f13.net

So, I happen to get a e-mail from gog over the weekend saying they were having a sale or something, so I clicked on the link and Fallout 2 was $3.00.  I couldn't pass it up, so I bought it (its still 3 bucks, comes with soundtrack, manual, survival guide etc).

So I started playing through it again and my goodness I remember why I used to love the RPG genre so much.  I've sort of been a bit outspoken about how I haven't liked story in games recently and how at some point I stopped liking RPGs as much as I used to.  And Fallout 2 has really helped to sort of crystalize that feeling for me.  Its just so damned good.  This isn't really news to anyone here, but here is just an example from the first, hell, 15 minutes, that really made me happy:

 
So, right in the beginning I found C4, and I found a door that I was informed by the game text was locked and couldn't be opened at all.  I honestly didn't remember if it was supposed to or not, but I reasoned that I could probably blow the door with c4.  I set the charge next to the door, put the timer for 30 seconds, and ran!   The thing went off in about 20 seconds and I got the message because of my poor explosives skills, it detonated early.  I did get the door open though!

I was talking with my friend about this, and we thought, in today's RPGs, and NPC would hand you the c4 at the beginning of the missions, saying you'd need it to open a door.  Then you'd get to the door, hit the "plant c4" button, and then a cut scene would play with you jumping behind some crates as the door blew.  This would be judged as a "cinematic experience." Instead, there was no info telling me what to do, I got stuck, and I just had to ACTUALLY search the place for a solution. 

So, what old RPGs have you played lately, and why do you love them?

fallout 1&2, planescape tournament, baldur gate 1&2 these are "golden age" RPGs. Fallout Last Vegas and Dragon Age came close to "good old days" but not quite - too many concessions to consoles.

Baldur's Gate Tutu - Link (http://www.usoutpost31.com/easytutu/) for those who may be unfamiliar - has a permanent place on my computer. It gets fired up every time I get the itch to play, which is usually every month or two. I always start a new character with the intention of playing through BG1, BG2 + expansions, but I rarely make it past BG1 + expansion before either losing interest or being struck with another idea for a character that I just have to try. This is in spite of the fact that Jon Irenicus (BG2) is my favorite villain from any game. BG2 was great, but it just doesn't quite match the open-ness of BG1.

I've been enjoying Galactic Civilizations 2 lately as well, though it isn't really that old. I just like the 'old' turn-based 4X style strategy game.

I've been on a bit of a retro kick lately, thanks to GoG.  I keep looking for an old game I can do a radicalthon on, and keep drawing blanks.  Thought I'd give Ultima Underworld a try, but I know nothing about the game or Ultima in general, and the controls gave me a headache.  Thought maybe I'd try Baldur's Gate, before I remembered it's already been done.  Thought I might give the old Vampire the Masquerade game (Redemption) a try, but holy hell, the combat in that game is MADDENING.  Then I thought maybe I'd try Arcanum, before I remembered that's already been done, too (and I always want to play a tech character, and they're completely broken).  Gave Fallout a try, but I have no idea what I'm doing, and I think I might have gotten stuck in an unrecoverable spot.

I have Septerra Core sitting next to my PC, I keep meaning to play it, maybe I'll get around to it one of these days.

Probably my favorite old RPG series is Quest for Glory, because it's fucking awesome.  It's half RPG, half adventure game, so there's lots of ways to solve problems that don't involve murdering things, which is a problem that annoys me with a lot of RPGs.  Plus, since you can play through as different classes, there are multiple ways to solve most of the puzzles.  It lets you import characters from previous games into the sequels, which was pretty impressive to me (especially considering the time scale involved; grab a character file from 1989's QfG1 and you can import him into 1998's QfG5 with no problems).

I miss the Might and Magic series.  Even up through 8 (2000) it was still a pretty decent series and was good for great entertaininment value & replay.  Some stumbles along the way (6 was notoriously combat heavy in an annoying way) but I played through all of them (except 1, too vintage) and enjoyed myself immensely.  Lots of time in high school was spent playing 2 & 3.

I game i fondly remember was one of the Ultima series spinoffs: Worlds of Ultima the Savage Empire (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/23970/Worlds+of+Ultima+-+The+Savage+Empire.html).  A homage to the Lost World kind of setting complete with dinosaurs, inca inspired indian tribes and hidden secrets, even a sleestack substitute...  I distinctly remembered how cool it was when i figured out i could construct primitive firearms.  As linked to, available on abandonware sites...

I fucking loved that series. So fucking much. I played the shit out of those, and I would totally play the shit out of them again if they magically appeared on my computer. The only other series that came close back then on the "played the shit out of" scale was the Space Quest series (well, and the original Sims, I guess, but that doesn't count).

I am pretty sure anyone who has eyed my steam stats knows what series is the current "plays the shit out of" winner, though.  :ye_gods:

Don't.  It's fucking terrible.  I bought it launch.  I still remember why I quit: it was goddamn tedious to play. Monster spawn points were static and reset every time you changed areas, which was often.  Plus the battles took forever. That quickly nullified any of the charm it had.

The Exile series. Specifically Exile III: Ruined World.

Still have a copy on my computer. Loved the ability to wander around and find all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies and how often finding those places got you into horrible unexpected death filled situations. Also loved the way the story progressed and how the longer you stall the worse the world gets. I used to play through over and over again just to see how few party members I could finish the game with (my best was 3 Slith).

To this day the mention of the Golem Tower causes me to swear uncontrollably.

Arcanum - Troika really wasted a lot of potential with the setting. Magic + Steampunk is not even common these days, the most recent example being Fable 3 and Dungeon Siege 3. The SPECIAL system they copied over from Fallout Series was peppered with more stats and variety of skills. It did not mesh.

Pros: Interesting setting and somewhat cool choices that affect endings you'll get.
Cons: Bad combat balancing and buggy at release.
Available at www.gog.com - worth the price, especially with High Resolution mod for 16:9 monitors and above.

