Originally Posted by Gyson
I think I triggered some unintended results at the orc beach battle prior to first entering Cyseal.

Having played this many times, I knew the fight was coming and ran my melee character down to the same point I always run him (towards a corpse near the water's edge). Usually that places me into fight mode as the orc ship arrives, the orcs (and a human) debark, and rush into their positions on the beach and the turn-taking begins. This includes the NPC guards who are already fighting another large orc who is already on the beach.

Instead, what seems to be happening now is this: I run down to my spot, the orc ship arrives, and before the invading force has even gotten both feet on the sand the battle goes into turn-mode. In other words, the orcs are all clumped up by the boat. The consequence of this is that this battle is now far enough away from the NPC guards (who are fighting a different large orc) that they're never included in the fight. I end up having to kill the human cultist, orc shaman, and his two orc guards with my two character party (while the guards just pace around on the beach in real-time after slaying the orc we spotted them fighting from further up the cliff).

This seems to be repeatable now, so it's not a fluke. I can get the battle to play out "normally" by initially running my character towards the guards instead, but otherwise it seems to break down pretty reliably.

Here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about:

[Linked Image]

Note the guards standing around at the top right of the screen, not engaged in the battle. You can see they're not even present in the portraits up top. You can also see over on the left how the orcs have barely departed the boat and not had an opportunity to complete their run onto the beach.



I just want to add to this report and show additional locations that cause this fight to fail, with failure defined as 1) the guards not joining in on the battle and 2) shared XP not being awarded to the party for the orc killed on the far right of the screen (mainly because the guards aren't being merged into the battle with the players).

[Linked Image]

Moving your characters down to the locations outlined in red typically cause the encounter to fail (as defined above), where as moving them to the area outlined in green causes the battle to involve the guards (and shared XP is awarded for the orc (when killed) on the far right of the screen). I believe the two outlined areas combined represent the extent to which characters can move before being drawn into battle-mode.

In fact, I worry that some new players may find themselves stopping at this location:

[Linked Image]

That is the spot where the incoming boat animation is first triggered, which might cause some first-time viewers to come to a sudden stop and watch the animation play out before attempting to move further. That location also causes the encounter to fail to include the guards.

Clearly this is not a simple case of "running up into the orc boat and breaking the encounter" as one poster erroneously argued, as there is a lot of room here for this encounter to trigger incorrectly (if we define "correctly" as "the way it worked prior to this latest patch, where all orcs and humans on the field were always involved in the same battle").

Hope the additional information helps!