Been playing Plague Tale: Requiem again. There's a lot more going on with the mechanics and levels than the first game, and I'm probing it all out.
First thing I notice... so many easy to miss secrets! So many more than the first game... and better hidden. Lots of crafting pieces, knives, and pyrites, too.
I'm trying to understand the skill leveling. The way it first appears to work, is whichever actions dominate your run through a section, determine which skill gets the XP.... or that's what I thought. I'm starting to think it's simply down to how many you kill versus how many you leave alive. So if you kill the majority, you get points in aggression. If you kill few to none, you get prudence. If you kill ~half, you get opportunism.
That last one seems baffling, as opportunism is all about using level traps and alchemy. It shouldn't matter how many you kill if all you're doing is crafting and using alchemy stuff for the majority, right? That's how most games work - level the skill by doing the related things. If you want to get good as a sorcerer, your character isn't gonna be reading books or practicing spells... they gotta get out there and kill lots of people with magic! Everyone knows that mass murder is the only way to get good at combat skills. If you wanna be an alchemist... stay home and make 1000 useless potions. If you want to get better at sneaking, don't walk or run anywhere. Crouch all of the time and one day you will become a ninja. Fall asleep in a bush near some enemies and you'll be a stealth master by morning time. That's the usual language devs use.
I'm just going on some basic testing. I couldn't accept it at first. I can say with almost total certainty that every full section with enemies gives you an opportunity to level just one skill. When I reached the quarry in chapter V, I wanted to see how many enemies I could kill and still get points in prudence. I managed to use basically zero alchemy on the big, open quarry section. I killed ONLY enemies in my direct path with my crossbow, taking the quickest possible route to the door at the end... which due to the big split pathing, left half of the enemies there alive. Neither, I nor the killings were seen or heard even once. And somehow, that gave me points in opportunism and nothing else. Weird, right?
I mean... it's not how the game tells you leveling works, but they really don't explain it well anyway. I think the reason it works this way is because the levels are generally set up in ways where say... only half of the enemies can be killed using your alchemy skills, leaving you to distract the other half of enemies not positioned to be killed using alchemy or rat-luring. Whereas if you want to stealth, you often won't kill anyone but maybe the archers/spotters. Aggression is obvious. Kill everyone you see at all. If you believe what the game tells you and think "I wanna level opportunism, so I'll do as much alchemy as possible." you will likely end up killing around half of the enemies by sheer planned coincidence. It only stops making sense when you actually start to analyze it and really actively pursue specific skills. If you just play and don't overthink it, I bet it generally goes as advertised. The game's not made for you to comb over everything. That said, I'm betting opportunism ends up being most people's least-leveled skill due to the weird middle-ground kill requirement and most people will be paying more attention to doing either stealth or combat. You would think using lots of extinguis, ignifer, odoris, so on, on guards would do it, but no. You need to thread the needle on kill counts.
Now that I think about it... this actually makes perfect sense. By 'opportunism' they mean, you only take the opportunistic kills. It's the middle-ground where you don't put discreetness first, but don't go actively seeking kills and only grabbing the low-hanging fruit. It's literal, not a catch-all for alchemy. Maybe it's only confusing because killing opportunistically nets alchemy-based abilities. Where as the other paths give you abilities more directly conducive to performing the required actions more easily. It's harder to see how alchemy and opportunistic killing connect. I suppose they actually do, though. A lot of the opportunities that come, rely on alchemy to utilize, such as putting out an enemy's torch when they're surrounded by rats.
IDK what's really going on, but there's something weird about it and that's about as much sense as I can make of it. It's like they're banking on you prioritizing one of those 3 methods for any given passage. If you're like me and explicitly try to use everything available on a situational basis, the things you gain levels in make NO sense.
I think I've found the best way to optimize upgrading gear, though. If you grab every secret chest, tool chest, and loose pieces (gonna need every knife you find for the secret chests, too) in the first 3 chapters and max out instruments before upgrading anything else, you can upgrade freely without tools or benches for essentially the entire game, and each tool you find from there is just spare pieces for crafting. I'm talkin... you can make tools and workbenches completely irrelevant to your upgrading before clearing the intro arc. By the time you get to the tar workshop, you should find the last tool you need for 3 upgrades on one thing... the 6th possible tool. And you should also have more than enough pieces to make that last upgrade to your instruments by then.