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader - Another failed potential from Black Isle. They pulled off Icewind Dale 1 & 2 as well as Fallout 2. But Lionheart is beyond saving. Set in 15th Century Europ where magic and demon mingle with the Crusades, the player must choose between factions of Inquisition, Knight Templars and the prosecuted Wielders of Magic. And that's where the interesting part ends. The SPECIAL stats adopted from Fallout promised so much yet dies a horrible death when real-time combat was unveiled with punishing combat-oriented world and horrible level-scaling. Gamers were forced to abandon their games due to their 'non-optimized builds' failing to make the cut in mid point of the game. Mobs literally destroy them in one hit. Not for the faint-hearted.

Pros: Intriguing game world with historical figures making appearance.
Cons: Horrid action rpg interface and level scaling making this game unplayable. I literally abandoned 3-4 playthroughs and was crying for difficulty slider before beating it with lots and lots of perseverance.

You left out on the 'Con' list for Arcanum that 90% of the game is spent slogging through fairly identical sewers and mines, populated by monsters where no apparent thought was put into the mix of difficulties. A room full of level 3 rats! A level 25 gore guard! Back to level 3 kites! The way shit actually works with your stats and skills and such is also horribly documented and in some cases actually lies to you.

On Lionheart, it should be noted that Black Isle was not the studio that developed it, that would be Reflexive.

If you can track down a copy (it's not on GoG, and I don't think anyone knows who the hell owns the license for it; I'd venture to guess Atari, but who knows), I'd say play some Darklands. One of my favorite RPGs ever, and since it's by Microprose, there's a nice and tasty 200 page manual to read through. Open-world sandboxy stuff set in medieval Germany with a proto-Baldur's Gate combat system and some fairly in-depth character creation. No magic (though some supernatural elements exist), instead you use alchemy to make potions with a variety of effects (which I believe was a novelty roughly 20 years ago when the game came out) or pray to Catholic saints for aid, depending on your acquired knowledge of the saint and the situation at hand.

It's got a few problems though, namely the fact that it's a complete and utter pain in the ass to learn new alchemy formulae and the various saints, and gathering enough ingredients in order to make enough potions to even bother with takes upwards of an in-game year to accomplish. The few quests you can accept are also quite difficult to accomplish, and the main plotline is buried so deep and so dependent on other random stuff happening to discover that I didn't even know the main story even existed until more than ten years after I got the game.

Even still, it's a really good game that's surprisingly stable on modern hardware, especially given how much of a pain it was to get running back in the day. I haven't tried it on Win7 yet, but even as late as WinXP I could run it just straight from the .exe and it'd boot up and run perfectly without needing to use DOSBox. Just hunt down a .jpg of the copy protection alchemical symbols, though; whoever boxed my old original copy neglected to include the copy protection leaflet, so I had to hit up the county library and find old books with alchemical symbols in them and write them down to use.

Oh yes, Darklands. I think I found it on some Abandonware site some time ago (my original disks are 5 1/4"). Loved that game, especially the character creation.

The Alchemy symbols were in the margins of the original handbook, not a leaflet. At least in my version. But yes, they were the historical symbols, so every source works.

What I played recently: Arcanum and Avernum (the updated version of Exile). Wanted to work my way up to part 6, but those games are huge!

Realms of Arkania - Sir Tech
Oh, look, I got cut...need treatment...
Witch, treat wounds.
FAIL. You've caught tetanus!

Jagged Alliance - Sir Tech
Mercs, guns for hire. X-Com with real personalities.

Realms of Arkania is from Attic Entertainment, Sir Tech was only the US publisher (which is important if you want to find the GoG version, which has it listed under Attic)  :awesome_for_real:

Edit: And Dark Heart of Uukrul, how could I forget about that. Talk about a Hard game. Both hard puzzles and character Permadeath with fixed Safepoints.

Ultima, specifically VI and VII.

Ultima VII and Serpent Isle are goddamn masterpieces of engine design.  Pretty much took a decade for the rest of the chucklefucks in game design to catch up.

Ultima VI is just a plain fucking badass story about why exactly Lawful Good alignment just doesn't fucking work.

U7 wasn't much of a game to me. I was just more interested in walking around, hoarding gold in my ship..then found a carpet. Stuffed 2-3 barrels full of meat in there..then another chest containing dozens of weapons and phat loot we had.

It was the best medieval sim ever....i felt so sad when it was all over...

u6 had interface problems and really needs a remake to make ppl understands what's a great story n setting is about in rpgs.

Beside the usual "rose-tinted glasses" argument, Ultima VII was unique for another reason too.

- Think about the latest Bioware RPGs or others: you have the distinct feeling that the game is structured in various stand-alone "hubs", in other words a "modular" approach, and in each of them you have various plots and so called "quest-givers". Yes, they try to simulate a world but, at least for me, the "artificial" feeling is still there, no matter how good the story or the design is (and I really like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, for example).

- Then, think about Ultima VII: it was really an attempt at creating a virtual world and a realistic society (while in the background of course you have an overarching, epic plot to save the world). Every NPC has a specific reason to be there, from Abraham and Elizabeth running around Britannia, to those folks setting up a theatrical display outside Trinsic. It's a realistic medieval society, a rural one, with "real" problems (the poor folks of Paws, the miner problems in Minoc, the on-going integration of another race in Vesper, the toxic waste of Lock Lake): "quest givers" were cleverly concealed. Oh, and of course the much praised (and still to be replicated nowadays) schedules. That's why, at least from a strictly "world simulation" point of view, Ultima VII (both) are still the best CRPGs ever created (then your taste may vary, of course. Planescape Torment, BG and Arcanum were awesome too, each for their own reasons).

I'll just add that for my money, Daggerfall is the best Elder Scrolls game.

Yeah, unforgettable dungeon crawling experience and amazing character customization. If you want example of why streamlining is bad, just play Daggerfall and compare it to Oblivion.

