Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't adding rifling to a blunderbuss musket have virtually no effect on the pellet spread?
The point of rifling is to impart spin on the projectile. Spin makes the bullet fly more reliably straight. When a bullet has no spin, you get a bullet equivalent of a knuckleball. So, if you took away some or all of the rifling, the bullets would actually spread a bit more, or at least fly more wildly. Possibly a case of Fridge Brilliance.
If you put spin on a bunch of pellets, it normally results in a donut shaped pattern - spinning the pellets in the barrel means they all leave at an angle, so the shot pattern is similar to the SURFACE of a cone. You can see this when shooting stuff like birdshot (.22 shells full of small shot). That said, only a tiny number of people care.
The point of that entry is that the musket doesn't fire bullets, it fires pellets, which are unaffected by rifling. The game perhaps could have made that upgrade "narrow choke" versus "wide choke", which would indeed change the spread of the pellets, which would have been more realistic.
Considering the nature of the technology in the setting, calling it a "musket" and assuming it operates exactly like real-life muskets is a bit daft. Considering rifling apparently increases the accuracy of the weapon, it likely doesn't fire pellets like a real-life musket. It's probably more akin to a real shotgun than a true musket.
Is it just me? or do you move slower while holding Zulf's body than when you hold the Battering ram? It probably to be more dramatic, but still.
Well, you need to be a little more careful when carrying a badly beaten man on the brink of death than you do a massive pillar of rock. Maybe The Kid is just being careful?
If a health tonic can heal any injury, why carry Zulf out, when The Kid could have just given him a health tonic and kept the Battering Ram?
Who's to say the tonic would work on anyone besides The Kid? Besides, the health tonic wouldn't stop the Ura from shooting Zulf. The Kid's tenacity certainly did, though.
Also, it's tricky administering an ingested liquid to an unconscious person. The Kid may have also been in a hurry, thinking ahead and trying to ration them, not thinking that part through, worried he'd screw up and choke the recipient, or who knows what else.
Why is "Mother, I'm Here" called Zulf's theme, when it's the Kid whose backstory involves spending a long time away from home and mother?
They're more alike than you think.
The song isn't addressed to Zulf's mother, it's addressed to the goddess Micia, who is commonly referred to as Mother- she brought everyone into the world, and everyone will eventually return to her. The song is essentially about Zulf dying and seeing god.
Word of Composer is that it's just a funeral song from the game's world, used to reinforce the mood. It has obvious parallels to the Kid and Zulf, but isn't literally about either of them.
If Rucks` narration is him telling the Kid's story to Zia, then wouldn`t Zia`s dream in "Who Knows Where" be Rucks telling her about her own past?
Rucks starts the story by saying, "Let me see if I got this right...I only heard it once," which means he's essentially double-checking the story Zia told him and making sure he remembered everything properly.
Not an irritant so much as a point of confusion—are the Ura simply a different culture than the Caelondians, or are they actually a different species? Both they and the Caelondians look human, but that doesn't mean much in fantasy, and there is the matter of how the Ura live in burrows.
They're human, and might actually be natives of the continent (the Caelondians immigrated from across the ocean). They do live underground, but it's likely just a quirk of their civilization.
Or they moved underground after people from across the ocean came and started attacking them and stealing their land.
Ura most likely lived underground before Caelondians arrived, considering that they had issues with Caelondians laying out railways; Rucks says 'it should've shaken them down to their bones in their dens.' It sounded like that railway was a big part of why Ura started the war.
Rucks says that the Tazel Terminals got the worst of the Calamity. So why are there so many Ura still alive when apparently everyone from Caelondia is dead or petrified?
Caeldonia is mostly intact physically; the Tazel Terminals are frozen over and the Ura tunnels are all broken apart with the cracked earth. So one end suffered more population devastation but the other suffered more from the physical effects.
From what it sounded like, the Mancers didn't necessarily want to eliminate the Ura, just the Tazel Terminals since it was essentially a massive tunnel network. The best way to render tunnels useless is to literally rip them out of the ground, which is exactly what the Calamity did. It's also possible that when Venn sabotaged the calamity, he also modified it to destroy all the Caelondians.
Zia and Zulf both survived by hiding in Ura dens or an approximation thereof. This implies that hiding underground protects you from the Calamity, and that Ura dens are sturdy enough to withstand it. The Calamity wrecked the Ura's home and probably killed a bunch of them, but they were all underground and were thus protected from the brunt of the attack.
Did it bother anyone else that even if you choose the Evacuation ending first, Rucks still shows signs of deja vu?
