FM:
The Ritual
File: ritual.zip
Ghost -
Failed
Time - 01:40:22
Loot - 1690/1740
Pockets Picked - 5/7
Backstabs - 0 Knockouts - 8
Damage dealt - 10 Damage taken - 0
Healing taken - 0 Kills - 0
Bodies Discovered by Enemies - 3
Causes of Failure:
1. Falling down into the well alerts a submerged haunt.
2. Cannot take Seliquary (obj) without causing an AI to continuously chase the player.
3. Cannot sneak through town with Merimee in pursuit; too many agitated AI.
(4). It's very difficult if not 90% unlikely to sneak through the Hammer church to retrieve the Well key.
Comments - I remember playing this mission so many years ago and having trouble with the Hammerite church. Dousing a torch is required to sneak into a room and get the Well key, but the AI are hypersensitive. I tried lowering myself down from the far side of the balcony overlooking the pews; the hammers always saw me. I tried dousing both torches from various positions, but they kept going on second alert. Finally, I lowered myself down behind the hammerites and doused the torch on the right side of the wall. Astonishingly, everyone went on first alert but nothing more. I doused the other torch and waited a few seconds - success! I have a screenshot to prove it but I wonder if I could repeat my results... I can't figure out why no one was alerted this time. Perhaps if the hammerite patrolling the balcony doesn't hear the water arrows, none of the other hammers lingering around the pews are affected?
My joy was short-lived when I finally got the Well key and dropped down the well. The splash from the fall alerted a haunt standing
in the water at the bottom! What is this guy doing here? I didn't hear him and I almost didn't see him. Imagine my shock when I look down and see him peering around in the water. I could see no logic or purpose from a plot standpoint of this haunt being here:
I could do nothing to prevent his second alert mode since he stands so close to where I fall straight down.
Getting the seliquary generated an AI problem I've never encountered before. Picking it up causes one of the nearby patrolling cultists to run into the pitch-black room to my position. He is still at zero alert status and is only running because of a script:
I guess the author intended him to run right into the player and become alerted. The room with the seliquary is dark, though, and I found I could just crouch and he would continuously run into me:
The problem is that I couldn't get him to stop chasing me. If I moved to a location he couldn't reach, he would stop in mid-stride and remain stuck in that position until I left my safe place, at which point he would run after me again. If I could have ghosted the haunt and other areas, I would try to loot the seliquary and then make a run for it out of the catacombs with him in zero alert pursuit. Instead, I took the seliquary and leaned forward to BJ him as he ran towards me.
-Meeting the loot requirement in this mission is tough on expert. I absolutely needed to get by the spiked wall near the two chests behind the portcullis'. Moving by the spiked wall onto a pressure plate causes it to fling forward and crush the player. I found that if I ran onto the pressure plate and jumped once, the wall would start to move and recoil back into position before making its final trajectory. That gave me just barely enough time to run and shoot a rope arrow and climb up out of harms way.
-To pick up Merimee's body undetected, I needed to douse all flames around the altar because of three cultists observing her. Once I took her back out of the catacombs, her corpse disappeared and a fully conscious Merimee started following me. But the town is now crawling with cultists who have started melees with the bluecoats. There is one patch of three or more cultists with an oval-shaped patrol in front of the hammerite church. There was no open gap between the patrols for Merimee and I to dash through. I resigned to KO these cultists in addition to a few others in the town. The bluecoats at the mission start were on second alert, having fought and killed a cultist, so I dropped a flashbomb in their faces and raced to the mission end.