I have been playing a great deal of Ultima underworld. (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/193/Ultima+Underworld+-+The+Stygian+Abyss.html) I am constantly reminded of how this game was ahead of its time in so many ways. Hopefully i can finish it, and move on to UW:2, a title I never played when it came out, I think by then i was sucked into the wing commander ride.

Daggerfall is the only vintage game I've played in a while.

My fiancee thought it was really cool, she loved the music and atmosphere.

One odd little game I used to like years back was Evil Islands. How about Temple of Apshai?  :grin:That was my second era of gamer elitism (first being c64 Ultima4/5 while the plebes were playing super mario). Bunch of my friends were raving about zomg3dworld DOOOM and I'm all, yeah, Ultima Underworld.

What a great thread!  You guys are really bringing back some good (and some not so good...) memories.

I'll go old school and mention Dungeon Master for my first computer - an Atari ST.  circa 1987 from FTL games.

One of the first, if not the first 3D dungeon crawls.  Puzzles, traps, monsters that moved.  

No maps.  No internet.  No clue books.  You had to feed and water your characters.  You needed torches or spells to light your way.  You had to sleep.  You had to map by hand on graph paper like D&D (and pausing the game was a black screen, so all mapping was real time with real monsters that could attack you as you were mapping).

Excellent, excellent game.

I still have this sitting in my closet somewhere on three Commodore 64 cassette tapes. It ran in BASIC, so back in the day when I was a kid, I LISTed it, figured out the variables for the different stats, added a few LET statements, and made myself a god. Good times.

(http://static.ulike.net/img/02_The_Bard's_Tale.jpg)(http://free-game-downloads.mosw.com/ss/4845_0.png)

I want to go back to when I played this game for the first time.

Since my other old favorites (Darklands, Daggerfall, Ultima Underworld + U7, BG) have already been mentioned by others, I'll instead mention an obscure game I played what seems like an eternity ago, but I still remember the name of because it was such awesome fun:

The Aethra Chronicles - a shareware RPG (possibly the best shareware RPG ever made) that was supposed to come in three parts, but the author only completed the first part, leaving you with a cliff-hanger ending a third of the way through the story :P Clichéd plot, artwork and sound were freeware stuff, but great depth and it apparently uses a percentage-system from Role-Master instead of dice, for those who care about that sort of thing.

From the user-manual:

Having to raise magic levels... having to use runes to make spells in flasks (and how 1-2 of the runes weren't even used...).  I think I got to the 5th level... wherever the giant worms were that I couldn't kill.  It was an exercise in frustration.

At, thats level 4 with the purple wurms and their respawn points. (plus a single solitary ghost who wandered around). It worries me I can, to this day, remember each level of Dungeon Master. Played that game to death, and at the time it was so ground breaking and ahead of the game.

Also echo the above comment about Might and Magic. Only 3 months ago I finally finished M&M3 - I think I first played that game 16 years ago! Numbers 3 through to 7 were all great games - it's always surprised me that they haven't been quickly ported to the iPad or something as they would be ideal for the system if cleaned up a tad.

This seems relevant: A lblog where a guy documents his experiences in attempting to play and review (in chronological order) every CRPG released for PC. Or at least those that are mentioned on Wikipedia and Mobygames. I think he's up to 1988 by now.
 
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/

Its been a long time, but I think all runes have been used in Dungeon Master.

The purple worms were the difficult monsters. but I think at the beginning there were conveniently places doors nearby, that and hit and retreat made them into good sources of food and not much else. Standing in front of monsters and getting hit was a bad idea quite often. "Step left, turn right, melee left, melee right, repeat" is something my motor memory is still able to do in its sleep. Worked in Eye of the Beholder as well  :grin:

I always used Resurrection though, it gave you superior characters very soon, just make those MA potions as soon as mana regenerates.

Fucking back button ate my post.  Ugg, I'll just shorten this up I guess.

I just can't retro-game anymore.  Not enough time.  Especially not enough time for the likes of BG 1/2 or PS:T.  The oldest game I have installed on my home system (if you ignore the SNES emulator) is Deus Ex.  But then again, the earliest I really got into computer gaming was around the release of Warcraft II.  I have no memories of a lot that's being mentioned and some stuff just won't be playable for me due to a combination of hassle to get running, graphics, and especially old, shitty UIs.

Oh, I do have Ultima 7 installed on my work laptop.  I always end up playing the first few hours of it and then just wandering off.  It is very cool, but I just can't stay focused on it when I can barely keep up with recent releases.

Arcanum is one I'd like to play though if I get time.  However, the combat balance is a fucking mess and I'm afraid what I'd want to play would be totally gimp at a certain point in the game. That's what killed it for me last time.

I'd There's also a lot of older PS2 releases I'd like to get through.  However, older, long JRPGs are just as much of a nonstarter due to their insane length.  

The only things I really tended to fire up on a regular basis (at least a year or two ago) and then put down just as quicky are (in no particular order):  Deus Ex, Earthbound, FFVI,  Fallout 2 (even though I'd rate 1 higher, 2 is more fun to play), Ultima 7 (as mentioned)  and VtM: Bloodlines (I know it's not that old, but it feels like a relic).

Arcanum was a shitty game. I own a copy but never had patience to finish it after more than few attempts. "Crafting" system alone is vomit-inducing.

Gimme your money!

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/d/de/20090915123051!Space_Ghost_Zorak.jpg)

Like Maledict, I'm a tad worried that, even nowadays, I can remember almost every level of Dungeon Master. From Lv5 onward, the difficulty really increased: I fondly remember the "master level" with all the locked doors you had to insert the "RA Keys" in, that will eventually lead you to the Firestaff; also, the infamous third level, "Choose your destiny, choose your fate". And what about that incredible fight with the Red dragon, that lasted forever?

