only ever see the level you're currently on. This would be fine if it was like, say, Legend of Grimrock or one of the old Gold Box games or the first Lands of Lore game where each level mostly doesn't interact with the others. Here, however, we're CONSTANTLY popping up and down levels, so it's just a bunch of separate segments that seem stranded in space. Most of my time in the Snake Temple was spent being lost and looking for locations I knew existed but had no idea how to reach.
It's also compounded by a combination of doors that open when you get close(but never at the same distance, so some I thought were locked just required me to mash Kuros' forehead against them), some that open with levers near them(but often slightly out of sight), others that have locks which are hidden in the perpetually terrible lighting(some corridors are literally pitch black) and so forth.
Ahem, anyway, back to the game.
The gate ahead of us can't be opened, to the right is stairs up, and to the left there's a gate to the SERPENT HOLDS which we lack the key for at the moment. Guess the trip goes upwards.
Just up the stairs is a door and beyond the door are some snakes. That's kind of predictable. They come in two varieties: Temple Vipers and Royal Cobras. Both of them are fragile vermin-level enemies usually wiped out by a single Flamestrike or Meteor(as in, the entire group wiped out), but the Royal Cobras give disproportionate amounts of XP for their difficulty so I'm always excited to see them.
Ahead, the path splits again, with one of the options being a dead-end storage room.
They set up these boxes to hide an enemy ambush as you rush for the crate, only for the ambush to be one(1) snake and to come out before you have a chance to get mired in it and eat a meteor to the face. Mostly I don't show what's in chests because it's not very interesting, but this one has a Quest Item(tm)!
Which I suppose is a good time to talk about what our objectives for this temple is.
Quest objectives: Kill Xydusa(temple quest), get the Scroll of Trickery(Bard quest), get the Masque of Death(main quest).
Our sub-objectives for these main objectives, even though we don't know them yet are: Get four monkey statues, get one snake statue, get the runed wand, get some spider juice, get some incense and collect a bunch of temple scrip to access their treasury(?) and vending machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g74d_G-kIkc
Even though we just climbed out of his broom closet, Kreug mistakes us for the new interns and sends us down the stairs again to clean up the Serpent Holds. Oddly enough, snakes never spawn in the Serpent Holds.
Heading down the stairs we encounter a random batch of snake priests. For the moment, everything in the temple that isn't a snake or monkey is neutral to us, thus we get chatter instead of threats. Generally the chatter implies that the serpent priests are a bit scared of Xydusa and Elyssia(their high priestess) and feel constantly on a knife's edge of being sacrificed and do their best to "look busy." In a better game, we'd have a low-fatality/violence route and be able to free a lot of these idiots from their shackles. In this game it just means we feel a bit conflicted when we eventually murder them anyway.
Welcome to the first thing in the Snake Temple that required multiple reloads. See, you enter the Serpent Holds and jump down into the water.
You swim two meters and find a tunnel leading upwards, blocked by the UNHOLY FILTH, a big slime. It's not a big deal to kill but. BUT.
Do not attempt to surface for air. If you do, either while fighting it, or just after killing it, you get lodged in the geometry and have to reload.
Instead, kill it, then, while drowning, swim back to where you entered, recover on the surface, go down again, swim in, and you can now enter the tunnel without getting stuck. The reward?
One out of eight minor quest items for the Snake Temple! Back to Kreug.
Kreug is happy with us and lets us progress. It should be noted that the doors leading away from Kreug are locked until either you kill him or do his little cleaning subquest, so you can't even really bypass him. Now let's see what fun the temple has to offer!
Literally pitch black corridors!
Dowry Priests that can't be dodged and extort us for ever larger sums of gold!
Extremely bitchin' murals!
Honestly part of the sad thing is that the temple actually looks pretty decent, with some good modelwork in places and generally solid texturing everywhere, but a combination of poor lighting and just... terrible layout that in no way attempts to resemble a real location sabotages it because you'll be focusing more on how to find a way out/in than where you are.
Tucked away in a hidden corner is the snake machine that dispenses incense(or, rather ?aromatic cones?) in exchange for snake priest coins. We just need one for this.
Another room, another giant novelty snake structure.
