Anyone else panting in anticipation of Dragon Age?
As someone who played through the Baldur's gate series over and over again, this is a gaming dream come true.
Electronic Gaming
(82 posts) (20 voices)-
phrankygee
MemberI liked Baldur's Gate, but I haven't done much gaming since I got married. My wife and I bonded over Icewind Dale, and then REALLY got hooked on Civilisation III, but our windows laptop (bought with a one-time inheritance windfall) became obsolete, and finally died, and I got a cheap-ass thing barely running ubuntu linux, and since then, the only gaming has been on the PS2 I bought at a pawnshop for 60 bucks.
We're too f***ing stingy to be gamers.
I have not heard of this game of which you speak, how is it like or related to Baldur's Gate?
Posted 3 years ago # -
vorjack
ModeratorI've been a gamer since the Coleco, but I've had to give up on the latest games. I just don't have enough computer to run the current stuff.
I have played Baldur's Gate, of course. And especially Planescape: Torment.
As long as we're talking about this on an atheist board, has anybody else played "Kult: Heretic Kingdoms" (AKA "Inquisition" in the UK).
Posted 3 years ago # -
Sock
MemberI'm very reserved about Dragon Age. I'm worried that it will be entirely too short, or it wont have any replay value. So many games these days are all about the graphics and gameplay, but the story gets the short end of the stick. The last absolutely awesome RPG I played was Arcanum. I haaaaaate how popular MMOs are these days. Since UO, quality single player RPGs have all but vanished from the market.
I've played all of the Black Isle games, and I've played BG2 heavily modded. I've also played NWN1 (and all expansions) and NWN2 (and all expansions).
I can't speak enough good things about Arcanum. I want to give myself a brain injury so that I can forget everything about Arcanum and play it again from scratch. That's the only game that I've played every single aspect of.
I'll be giving Dragon's Age a shot, of course, but I'm extremely skeptical.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Ty
ModeratorI appreciate your skepticism, but the fact that all the game designers from BG and BGII were brought on board to script and design this game makes me think it's unlikely that it will be either too short or that it will lack replayability. Reading the descriptions on how the game basically rewrites itself to adjust to your origin story sounds very much like the next gen of what they were doing in BGII.
These guys have bought a LOT of credibility with me.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Ty
ModeratorAlso, Arcanum was a very fun game with a cool concept, but the problem is that the combat system was absolutely broken. A few more trips through the play test and redesign process would have done that game a world of good.
On the other hand, it remains to this day the only CRPG I've ever played that I beat using a character without a single combat related skill. That says a lot about how ambitious they were in the game flexibility.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Daniel Florien
AdministratorFor some reason I play SNES RPGs when I get depressed, or am just ridiculously bored. Oh, and I play uniwar on the iphone...
Posted 3 years ago # -
Sock
MemberMaybe you can think of a few others that post-date UO. However, that's the problem. A few. I can think of dozens that were awesome before UO came out. I mean, come on. The Ultima series period. Wizardry. Darklands. Stronghold. Lands of Lore. The games made by Black Isle, though those may come directly after.
When MMOs took off, single player RPGs nearly died out, unless they were on a console.
Posted 3 years ago # -
vorjack
Moderator@Daniel: For some reason I play SNES RPGs when I get depressed, or am just ridiculously bored.
Likewise. They're the RPG equivalent of comfort food.
The first thing I did once I got out of college and into my own place was to stop by the pawn shop and buy an old SNES. And Chrono Trigger. Good times, good times.
Posted 3 years ago # -
phrankygee
MemberSNES Secret of Mana, anybody? Or was that just me?
My brother got a PS2 back when they were still pretty new, and being the cheapskate that I am, I immediately bought PS1 games to play on it, including Chrono Cross.
Good times indeed.
I recently finished DragonQuest VIII on PS2. It was pretty fun.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Secret of Mana is awesome, other than levelling all of your spells to the max. I love Seiken Densetsu 3 even more, except for the intro which can drag on a bit. But then the mana games after Legend of Mana were just disappointing.
FF5 was one of my favorite FF's, the customization you can do really helps make the grind much better. You're not just levelling to 50, you're working towards gaining a skill such as X-Fight, Terrain, Conjure and others.
I haven't been keeping up with new games coming out, Dragon age sounds interesting. I liked KOTOR and some of the other bioware games so I'll have to check it out.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Elemenope
ModeratorI really dug the "job" system in FF5. Figuring out which strategies could work for each combination was half the fun.