Personally, I find the Bard's Tale saga enjoyable, even nowadays: problem is managing to get past the initial bore, when you are REALLY weak and you are trapped in the rinse & repeat cycle "fight monsters inside the houses-buy/sell items/go to the review board". The first dungeons are not that interesting either (wine cellar, the first couple levels of the sewers), but when you finally manage to get into the Catacombs and Harkyn Castle, game becomes great (same thing with the third episode when you finally access the other dimensions and the two unlockable classes).

The first serious game I played to completion was Wastelands on a C64, and I continue to replay it every three years or so.  I can remember being ecstatic when Fallout was released and it felt like a real spiritual successor to that long lost gaming experience.

There were several other real winners back then that kept me chained to the desk: Legacy of the Ancients, Bard's Tale II...

Oh, and Darklands!  It was my first encounter with non-linear gameplay, and the world seemed spectacularly large and full of mystery. 

Maybe it's just nostalgia or I've become older and more jaded, but those rpgs really seemed to suck me in a lot more than any modern iterations of the genre have been able to.  There was far less hand holding when it came to the actual roleplaying of your character(s), which allowed the player to use some imagination and critical thinking to solve problems.  Hell, I remember keeping graph paper on my desk just so that I could map out dungeons while I played.  I miss that, but I also acknowledge that now that I'm an adult I probably wouldn't have time to do all of that stuff like I did when I was younger.

If you want to experience the tedium of mapping all over again there's always Etrian Odyssey.

I do not miss mapping at all.  I miss it as much as setting up your dos environment to get something to actually work.

I feel the same way. I blame "must work on console, must work for dur dur console gamer" for dumbing down otherwise great games. Dragon Age could have been one of these Classics, but they had to dumb it down so 6-pack Madden Joe could play it from his couch.

As much as I loved taking copious notes and mapping, I COMPLETELY AGREE.

I think I am with you overall, but I think I like the old way better than the amusement park handholding of modern games. I feel like a passenger rather than a participant. Maybe some sort of automap that I could annotate myself? That would be nice feature.

Oh. here's a stupid gem. Might & Magic: World of Xeen

You have a party of 6, just killing stuff....you can't even split them up. They stick together like a human blob. Fighter, mage, wizard, ninjas, etc. Killing slimes, rats, all the way to Dragons and Giants...from swords, clubs, slings, all the way to phasers. I think I was confused when I was a kid, but it was cool enough to warrant repeated plays and burning away evenings after I finished my homework. Strangely, I never finished a single M&M but felt I got my money's worth.

Wizardry's like that too. World of Xeen was fun as fuck though.

I miss the old Might and Magic series. It's like Ubisoft was fucking with me when they named the new Heroes game Might and Magic: Heroes.

Indeed, M&M was great. My only problem is I can't really play World of Xeen - the goG copy I have seems to have a dodgy, slow mouse cursor that partly vanishes off screen, and the entire game plays very slowly. Shame as it's the only one I haven't finished from 3 to 8.

Re. the Dragon fight from dungeon Master on level 14 - there was a way to do it very easily. Just use the green and blue "Freeze Time" boxes whilst chain casting the poison cloud spells on the dragon. It would be toast after a couple of boxes, from the massive stacking damage. Learnt that whilst finishing Chaos Strikes Back - far easier than the 30 minutes it originally took me to kill the dragon jumping around on the stairs and running like crazy whilst wailing for mummy!

(Chaos Strikes Back - now THAT was a difficult game!).

Most of my experience with PC gaming only goes as far back as, say...Diablo, Warcraft 2, BG1, original Rainbow6, Fallout...my friends had some older stuff, like Commander Keen and Quake. We played Quake 2 and RotT at school.

I could never get into any of the old "first person" RPGs, which is how BG1 hooked me so hard when I saw it coming out.

This thread has me tempted to actually try and dig up an Amiga Emulator and play Bard's Tale in it's proper glory.   I never got to play the Amiga version of Dungeon Master now that I think of it either.   My dad didn't want to buy a whole megabyte of memory for it  :ye_gods:.

I barely even remember that Xeen allowed a mouse.  I keyboarded the entire thing and still do.  The mouse cursor being dodgy is something I think I remember on one of my ancient 486s, but I never bothered with a mouse afterward so I don't know if it was a driver issue or just the way it was written.  Clouds of Xeen was actually pretty easy, Darkside was rather difficult, especially towards the end.  And those stupid monsters that break your weapons EVERY TIME YOU HIT THEM.  A big problem with the 2 games... not enough money to train!  If you cleared too much, you'd run out of money and be unable to train your characters anymore!  Could be a problem if you didn't spread the leveling love out amongst the 6 in your party.  My favorite M&M is still 2, with 3 and 7 a close second tie.

The RPG I would venture to guess I've spent the most hours on (BG2 is the other possible contender):

(http://www2.cs.uidaho.edu/~cs428/nethack.gif)

In a similar vein, I think ADOM is the most enduring piece of software on my collective computers. 

Do Roguelikes count if they are still in development? :)

Just in case the Roguelike with the most realistic and WAY too abusable job system which is guaranteed to not be in development anymore:

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yQB-HylXt_k/TdMru-sJkhI/AAAAAAAADzA/1lDaUFoEm4o/s1600/omega_000.png)

ADOM, Nethack and Dungeon Crawl are a given. I'm cycling through them, Playtime over the years in that order.

Dark Sun is pretty nice too, one of SSI's finest gem. Too bad the sequel is devoid of improvement.

I never played the original, but really enjoyed the sequel. It felt a lot bigger in scope and options than other RPGs around at the time which focussed purely on combat really.

Oh, what about the old 3D dnd games from SSI? Stone Prophet was my favourite, even if the first time I played it a bug occurred that meant my characters constantly got xp from thin air. When I finally reached the end of the game I was actually high enough level to just Turn Undead the end boss mummy and have him instantly disintegrate.

When I look back its always books of graph paper and swapping bards tale maps with my friends.

