On June 07 2019 06:46 Manit0u wrote: I wish this trend with games and movies would end. I could really use some new titles instead of constantly rehashing old franchises and milking the nostalgia.
Then I hope you are already playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker as it is not based on old franchise but it is equally awesome.
I am indeed. Pre-ordered it and got all DLC for it.
On June 07 2019 20:05 blunderfulguy wrote: The Witcher 3 is one of the best games ever made, but that whole series is pretty far from CRPG territory. Although, perhaps it's time for CRPGs to have more cutscenes and up-close, face-to-face interactions with NPCs like a lot of the other styles of RPGs so they can change up the storytelling and dialogue formulae within the sub-genre a little.
Thinking about it again just now, one game I loved at the time but always forget exists is Shadowrun Returns. Never played Dragonfall or Hong Kong, or at least I don't remember playing them... I was even on a tabletop Shadowrun kick at the time, too. Is my memory just that bad and everyone else really likes them?
Witcher series are not my cup of tea. They're just trying to do too much: plenty of action and also plenty of gathering resources, crafting, wandering around etc. I think it would be better if they went in one direction and maintain the pace instead of "some story, action, action, action, gathering, gathering, crafting, action, action, wait... Where was I with the story again?" It's also a bit too arcade'y for me. I think that in this format the best RPG to date is Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall is amazing, much better than Returns actually. Hong Kong is really good too.
On June 07 2019 15:36 Silvanel wrote: Havent played Kingamaker yet but there have been some very good RPGs in the last few years. OS2, Pillars, Tyrrany (too short), Witcher 3. Its not BG2/MoB/Torment 1 but they are still very good in my opinion. New Torment kinda put my out in the begining still have to come back to it.
Kingmaker is fun to a point, but I had a lot of frustration playing it. The battle difficulty is all over the place, it can go from "this guy has such high AC that I can only hit him with critical hits" to "this one character (goblin rogue dude) is killing everything by himself with his insane sneak attacks". Luckily, there's a "fuck this bullshit" button (difficulty slider) which you can mess around with at will.
I found the world building to be uninspired and dull (with exception of a few choice places like the cyclop lich's tomb). Part of this is a consequence of the story: you're not really exploring some wondurous land on some exciting quest. You're running around in your backwater barony's lands (which is just empty forrests/mountains with the ocassional ruin) killing dangerous things and solving whatever's plaguing the populace that year. Chapter 4 (or whatever the Pitax one is) has you doing some nonsense diplomacy that made me cringe.
Finally, the UI could use a lot of work. For example, when I was leveling up, there's no indication of which future feats will become available if I take a currently available feat (like cleave requiring power attack), so this requires me to look at all unavailable feats one by one to figure out what I would do, when a simple feat skill tree would have made it much clearer. Quests are much more confusing than they need to be, meaning I had to wiki way more than I did for something like PoE 2.
Larian is probably the best studio to do it, they have done a great job at old school crpg. I do hope they do a better job at tutorial then the first games tho, as someone who started CRPG with BG2 and didin't play pen and paper RPG, it's crazy confusing, I had to go to the wiki a lot, the time system in particular was hard to grasp, it had a bunch of hidden timer, the round/turn system wasn't clear ans there were some problems with animation vs timers. I ended up confuse trying to make my mage cast back to back spell as they stood around doing nothing.
With that said, it's one of the best game I ever played.
On June 07 2019 20:55 Silvanel wrote: Edit: I am absolutly going to play Kingmaker, i just prefere to wait for the time when game has all dlc realesed. I dont have time for two walktroughs. Edit 2: Is Kingmaker based on any books, campaigns, theme in Pathfinder universe or is it something tottaly new?
The original Kingmaker adventure series was an Adventure Path for the tabletop game. The Kingmaker CRPG by Owlcat follows the basic premise of the original series of adventure books but has a lot of new or slightly different things going on, and obviously plays completely different than the 4-6 player tabletop campaign. I believe Ed Greenwood was a big part of making the original adventures, and Chris Avellone worked on the CRPG with Owlcat staff.
The Adventure Path is also coming up on its 10th anniversary and is getting a crowdfunded rerelease of sorts. It'll include all or most of the new things in the CRPG, and will have rules for Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e iirc.