Also this room sucks. See, you've got it talking in the descriptive text about the pit in the floor which turns out to be completely irrelevant. I spent like half an hour wondering if I was meant to drop something down the chute when it turns out I was just meant to press a button in a corner, at which point monkeys would drop into the room, and one of the monkeys would, rather than attack, run away and need to be fireballed before getting lost, as he'd be clutching one of the four monkey statuettes needed for the Bard quest.
There's the little fucker almost getting away.
Another place of interest is this annex with four levers, five doors and a coin slot. You set the levers to a combination and drop in a coin, and if you get the right combo, you open a door that has a chest and some monsters behind it. One of them also hides another monkey statuette. This was where I realized I was out of patience with the temple and started killing. I think you can get almost to the end without killing any of the faithful, but fuck 'em, I need snake coins to play serpent gacha games with their treasury.
STOP MAKING ME PAY TAXES. Thankfully just about everything on the main floors goes down to a single Flamestrike or Meteor. All very chump change, and they rarely cast anything but the aforementioned wimpy Venom Bite.
They also keep spamming their non-hostile lines until my kills are well into the dozens, as well as walking into walls and generally being very confused. This massacre may be a mercy.
Eventually I finally find this guy who's trying to walk through a door and failing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hCB1LpJgsU
He's got a key we need, and also finding him indicates we're near the torture chambers.
After declaring his intent to kill me, he promptly starts walking away, probably a smart move on his part, though he IS marginally dangerous. The more snake-y looking snake priest type enemies can sometimes bust out actually damaging spells like Locust Swarm(which can actually one-shot the party and is not to be fucked with), but they remain fragile.
Nearby I find the torture chambers, where someone's hidden a secret button in the middle of burning... lava? Embers? Either way the temple is generally full of poorly-hidden, entirely optional "secret" treasure chambers that usually have a single chest each.
Next door is H'tark, released with the inquisitor's key, though he won't even try to escape, much less talk to us, without being given his lockpicks which we got from Gorthius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VodNwyOAfVI
His escape strategy is... novel, but if we hadn't brought him his lockpicks we would have been 100% in the dark on how to actually progress to the next part of the temple(incense+nectar+wand), nothing else indicates it, which seems strange considering that encountering him at all is quite sidequesty. You could have completely missed Gorthius. Also note him revealing that Harespia was giving everyone the same damn prophecy, either because she really wanted the Snake Temple busted, or because she really wanted her customers dead before they could demand a refund. I feel vindicated in chopping her up, now.
Next door is a giant Conan-esque spinny wheel which lowers a big crusher up and down. So raise the crusher...
Suffer a bunch of physdamage from poorly-placed doors while navigating there...
Then drop a spider egg under it.
And a flask at the output below. You then lower the crusher to produce...
Spider nectar! Now we just need the serpent wand! From talking to H'tark, we have a pretty good idea it's in the library, which is about the only not-another-corridor location I haven't found so far...
Now, I don't mind that saying it took me easily another half hour just because I had to look in a corner behind me on entering a room to be able to open the door leading there.
Kind of wishing the temple had less bland corridors and more rooms like this. Sadly (most of) the books are unreadable, so we don't know what kind of hisstories the snake people like to read.
Above us is an unreachable corridor, and the shelves have five pedestals set in them. One for the snake statuette, and four for the monkey statuettes. Snake goes in the middle, monkeys around the edges.
The snake statue uncovers this book containing the words we need to enter the inner sanctum.
The monkey statuettes activate this elevator which takes us up to the passage, and also triggers a fight with Kreug's Familiar, an oversized dragonfly which, like everything so far(notice the foreshadowing here, folks), is a pushover.
The little lab up here contains the serpent wand AND the scroll of Trickery for Trap Option's bard promotion.
Let's conduct us a dark ritual!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL_vuh1TRTc
I think we just got promoted.
Yeah this sure doesn't look suspicious at all, let me just save before pulling that switch on the far wall.
So when the switch is pulled the floor is meant to open, and stay open, dumping you into the pit below. Instead, the floors keeps opening and closing, slamming the party against the walls and doing physdamage to Rondor because apparently his foot is stuck in the mechanism, until I walk back out again, at which point it opens properly and I can voluntarily deposit myself into the depths.
This drops us into the Lair of Xydusa. At first we're just greeted by a couple of snakes(easily dispatched, like usual), and then comes the big girl herself in the next chamber.