Being skimpy with pots/pyrites then adds a surprising amount of extra upgrade pieces, because instruments also let you break those down for pieces. Pots are for noobs, honestly. Most of the time, there is another option other than using a pot. Pyrites? They're like extra lives. To get the high score, beat the level without using your lives. Knives are like an optional challenge skip, where if you take on the challenge instead, the secret chest it opens later is the reward, like finding a special bonus item by doing fancier platforming.
With the checkpoint system, I'm not sure what the pyrites are really for. Waste a super-rare item on a screw up? Or lose 3 minutes of progress? You know? It's not like there is anywhere you can't go without a pyrite. The only essential one is given to you right when you need to use it.
I'd also go so far as saying that if you ever find that you absolutely *need* to use a pot as a distraction, you screwed something up. A lot of times, you don't even need the alchemically infused pots - be clever with everything else you have and there are often other ways to access the same areas, or dispatch/distract enemies. You start to find extra knives as things progress. Pots only give one piece when broken down, but knives and pyrites give two. I've looked at loot guides and nobody seems to be spotting all of them. Past chapter 5, there are so many extra knives and pyrites on normal difficulty that I haven't seen anyone point out. Narrative has even more. There are always tons of pots around. If a level has say, 10-15 pots, all of those broken down could get you another upgrade one level earlier.
After you bypass tools and benches, you level opportunism as often as possible, as the 3rd skill gives you pieces every time you craft ammo, to go along with what you get from breaking pots and such down. By then, you probably carry more ammo and materials. So if you start being a little wasteful with the alchemy items, you can rack up a nice bonus in materials. Double advantage in that alchemy eases a lot of situations, and re-crafting then helps you build your character.
The first few levels aren't hard on ammo or anything, no need for going for ammo/material capacity. The sling upgrades aren't needed either. You pretty much never need those as much as virtually any other upgrade. Not even for stealth. If you level prudence, you'll pretty quickly gain the ability to toss stuff way further, negating the need to even use it to hit a torch or armor chest from distance for distractions. And if you play aggro, the bow is superior. To me, there's no good reason to not first max-out instruments. You get access to a massively stronger character by the time the game actually gets challenging that way.
I was thinking about that sling though... Amicia is probably the most efficient sling-user in all of human history. Her power with that thing is legitimately genocidal. Her effectiveness with a sling is downright menacing. I mean, she's legit striking fear and hatred into entire armies with that thing. Genghis Khan himself would be elated. She scarier than any raider.
Personally, I like to hold my pieces after maxing instruments until I get the crossbow. And right after I kill that first guy in the slo-mo crossbow sequence with the boat snared, I stop and craft the first two upgrades for the bow, which lets you hold more arrows. The other enemies don't actually come until you step out of the water - so if you stop, you can safely craft the upgrades. You have enough to do that with 20 odd pieces to spare if you do as I say and don't upgrade anything but instruments, explore thoroughly, and hold your pieces until the moment the bow is in Amicia's hands. Immediately after that, in the same fight, if you use the sling to kill the majority of the enemies attacking you in that little section instead of the crossbow you just got, you can come away with 3 spare arrows. After finishing the boat passage, you can be like 10 pieces away from the upgrade that lets you recover arrows. And then you can just kill everyone forever, and following the path I outlined with hoarding and upping opportunism, have everything upgraded just before the final arc of the game begins.
In this playthrough, I hit max upgrade levels on my crossbow while I was in that enclosed quarry mine passage... the same place where you get Hugo's rat sense. REALLY trivializes that section when you can straight up shoot every enemy with the c-bow AND leave with 2 more arrows than you entered with. It's tough otherwise, with helmeted enemies, crossbowmen, and slow doors between you/them. You can become a monster in combat very early. Arnaud kills like a grunt compared to Amicia with a crossbow and the ability to re-use arrows. She'll kill 8 in the time it takes him to deal with 1.
juk lol