KOTOR/KOTOR2 rocked, though I actually found the full 3d (as opposed to isometric BG/Diablo-style view) to be kind of a hindrance. I mean, sure, it was pretty, and the immersion was higher, but that stuff gets outweighed by characters clipping around "obstacles" and doing really stupid pathfinding during battles. I actually liked KOTOR2 all-around better than the first (heresy!), though I get the bitching about the ending.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Daniel Florien
AdministratorMy favs are FFVI and Chrono Trigger. I haven't played FFV for some reason — looks like I'm going ROM "shopping" today...
Posted 3 years ago # -
Elemenope
ModeratorNo Mass Effect love? For shame. For shame.
Mass Effect was great, though not exactly an RPG. I thought of it more like an RPG-flavored FPS.
I haven't played FFV for some reason — looks like I'm going ROM "shopping" today...
LOL. Careful; IIRC, FFV is the longest of the FF series by far. We won't see you for a while... :)
Posted 3 years ago # -
Ty
ModeratorI dislike JRPGs in general. The combination of forced grinding and railroad plotting makes me feel like I am playing a game of D&D in which the group has already been going for years, and I'm filling in by playing someone else's character.
Any RPG that has me saying, "Oh, I see what the developer wants me to do now," is a bad RPG.
Mass Effect was awesome. A friend of mine wrote a very popular sci fi space opera series, and I've been telling him to buy it. "It's like playing in a game you wrote," is my pitch.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Elemenope
ModeratorWell, railroad plotting was a feature of all games until quite recently, so that criticism I think is not quite fair. As far as the grinding goes, some of them are better than others. I thought that FFV did an excellent job of balancing so that your power level was pretty much always consummate with the current task. Other FF's perhaps not so much (I'm looking at you, 4 and 7!)
Posted 3 years ago # -
Sock
MemberFF8 had a system where the mobs were as strong as you were, give or take a few levels. So if you were level 1 and fighting a grue, you'd be fighting a level 1 grue. If you were level 50 and fighting a grue, that'd be a level 50 grue. The bosses were at a set difficulty, though, as I recall.
It was kinda neat, and IMO, that's how it should always be done.
I've played every FF. I am even one of the few who managed to beat the first Final Fantasy. That was a really hard game.
These days, I role-play on a private UO server. I can't afford to spend thousands of dollars a year upgrading my computer to keep up with the gaming industry.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Elemenope
ModeratorThe auto monster balancing reached annoying lengths in ES:Oblivion. It can be done well or poorly, just like all game balancing. What it tends to remove is the ability to beat a superior adversary by being clever, because there are (almost) never any superior adversaries to be had. But it does obviate grinding, and that's a big plus.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Ty
Moderator"Well, railroad plotting was a feature of all games until quite recently"
What are you calling 'recently'?
Wastelands set the standard for non-linear RPG game design and it came out in 1988, about four years before FFV.
It is more accurate to say that railroad plotting is a feature of all JRPGs, including the ones they are making now.
"It was kinda neat, and IMO, that's how it should always be done."
I could not disagree more strongly. This is the same system that the recent Oblivion game used, and it is, IMHO, fundamentally flawed.
What point is there in leveling if every creature you fight is your equal? It was quite common in Oblivion for people to pick skills they never actually used as their primary skills so that they never leveled up. I mean, level 50 rats wandering the countryside just because YOU happen to be level 50 is annoying, and throws me out of the immersive game experience.
A much, much better system is one in which the player is allowed to move around the world freely, and discover which areas are too hard for them on their own. That leaves the excitement of coming back to that area later when the player is sufficiently powerful enough to handle it. Arcanum is an excellent example of doing exactly this.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Ty
Moderator"I can't afford to spend thousands of dollars a year upgrading my computer to keep up with the gaming industry. "
This is one of the pluses of the ubiquity of consoles. You're going to spend 300-400 every three or four years, and every game developer will be targeting their content at you, since you are part of the largest group of game buyers. Dragon Age is coming out for the Xbox 360 because if it only came out for the PC, it would sell about 10% as many copies. I like being part of a group with so much buying power that the developers cater to me.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Elemenope
ModeratorWastelands was in a class by itself for quite a while. True non-linearity didn't become an industry standard until Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and that generation of games in general (circa '97-'99). Before that, due to simple constraints of technology, having a world that the PCs could wander around in willy-nilly was difficult to construct.
Posted 3 years ago #
Reply »
You must log in to post.