Fidcal

Wait! Just remembered! Thief's Den 5 right? Well, it got absorbed into the campaign and modified and I lost all my original story. Unless anyone has a copy of the original beta test? I think that test was done on an external private forum.

What's TD5?

I think you first frob and then the frob highlight clears and then you can use the mouse wheel. That's how I recall it because it confused me for a bit.

Hooray! Finally found a way. I'd been close many times before without realising. Been away too long. Guess I underestimated how high one can mantle up. I did eventually work out the final part of the route by 'if I could get on there, then I could reach there, and then I could jump to there - but how to get THERE in the first place?' By working it out backwards I found myself staring at a ledge above my head apparently out of reach. A step or two up the roof slope I was standing on and I could just reach up... Definitely the longest time I've ever taken to get into a manor in any mission. Now I'm buggered and need a long rest before continuing!

OK, thanks. I'm astonished those double doors are frobbable - I could have sworn I tried them out of curiosity. However, a good thief would never normally consider going in the front entrance. So... 'various balconies' eh? I really thought I'd exhausted all the higher areas. Anyway, I don't mind searching so long as I know there is a way in the area and not ten streets away. I'd suggest though, if there's some other need to recompile, to put in a message that Andreas feels sure there is a way in close by but warns it will be really really difficult to find it or somesuch. As a last resort, I've got the double door. :D Oh, yeah, I think I did go through some sewers but couldn't proceed and had to back out. Maybe that's why they're not recommended? Great city and climbing mission though.

This mission certainly looks great but I wonder if I'm playing it right? The quest is to rescue someone so, as directed, I study the map, head to the armorer, then the pharmacy (disappointed to only find a single health potion) and then on to Marlow Manor... I've played about 5 sessions. Been round and round the streets around the manor. Climbed pipes, roped up, crossed ledges and rooftops, jumped gaps, frobbed every door in sight. But can't find any way in to the manor. Am I being stupid doing the sensible thing? Should I instead not worry about Lily and explore the entire city and hope to find a route? And then only explore near the destination later (by which time she's dead. Or worse!)

OK, finally gave in and watched a Youtube vid. At the point I mentioned you run around a slope in the opposite direction to where you want to go and climb up onto a different cliff and make a HUGE leap across to the cliff you want. I admit the game does indicate earlier you can make big forward leaps but, fresh from other games, it never occurred to me from below that you could jump that far so I never even saw it. Imagine in Dark Mod you have to climb the house across the street and jump the width of the street! No rope, no pipe, no physical link at all. The marker (like most games) is fixed on where to get to, not the route. A hint in the game at this early stage would have helped. As it is, it's completely ruined the game for me, leaving a bad feeling, when a game should be enjoyable. Games ought to be able to tell when you've spent four game hours in one nothing location without moving forward and (optionally) help you move on. Devs still don't know what gaming is about. It's about only one single thing: enjoyment! Everything else is subsidiary.

Well, just had a fourth session and none the wiser. From the start you run forward and jump over a log. Then a jump over a depression to a ledge. Then turn left and jump up to a higher ledge. Then run forward and leap to another ledge. Finally a longer jump to another extended shelf. All that is reasonably easy once you try not to hate the marker system. But then you are on a shelf below a semi-circular sheer cliff. The shelf ends in a dead drop at either end. In between I can see no way up. I've tried blind jumping all the way round at every point many, many time without success. I see no further way to go. I'm playing on 'easy'. P'uh! If I could press a button in Steam and get even half my money back, I'd do it. I might search Utube for a walkthrough tomorrow, but why should I have to? I've failed. The game has failed. Someone tell me there's a secret grappling hook hidden under a rock? A levitation potion in your inventory? You shout to the guy above and he lowers a rope ladder? Or you walk round the other side and there's a road you can walk up?

Feels a bit better now I've sorted some of my start snags. I have to set in-game bright to 75%, but first my Nvidia display to +20% bright, +40% contrast, and +.76 gamma each time I play! Then back to normal after! Why don't Nvidia provide profiles? But still getting used to the devs' mindsets. Searched and searched a way from the beach, eventually by chance, moving close to something I got an interact frob - but nothing worked. After several minutes of head-banging, I noticed a tiny message up in the top left of my 55" display (yeah, that's the downside of a big screen.) "I need something else." Well, that's erm... helpful. Search and search and search for I know not what. Go back to the beach? Dunno. Scoured the area blindly and finally glimpsed a frob deep in dark foliage. Pure blind luck. That's a bit much for a mission-critical key.

