So then, under our high heels now lies the alien soil of the Valley Of Pillars.
Yep, those are definitely pillars. Wait a minute. Pillars… A Memory Of Eternity… Pillars Of Eternity!
Eldritch beasts roam about the place, though unmenacingly so, being content perhaps to graze on the otherworldly flora of the valley. Their laisser-faire attitude stands in contrast to that of rogue Mandate troops who, in the fashion of Pokémon trainers, will dash at us soon they see us.
Entering the valley I immediately see, as in the first screenshot, two places named Decaying Tower and Forgotten City. But exploring northward I discover a Central Temple, tightly guarded by rogue troops, and likewise a Refinery. Still northward from these is a Broken Monument:
Engraved in the stuff of its make is a faded text I cannot decipher. But loremistress Isutyr can: “Beneath, she sleeps. Our sorrow keeps her there, chained by our will and hate.”
Ever northward I find a great, white, domed building named Third Division Installation—the very same Third Division gone rogue on Mitty and the Travelers’ Mandate! It is heavily guarded on the worldmap but, circling wide and to the back, I manage to reach it undetected. Alas the game prevents me enter it, as a text alerts me to the following:
I can see […] an invisible web of cameras? Yay, me! Forget 20/20 vision; I’ve got True Sight baby!
Finally, northernmost of the valley I see this:
It stands there, immobile.
I actually whispered, “Oooooh, that’s an easter egg of sorts!” upon seeing it. Again, Tyranicon:
So then, what happens?
“We await. We wait forever. In the black beyond. You will join us. In the dark, we love you. Will you join us? Take our power?”
Accepting it grants me… an insta-kill skill! I’ll have to try it at some point. Maybe on the last boss or something, to trigger a super-mega-top-secret alternate ending, in which we solve all of MoonFall’s problems via one giant orgy.
Southbound then, the lot of us girls, back to the Decaying Tower. But this place I cannot enter either, as my companions feel stir in them a deep unease when we approach the structure; plus, the only entrance we can find is locked, so there’s that.
It seems the only place the game might allow us explore at the moment is the Forgotten City. There, silence would reign absolute but for the wind shrieking through streets left lifeless by the passing of cycles. And verily the city is of cyclopean proportions: beneath our feet lay gigantic flagstones, while each wall, each tower, each building is wrought of such colossal moellons could only be moved by the thews of giants.
Carefully, we explore its streets, and finally stumble upon a Mandate encampment:
A manned Mandate encampment, here, without the presence of Mitty, Nona, or someone else I might know? Oh Suspicion, how gently you nibble at the back of my mind.
You’re stuck here? Yes, something definitely doesn’t feel right.
Such camps as this one, the woman claims, each have a heavily-encrypted datacore, a safebox of sorts for the researchers’ findings. But this camp’s datacore is missing, and she could not get Mandate troops to quest after its exact location. She suspects—on what basis?—it might have been taken into the nearby tower; and she has—what a coincidence!—the key to said tower.
Moments later we insert the key given us into the tower’s door, and the latter swings open. But after stepping into the tower proper, as we take in our surroundings, the door slams shut with such violence shatters its lock irreparably, preventing our exit. Then in front of us appears this:
Here I can imagine ERYFKRAD at a table with friends, not yet hammered but already passably pissed, listening to the DM list the options, getting mentally stuck upon hearing the third one then—dice already in hand—yelling “I use my fists!” as he slams one onto his character sheet.
Side note before moving on to the next post, touching on a subject I had briefly raised earlier.
When fighting a couple of monsters in the Valley Of Pillars, I encountered this:
This is what should have ideally happened, presented in order:
– I encounter a plant monster during a random fight;
– I meet an important and mysterious character in a tower;
– I instantly recognises that said character shares the plant monster’s sprite;
– I conjecture that the character is either an evolved form of this plant, or is something else entirely having elected to garb itself in the guise of this plant.
Instead of the fourth and last point, what unfortunately happened is that I wondered if I wasn’t overthinking it, if it wasn’t simply a case of sprite or portrait reuse as I’ve seen before in the game.
I mentionned before the man seen during the game’s introduction. He works for the Courtesans’ Guild, he seems evidently implicated in some cardinal conspiracy, and he shares his portrait with a number of NPCs. Most of these NPCs are unimportant people readily recognised as such, and so in their cases the portrait reuse is quickly shoved aside as anecdotal. But in the questline ‘The Coming Storm’ with Dejah there features prominently a man with this same exact portrait; and at this point in my playthrough I still don’t know if the character in that quest was indeed the character in the introduction—which would have certain momentous implications—or if it was simply a case of portrait reuse.
I can imagine the problems begot by lack of manpower; and so would say that most of the times, sprite or portrait reuse is fine. But in a small handfull of instances it is quite detrimental to the game.
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