It goes down faster because the wiring is one way, bottom to top. So the water gets picked up starting at the bottom going up, and the last one just drops the boat at the water fall speed
I absolutely LOVE the concept of Caves of Qud, but I literally suck at it so badly that I cannot actually experience it. I leave the starting town, and insects kill me, every time. I have literally started over 50 times, and I never get further than some reeds where insect things kill me.
You start out a bit fragile in the game. Qud tends to, IME, get easier over time (though one needs to learn how to deal with the goatfolk when one runs into them).
Giant centipedes are generally harder than crocodiles and snapjaws. Giant beetles too.
Start in Joppa, which is the default.
Can you kill a single crocodile in the nearby salt marshes in surrounding maps?
If so, you’re good. Just don’t get aggressive. Don’t fight more than one at once. Back off if you’re low on health and heal up – important for the game in general. You can run if things start to go badly (especially if you take starting perks perks that let you move more quickly).
You can start with some kind of “burst” ability. Like, a marauder has the ability to lop a limb off, which will not only gimp the enemy in various ways but cause bleeding for a while. Espers can start with damage-causing abilities like Freezing Ray or Light Manipulation. Using that to kill the first few monsters and letting the ability recharge after each is desirable.
If you want to try to get a starting level of two, go to talk to Argyve in the southwest corner of the starting map. Get his “find an artifact” quest. You can loot chests in houses in Joppa without angering the citizens if you close the doors first ((o)pen them again) so that nobody can see you. You’ll likely get an artifact or two, which lets you complete his first and second artifact quest.
IIRC, you can also get some experience from examining the statue in the northeast of the map and another on the map immediately to the north of the starting map.
In the north-western corner of the Joppa map, there’s a secret passage in the water that you’ll find if you walk in the water. That will take you to a tunnel that leads to the bottom level of Red Rock, gives you a reliable early way to get underground. I think that the enemies there are generally harder than the ones on the surface, but there are snapjaws, and they’re easier (and they also are a good source of dropped equipment for a starting player). Don’t go below the first level underground at first.
Don’t try to rush to the rust wells for Argyve. And you might want to gain a few levels before you do Red Rock for the warden of Joppa. Same, but more so for trying to cross the salt desert to the Six Day Stilt for the zealot who is also on the starting map.
I like Qud – didn’t at first – but I feel like it kinda plays out similarly each time, at least with the chimera-marauder build that I like. Like, I’m not really forced to deal with drastically-different situations each run, which is kind of a core element of roguelikes.
For me, it’s not so much a question of length but whether a game should last as long as it does. There’s got to be something that makes it worthy of its run time.
Case in point, I played about 24 hours of Assassins Creed Valhalla when it came out, only to sack it off when my friend informed me that he clocked about 100 hours in it to play through. Fuck that! That game would have been a decent 20 hour Viking romp but it’s got nothing to say, show me or keep me engaged at 5x that length. Hell even at 40 hours I’d have said it was inflated, but 100! It’s madness.
On the flip side, I played Elden Ring through to completion over 80 hours and would have played for 80 more had it asked. It was engaging, exciting, full of interesting locations, characters and things to fight. There’s tension in and intrigue in just exploring this unique setting and it all adds up to an experience that’s worthy of its runtime.
Similarly, one of the only JRPG’s I’ve finished in recent years is Persona 5 Royal, which took me a huge 109 hours to finish and yet I loved it. It’s full of style, flair and a sense of fun often missing from this genre that it just got me hooked. It’s not even that the story is all that great but the characters are well realised and there’s a wonderful dynamic in the core cast that really got me to go along for the full journey. I also think P5R also did the one thing many games fail at and it’s pacing, the thing just goes and despite facts like the tutorial is about 8 hours long I never felt like I was just killing time.
My point is, my feelings these days are that most games aren’t worthy of being over 10-20 hours, and even less so of being 20+. It’s not a one size fits all answer and individual mileage might vary person to person but there has to be a hook (gameplay, game feel, story, characters, setting, playing with engaged friends , etc.) to warrant time invested beyond a point.
Elden Ring is one of my upcoming games and I was worried about the length versus how much it would engage me. Glad to hear it kept you going for your whole playthrough.
Why is length a problem exactly? If you enjoy a game for 200h that’s great. If you get bored of it after 20h fine play something else. There’s no need to complete everything in every game you ever bought.
I very much do move on when Im done with a game, rather than when it’s done. I mentioned that I moved on from AC Valhalla only 25 hours in, and a more recent example is when I stepped away from Armoured Core 6 after only about 5-6 hours realising it wasn’t really for me.
The problem with length is when length is the reason I stop playing. I can love a game at first and think it’s great 4 hours in. That love can turn to like if the formula is getting a little stale or the plots not going anywhere. If this continues then my like might turn to just “consuming “ to get it done, and if I’m still plugging away for long enough in this state it’s easy enough for things to slip into a negative view of the game because it’s asking more of me than it’s giving back.
Take Final Fantasy XVI this year. It took me 44 hours to finish, but imo it peaked around the close of act 2 (a certain boss fight that went hard about 30 hours in). By then the gameplay formula was established and it’s largely the plot carrying it but (imo) neither ever really got any better in act 3 but I still had another 14 hours to go. I was invested enough to keep going but I went from loving it to just liking it as a whole because it never escalated and 14 hours of treading water is a bloody big investment. This was main-lining the game too, I gave up on side quests early on, so we’re not talking about completing a game just getting through them.
It comes back to games justifying their lengths. This is going to mean different things to different people, as well as the games themselves doing different things so there’s no one size fits all.
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