Been looking forward to this for ages but am very disappointed with the start. Dying Light 1 had/has the best climbing in any game I've ever played. BUT the start of Dying Light 2 is a scene where you have to climb up to a ledge. Two sessions and 90 minutes later and much frustration, I've still not succeeded. Endless failure is NOT the way to start a game! What am I missing? Move and jump. Fail. Move and jump. Fail. Move and Jump. Hey, I'm up a step! Move and jump. Fail. Move and jump. Fail. Move and jump. Hey I'm up another step! Move and jump. Fall. To my death. Start again. Repeat 50 times. In different places. I got within 8 metres of the guy above but still couldn't reach him. By contrast, the parkour training in DL1 was much more fair.

I found the start confusing, muddled, clumsy, surreal, and virtually unplayable because I had problems configuring my controller in Steam (even though it worked immediately in Skyrim.) Also had to fool around trying to get 4K, (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Enderal Special Edition\Skyrim\SkyrimPrefs.ini ... set Isize H and Isize W to screen height and width.). Also fighting with the gamma was horrible. The beginning was mostly out of the player's control anyway. So, start quest after two sessions of configuring was to meet someone somewhere in the world with no direction or marker? Not much fun to blunder. The next time I had any control it was near pitch black and my companion was telling me to fight! I turned to my Nvidia control and boosted gamma full only to find it changed back when I returned to the game (whose gamma control was already up full plus my display was up full.) Absurd. In the end I think he finished them off. Certainly I groped around and found two bodies. Here's a screenshot... (can't see anything? neither could I.) Then there was configuring the player character. Mouse and controller kept going crazy. Mouse wouldn't move the slider to minimum. Controller over-sensitive when acting as a pointer and jumped from slider to slider. I never did get to rotate the character (can you?) so you get a better impression of facial contours etc. Eventually I gave up to the defaults. All of that massively spoilt the beginning for me. HOWEVER, with those problems (mostly) out of the way (and hopefully I'm the only person in the world to have trouble with games,) now I'm at the beach and seem to have control like a 'normal' game, I'm more hopeful. And what I've read here is encouraging. I was impressed with the voice acting etc. and, of course, the Skyrim terrain quality.

Limiting your own saves requires discipline. Having the restriction built-in really feels different. I've spent the last two or three years on and off playing Fallout 4 with new rules of my own. Nothing enforced them except my own will. However, I'd have rather there had been the option. I love freedom but that includes the freedom to choose restrictions of my freedom. I recall long ago (probably before Dark Mod 1 was launched) that I proposed we have extra choices on the objectives page, but the idea was not adopted. In particular I wanted note-taking that would eliminate frustration and abandoned missions forever (except where some special skill is needed, i.e. you know what to do but find it too difficult.) The idea was that the player character would make notes as he/she discovered info. There were to be four levels of help: Option 1 was to disable this help completely and play as now. Option 2 would provide three degrees of help in the player notes: hint, strong clue, or full explicit description of how to proceed. A bonus side-effect of this is that those who don't like lengthy readables need only click on them once and the player character notes down what matters, reducing five pages to a couple of terse sentences. Everything would be optional. If you only want an occasional nudge when stuck then that is what you can look at. If utterly stumped then you view your characters more extensive info. Back to save rooms: one could have an option to disable it halfway through if desperate - but not reverse that later. Fallout 4 does this with Survival mode. You can switch back to a lower difficulty but you can't get back to Survival mode except by reloading a gamesave.

ok, thks, datiswous.

OK, thanks. SPOILER questions: Thanks for any help.

Typed a spoiler question, highlighted it, clicked the spoiler icon, but can't tell any difference. How do I know if the spoiler worked? I'll try a harmless test... TEST [EDIT - No, I highlighted the word TEST above, clicked the spoiler icon, but it still shows. So how do we do a spoiler?]

HAHA! Right now I'm playing Dark Mage with my PS5 controller! I've just managed to configure the touch pad to lean left, right, forward, and crouch. [EDIT - I meant Black Mage, of course. I've been reading too much Harry Potter fan fiction!] Mapping? In a perfect world with more spare time I could have fun mapping again. No plans currently but never say never.

Excellent! And it proves the point that whenever anyone tries to control, manipulate or impose their will on anyone, eventually they will fight back. This is why we have ad-blockers against aggressive intrusive adverts. I don't recall ad-blockers years ago when adverts weren't so aggressive. I've said it many times: options, options, options (which equates to FREEDOM!)

Another way of doing this is using something like the save potions in Kingdom Come. They're not cheap or easy to get early on, but you need them to save. In Dark Mod they could be expensive 'magical time devices' that count as part of the objectives to obtain a certain number. But the more you use them to go back in time (save the game) the less you have at the end. So you balance it against your ultimate achievements stats, e.g., objective is to secure at least 50, and thre are only 100 to be found. Having all 100 at the end would mean you never saved at all! But you can still finish the mission even if you only have 10 left at the end - just not such a good stat. More realistically, a hybrid with save rooms, so you reserve the temporal devices for serious emergencies when you're desperate.

