Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy — Fantasy RPG from ATOM devs

[UltraFan123]

Releases in Early access on 12/12/24

feathered dinosaur = gay redditcore shit

I think "feathered" is how many dinosaurs actually looked? If so, I don't think we should be associating such a thing to redditards.

[Tinky Winky]

Releases in Early access on 12/12/24

feathered dinosaur = gay redditcore shit

I think "feathered" is how many dinosaurs actually looked? If so, I don't think we should be associating such a thing to redditards.

I just find it odd that how pretty much every raptor-based creatures this days are designed as feathered, even for settings that have absolutely nothing to do with real life dinosaurs.

I'm busy with Fallout Sonora right now and I'm definitely NOT paying to be a beta tester, so I can't really tell how its fantasy creature designs actually are. Game seems to be fine anyway, looks better than Urban Strife according to reviews.

[Rand]

It's a decent game, competently done, but nowhere near finished content-wise.

It's pretty good with the UI and stuff.

It does even the most basic of basics right, such as loading a game from the list of saved games by double clicking on it without a confirmation box, and without having to click-select, then move the mouse to click a load button.
Always a nice QOL feature that too many UI designers, the non-gamers that they are, miss.
(The original Fallout had this feature, iirc.)

[Rand]

These would be dinosaurs that lived and evolved for another 65 million years.
There's no reason why they wouldn't be able to develop feathers like the real life surviving dinosaurs (birds) did.

[rusty_shackleford]

Took me about 6 hours just to do the first map btw

[rusty_shackleford]

I made a noble with maxed out luck that thinks he's a great swordsman, all of his other stats are mediocre. High bluff, swords, and mercantile. He never steals and always helps those in need. He's completely unaware that all of his successes in life have been due to luck.

I think I misunderstood bluff tho. It's closer to deceive, which feels wrong

My background(nobleman) comes up a lot, I'd say near every dialogue at least once, btw. I hope they add more, I think there's 3 total right now. Also seems to change the style of dialogue.

Also, dialogue is as good as ATOM/Trudograd. Enjoying this.

[Unhelpful Contrarian]

[rusty_shackleford]

he's an idiot so I'm not watching btw

[Yankee Zulu]

If you played ATOMs EA how is this in comparison?

[Unhelpful Contrarian]

he's an idiot so I'm not watching btw

I’m curious why you think that.

[rusty_shackleford]

he's an idiot so I'm not watching btw

I’m curious why you think that.

1. he hated ATOM
2. he loved veilguard

[rusty_shackleford]

I think I'm going to stop for now. Not because I hit a content limit(I suspect there's a lot more content.) I enjoyed what I played and am looking forward to the full release. It feels very polished so far. I suspect I missed some stuff in the first area, and have ideas of how to get it.
I took screenshots of all the books I found. If you want to find them yourself, don't click the spoiler.

► Show Spoiler

Swordhaven_007.webp (507.52 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_008.webp (537.96 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_009.webp (611.94 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_010.webp (434.7 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_011.webp (602.59 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_012.webp (734.77 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_013.webp (812.89 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_014.webp (790.12 KiB) Viewed 418 times

Swordhaven_015.webp (687.54 KiB) Viewed 418 times

(Reading this did allow me to begin conversing with barbarians, it gives you a distinction that you understand the basics of the language.)

Swordhaven_019.webp (1012.96 KiB) Viewed 418 times

For companions, since @Finarfin asked,

► Show Spoiler

The female bard will accompany you to the first town, then inform you she is going to stay at the inn. After you learn about the barbarians, speak to her again to get her to accompany you.
After speaking to the village elder, the guy who hangs out near his house will offer to accompany you. You can say the village elder said to tell him he's supposed to assist you, but I don't remember being told this at all. If anyone can correct me, I'd like to know.

I spent probably 3-4 hours just running around talking to NPCs in the first town. Any NPC you haven't spoke with yet will appear as a yellow dot on your map with a dark inner dot, otherwise it's just a yellow dot. NPCs have full schedules and such.

[1998]

I think I'm going to stop for now. Not because I hit a content limit(I suspect there's a lot more content.) I enjoyed what I played and am looking forward to the full release. It feels very polished so far. I suspect I missed some stuff in the first area, and have ideas of how to get it.
I took screenshots of all the books I found. If you want to find them yourself, don't click the spoiler.

That's one of the very few EA I am zero worried that they will eventually release it in a somewhat decent state. Already bought it, but won't play until 1.0

[rusty_shackleford]

Oh yeah, guess I should add a disclaimer that I got the game for free. A nice HQ member sent me a key, I don't know if he wants to be mentioned so I'll just say thank you nice HQ member.

[rusty_shackleford]

I suspect you might be able to take one of the other shipmates with you as a companion,

► Show Spoiler

Rather than the nice bard lady. The store itself has a different one as a companion:

It's on the very first area. Perhaps, maybe, not in?

[Rand]

For companions, since @Finarfin asked,

► Show Spoiler

The female bard will accompany you to the first town, then inform you she is going to stay at the inn. After you learn about the barbarians, speak to her again to get her to accompany you.
After speaking to the village elder, the guy who hangs out near his house will offer to accompany you. You can say the village elder said to tell him he's supposed to assist you, but I don't remember being told this at all. If anyone can correct me, I'd like to know.