So think back to my descriptions of every encounter in the temple thus far. Note the use of wording like "easily beaten" or "destroyed in one hit" or "can't really hurt us." You would assume I am overlevelled or really good at the game and thus, the first boss of the temple will also be a cakewalk.
Instead here you've got three out of six party members turned to stone and two of the survivors paralyzed. She's capable of rolling her save-or-die bullshit on one party member per combat round if she chooses to, my only combat spell that can damage her is meteor, of which I have four casts. It would take me about... probably 30 rounds of combat, with no one getting stoned or paralyzed, to take her out.
Now, what's meant to happen here is that if you returned Algamesh's necklace to Kerielle, she'd have given you a potion which would inure one party member to Xydusa's bullshit, allowing you to at least keep one high-damage fighter in the fight permanently.
Instead she owns me. Utterly.
Reloading ensues.
Second time around I play keep-away with her around the altar(?) at the center of her room, popping her with meteors and using the altar to block her return fire. But it soon becomes clear that, while this might work, it would take the better part of several hours to do because of Gizzord's slow mana regen.
Then I spot a lever at the back of the altar.
Since she's not actually a main quest objective I can just skedaddle and kill her a bit later.
Xydusa chases me into the narrow network of labyrinthine passages beyond, but I manage to evade her.
At the far end is this... thing. A room with four elevators, some going up and down, connecting to other similar rooms. Some "combinations" of elevators will take you to places that actually matter, but, as usual, it's extremely hard to tell where any of them take you and there are no clues whatsoever.
I could probably not replicate it, but I eventually manage to break out of the maze and into this group of Serpent Caretakers. As mentioned, they're the kind of enemy that can cast Locust Swarm. It's like Flamedrop, a damage-per-second spell except if it hits the party, it latches on to the party, not their location, and thus you can't even walk away from it. Very, very dangerous, one cast will almost surely kill at least one party member if it hits us. I trade shots with them from the safety of the secret corridor and eventually manage to take them down with no losses.
It turns out they can also summon snakes but the snakes are, as mentioned, not even a vague threat.
Have I pointed out how much I hate that I can only see my current level on the map? This wouldn't be such a huge puzzle if not for that!
Failing to find a way out of the maze, I eventually bungle my way back to the other maze, the one Xydusa is still in and decide that maybe killing her opens some doors somewhere. Sometimes boss kills are keyed that way.
She's a lot easier to dodge and exchange fire with in the corridors, but eventually I lose patience with that(seriously I think it took about 20 minutes just getting her down to 25% health), save and charge in.
Of course Kuros, my main melee damage dealer, eats a stoning on almost the first round of combat. I've got a single potion of stone to flesh that I got from a random drop, which gets spent on a mid-battle fix-up for Hierophant.
Rondor gets stoned as well, but I've almost got her...
She drops nothing and nothing opens when she goes down, but she does give a phenomenal amount of XP, allowing both Gizzord and Hierophant to level up. For Gizzord, I pick Stone to Flesh as his new spell so I don't have to haul Kuros and Rondor back to town as statuary and waste money on getting them turned back into meat.
...so I'm still stuck in this maze, huh. Well, back to the elevators. It turns out the only "combination" of up/down elevators I missed was, of course, the one that actually allowed me to progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQwaVwUKWcE
I believe it is, again, possible to talk past this guy. Instead I just tell him the truth and stab his face open so I can open the elevators behind him and advance. The video above also shows the sort of damage a single cast of Locust Swarm can do, and that's on the low end of the potential damage scale.
So two elevators. One of them takes us back up to the maze we just came from, while the other is progress. I, of course, pick the wrong one on my first try, because I'm good at this game.
The second time, we're back to the big elevator that dropped us down to Xydusa in the first place, but this time the floor doesn't split and it instead raises is up to a new level above.
Now we're finally about to be done with the Snake Temple.
Let's see what imposing boss babble Elyssia has to drop on us before the fight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n-DOFt_LUs
So she has two triggers for summoning reinforcements, one seems to trigger as soon as you talk to her, the other when she's damaged.
