Lormak is dead - the end of his permadeath adventure

The mighty bear has died.

Felled through dubious game mechanics.

At the end of level 37, taking on a bandit chief, who on his last leg ran Lormak through, impaling the big man on a two handed sword.

What's worse, the bandit chief fell dead as soon as the cut scene finished.

I had a clear view of Lormak's health, greater than 50% health, probably 55% - 60%. Which would translate to close to 200 hit points left.

The brigand chief has triggered some kind of cutscene on a regular attack and simply run Lormak through. I have to object that I was unable to use my shield. After the cutscene triggers, it simply means you die. So if you get caught with your shield down, you risk the cutscene triggering and then will have no ability to react to it.

This is wrong. I know it's on master difficulty but that is not fair. A blocked power attack is not going to take that many hit points off. I seriously doubt he could power attack anyway, as it was near the end of the fight, he had wasted his big hits on me early (which I blocked) and my mace drains staminia.

So he does a regular attack triggers a cut scene and gets rid of more than 50% of a level 37's health, whom has legendary dragon plate armour on and a dragon shield.

This is a flaw in game design. Cutscenes should only trigger when a character is unable to block (back attack) or down on the ground begging for mercy. The other exception is when an attack is blocked, but they don't have enough hitpoints to soak up the damage. They would die anyway, so a cut scene could rightly trigger on a person with low hitpoints that is blocking.

Having such a large amount of health left, plus the ability to block the attack, I feel cheated.

What's more confusing is that Lormak seems to have delt the guy the final death blow just as the cut scene triggered. The cut scene was not interrupted and the guy runs Lormak through then drops dead himself. WTF?


I went back and replayed the fight. Same thing happened again, but this time I was on 40% health. The bandit chief didn't drop dead this time though as I didn't have him down low enough.

It would seem if the shield is raised, then it stops the cutscene from triggering. However, you can't kill the guy then, you have to hit him with your mace sooner or later. Lowering the shield and having hits which are lower than the maximum damage that he could do on a big power attack seems to make a cut scene possible even with regular attacks. It seems to work like this as the player. They've been a few times when I've done massive damage via a cutscene to finish a foe off without a power attack.

When you are on the recieving end of this, it really doesn't seem right. The mechanics behind how this work are out of balance for both the player and the NPC's. Cutscenes should only trigger when you give them a finishing move. They need to be sufficiently weakened without the ability to avoid the attack.


This is the last post for this blog. The best that Lormak can hope for now is that he comes back as some sort of vengeful spirit.