Oh, but those graph papers made you remember the maps. I replayed the Pool of Radiance Goldbox series again a few years ago and I still remembered most of the maps of the first two games. My skill broke down with "Secret of the Silver Blades" because the setup and because they started to repeat themself (Down the shaft, passage in four directions).

Ah, good times. I want those from GoG. I don't have disk drives in my PC anymore.

Someone touched on an important distinction between these old games and their modern equivalents - ease of information.  Dealing with dungeons traps, teleporters, riddles, puzzles etc without maps only works if joe gamer can't simply look all the info on the internet in 5 seconds.   I remember when playing many old rpg's running into challenges that i couldnt easily figure out, but that was expected.  Heck i think i even called a hint line once for help on some ultima question i had.  The lack of discovery or mystery is what makes most modern games seem souless.  You could seem this shift from importance on game self discovery to "gotta know it now" with the advent of online rpgs like the original UO and EQ.  Even AC with their magic system.  The only real remaining area where that applies is in modern rpg's stories/plots, but even with that you still have to actively avoid spoilers if you want to get the most enjoyment from it.

It's just really hard to recapture any sense of wonder in modern gaming, but i dont think most people even recognize that they lost it.  Just look at much people complain when a game has any sort of hidden information.  Hidden information used to be a good thing...

Oh yeah, another old school rpg I played the heck out of was Autoduel by Origin systems.  Don't think i ever finished the main plot, but catching a bus to atlantic city and breaking the bank at poker so i could design all these dream cars was hours of fun.  Course I also remember the old joystick we had to play this on my Apple IIe to be rather...wonky.

Obscure information I can buy, hidden information?  No sir, I don't like it.

EDIT: Lol, NVM, it points to GoG anyway.

This WAS FREE on abandonia, but now you apparently have to pay for the same thing on GoG. Awesome.  :oh_i_see:


Might and Magic IV and V - World Of Xeen (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/482/Might+and+Magic+IV+and+V+-+World+Of+Xeen.html)
 

I wish someone would do a modern Daggerfall. Proceedurally generate a world 50 times bigger than you need, punch it up with handcrafted points of interest here and there, and then bolt on the obligatory "main quest". Throw in lots of random worldy shit (dungeons occasionally overflow and invade a town that'll send out a call for heroes, etc.) like we wish MMOs would have but never do. But fuck that, make a smaller game and license some shitty Marilyn Manson song to play over a trailer that shows how hardcore you are because there's a woman in a BIKINI in it. That's easier.

I'd buy it.

Honestly, I have some hopes that in the end Minecraft adventure mode will scratch some of this itch.

I liked that in Divinity 2. "This cave has 2 chests I need level 4 lockpicking to open"
I ran a bbs in the mid-80s that had a pay-wall for Ultima 4 hints (I used a FastLoad cart on my C64 to haxxorz it).

I recall Bioware having this as late as Neverwinter Nights (2002?) which was especially useful for Persistent World servers.   Seems like it should be a pretty standard feature as far as I am concerned.

I found that as abandonware and played it a bit with DosBox a year or two ago. It is still pretty fun designing cars and such, but DAMN it is punitive. If you don't have a clone and you get killed, game over. The terrible controls doesn't make it very easy to stay alive either. Desperately wish someone would make an updated version of this. Darkwind (http://dark-wind.com/) is still fun, but it is really slowly paced. Either a robust single player game or a good MMO (HA!) would be better.

(http://www.ulujain.org/images/uwmaps/uw1level3.jpg)

Two Worlds?

I would love for a modern Daggerfall as well but what you describe, except for randomly generating, doesn't that cover Oblivion?

It also sounds kind of like Vanguard.  :grin:

I think Oblivion is ruled out on the "50 times bigger than you need" part.

Not saying I agree but people already complain of the tons of empty space that they felt wasn't needed in Oblivion. I have a love/hate relationship with Daggerfall, I put more hours into just the demo than I have in most single player games. It's what broke me into PC gaming when I was 13. However, the Daggerfall world being large was just smoke and mirrors.

Who are these people?  I will cut them.

Ditto. Just wandering around and finding random stuff was about 80% of the fun in Oblivion.

Thinly veiled racism? :awesome_for_real:


The option of "Exterminate their kind... Or, go to the Lycaeum and decode this book.  Totally up to you." presented right at the start of the game is still one of the best damn examples of developers playing with loaded dice ever.


So, pretty much you want a roguelike not made by a total goddamn neckbeard who thinks that ASCII tunnels is the cat's ass.

oh man, Ultima XII + Serpents Isle is still unmatched in feeling like an actual world.

I played so much that eventually I could just read their script/langauge.

Once I forged the demon fire blade of ultimate badassness I spent weeks killing every single inhabitant of that glorious world personally. From the nudists in the cave near the winery/monastery to the filthy gamblers on Buc's Den, I can still remember them individually.

Some of the more moral in my group protested and eventually had to die. The group dwindled down to the sagely Iolo & the orphan bastard and ever faithful Spark. Only Spark would finish this journey into madness with me as Iolo had a line he would not cross: Lord British.

The enemies that were too powerful to be bested in combat I simply asked the demon to kill w/ his purging fire. I remember being as excited as the demon when I finally asked him to destroy Mr. Garriot himself.

Damn good game. A graphics mod would be awesome... maybe some UI enhancements....

Many fine examples of old school PC RPGs have already been mentioned. But there are also a few good mid 90's console gems, and so I will contribute with an enjoyable little game that is a little more action oriented and dark then most: Blood Omen:  Legacy of Kain.

Great atmosphere if you are into vampires before they became sparkle sparkle and whiny, and a storyline that was interesting enough to keep me hooked. Lots of secrets made it fun enough to explore the world, allthrough it was not big compared to many PC RPGs of that age. I also remember the music and voice acting to be top notch for that time. Simple but entertaining game.