Now, if all she summoned was priests, that would be no probalo. Two meteors and they'd be dead, but half of what she summons are serpent caretakers who can cast Locust Swarm. In addition she, herself, can cast Locust Swarm as well as an even more powerful spell of the same type called Deadly Vapours. Getting into a close-quarters fight with her just means that both she AND all her goons can hit you at once and is, as I discover after three times, not the right way to handle the fight.
Instead I cheese it by standing at the entrance and hurling meteors and fireballs at her and her congregation.
It's still not perfectly safe, as they can shoot back, and it takes me two reloads before I get a fight where I'm not nailed dead-on by a locust swarm, deadly vapours, or both.
Thankfully they seem unwilling to mount the ramp from the sides and instead all head down to the floor of the auditorium before heading up it. This makes them great targets for AoE spells of all types. The last level-up also gave Hierophant his own Locust Swarm, so he's now a relevant contributor to the damage race in fights, too.
Elyssia also complicates things a bit by being able to put a large part of the party to sleep at various points, which disrupts my ability to do damage.
Oddly enough she mostly hangs out behind her altar and doesn't advance until the entire congregation has been chunked.
I'm not going to post screenshots of all the failures, like I'm not going to post screenshots of all the random encounters I get in between each pic(just trust me when I say there are generally three or four minor fights between each screenshot), but I had to reload, I think, about six or seven times in total for this fight. Xydusa was I want to say three or four.
Not sure I'd agree with the narrator calling her foolish. She was smart enough to surround herself with guards, summon them while making a speech and require reaching her at all being conditional on a close encounter with a very large, scary monster. I'd rate her pretty low on the level of foolish villainy, personally.
In any case, she drops the MASQUE OF DEATH, which we still don't really know the great importance of, an upgraded staff for Gizzord and a variety of small gewgaws of the vendor trash variety.
Also, with her dead, we can now finally leave this hellhole, thankfully and surprisingly nothing spawns on the way out.
Sweet, sweet freedom. I haul ass back to Ishad N'ha before any giant spiders or other dumb bullshit can start chasing me down.
So, time to tally up the advancements.
Trap Option becomes a bard and completes his first Thieves' Guild quest, his next one is to loot a wizard's lab in the ruins of Shurugeon Castle. All arrows are starting to point therewards.
I also take advantage of the training mechanic to get him his first rank in Music so he can start using instruments(he found some garbage pipes in the Snake Temple that lets him cast Venom Bite and I bought him a lyre that lets him cast Summon Creature). The cost of training scales with existing level(both for stats and skills), and it usually gets prohibitively expensive, especially for stats, where a boost can cost up to 17k gold or more at the party's current levels(for context, I made about a 10k gold profit on clearing out the snake temple, in total). Additionally, you can only train one thing, once, per level-up. So until Trap Option gets another level, this is all I can buy for him.
Hierophant gets praised for killing Xydusa and directed to go to Shurugeon Castle as well, to discover what happened to a woman's dead husband.
Gizzord, having finally learned Lavawalk, gets turned into a Warlock. See, Wizards start out knowing Sun and Stone magic, and no other class gets Stone Magic until one of the very latest-game optional superclasses. But there are also late-game dungeons with lava in them which can really suck if you haven't levelled Stone Magic to get Lava Walk before upgrading your Wizard to another class. Because if you turn him into, as in this case, a Warlock, he stops advancing in Sun and Stone magic, and instead get Moon and Fiend magic.
Like Sun and Stone magic, these two schools have some blasty spells, but Moon also has some utility stealth and teleport spells, and Fiend has summons and mind control spells.
In addition, Warlocks are the only ones who get access to the Artifacts skill and thus the ability to ID items without paying exorbitant prices at the guild stores for it.
Hierophant goes on the quest to become a Monk, which requires being completely un-equipped of all items for 2 full in-game days. Monks, predictably, get to do decent unarmed damage, and can still cast Spirit spells, but lose access to Vine spells. Hierophant already has a lot of those, though, and Sophia is now making slow progress in them. Level 6, the penultimate level, of Vine magic is worthwhile for a spell that cures Disease, but otherwise it's not anything I'm really excited about in any case.
But with that, we have done every quest(except Kerielle's) between Ishad N'ha and Valeia, and can thus pretend that part of the world doesn't exist at all until I turn a member of the goon squad into a paladin.
Next Update: Little Shire of Horrors