Ideally, once you choose the Evacuation ending that would be the logical conclusion of the game. Storywise, New Game Plus is only possible if you chose the Restoration ending.
With Evacuation, the story has indeed ended and the loop halted. New Game Plus is just another loop, so there are still past loops Rucks seems to remember. Apply some Gameplay and story Segregation here, players wont appreciate a game end choice that locks you from New Game Plus.
Who said that the player's first playthrough is the first time the loop happened? Maybe the Kid has been doing this a while already, and we are just hopping in the midst of it.
Why do so many people assume that Rucks was lying about being a Trigger? I mean, I just assumed that after his time in the Triggers he turned into a Mancer.
Even the comment he gives when you select the hammer and carbine implies that he was a Trigger during the Ura-Caeldonia war. It would be hardly surprising if there was a lot of movement between guilds after the war ended.
If Rucks was telling all this to Zia, why did his dialogue get nastier during the Jawson's Bog sequence?
If you mean when the kid blacked out, that's not really Rucks talking, it's all in the Kid's head.
Why did Zia's father do what he did to his daughter? Specifically, why in the world did he get so angry at her because her friend/boyfriend insulted him in such a way that she couldn't even have known was an insult, because he'd never told her? Throwing the boy out, I can understand. Throwing his own daughter out and leading her to decide that she had to run away makes no sense, especially considering that she was the only family he had, too.
Because people can be irrational when they're angry. Zia's father was working on a superweapon project too, so he might not have been all there in the head to begin with.
Didn't it say that tried to run away together?
That was after that incident.
Is the Kid hearing Rucks narration in his head? Does he understand everyone's motivations by the time he catches up to Zulf?
No. But he is implied to be talking with everyone between each trip to get caught up on everything that is happening.
It is implied that the Kid and Rucks can communicate somehow when the Kid is out and about. When the Kid goes into Jawsong's Bog Rucks warns him that "he'll get lost, and I won't be able to guide him back," and in the Kid's Dream Rucks says how the Kid wakes up after the Calamity "with only a Stranger's voice to guide him." However, the Tazel Terminals kicks off with Rucks saying "I can't hear him at all anymore. He's too far away." Everything the player hears during the final level is being told to Zia only, and Rucks is quite oblivious to exactly what's going down between the Kid and Zulf.
How did a bunch of plants build their own Bastion?
By being clearly intelligent.
Were the Ura evil or the Caelondians? Zulf's backstory said he wanted to show that the Ura had changed, was he just being an Uncle Tom or something?
Was that intentional? The Caelondian's bastardy seemed to be played up more than the Ura's
They're both bastards, just in different ways.
If the Caelondians are colonists from another continent, and the Ura are the natives, why do they worship the same set of gods?
They don't. Rucks makes it clear that the Caelondians have no real reverence for the gods now, and nothing he says confirms that they ever did; the closest he comes (as far as I remember) is saying that "the gods used to stand for something", which could just as easily be referring to the prominence of the Ura's faith before they lost the war and had their gods appropriated.
When you show the Pyth Plush to Zulf, The Kid clearly asks him "Don't we worship the same gods?" So, yes, they do. Which makes this a bit odd. Maybe the gods made themselves more obvious in this world, like in most Dungeons and Dragons settings, where everyone knows of the same gods, by the same names.
Or the Ura and Caelondians share the same ancestors and the gods and religion is one of the few things that have remained intact, during the decades. The Ura still holds the traditions while Caelondians have disgarded them.
The Shrine in the Bastion itself and its effects in the game prove that the gods are capable of acting: Both the Caelondians and the Ura might simply recognize the Gods as beings that really exist, and that's why they have the same gods, like in The Elder Scrolls or in Discworld.
What is the Kid praying for in the Shrine? Forgiveness for his people? or is he raging like Rucks and is mocking them? After all, why do the Gods empower the enemies, and not The Kid when he prays to them? Are they angry at him for destroying their work? Is he being accountable for the sins of the Caelondians? And if so, are they doing it out of spite or are they testing him to see if he is truly repentant?
I imagine he's not exactly repenting (Remember, he doesn't know that his people caused the calamity), probably just praying. The Gods most likely empower his enemies primarily because they're putting him to a test and rewarding him with fragments to make sure he's worthy of them, and secondarily because they're punishing him for his people's sins.
Read up the nature of these gods, "growth through suffering and hardship" is a running theme.
from the game's world, used to reinforce the mood. It has obvious parallels to the Kid and Zulf, but isn't literally about either of them.