Jonelithe Irenicus is my favorite villan of all time as well.  There was so much to hate with him and so much to understand.  I remember him hounding me in my first play through he is the standard to which I compare villans now.   Since then, no gaming villan has even come close and this was my biggest complaint about DA:Origins and DA2.  Half the time in both games I couldn't figure out who it was I was up against and that diminished from the gameplay IMHO.

I would love to see a return to a main villan RPG storyline again.

Until you realize half of the dungeon chest and barrels are filled with potatoes and daggers worth 2-3 gold. Guarded by rats simply because you're level 2.

Thats a level scaling issue, not a size of the game world issue.  I definitely think bigger more open game worlds are important.  Hell, I'll likely buy Skyrim just for that reason, even though I'm going to have major problems with it, just because there are so few new games coming out like that.

'
YESSSS. Most in that series were great.

Even the weakest game in the series, Blood Omen 2, was still decent.

Don't roguelikes focus on dungeons almost exclusively?  Dungeons are ok but you need the rest of the world too.   Otherwise though yea.   Roguelike with mostly crappy 3d graphics sounds perfectly fine.

I don't even feel like playing it. Soulreaver action sequence was shit..and it's not even RPG, but the whole storyline was worth watching a youtube playthrough of it.
Which never got resolved at all in the nonexistent sequels. :(

Legacy of Kain was one of the first games I ever played where everything was voice-acted, and I do mean everything right down to inventory item descriptions. There was pretty much no text in the game at all. The voice acting and dialogue were pretty good, too, unlike the ridiculous shit in other games of the same era like the first Resident Evil.

The game was kind of a "thing" among my little circle of friends at the time, and I remember everyone being utterly turned off at this too-cool-for-school Raziel guy when the sequel came out, and pissed that Kain was now the antagonist. None of us really liked it and we quit following the series.

It's almost embarassing how a "old school" style game like Eschalon (albeit done in 2007) has tons more atmosphere from the get-go (music, colour palette, environment detail) than the majority of the proper "modern" CRPGs nowadays. Major kudos to Basilisk Games (just in case you haven't see a related post on the Steam summer sale topic, I remind you that both Eschalon Book I and its sequel are sold for less than 5 dollars each).

http://basiliskgames.com/

Ahhhh. That's not how it turned out to be, go read or watch some playthroughs, man. I was impressed with how they pulled it off, the gameplay is shit, no doubt but the story telling was epic.

IIRC, Soul Reaver 2 twist was brilliant near the end. But the cliffhanger never got resolved...

Eh, whatever was going on, it didn't feel like it had anything to do with the first game. We just wanted to be Kain and blow people's skin off.

Much more recent, but I have to say Baten Kaitos for the gamecube is easily one of the best JRPGs I've played, and knocks the socks off everything this generation. Discovered it by accident, and played it through on my Wii, but it really shows how far modern JRPGs have fallen. It has a superb battle system, a storyline that starts off very stereotypical and then goes completely haywire in a good way about half way through, and a huge amount of detail and effort gone into the world and environment. It's silly thatagame 7 years old managers to pull off 'city living in a giant tree' better than Tales of Vesperia.

(I'm a huge sucker for well done art and design above polygon count and 3D)

I think the last one was Defiance, where you jumped back and forth between Kain and Raziel.  .  The series overall was one of my favorites, despite some hiccups with gameplay, and I'd have liked to see what Kain would have been up to next. 

Flinky forgot to mention one of my favourite Roguelike's  Ragnarok

The basic premise is you're a norse warrior helping Odin and his brethren prepare for Ragnarok the end of the world when they fight the evil that threatens the world.

The basic worlds are the same but obviously spawns/items/previous adventurers are placed randomly and hence the fun begins.

(http://www.download-central.ws/DOS/Games/R/Ragnarok/screenshot.png)

I'll let Flinky detail it more

That looks like someone took a screen shot of Centipede and shopped in a UI.

Roguelikes with graphics almost invariably look worse than if they'd just used ASCII.

Whereas I can't play pure ASCII games for longer than about an hour before getting severe eye strain and slightly nauseous.

This is oddly giving me an urge to play Dwarf Fortress. 

My favorite RPG experience wasnt a single-player one.  Twas back during the DX2 hey-days just before Aol1.0 and the web.  I'd stumbled onto a local BBS running "Realms" (basically a d&d clone online)  No graphics, no ascii, and no maps unless you earned one.  It was pretty much Zork (online) but D&D based.  I wanna say I was 11 yrs old at the time and I distinctly remember:

/Go North
-There's a bigass green dragon and he doesnt like you
/Go South
-A bigass greed dragon enters the room
/GO SOUTH again bitch!
-A bigass greed dragon enters the room
/GO SOUTH INFINITY!
-A bigass greed dragon enters the room
-There's a +1 bastard sword on the ground
/pickup sword
-Green Dragon breaths fire on you for 103985762891.013 dmg
-you have died.
-Ghyslain enters room
-Ghyslain says "dumbass newguy"  (they didnt have 'newb' back then)
-Ghyslain picks up +1 bastard sword

/exit game

Fired up of Pool of Radiance on a C64 emulator and found it nigh-unplayable. Along with Ultima 4 this is one of the classics where the dirty little secret is that the NES port was better. Playing that now.

Why not the PC version?

The differences between the PC and C64 versions are minimal and mostly come down to whether you prefer slightly nicer graphics and sound over a lack of emulated disk swapping, and which version you can find cracked so that you don't have to fuck around looking up the key to that ridiculous translation wheel.

The NES version is inferior in some ways, but superior on the whole. Some race/class selections are removed for whatever reason, you can't customize character icons, and the party only goes up to five members. You also can't modify stats and just have to roll until you get a set you like. The writing is simpler but that's excused by a wonderful lack of "The old man tells his story, see journal entry #22 in the manual to read it!" bullshit.

