AVWW2: When Does The Game End?

[abdulmuhsee]

So I just beat Demonaica and had Elder give me his spiel after I touched his remains.

There was no door to go further, so I had to backtrack to the atrium and get back to the world map, then nothing...

The game continued as usual with nothing more to do.  I even knocked out another wind generator to be sure.  What is it I have to do to finish the game?

[x4000]

Hey there -- apologies for the confusion, but you've already won the game!  Elder's spiel is the ending, and then it starts playing credits right after that.

It lets you keep playing beyond that point so that you can hunt down the other henchmen if you want, or finish whatever else you might have wanted to finish.  Mainly it's a matter of Lilith, who is invincible until Demonaica is killed.  So you can see her final words if you wish to track her or the others down.

But that's all optional, side-quest-y type of stuff!  In terms of the main game, you've already won.  Hope you had a great time!

[madcow]

Yep beating minions. I actually lost the game after winning it (killed all my recruits) going after Lilith. 

The optional metagame goal is to get enough people to buy AVWW 2 so we can get an expansion though . I might be a minority but its definitely my favorite of the arcen titles and the one I most want to see expanded.

Unfortunately, that's probably only slightly more likely than a tidalis expansion, heh.

[x4000]

In terms of likelihood of expansions, I would say:

AI War and Skyward: 100% (obviously, since those are in the works)
Tidalis: 0%
Shattered Haven: 0% unless something changes (though we thought this would be like 90%
Valley 1: 0%
Valley 2: 20%

So in other words, Valley 2 is basically the only game that I'd consider it for out of the ones we've not yet done expansions for.  I'm not sure I want to revisit that, because I'm not sure what there is left to add to that game honestly.  It's a complete experience in itself, and without a clear "this is really worthwhile to do for players and ourselves" goal, I'm not inclined to take a leap.  But if we had some sort of solid idea that could be implemented in a reasonable amount of time (a month or three), it could be something that is not a financial loss at least.

[abdulmuhsee]

I actually didn't get any credits after Elder's exposition; maybe it was because I could hear a wall gator beating the crap out of me when Elder was talking. 

It just went to my dead body and a resistance member complaining that I died after he was finished.  Then I sludged my way back to the boss room and listened to Elder again, looked in vain for a door, then backtracked to the world map.

Anyway, how do I hunt down the henchmen?  Do I have to visit the remaining level-up windmills?  I'm pretty sure I already got all of them pre-Demonaica.

Really loved the game by the way; the random world and level generation, random mage tiers, character customization, etc. is really what I've been waiting for in a platformer since who knows when.  My only critiques are that the boss fights were far too easy and that the game started to lean towards monotony near the end.

The only real challenging boss was Lilith near the beginning of the game, since she was the only one who sprayed the green bullets as a counter-attack, making me actually want to dodge and plan after I hit her.  Every other boss could be easily defeated by walking up to them and pressing the attack button as they slowly churned out a painfully inadequate amount of projectiles.

I think the monotony towards the end comes from how the game balances difficulty; increasing the number of monsters might not be the way to do it, since it made me just want to run through the level without paying attention while spamming the "Heave Glacier" spell, with the shrapnel doing thousands of damage and insta-killing anything it touched (including bosses).  With the health I got from the massive number of dead enemies, it more made up for any damage I happened to take.  Thank goodness for the Boltlord bat transformation.

I think I was just desiring fewer, more important and stronger enemies that required more than one hit; it was more fun trying to line up my shots and take down threats early on against enemies that took a bit of work to fell, though I can't say I didn't employ the homing projectiles.

But yeah, those are just my critiques which I was more than willing to overlook in the overall picture of the game, and I can't get the menu song out of my head.

EDIT:  Started a game on the highest difficulty settings and take back what I said about game difficulty.  Died about 5 times in the first level up tower and can't get past one of those mine-throwing airships in a normal platforming segment.  Are the highest settings supposed to be remotely fair?