itch.io

Hi again. I will try to address some of your points, and explain the rationale behind some of the design choices here!

you’re still there chugging along, it’s only that the curtain was pulled on it

Canonically Failbetter Games had to force you to “chug along” as Serault, and her Marquis, have a minor role in Dragon Age: Inquisition (aka the game this one is a prequel/interquel of). That’s why you don’t have an apocalypse-sort of ending even in worst scenarios.

You can’t go back and revert something at chapter 3 for better stats (even if you could) because it may drastically affect something later

This is one of those gamebooks where you are supposed to play again and try different approaches if you want to see different/better endings, and getting a less-than-ideal ending on your first run is absolutely a genre stapple. Though perhaps the current threshold IS too harsh?

I will make more test runs, but feel free to share your own endgame stats, it would be helpful!

‘30’ is hardly the high mark the game implied for making it through

Sorry, the number is not important actually, the flavor text next to it says it all. Did you read the Tutorial?

“If your Threats rise too high, you may be taken to the Game Over screen. You may get one final chance at redemption if, depending on your situation: your Dignity isn’t Pitiable or Despicable, your Prosperity isn’t Desperate or Shattered, or your Freedom isn’t Wretched or Oppressed.”

If you had a Dignity Game Over, your Dignity was Pitiable or Despicable (i.e. less than 30) and your Twilight was above the (appropriately named) “Midnight looms” threshold. Hmm, I really need to test this more.

I was playing on Normal. I don’t mind failure at all

Oh. Ok. This is useful information.

You cannot just rewind every 5 seconds and pick the most beneficial choice in the moment because then you aren’t playing your story

Sometimes our choices, guided purely by role-playing, lead to “failure” scenarios like these. Perhaps the game is poorly-balanced. Perhaps you just chose poorly (no offense, I also got bad endings myself! lol).

Perhaps it’s a bit of both?

you say the original allowed you to pay to carry on past it anyway, but at least there would have been that option

I made Casual Mode for cases like this. Did you know you can just skip over that Game Over passage if you were on Casual? Bad stats will take you to that screen anyway, but you can always just jump out of it on Casual.

I am feeling like half of your core problems would have been solved by playing Casual. Why “half”? Well…

The ‘Bad’ ending is no ending at all

… because - spoilers ahead - all endings are sort of like this, even the best ones. You won’t be getting e.g. a slideshow or cutscene saying what happened to every character. You get a passage describing the gist of what happens to Serault now, and that’s it. Your imagination must do the rest.

This is the half of your issue that I cannot fix, and I am very sorry for that.

A player shouldn’t be treated like that in a standalone

Like I had mentioned, this isn’t a standalone. This is a pre-existing work, a sequel to Dragon Age II and a prequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Serault’s story continued in the latter… to a degree.

And I concur, the player shouldn’t be treated like that. We still don’t know whether the Hero of Ferelden from Dragon Age: Origins managed to find a cure to the Calling, and what on earth happened to Hawke after Inquisition. These guys had AAA budgets behind their games, and still got very little closure from BioWare.

Between Failbetter’s text-based low-budget and me - who teaches History to schoolchildren for a living - spending about 130 hours on this preservation project for free, your Marquis never had a chance! lol

I am sure you liked (most of?) your journey since you clearly cared enough to be quite annoyed about a bad ending… but damn mate it’s the Dragon Age curse, vague-ass endings, so we either enjoy the journey despite unclear destinations or we just move on. :S

By the way, I just finished a quick test run with zero planning, clicking mostly at random. Got into the same Game Over as you did, but had plenty of Dignity to escape. Narrowly escaped a Revolution Game Over though, by 1 point (I would just have rewinded 3 or 4 passages to deal with the Iconoclast differently if that bothered me to be honest). I am on Normal Mode too. https://imgur.com/a/4JDPMon

Hello! I appreciate the feedback.

The way Game Over works in very similar to the original in that you won’t be getting much in the way of resolution if you “fail” to even bring the Divine to Serault. I wasn’t willing to change something as major and core to the original as an ending. You fail, you get the end-game passage and that’s it.

That said: you know you can rewind as many times as you want, right? Change a handful of choices until your Dignity (if you got the high Twilight ending), Prosperity (if high Peril) or Freedom (if high Revolution) are above 30, and voi a la - “bad ending” avoided. Fun fact: in the original, you had to pay real money to be able to skip the Game Over! Not kidding.