Meanwhile the NES gets things the other versions lacked, like visual indication of exactly what targets your AOE spells will cover and which targets are incapacitated. There are also a bunch of simplifications that were probably necessitated by the console port, but which in practice make the game a lot more playable. Monsters no longer drop their basic equipment as loot, so you're not rooting through three pages of worthless kobold short swords looking for something good. If an item turns up, it's worth taking. The different types of coins are eliminated, no more silver and copper ane electrum and shit. There's only gold, and while it still has weight, it's automatically pooled for large purchases and distributed among the party otherwise. This eliminates all the clumsy commands for throwing everyone's money on the ground in a big pile to buy things and then splitting it up again.

Most significantly they nerfed the set-piece battles by anywhere from a little to a lot, and nerfed the fucking shit out of the random encounters. The other versions think nothing of throwing 15-20 grunts with archers in the back at a level 1 party, then doing it again when you're ambushed while trying to rest afterward, then doing it yet again when you take another three or four steps. Even if you win all of these, you just plain spend more time fighting identical encounters against two-dozen goblins than anything else, and they're not even good for grinding since XP is based on loot and not kills.

Meanwhile the NES set-piece battles are beatable by a not-totally-optimal group of 5, and the random encounters are just a handful of monsters that might slow you down with the occasional lucky hit but aren't a serious threat. Which is how it ought to be.

Sounds like the first RPG that was dumbed down for consoles!  :awesome_for_real:

I just meant because you could waltz through all of the Forgotten Realms Gold Box games in one go (Pool of Radiance, Hillsfar if you feel like a masochist, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades and Pools of Darkness). Every time I did that marathon it was extremely satisfying kicking Gothmenes butt with that high level party whose humble beginnings were picking on Kobolds for the Phlan Town clerk.

I just don't have any stomach for fighting the exact same "random" battle three-dozen times anymore. It's the same thing that chased me away last time I tried to pay Final Fantasy 6 a nostalgia visit. I'm just fucking around in the NES version and using quicksave states to skip random encounters entirely. You can't really do that in the Commodore version since (see journal entry #69).

1991-- Final Fantasy on the NES

1988 (?)--Ultima on the NES Exodus

1995--Curse of the Azure Bonds on PC

Those were fun times.

Oh there was a game on the Sega Genesis, Phantasy Star III that was great till I got to the end and couldn't beat the end boss...

The old Phantasy Star games were weird.  I don't wanna say great, because they had a lot of annoying elements to them, but I also don't wanna say bad, because they did a lot of really interesting stuff and had some really interesting settings and elements.  PS4 especially was awesome, you might wanna check it out if you liked 3 (generally seen to be the "bad one" of the series, like Zelda 2 or Final Fantasy Mystic Quest).

I remember being pissed that I grabbed the GBA Phantasy Star collection and it had the whole series EXCEPT for 4.  What the hell, that's like selling a Star Wars bundle that includes all the movies except Empire.

Just picked up Eschalon Book 1/2.  Been waiting for a price drop.  $30 apiece was ridiculous.

I bought these on the steam sale and have been playing through the first one.  It is really old school, sometimes in good ways and sometimes in bad.  The dungeon design is great; you can always tell where you're going but you don't feel like you're walking in a straight line. The interface is relatively modernized compared to the games that inspired them, although Book 1, at least, doesn't have keyboard movement, and the inventory really needs an autosort button -- I thought I was running out of room until I realized that some things (potions) autostack and other things (reagents) need to be dragged on top of each other one by one.  I'm playing a fighter type, and the combat is very simple but has some tactical depth -- for example, you can position yourself in shadow and your enemies in the light to get a hit % advantage.  Kiting enemies away from their camps one at a time works really well.  Consumables are very powerful and a pain in the ass to craft, which I guess is in the nature of these kinds of games.

On the other hand, playing this reminds me of why not being able to save anytime and anywhere in some modern games is a good thing.  Constant saving makes you do things which are no fun at all because they work so well.  Eschalon uses a DnD style rest mechanic, and the fights are designed so that you have to rest repeatedly in dangerous locations to heal.  Since you can rest as many times as you want to there are random encounters that knock you out of your rest, the optimal strategy is to save and reload constantly.  But it's even worse -- instead of letting you wake instantly either fully healed or in combat, like in the infinity engine games, you watch your health slowly increase, with the possibility that you'll be attacked at any moment.  The optimal strategy is to wake from rest every 10 hp or so, quicksave, then rest some more, save, and so on.  You can also save and reload in the middle of combat, although I haven't really had to so far.  I hate feeling like the game is forcing me to do save and reload in order to survive.

Holy shit this almost guarantees I'll never play the game.

I still think Wild Arms was the bomb.  Considering I bought the PS1 for FF7 and instead played the hell out WA.

Nah, Chrono Trigger on Snes Emulator still beats them all.

Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 were phenomenal.  Great stories and you could rob just about every house in Baldur's Gate. 
Icewind Dale for the atmosphere and lots and lots of combat.
Planescape Torment for the fresh setting and an ending that upset me and made me think about free will and destiny.

After that I'm a bit hazy, guess DA and ME games and of course Red Dead: Redemption for the new milieu and non-hackneyed story.  First entering Mexico and the twist ending will always be with me.

Last but not least, Fallout: New Vegas for an incredible sandbox and great stories that blew Fallout 3 out of the water.

Ok the're not all old, but I had to give shout outs to RDR and FNV.

I have just one thing to say about Ragnarok;

HIGH SCORES:
Gromir the Level 1 Warrior - Killed by a bear in the Village on Turn 1

I really tried to give the 'real' version of Pool of Radiance a go, but I'm just not having it. After playing the NES version where the targeting cursor automatically changes when it's out of range or blocked by line of sight, having to target something, notice the lack of an attack option, select NO off a menu with only one entry, then target something closer and repeat until I figure out how far I can throw a dart or whatever just isn't acceptable at all.

