[iwd] Closing a 20-year old plot hole

[CamDawg]

After you restore Larrel's Astrolabe at the Severed Hand, Larrel sends you along to Dorn's Deep. You start in the myconid cavern and can adventure around for a bit, and eventually you'll reach the frozen aquarium. At this point you're supposed to deal with the frost salamanders in the aquarium, fix the bridge to the southwest, and venture into the caves where Joril and his fellow frost giants live.

The problem is that, from the aquarium exterior, you can move directly to this area (ar7000):

You can go directly into Lower Dorn's Deep, skipping the frost giant cave (and the aquarium) outright. Now, this doesn't break anything--you can complete LDD, the frost giant cave, and the aquarium in any order and still proceed to the endgame. The problem is that as soon as you enter LDD you get the new chapter screen, where the very first line of the chapter narration is "Leaving the horrors of the frost giant caves behind them..." even though the party could have skipped them.

So, suggestions? We can do nothing (always an option) or put up some barrier to prevent the party from using the LDD entrance until they have Joril's badge, or something else you want to suggest. Personally I advocate for a barrier: disable the transition and overlay an info trigger with text along the lines of "A mysterious force bars the way and you ca go no further at this time." (feel free to suggest better text, if you prefer this option).

[CamDawg]

This is for @Bartimaeus

[Sam.]

49 minutes ago, CamDawg said:

This is for @Bartimaeus
[][...]

I knew your were series, but somehow I didn't fully believe you until you did it lol.  Well played, sir, well played.

[Endarire]

A text prompt encouraging players to visit the plot-expected areas first seems better than an outright barring of entry into something vanilla IWD allows.

[Guest Morgoth]

I would change nothing. If the text screen is the issue, just make a clone or remove the relevant lines, otherwise, I personally wouldn't fix.

[jastey]

If you miss content by advancing too soon, then I'd be for a fix.

If players could advance too early without intend just by exiting the wrong exit, then some change to make them aware would be good.

If you can do all content in random order without making the content awkward, and the text screen for the chapter change is the only thing that's wrong in that case, then I'd be with Morgoth. It might have been dev intend to do it in a certain order so adding this would be a fix, but as it is now it would decrease players choice and make it more linear.

If it's an optional component, go for what you have in mind anyway.

[CamDawg]

5 hours ago, jastey said:

If players could advance too early without intend just by exiting the wrong exit, then some change to make them aware would be good.

It's just another cave entrance in an area with three; there's no indication that you're moving to a new chapter. To me the narration makes it pretty clear that the devs intended for the party to finish the glacier events before moving on to LDD.

[Graion Dilach]

18 hours ago, CamDawg said:

Personally I advocate for a barrier: disable the transition and overlay an info trigger with text along the lines of "A mysterious force bars the way and you ca go no further at this time." (feel free to suggest better text, if you prefer this option).

I'm voting for this preliminarily. I managed to forgot the frost giants in my previous attempt and triggered the chapter transition unwilliingly.

I do want to check some speedruns to see of this was used there, though.

[argent77]

I used my rusty Photoshop skills to block passage to Lower Dorn's Deep by another door that can only be opened with Joril's Badge (see attachment).

Imo, it would not really be suitable for the fixpack, since it alters original content a bit too much for my taste. But it could be a candidate for an "Optional but cool" component or a tweak pack.

A7-WTGPassDoor.zip

[subtledoctor]

I appreciate the intent here, but the insertion of a mysterious force that yields to Joril's badge, without any kind of plot connection to Joril's badge, seems a bit... random? How would the player know what is needed to advance? I guess the answer is, they would keep exploring and eventually they would find it. But they wouldn't necessarily know they found it, and when the passage is open afterward they might not know what exactly did it. Could make for a confusing experience.

Further, there's no technical problem with doing these things out of order, right? You can clear LDD, get to the point of needing all the badges to proceed, and then go back to the frost giant area and get Joril's badge. That sequence being possible feels intentional to me. Well, except for being inconsistent with the the chapter-change text.

OTOH, if an iOS update ever happens so I can play this stupid game ever again, I will always do the frost giants first and would not be sad to lose the chance to do things out of order.

I  have the distinct recollection of playing IWD and seeing one of the passages there barred by iron gates, which then opened up later. Am I crazy? Was that the work of some fixpack or tweakpack?

[Graion Dilach]

The iron gate opens up the route marked as aquarium tunnel on this same screenshot. It's the aquarium quest's resolution, when you allow the slaves out to escape through it.

[pete_smith1229]

16 hours ago, Endarire said:

A text prompt encouraging players to visit the plot-expected areas first seems better than an outright barring of entry into something vanilla IWD allows.

I second this option. You could place a trigger directly before the transition with some floating text as if the char is saying it out loud to his party. E.g.

"This path leads further down into the deep. Perhaps we should explore the upper caves first."

Then the option to go down to the deeps is still available if the player is a masochist.

[subtledoctor]

3 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

The iron gate opens up the route marked as aquarium tunnel on this same screenshot. It's the aquarium quest's resolution, when you allow the slaves out to escape through it.

Ah, right. That seems like the natural place for the game to advance to a new chapter.  Maybe the devs originally required something in the frost giant cave to free the slaves? And then it changed later in development to make the frost giant caves optional at that point? That would seem to be the ideal design, given the chapter-change narration specifically refers to it. Maybe the FP could do that, give Joril a MacGuffin for freeing the slaves? But I guess that would be too big a change...

[Frenzgyn]

17 hours ago, Guest Morgoth said:

I would change nothing. If the text screen is the issue, just make a clone or remove the relevant lines, otherwise, I personally wouldn't fix.

I second this.

[subtledoctor]

I think the issue is, there are voiced lines. No?