Tortured Hearts I.

thank you for this. am looking forward to playing this..

What happened to the additional portraits that came with TH1 on the old nwvault?

Pros: Challenging combat, multifaceted role-play in dialogue, dynamic dialogue, moody NPCs, many areas, and multiple options for some quest completion or outcomes. Modder will assist with any issues a player might have during gameplay.

Cons: 240+ areas, but most are locked pending plot/quest/or conversation completion. Many areas are seen time and again, and many players may grow tired of it. Dynamic dialogue, but often in the same area, with the same NPCs ad nauseam. Occasional glitches and quest breaks throughout the game that add their own flavor to the mix.

I was quite excited to try this, as I never got around to it years ago. There certainly seemed to be a lot of content. After about 60 hours, however (and numerous quest breaking bugs and glitches, countless reloads and redone conversations) it began to dawn on me why I ran out of steam. I think the promise of 240+ areas gives the impression that once you are finished with an area (after going there once or twice), you were finished with it, and you will be moving on to something new, which is not really the case here. Areas and NPCs, even conversations, are experienced again and again, to the point where fantasy and fun are slowly worn away. Tortured Hearts 1 demonstrates why developers, even as far back as Baldur’s Gate and the Arkania series, gave freedom to gamers but also the ability to experience some sense of completion from time to time, if for no other reason than to give the illusion of progress.

A bit of research on Tortured hearts will give the impression that the head developer, SubBassman, wanted to bring a more hardcore experience to the gaming world. He delivered, I too found it fun to, on occasion, find myself unable to finish a quest or dungeon and have to return later to do so. For the majority of gamers, however, I suspect it will become too much of a good thing, as one may find oneself with a journal full of quests with seemingly no leads whatsoever. This should sound mysterious, right? It was, for the first 10 hours afterward.

In many ways one gets the impression the developer wanted to create something as dynamic (if not more so) than table-top gaming, but forgot that, in such gaming, dungeon masters can sense when their players have become frustrated and require a little help, if for no other reason than to preserve the friendship. In a single player game there is no such help, and while there are two readme files floating around the internet which can serve as a guide or list of “cheats” for players, they do not and will not solve all the issues one may encounter. The problems multiply when, with a mod of this size, one breaks a few conversations, quests, misses a loot item, or is simply stuck and can find no help online.  SubBassman himself has made an effort, to his credit, to answer emails regarding such issues, a testament to how convoluted one’s journey can become if enough things go wrong. One may find that all the help files and the developer himself insist a certain NPC should be in a certain place at that point in the game and saying certain things, for example, but is in fact somewhere else and not responding at all (often waiting for you to complete some other task, conversation, or time of day when they feel like responding). Three, five or even ten hours may go by and you will still not know what you did wrong, even after redoing conversations, areas, and fighting a few new respawns.

I had read reviews which complained as much, and yet –before playing--I drooled at the prospect of entering a world so dynamic. How could it be anything but remarkable? The truth is it was, but it went too far. When one considers that you are doing this for the majority of quests where( if you mess up or miss something important) you will be reloading, re-running through an area, triple checking barrels, chests, and conversations, and so on, one may surely lose it. In theory, it would make the game more dynamic and more interesting, yes, and likely--in the mind of a modder--the ultimate experience. I prepared for it, I ground through it…but when you add on top of all this the problems of having to return to certain areas or talk to NPCS again and again, and again, and again…I began to tire of looking at them and/or fighting or talking to anyone. Add to that the fact that many quests require you to go back to the city, for example, to buy something or return an item or finish a conversation, it starts to feel more like a list of chores to be done rather than something mysterious, new, or exciting. Ironically, the only measure I saw that seemed a nod to this problem was the fact that many encounters in one area might involve several different kinds of creatures -- to mix up the combat somewhat--but on the whole this is the illusion of change and makes dungeons and areas feel less realistic.

To SubBassman's credit, he was helpful through email, he gave some advice on a bug I encountered and how to get around it. But it required a reload 4-5 saves back, and I simply didn't do it, I didn't have anything left in me. To get back to where I was involved several hours of replaying, something that might not have been an issue if the game were not so anti-linear (having your character doing 10-30 different quests at any given time and thus minimizing the chances you might give up on one and bugger off and do five others, all the while not knowing the original was broken until you came back to it). To make matters worse, the odd quest is related or dependent on your finishing another--which means it is possible for one to enter what seems to be a perpetual cycle of running around but accomplishing nothing.

I am not sure what this mod was. I do know it was a reaction to the simplified, linear, boring, and uninteresting storylines of past RPG games in general and simply tried to take it beyond what anyone thought possible in a game. It is certainly a grand effort to undue the cookie-cutter nature of RPG games from the last 15 years, and I seriously wanted to like it. Unfortunately, however, in the end my suspicions were that my above complaints would not be an issue at all IF I were SubBassman, and knew how all the pieces fit together while playing. I only hope the development of this game (since the kickstarter in 2012) for independant release finds some happy medium between the extremes it so pointedly defines in the world of RPG games.

1st off this should help a ton when playing this game, it's a command i found online to move to some of the areas. 

Use the console command "dm_movetoarea" along  with the tag of any area you want to visit. (Then use "+" if you're stuck.) For example, "dm_movetoarea

Pikedale".   If you load up the module in the toolkit, you can find  the tag of any area. A few useful ones are: Glytheplains, Scaryvalley, PikedaleCityHallupper,

CapeCrestBath, CapeCrestInnerplains, CapeCrestOldtower, CreepyTunnel.

1 MAJOR flaw.. no auto save.. GOD help you if you missed somthing or saved by accident . The game has a massive potiential for single player, but best played w/ dugneon master.  There are many conversations that shut you out of quests.  I can understand the possible intent of creating a differeent exp, BUT it's crippled by not having a tip /hint system that can give you insight on a situation or characters.  That lack of help to immerser yourself into the world for single player drains the fun eventually.

I'm near the end ...

• I can not find the drawf's wife
• i can't find the waterworks supervisor
• i can't find the ruins despite having the map & the woman informing me of it's authenticity
•  

I don't know what to add to what Wayeward already wrote in detail about the cons of this module. I agree with all they said.

What I can add to it is that the henchmen were useless and died within the first minute of almost any battle.

The writing was strange. Sometimes it made no sense at all, sometimes it was very funny though it was probably not meant this way, like when the PC said something about doing one's buisness in Pikedale (look up "to do one's buisness" in the slang dictionary).