*I suppose I'll add here that, in the CRPG, the Hard and whatever difficulty above that are extremely difficult because enemy AC and critical hit damage multiplier are very high. It isn't recommended that you play on Hard unless you like the gameplay of save-scumming and doing fights over and over, which I do to some degree. They have a lot of options and sliders in the difficulty menu to tweak the difficulty. When I played I kept almost everything at "Hard" except for critical hit damage and something else, I can't remember what, and I'd suggest looking over that screen for a minute, and normal vs hard or what-have-you, no matter which difficulty you're going to play on.
**I'd also recommend playing the tabletop game, but getting that and a group of players together every week for a long campaign was next to impossible for me as a kid in my small-ish Midwestern town, and as an adult everyone is so much busier. Rise of the Runelords was another Pathfinder Adventure Path that a lot of friends started with and still love introducing new players to Pathfinder and D&D 5e with, it'd be cool of Owlcat takes on that if they make another Pathfinder CRPG... Anywho, there are tons of great tabletop adventurers out there.
Funnily enough i am actually gamemastering a very long campaign with Pathfinder mechanics (but different world). We are closing on 100 sessions and i am getting kinda tired. Want to switch to Shadowrun soon. I also play (as a player) in Fading Suns, i would love to see computer game in this universe.
I was dreading it was Larian. To this day DOS2 is the only uninstalled RPG in my library because i absolutely hate it.I don't even know why anyone is even praising the game . I don't know whose brilliant idea it was that every spell in this stupid game creates some aoe puddle that stacks to form some retarded aoe soup but yeah...horrendous game design. Oh you cast "fire arrow" aka single target spell well it is now lake of fire oh and the next guy that casts some other spell is gonna topdeck on top of your aoe, jesus christ, which you all have to walk through now .And i cant look past something like that, its not like i hate some guy's voice acting or some NPC' s hat , i absolutely hate the game when it comes to core combat mechanics. It's goofy, it's stupid, as soon as i started and i was collecting 2000 seashells and stealing whole cabinets from people's houses i could tell this game was not for me. I was hoping it was Obsidian but now i wish it had been Owlcat instead. Kingmaker comes closest to the true RPG experience of IWD, BG etc. Hopefully the game takes nothing from DOS2 and more from other, better RPGs, and emulates at least the combat and item progression style of the Infinity engine games. It could have been worse, it could have been EA's Bioware i guess.
On June 08 2019 08:53 Nalmissra wrote: I was dreading it was Larian. To this day DOS2 is the only uninstalled RPG in my library because i absolutely hate it.I don't even know why anyone is even praising the game . I don't know whose brilliant idea it was that every spell in this stupid game creates some aoe puddle that stacks to form some retarded aoe soup but yeah...horrendous game design. Oh you cast "fire arrow" aka single target spell well it is now lake of fire oh and the next guy that casts some other spell is gonna topdeck on top of your aoe, jesus christ, which you all have to walk through now .And i cant look past something like that, its not like i hate some guy's voice acting or some NPC' s hat , i absolutely hate the game when it comes to core combat mechanics. It's goofy, it's stupid, as soon as i started and i was collecting 2000 seashells and stealing whole cabinets from people's houses i could tell this game was not for me. I was hoping it was Obsidian but now i wish it had been Owlcat instead. Kingmaker comes closest to the true RPG experience of IWD, BG etc. Hopefully the game takes nothing from DOS2 and more from other, better RPGs, and emulates at least the combat and item progression style of the Infinity engine games. It could have been worse, it could have been EA's Bioware i guess.
This was a very well thought post with remarkable insights. Thank you.
The first thing I love is that they're doing something with the illithid (mind flayers, a.k.a. tentacle faces) and gith (at least the githyanki), which is cool as a D&D fan. The cinematics seem cool, and I'd love to see more, but there's also something about it that I don't quite like but can't put my finger on.
The dialogue and options feel off in a way. The voice acting is very off-putting, it feels so unnatural in the writing and overacted/overexaggerated, hyper-theatrical all around. ("*I* am a D&D CHARACTER with this fantastical ACCENT!" The vampire spawn is basically Edgy Paul Bettany the Dragon Age Character, and everyone else is a caricature too. I thought we were past this.)