I spent probably 3-4 hours just running around talking to NPCs in the first town. Any NPC you haven't spoke with yet will appear as a yellow dot on your map with a dark inner dot, otherwise it's just a yellow dot. NPCs have full schedules and such.

Seems like any of the beach people can fill that role.
For me it was the old man sage guy.

[Cipher]

he's an idiot so I'm not watching btw

I’m curious why you think that.

He defended Forspoken.

Shilled for Veilguard.

If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about his so called "integrity", then nothing will. He is a fence sitter on his "reviews" because he doesn't want to get shunned by the access media now that he has a son. I get it, he has to hustle, but that makes him a used car salesman, not someone with an opinion on games that is worth your time or attention.

[Brother Chad]

NGL, I expected it to be janky but it's surprisingly polished so far.

[Rand]

The only jank I saw was it opening up the crafting menu stupidly every time when you interacted with the thing.
It has a bunch of categories and will iterate your inventory to show which categories have craftables, but it will always expand the first category even if you have nothing craftable in it.

Also, I craft failed putting an axe head on a handle 80% of the time, losing the handle to the failure most of the time.
I have a crafting skill of 50+
Is my character literally retarded? That is an easy job that is very hard to screw up, and I don't see how you could break the handle.

[boot]

Game sounds awesome

[Ilovecheezecake]

Made a adventurer with max int, luck and perception, str, endurance and dex dumpstats. Spent also 6 hours in first village, leveled up from conversations. Was a blast.

Hoping they add more backgrounds and traits like Atom, with varying bonuses/maluses

[wndrbr]

Oh yeah, guess I should add a disclaimer that I got the game for free. A nice HQ member sent me a key, I don't know if he wants to be mentioned so I'll just say thank you nice HQ member.

you're welcome!

[rusty_shackleford]

Forgot to add that anyone who was worried about RTwP combat ruining it, I'd say there's about as much combat as ATOM i.e., it's not a RTwP trashfest. I played it exclusively in TB mode, no issue.
Also, it seems to have extensive RTwP AI options.

[Acrux]

Also, it seems to have extensive RTwP AI options.

Is there any game you'd say the RTwP is most similar to?

How accurate is this information below about the current state of the game? Considering that in ATOM skills went up to 200, I'm not sure how much of this complaint might just be poor calibration of expectations or weird early game balance. But tools breaking on use doesn't sound good, though.

► Show Spoiler

Also, people need to stop using the phrase "anti-fun".

Stat/skill gameplay problems

Going in order of when these gameplay problems should become obvious to the player:

1) The skill effects needs to be doubled and increased by 5X in some areas. It makes 0 sense for my hit to be 50% on average in the first 2 starting zones with a weapon that I'm fully invested in with 50 points in.

I started as a bandit, so I'm just going to go over my major skills to start with.

2) Lockpicking at 50 seemed nice on game start, but do to the anti fun mechanics, lockpicks are finite, are destroyed on usage and can only be used on locks of the appropriate level. Meaning the whole skill is useless. You will open around 4 chests out of the 15 or so on the first map and be unable to touch the rest. I think you can save scum to try to save your lockpicks to get as many chests open as you can. But like I stated, that's anti-fun. The player should never be save scumming, this game has ironman mode already in game.

3) Pickpocketing is completely worthless. You can't even steal small change from unaware NPCs at night. You just get discovered. It's suppose to be based on weight and coins weight nothing so my testing just made it look worst.

4) Sneak is a worthless skill. Walking around the world map will give you encounters that you can try to sneak away from. My sneak chance to get away is 12%! My sneak is 42! It's crazy to think just how much I'd have to pump into that skill just for it to be usable, let alone, good. But it wouldn't be worth it! You don't need sneak skill to sneak, if they see you you're caught regardless, there is no "eye" indicator like in Baldur's Gate 3 for example, to give you a chance to get away, it's instant spotted!

5) In the same vein as my lockpicking complaint, crafting has a failure chance the failure can make you lose items. That isn't a problem... the problem is that you can lose your mortar and pestle! Like how hard do you need to fail a craft to break a m&p? At that point just give me a game over screen! Seriously!

You get 1 mortar & pestle at game start and there are 1 in each herbalists shop and they are fairly expensive. So they are finite, you need them to make potions and they can break on the first usage. You can flat out be locked out of making potions very easily. You can prevent this with save scumming. Again, anti-fun, player shouldn't have to resort to save scumming to play the game or maximize their skills.

On that note the game has a fairly complex crafting system involving acquiring several realistically comparative items to craft with, like a ball peen hammer for copper working. After seeing the M&P explode I didn't engage with this system because spending 500 coins to get all of the crafting items just to watch half of them explode on my first craft would have lead to this review being a lot shorter...

So basically every skill I picked was either useless because the bonus from them was too low, the skill requires an item that is destructible and therefore easily lost making the skill inert or was just plain useless in the gameplay context.