You can also use the Autosave to return to the start of Chapter 7, which should give you a ton of options to raise the corresponding Attribute(s) to a level higher than 30. If you tell me what your end stats were, I can help guide you out towards a better ending.

Finally: which difficulty were you on? Casual Mode helps a ton if you “lack the patience for failure”, as the start screen says! On Normal, it’s intended that you may get a “bad ending” almost half of the time if you do not carefully balance out your stats - rewinding if needed.

Seriously, rewinding is just overpowered.

Huh, this is indeed weird. You should have been pushed to The%20Last%20Court%202.2/The%20Last%20Court%202.2/index.html, which is the version I am playing right now on the itch.io public version.

Perhaps your browser kinda "froze" the version you were playing on and didn't update? Just to be sure, you did NOT download anything, did you? Because the offline version can also be played on a browser, but it does not get automatically updated.

(EDIT: Yeah that's already fixed in Update 13/version 2.2! You can download the new version in the game's description.  "Fixed an issue where trying to get into somewhere you shouldn't would show up a success and failure scenario at the same time.")

I fixed the typo but I cannot figure out the second issue. The Cunning checks works for me, both as success and as failure. Which version are you playing, the browser version here on Itch or the standalone version you have to download? By the way thanks for being thorough and finding these issues.

Hello! Thank you so freaking much for the bug/typo reports, I will be uploading a fix later today! It should be save game compatible.

Huntress/Hunter

• Derring-Do: 50

• Woods-wise: 30

• Rulership: 30

• Scholarship: 20

• Cunning: 20

Scholar

• Derring-Do: 20

• Woods-wise: 20

• Rulership: 30

• Scholarship: 50

• Cunning: 30

Alchemist

• Derring-Do: 30

• Woods-wise: 50

• Rulership: 20

• Scholarship: 30

• Cunning: 20

Envoy

• Derring-Do: 30

• Woods-wise: 20

• Rulership: 50

• Scholarship: 20

• Cunning: 30

Initiate

• Derring-Do: 20

• Woods-wise: 30

• Rulership: 20

• Scholarship: 30

• Cunning: 50

There are 7 distinct endings, with 1 of them - the "Good" Ending - having 4 increasingly good variations depending on your success. I use quotes here because all endings are valid in their own way and feel satisfactory enough, at least to me.

• Peril Ending: Have Peril higher than 60 by the end of Chapter 7; somewhat avoidable.
• Twilight Ending: Have Twilight higher than 60 by the end of Chapter 7; somewhat avoidable.
• Revolution Ending: Have Revolution higher than 60 by the end of Chapter 7; somewhat avoidable.
• Confrontation Ending: Enter the Sealed Chantry... and be an ass when asked about it.
• HK Ending: Be friendly with the HK in (almost) every opportunity.
• The "Bad" Ending: Fail to impress the Divine (that is, have 4 Divine's Favour points or less).
• The "Good" Ending: Impress the Divine (that is, have 5 Divine's Favour points or more). If you get 6 Divine's Favour, you will get the Keys event; with 8, the Mask event; with 10, the Fortune event ("best" possible ending in the game).

Thank you! That was the whole goal of the project, to show people a narrative that they never had the chance of trying before. 

Greatly appreciate the stats too, you did well on managing the final attributes, look really well-rounded. 

Huge thanks for the kind words and the stats! I fixed the bug already, will upload the fixed version soon.

The stats are immensely useful because they allow me to gauge how strong/weak  the skill checks are; if, say, I put a skill check of 65 but most people only manage to take a skill up to the mid-50s, then I have to slow down a bit on the difficulty progression to give everyone a chance at succeeding at events. So that screenshot gives me a lot more information for how to develop the story going forward.

I should finish it this month, please stay tuned!

New version is up, Her Smiling Highness now gives top-notch advice as the Maker intended. :D

Your words warm my heart! I am committed to finish this soon, thankfully I will go on vacation next week. 

This demo has over 37k words in it and as someone who never programmed shit in his life, it has certainly been challenging but also fun! I really love this story, haven't played since 2018 but Serault was always something I think of fondly as a big Dragon Age fan.

No seriously your report saved me a ton of time by pinpointing it to the Smiling Guildmistress. God, I guess her advice did suck! Haha

Thank you for your feedback! 

That's totally a bug. I wrote "setcunning to +2" instead of "setcunning to whatever cunning currently is +2". I had the same bug (it's 14 here after a full run, but should never be below 20). I fixed it already and will seek to update it here, so thanks again!