Ideas to make "needle in a haystack" remotely enjoyable

Gameplay
#1

The quest “needle in a haystack”, wherein Henry attempts to unmask the criminal Pious, has caused me to put this game down. Whether I will pick it up again, I don’t know, as my frustration with the decisions you made in creating this quest is severe. Here are some of my reasons:

  1. Acting in a rational manner can make things more difficult, or even impossible. This is the biggest problem with this quest. First of all, it’s weird to head straight to Rattay to report to Sir Radzig when the bandits said they’d be keeping an eye on you. Isn’t Henry meant to be undercover? Then there’s the fact that it is literally impossible to expose Pious without simply telling everyone in the monastery why you’re there. Again, isn’t Henry meant to be undercover? The rational thing to do is to keep your purpose there to yourself, but the rational course of action is completely opposed to the completely stupid course of action you apparently intended: be the worst spy ever and get poisoned. To fix this, there simply needs to be some way of getting Pious’s identity out of him without acting like a moron, and you need to think about what actions would make sense to a player.

  2. There is no point in engaging in the intrigues of the monastery, as far as I can tell. Getting friendly with this or that character ultimately has no bearing on how the quest proceeds, and this makes the whole thing feel like a waste of time.

  3. The Circators react to your location at different times far, far too quickly. Code in a grace period or dispense with the whole schedule idea.

  4. How can Henry even get away with this? Why is he going around telling everyone his name? He’s supposed to be undercover! None of this makes any sense!

For now, I’m done. The game has a lot going for it, but come on guys, this is a travesty, and I know I’m not the only one who thinks so.

#2

Are you serious? You’re not, right?
That is the best mission by far in terms of story. Shame you can’t comprehend it.

5 Likes
#3

Just keep the flow. I almost cursed this quest after always failing at first.

When I finally completed the quest I felt it was to easy, easiest in fact.

So, I went again and could have completed all the quest (main & secondary) in just 2 days if wanted, but stressed my way to make it more difficult.

When you comprehend the flow, you could easily live there as much as you want - you can return even after parting ways with Pio (no point doing it anyway) - while going to loot all sassau every night.

  1. Remember your daily schedule. It’s the real issue to fail. Once you got the flow it’s really easy.

  2. Befriend the circators help you when you are caught failing your schedule.

  3. Expose yourself making the investigation and the prior will be interrogating you in no time. Second time and you are out.

#4

This was the easiest to solve for me. I unlocked all doors and chests in monastery. Later bandits found me in Sasau church. I offered to help them. Then I accepted my new name, talked to two people and I guessed who it might be, to my bad luck, third person banished me from monastery because I had halberd in my inventory, which can be locked there after repairing it, but practically, even not in my hands, they saw it on me. So I came back at night, pickpocketed all monks while looking for clues. I didn’t find any. Then I remembered what one monk said to me about new novices and I chose my first victim… Quest complete. One monk woke up and I ran back to Radzig. So on and so on. I am more frustrated I couldn’t do my monk stuff.

#5

I solved it on accident cuz I trusted someone who didn’t need trusting almost immediately. A. He seemed lik a good guy and B I didn’t really care so I just told him why I was there. Out almost as fast as I got in lol

1 Like
#6

Kirksty, you have no place feeling smug defending the indefensible.

To the rest of you, I had no problem solving the mystery. My problems are that the choices available to the player once the mystery is solved are ridiculous and limited and that every other activity one can engage in turns out to have nothing to do with anything (yes, you can help Lucas, and he’ll tell you that Antonious is lying, and then you confront Antonious with this, and then nothing happens). The only options once it was solved were: 1) murder Pious or 2) act like the biggest moron in the universe and tell him that you’re looking for some guy named Pious so you can kill him. I befriended the circators, realrules, and that had no bearing on Pious or how I could handle him. This quest had so much potential, and Warhorse squandered every single bit of it.

#7

Mate that mission is one of my favorite missions in the game, i keep replaying it just to play out different ways to go through it for instance snuffing every single monk and dumping their bodies in one corner of the balcony

#8

Well, I do agree that the quest needs a bit of work in some of the areas you describe. Some of the scripts are particularly quirky. You did miss one way of determining who pious was, which is a bit obscure. If you fail to get information from Godwin, you get the option to search criminal records in Rattay, which reveals his name. Otherwise, you can always do research within the monastery and determine fairly conclusively which novices were not Pious, leading you to a single conclusion. Still, I agree there should be a different way to approach him.