The combat looks like it's in the middle of being polished. It doesn't exactly remind me of Baldur's Gate, but this long after those old CRPGs, I would never expect it to either. What it doesn't remind me of is Divinity Original Sin in any way except the pacing, it just looks like a modern CRPG. All the systems are very much in-line with D&D 5e with the character creation, abilities, different actions, bonus actions, advantage and disadvantage; which is nice but doesn't make a big difference to me with a first impression of an awkward gameplay demo. Looks like D&D, albeit a very literal, cut-and-dry adaptation of the rules. It doesn't look like they're including "gimmicky" mechanics (like the elemental effects of DOS2).
The biggest gameplay things that stand out are the kinds of things that are (hopefully) going to be changed throughout testing and before release (AI, pathing, UI stuff, targeting awkwardness, to-hit and damage numbers, that kinda thing), and animations that are still being finished. I'd much prefer if the numbers behind the scenes were fudged for the monsters to make the game less swingy and random and instead more designed, but, eh, hopefully you can tweak a bunch of difficulty settings and other options at launch.
I basically just see a lot of potential, and nothing telling me that it's going to be a bad game by any means, just maybe lacking in a few areas (mostly dialogue, but I've only seen a few minutes of that so far), but also potentially excelling in some too (like the cutscenes).
I guess it looks kinda like Dragon Age in the Forgotten Realms more than anything, and kinda like Larian is treating Baldur's Gate similarly to how Owlcat is treating Pathfinder but using an already-built engine and an experienced team. We'll see how it goes.
I dunno, not that impressed. I wasn't a fan of Divinity OS 1 (and never played 2), and it looks very similar, so I don't have the greatest expectations.
I know it's minor, but the dialog as narration is very strange.
While I don't really want to form too specific preconception of what a game should be, I really struggled to find anything Baldur's Gate on that one. It could be a good game nevertheless, but so far the licence and title are there only for the PR and maybe for DnD ruleset.
Not that I really feel like going back to the bhaalspawn storyline though, not at least to the excisting characters and all that. The original saga is one of the most complete arcs in the whole gaming in my books. It doesn't really need expansion there. Lots of things to explore outside that too though, so I hope Larian finds their Baldur's Gate connections in some different way.
On February 28 2020 21:22 Sbrubbles wrote: I dunno, not that impressed. I wasn't a fan of Divinity OS 1 (and never played 2), and it looks very similar, so I don't have the greatest expectations.
I know it's minor, but the dialog as narration is very strange.
I agree with this. I also quit DOS1 about 2/3 into the game and never even bothered to try DOS2.
I am especially not impressed when Larian was saying recently they got 350 people working on this game (when they counted all the outsourcing too). For a AAA production, this looks worse than DAO. I was hoping at least it would be at DAO level and hoped for better..
I loved both BG and DoS 1, but DoS 2 never really did it for me. Lame story, tedious combat. (BG2 also was VERY tedious, but that was kind of normal back in the day.)
I like the combat in DoS 1 and 2. Didn’t like story though, especially the second one.
My biggest annoyance is the item system. It’s really tedious to have to search so many things and go through so much junk to get the few important quest items and crafting materials. Game does a terrible job of letting the player know if it’s safe to get rid of certain flavor items.
i had a lot of gripes with what was shown at the reveal, but this is probably a version of the game that would be the most far-reaching.
thing i don't like: - DoS2 with small UI and graphical changes. from what was shown, the large circle (indicating the hitbox or space occupied by the moving character) that shows where you are moving is very very out of place for a game like this. they would have done better with RTS cursor movement. i'm not a fan of the same old font used in other larian games. there is no system in the huge skill bar (34 per row i believe) to help with organizing. meaning that this will all be a nightmare when this game eventually gets released on console.
- once again with the magic inventory system where you can send items from anywhere regardless of distance. i see this as a negative unless you are playing purely solo. this is a problem because it allows for a lot of weird exploits.
- dialogue options as mentioned are narrated first person and roleplaying centric. this is this exact stuff people do online, asterisks included. it's out of place and uneasy as it is.
- the DnD systems are hidden under a shell that most people will never touch. so 90% hitrate is just 90% hitrate. this is an example of convenience and ease of use not really accomplishing much more than simplifying systems that a lot of people are familiar with.
things i do like: - the freedom which seems to be even more than in DoS2. now the problem with this are the exploits and the many walls the level and encounter designers must set up to make it so the creativity can't get out of hand. you can do shit in the other larian games, but with DnD spells and more support.
- cinematics are on point.
- looks good, and will be far-reaching.
- will have a great co-op experience with 2 or 3 other people.
EPT