GREAT NEWS! Finally getting consistent results. So good that I've now installed Dark Mod again and began configuring it to play with the controller. This is effing great! So glad I persevered. I'll post a proper instruction eventually and probably a config for Dark Mod. You can run Dark Mod through Steam by adding it to your Steam library. There's no charge for joining Steam itself so it's worth it just to use 'any' game pad controller. Thanks for help!

Well, I've always been a strong believer in options, options, options, so save restrictions on the highest levels (or as an added iron man level) are fine so long as there are easier levels. I've been playing Fallout 4 off and on for years and on survival mode you can only save by sleeping in a bed, sleeping bag, or on a mattress, but there were far more hazards than that. Eventually that wasn't enough for me so I set my own rules: no armour, limited weapons, no perks, and no killing humans at all. I completed the whole thing twice under that rule so I made myself an even harder rule: no companion AND do not kill any humans. I never quite finished the end battle but it gave the whole game a new lease of life. So, yes, extra hard as an option. But speaking of options, I'm a great believer that ALL games by law must provide a super easy level (you can switch to at any time) that is a virtual walkthrough (or skip hard sections after x attempts like GTA5.) No game should be allowed to frustrate or prevent anyone finishing it. I mean, if you bought a movie and couldn't finish the DVD you'd want your money back, right? I read recently an estimated 80% of games are never finished! OUTRAGEOUS! And how many of us gamers know dozens of family and friends who can't play games at all because they are too hard for them? The games market is potentially much bigger than we know. OPTIONS, options, options... <mumbles away obsessively into the distance.> ;)

OK, well that video doesn't deal with the steam config problem but it does relate to other possible probs/fixes so I'll come back to that if needed. Incidentally, he paid $10 for Splinter Cell; I paid about $1.40 - yeah that's right, ONE dollar forty! Now if I can just get it to work... Thanks again.

Well, I think I made another breakthrough last night, but I have to confirm it with more testing. My current theory is you need to export then import again plus some other non-obvious stuff. As for that video link, I'll check it out but I've already looked at several vids and none of them were complete and didn't solve the problem. Mostly they seemed out of date, as if Steam's config pages had changed and buttons removed that were shown in the video but not in present Steam. Thanks, datiswous.

BREAKDOWN! Just a heads up that my earlier euphoria was misplaced. The Steam Controller config is full of unpredictable inconsistencies that no sane person could understand. I suspect the only gamers who have any success with it are those playing more modern games that already have xbox support. To bind specific keys to buttons produces a config you can save, but applying it to the game is frustratingly near-impossible. I even got earlier tests I'd made applying themselves that I'd not selected! In the end I deleted all my saved configs except one. At some point thereafter I did a test but in-game the only thing that worked was the triangle button produced crouch. Nothing else worked. I recognised this as an early test I made! So how did it suddenly get applied? No idea. There are no other saved settings of mine but my current one which has most of the buttons and keys defined. I simply cannot get it work in the game. But because occasionally something does affect the controller settings, surely there is a way? Sadly, I can only endure sessions of up to an hour before giving up again. Total time wasted so far I estimate at 15 to 20 hours.

BREAKTHROUGH! :) I actually made progress! Thinking about keyboard bindings made me wonder if I was supposed to set the desktop settings instead of game settings so I went back to Steam. I was wrong, but while there I set Xbox support as well as PS5 support. That needed a pc reboot. Still no different, but then I went to preferences where you can set the light colour and other trivia on the controller. But there is a submit button. Now my key test worked! All totally non-obvious of course! Also found mouse sensitivity setting in the game itself and that fixed the camera turn (probably would also work on the steam sensitivity setting too now I know how to submit it.) Not been able to assign a key to the joystick click for some reason (well I assigned a key but it didn't work in-game even after submit. Anyway, if I figure it all out I'll post a more precise instruction here at some point. Also hopeful I can get this to work in Dark Mod now.

Many thanks. I took a long look at that doc along with the software. I'm getting the impression it should basically work without any further config on games that work with the xbox controller (which Splinter Cell 1 doesn't.) To emulate the keyboard I'd need an extra thing called Faker something which I might look at in the future. Right now I'm sick of the whole thing. I went back yet again to Steam and can still make no sense of it. I click one button and a panel pops up saying your ps5 controller is now running the config from Smith (which is my user name on Steam.) However, it simply doesn't! The game just has the same basic move movements and not my test config at all. I've checked several guides on Utube but they show a different button that is not present now so presumably they are out of date and Steam has changed. I give up on Steam. I might check back in a few months or so but otherwise, I've had enough. Thanks again.