There’s a few points in the game where it seems like they were ambitious in designing it, but ultimately lacked the resources to bring it to full fruition. I can’t say, however, that the adding of various distracting issues within the Monastery is a bad thing, as that’s actually realistic.

1 Like
#9

Loads of ppl disagree with you and agree with me. Learn to adapt to a quest which isn’t just fetching stuff.

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#10

How did you solve the quest?

#11

I am just about to join the order. I’ve already broken in the monostary and hid some money, weapons, lockpicks and potions in one of the cabinets…it’ll be fun

1 Like
#12

The monastery part is my favourite
It’s so cool and immersive to live as a monk, at least for first few days, and then just when it starts to become boring - I can’t describe this feeling of freedom when Henry finally sneaks outside

You can accuse Pious after reading notes about novices in prior’s chambers
And I’m not sure what it requires, but I managed to pull a confession out of him without being poisoned
Or you just can sneak into monastery, pick random monk and kill him

1 Like
#13

Well, I really didn’t mean to start a big argument, and I didn’t expect the forums to be this active, so I’ll leave it at this: I thought this quest was great right up until I was certain I knew who Pious was. It’s a great idea, poorly executed. No offense, but it’s Warhorse whom I want to reach, not you guys.

I’ve found nothing online suggesting this is possible. If it is indeed possible, then I would be forced to take back everything I said, but I see no evidence of that anywhere.

#14

I also found this quest too linear for my liking, especially as the showcase quest. It was clear who it was right from the second he came up to me trying to be my new BFF saying “I’m the only one here by choice”. After spending at least 5 hours trying to figure out a way to complete this quest I was baffled that I had to go against everything my brain was telling me and ask Pious for help… There is literally no other way to go about completing this quest as a pacifist. THAT is what bothered me, there really needed to be another option coming off of the sidequests you do (what was the point in the book, for example, if it doesn’t lead to alternate option?) that gives you a dialogue option to expose Pious either to his face or to the Prior.

Honestly, on new playthroughs I just queue Beethoven’s 9th, bust in through the front door during morning prayers and massacre every single person within sight.

#15

Well I found these notes and also entrusted Lucas after helping him, which made sense to me since I was sure he’s a good guy, I needed information and had his ‘weak spot’ so he won’t snitch on me for his own good (also makes sense that it’s more difficult or even impossible to do things on your own - I don’t see a problem there). And the dialogue with Antonius looked like this:

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and he just admits everything.
And then he gave me antidote ‘to calm your stomach’ as if Henry was poisoned, lol - just a dialogue line that devs added by mistake - so yeah, these quests are clunky sometimes and WH have to polish them, but they work

2 Likes
#16

I also thought it made sense to divulge everything to Lucas. He told me that he knows Antonius was lying. I also had evidence from the Abbot’s book, and I knew about Antonius’s stash. After all of that, the dialogue option that appears in your screenshot did not appear to me. Am I missing something, or is this a bug?

#17

Wait…it actually IS an option?! Damn bug ruined the whole quest for me, it seems, as like the OP I also never had that dialogue option from Lucus despite eventually telling him about the search. Here I was thinking it was just a half-arsed quest for all these months. Gonna have to dust off my good-guy hat for another playthrough.

#18

To get information from Lucas you have to ‘overhear’ a gossip that he’s being opressed by circators and help him with that. Maybe this activates the option, maybe something else. Maybe you indeed had it bugged. I have loaded a relatively old savegame to screenshot that dialogue and I remember there was some other dialogue and persuasion check with Antonius that I did prior to this save. So I can’t tell anything for sure except that yes, there is an intended option to not get poisoned

#19

Like I said, I did get information from Lucas. I “overheard” that conversation, I talked to Lucas about it, I got the circators off his back. This must be a bug, because I did everything you did, and never got that option. I guess I have to change my criticism to: please fix this frustrating bug.

1 Like
#20

at least you’re willing to be wrong, unlike a lot of people who harshly judge this game. I’m curious now too, gonna be fun this time around I hope.

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