Dialog

That brings me to what I called the "10% fun" portions of the game. The dialog. The dialog is actually pretty good. I love that you don't just psychically know the name of every NPC, you have to ask like a normal person! Each character in town besides for the children has a personality and isn't a blank NPC. Obviously, for the sake of spoilers, I will not go into any more detail on the topic.

And that's the praise, the dialog instantly goes down hill if you didn't go all in on personality and get the skills. The game doesn't care if you have a 30 in intimidation, it's like 50+ or bust. In the first zone! You can't even intimidate a lad with his first chin whiskers! They are so focused on stats, that context is completely thrown out of the window.

Getting companions doesn't help because they can't help or effect dialog regardless of their stats, meaning your character is the face and if you don't invest in that, you're gimping yourself. When combined with the previous grievances with the skill system this makes the game play horribly! You invest in a bunch of stats that don't matter, then see a bunch of dialog skill checks that you can't do, while your invested stats are worthless... big ouch.

Combat

This should be the games saving grace, but as I mentioned briefly, Fully investing into your main DPS weapon's skill and stat gives you an average of 50% hit rate on the first 2 maps. That's in part to the enemies being evasive but also do to your hit rate being horrible in general.

Most combat encounters are you watching your character miss, miss, miss while getting your HP depleted. Wouldn't be a big deal if your mortar and pestle didn't explode while grinding flowers...

For a second I thought I just built my character wrong, till I got a second character with 78 martial arts (the same main weapons skill as my own character's but he was a level higher) to my 50 and his hit rate was around 9% higher... so he was almost at 60% hit rate! How fantastic! And there are skills that give you negative hit rates lol yeah, you really need that!

The hit rate needs to doubled across the board just so the player can have fun. That's not even considering that the enemies on the first few maps being evasive is a poor decision to begin with if you're trying to have a positive "new player experience."

Closing thoughts

I get that the game is in early access but none of these problems should be in the game currently. It makes zero sense to have even a single one. All of them are anti-fun and obvious! So obvious that I had to make that "devs never played a CRPG before" comment.

Cause I can't image that the devs played this game in it's current form and had fun compared to any other CRPGs that are floating around steam right now. I got Atom RPG early on, when it was super rough and it was light years better than Swordhaven! So I know they had more fun playing their past games than this one!

If a dev actually played this game before release... They'd miss verse rats, wolves and flies for a few hours and fix that, they'd break their mortar and pestle and fix that, they'd open one chest and never get to use their lockpicking skill again for hours... and fix that! I can't imagine anyone playing and not noticing these obvious problems.

Hell, they'd drink a few healing potions and notice that they only heal 7 HP 100% of the time while having a 6-12 heal various on the tool tip... and fix that!

This game isn't ready for early access.

Not because it doesn't run. No, it runs great! No, because it's not fun and will scare away customers! That's the last thing we need since if these anti-fun mechanics are gone, the game will be looking good.

The problem is that 90% of the game has an anti-fun mechanic covering it's good point! The time spent fixing all of these obvious problems, could be spent making more game! But making more game with all of these problems? Nobody is going to play that! They wont make it that far!

I don't like saying that a game should be pulled from EA, but I also don't want anyone playing this game and thinking the devs can't make a good CRPG. I highly recommend their other titles. This one needs more time in the oven and some testers to point these kinds of obvious problems out. EA can really hurt your game, we aren't beta testers, we're customers. If we all pan your game before 1.0. It's panned at 1.0!

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2108180/ ... 566827666/

[rusty_shackleford]

How accurate is this information below about the current state of the game? Considering that in ATOM skills went up to 200, I'm not sure how much of this complaint might just be poor calibration of expectations or weird early game balance. But tools breaking on use doesn't sound good, though.

I skimmed it, he seems a bit retarded.

I didn't use RTwP, btw.

[Acrux]

I skimmed it, he seems a bit retarded.

Okay, that's what I figured. It's getting a lot of traction and dev response, so I wasn't sure.

► Show Spoiler

Nice response, btw

[rusty_shackleford]

basically retards expect to always have a 95% or higher hit chance and anything lower causes them to break down crying
it's why you see so few games use this kind of system anymore, it leads to poor reviews

[MrTwinkls]

Atom games had Hexogen, Mushrooms of all kinds, Bronzovka and other bizarre stuff. How crazy (in a good way) is this game?

[rusty_shackleford]

Atom games had Hexogen, Mushrooms of all kinds, Bronzovka and other bizarre stuff. How crazy (in a good way) is this game?

Seems a bit more subdued in terms of wackiness, I assume because of the genre shift. Post-apoc sci-fi tends to get more leeway for that kind of stuff.

[rusty_shackleford]

I've encountered no 'girlbosses' yet, most bandits appear to be male. Females in the first village were doing things like working gardens and such. Male blacksmith, guard at the gate is a male, etc., The town's healer is an archetypal wise woman healer.
I suspect one of the possible companions might fall under 'girlboss'? She seemed to be a foreign fighter or somesuch. If you keep it to a handful of characters I don't care, especially if they're treated properly.
I went with the nice not-french bard lady inadvertently, but I would have picked her anyways. French accent is cute