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

[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.

[Ayuhra]

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.

This quest didn't bother me much but that QTE is probably too tight for where it is. By that point you are worn out, it's a very mash-heavy QTE and if you lose you start over AFAIK. That's not great.

[Packetdancer]

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.

This was my one actual complaint about this section. Every other Active Time Maneuver locks out normal keyboard input during those times, so hitting "K" counts as "Press a button" as opposed to "Open character settings", and "C" counts as "Press a button" rather than "Open character window" and so on. This one locked out combat actions, but not keyboard input entirely. It startled me when I keyboard-mashed like usual and suddenly had like 4 windows open.

I escaped out hastily and finished the ATM without issue by sticking to just the movement keys, but it definitely could've made me fail that part.

I feel like that one's a bug; the control system probably has a few modes ("Standard combat", "Lock out combat actions", and "Lock out all input") and someone set the wrong flag there, compared to every other Active Time Maneuver. Hopefully that one gets a hotfix in 6.01 along with their adjustments to the difficulties.

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 am actually going to disagree here; that bit at the end was some of what made this sequence work for me. I took it as that all through the sequence up to that point, you're functionally limited to what this random Garlean grunt could reasonably have done. But at the end, pushed to your limit and desperate to get to your friends, you break through that and begin to draw on a bit of your normal power.

Which was, after all, the point of Fandaniel and Zenos' entire little mocking experiment: how formidable would you actually be, stripped of your strength? How much of your power could you feasibly draw on in an unfamiliar, weak body, if motivated by desperation? The answer seemed to be "more than I'd have expected at the beginning of this experience."

I still didn't find the sequence compelling enough that I have any desire to play it again, but it didn't fail narratively for me.

(Though it did feel odd they didn't do a little more with the thread from that sequence. I half-expected that at some point near the climax of the game, we'd be left in an unfamiliar body -- an aetheric construct to survive space or whatever -- and it would be the experience there that allowed us to still utilize any of our normal power in that form.)