"In from the Cold" Scenario, any way to skip it?

[Alleo]

You're in someone else's body.....That duty was supposed to be pure fear and suspense, thus why Fandaniel says to "scurry around like a rat" which is why it was so good. It was perfect for the plotline and skipping it would ruin the entire setup.

I find it funny how Zenos is able to use his own power when in our body, yet the WoL seemingly forgets any ability they ever had.

[DBriggs304]

Hm, I actually like it.

[Nothv13]

I find it funny how Zenos is able to use his own power when in our body, yet the WoL seemingly forgets any ability they ever had.

Zenos has experience with body swapping and appears to have more direct control over his false echo than we do with our real echo. Both of these can lead o the WoL not knowing how to access his powers in another body while Zenos has no issues doing such.

[Drkdays]

I didn't mind the action portion. I think it was a good stab at thinking outside the box, even if it was annoying to have to figure out everything in the fly. There really is no prep for this quest (no indicators or even vague "go this way" directions) any time beforehand to help players. There was no escalation to this style of quest. BUT I did figure it out-grumbling and growling the entire time-so it's far from impossible.

My real problem is the GAPING PLOT HOLE presented by our absurdly casual kidnapping followed by an apparently effortless relocation of our supposedly powerful and ancient spirit.

Well...at least next playthrough I can respond to this ridiculous treatment of our ostensibly semi-divine character by immediately KO'ing myself, setting difficulty to "lol just click this button and you're done," followed by pretending this quest never happened (which is easy since it's never even brought up again) and moving on with the actually meaningful, and less personally offensive, epic storyline.

Really, we spend far too much time proving how pathetically impotent we are to Zenos and how little control we have over events.

For me, Zenos and his antics are the only true black mark on this otherwise stellar expansion.

[Ronduwil]

I don't know what was going on when I did it, but it seemed way easier to me than expected. My daughter warned me that it was super hard, but I did it the first time despite making my way to the fuel cell before visiting the reaper and having to find the reaper before making a round trip. I didn't find the magitek units particularly hard to avoid, and I only got into one other fight after the mandatory one. Maybe I was just lucky, but it seemed to me that if you paid attention to where everyone was facing and intelligently utilized the walls and rubble to avoid LOS with the units, you could avoid 90% of the fighting. I ended the scenario with six unused medkits.

[Silvarer]

I find it funny how Zenos is able to use his own power when in our body, yet the WoL seemingly forgets any ability they ever had.

Zenos also has prior experience with being in another body while the WoL does not. Makes sense to me that the WoL wouldn't be disoriented enough to not be able to access any abilities.

[Garten]

I don't like fetch quests, let me skip those.
I don't like getting currents to fly. Let me skip those.
I don't like waiting in queue. Let me skip that.

That last one is clearly a joke, but if we just implemented skips because some people don't like something, we'd literally have a skip button for everything. Specially when the reason being given people wanna skip this is literally, "I don't get to 1 shot everything in front of me and have to actually think for a second reeeeeee"

I am absolutely terrible at stealth games. I hate stealth games. Yet, I liked this solo mission, because it did exactly what it was meant to do, and at no point did I feel it was cheating me out over it. You are a basic soldier, forced into a corner and having to find a way out of this situation alive, or else all your friends die.

>.> But what do I know, I didn't wanna people to have to skip the 4.1 solo trial either (You know, the one that requests you click a single button and that's it?)

Sure, just let "Reductio ad absurdum".. why not?

[Areic]

I thought it was fine. Took me one try, was a simple manage yourself and watch your surroundings kind of thing. If you had trouble, maybe get better or just pop it to very easy like they made for your type.

The quest evokes helplessness, and a dire situation. You're supposed to feel weak and lost, it was a good narrative point to add in and showed the strength of will the WoL had fighting through it to the end just to make it in time to interrupt Zenos. Maybe that speaks to your own strength of will if you couldn't bear 15-20 minutes of a mild struggle. MMOs are always going to have something you don't like as they're made for a wide variety, do I like running 5 ft at a time to talk to a new NPC every 20 seconds? Not so much, but it definitely didn't "ruin" things for me

[Nothv13]

Sure, just let "Reductio ad absurdum".. why not?

If anything has been shown to me over the recent years is that Reducto ad absurdum is no longer valid for dismissing arguments. It was absurd to claim their be vaccine passports, yet they are now around. It was absurd to claim that people would call for removal of founding fathers representation, yet they did. The more I see slippery slope and reducto adsurdum used this day and age the less validity I see in using it to dismiss an argument.

[Tridus]

I despised this. Loathed it. The whole thing took me right out of the story. There's several problems:

I was exhausted from log4j related stuff at work (and the disconnect prone 2.5 hour queue to get in) and not at my best mentally. So throwing me into this out of nowhere where I'm suddenly using another character that's awful was not at all what I wanted out of playing. I managed to die on the first enemy somehow, FFS.

This game is not a stealth game. The mechanics are bad for stealth games, and if you aggro something that is a mortal threat, it takes forever running away to drop aggro, which puts you lost who knows where or aggros more stuff and kills you.

... again, this game is not a stealth game. Wandering around aimlessly for a while with a countdown wasn't fun. Spamming one button isn't fun. Trying to sneak past enemies when you have no sneak skill and are just trying to eyeball distance isn't fun. Honestly, I find none of these "play as someone else with a simplified set of skills" sequences fun, but this one was just dreadful.

By the third time I was really over it and just wanted a "no, this is dumb, skip" button. But of course you can't skip it. Then I got to a QTE that I didn't expect, was drinking something, and failed it before I got my hands free.

Doing it AGAIN, I keyboard mashed as usual and somehow managed to bring up the settings menu, which you can't do in any other QTE in the game.

Somehow at the end of this entire sequence that exists entirely to show how weak you are, you are magically strong enough to do all that stuff that happens at the end? It's in no way believable and feels like they wrote themselves into a corner then just ignored what they had already established to write themselves back out of it.



I mean, great for people who enjoyed it. But this was literally the worst quest in the entire game for me, and if it wasn't part of the MSQ I'd have abandoned it in a heartbeat and never gone back. This entire zone is full of "we're going to try to make this game do stuff that this game is frankly not very good at it, so it's going to be finicky and annoying" gimmicks, and it really detracted from the story they were trying to tell.