I seriously have a D&D game itch for some reason, but PoR isn't holding up and I'm beyond played out on Baldur's Gate. I think it's time to give the Icewind Dale series a shot. I've never played them before. I know they're the more hack-and-slash and less story-driven cousins of the BG series, but that's about it.

What else is there? What's the scoop on Temple of Elemental Evil? I know Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is supposed to be a total shitheap that makes your computer explode.

Ruins of Myth Drannor is awful for more reasons than just the format-your-hard-drive-if-you-uninstall it thing, it also doesn't let you control your level up choices.  :uhrr:

TOEE is a pretty good simulation of 3e rules but a pretty bad game from a 'fun' standpoint, and it has some really stupid interface issues as well.

IWD is more up your alley, I would say. IWD2 has more story in it than IWD1, but neither are anywhere near BG levels of that stuff. (Note also that IWD is 3e instead of 2e as the basic underlying rules but it still more or less plays like the other Infinity Engine games.)

I had trouble running IWD1/2 in widescreen mod mode without crippling lag, so if you can solve that let me know how you did it.

EDIT: Should note that they have some of the best RPG soundtrack music ever, too.

The first IWD is great for pure combat driven AD&D game.  IWD2 is a bit of a mess and it just ends.  Seriously, the last boss happens and left thinking "that's it?"  Still, it's more of the same but at higher character levels.

In IWD, dual-classing a lvl 1 fighter into wizard makes for some broken uses of Tenser's Transformation, just FYI.  :grin:

I remember it being good for other reasons, but that's the one that jumps out at me.

TOEE is very faithful to the module so if you like old school with 3e then you'll look past the sluggishness.  Also fun to tweak the characters though archery seems weak.

Starting with IWD2 since the stories are unconnected and 2 goes up to higher levels. Installing now. I already miss BG2 class kits. I liked having an assassin instead of a thief, a blackguard (from a mod) instead of a fighter, etcetera. The IWD series doesn't have anywhere near the mods the BG series does.

On the bright side, looking at gear lists online shows me that this game doesn't suffer from the old "There are 400 types of weapons but you'll only ever use long swords!" problem that has plagued almost every other D&D game I've ever played. Especially fucking Pool of Radiance, where there were all these crazy obscure French polearms and shit, but the best long sword was +5 and nothing else went above +1.

IIRC, IWD1/2 loot is also randomized, so you won't be able to count on finding X weapon in a given playthrough.

Portrait art in IWD2 is better than the BG series. I mean, like, lots better. Wow. I won't even have to download any custom art I don't think.

I recall that being the case and seeing someone use one for years as an avatar but I can't remember them now.   I do remember a few of the better ones being used in NWN, though.

Fake Ed: Found some/ all of them. The IWD2 pics are here: http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/Image.php?id=109718

Though I preferred some of the original IWD ones, you can see here.
http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/Image.php?id=109717

(Numbers going Top to bottom left to right) Row,Picture
R1,P4; R1,P8; R2,P3; R2,P8; R5,P1; R6,P8 was my party, if I remember right.

If we're playing that game, my IWD party was:

R1, P4 & 7
R3, P3
R5, P5, 6, 7

Yes, I use full parties. I also had playthroughs with other members, but that was my first.

DARK SUN is still one of my fav. It didn't age well with awkward control scheme, but the story felt epic with multiple variable to make final battles easier.

It's abandonware too, so there's no excuse not to get it if you like it.

I wish any RPG dev take note of this less used setting and make a game out of this sometime.

OH SNAP, Dark Sun....I still have a disk of that thing! We're talking Shattered Lands, right? I managed to beat it...once, with only my dwarf rogue still standing at the end, and I think that was a bug.

Game was pretty epic. It would be interesting to go back to it, as I'm much better at min-maxing than I was 15 years ago.  :grin:

All I did in the time I had for this game today is mess around making parties and learning this new-fangled Third Edition shit. (Hey I'm only ever exposed to this stuff in computer games.) I dunno whether to remake my old BG party or do something different. Is there a lot of loot to steal in towns in this? Is it worthwhile to have my standard two rogues, one specced to ninja-stab people, and the other specced to pickpocket and burglarize shit?

I'm inclined to give my cleric a level of fighter so that he's not derping around on the front lines with a mace for the entire game. I can start him as a cleric, add a fighter level, and get all those weapon proficiencies, right? (Cleric with a sword, WTFFFFF!) I always avoided dual-classing in the old games where XP was divided between the two forever, because spell progression > all for casters and HP > all for fighters.

You'll still be hurting your spell progression by multiclassing, but eh. On the rogue, you probably just need the one this time, a high enough int and you'll have tons of skill points anyway.

when i was a 13, i just ran around with 4 half-giant gladiators in Darksun.

Seems uncomplicated, but I still didn't finish the game due to buggy stuff in the game.. but it was fun.

Although I like the IWD games, making your party is definitely more fun than anything else you get to do.  There is very little in the way of civilization, so I wouldn't worry too much about having a rogue except for traps (you also don't need a guy with charisma.) 

I started gaming, like a lot of you here, back in days of the VC20.  That was my first computer and I had to basically program my own RPG's.  8k memory with a cassette tape drive.  Good times.  Taught myself Basic and spent hours and hours making games.  The best one I did was based on the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, which was new!

After that, it was tough due to my educator father giving me Apple computers instead of PC's.  Back then, it was hell finding anything decent to play for that platform.  Once I was out of college and my own man, I started buying PC's.

I can remember pretty much everything mentioned already.  The only one I didn't see and still sticks out in my mind are the Krondor series games.  It is funny because I wasn't reading the books at the time, but thought it was great.  I only recently (maybe 2 years ago,) read the whole series well past the books used for the game and it was a great nostalgic ride.

Yeah but only by one level, right? So I'm no worse off than a caster that picked one of those fancy races with a 1 level penalty, and still better off than a drow caster with a 2 level penalty.


So two fighters, a cleric, a thief, a mage, and then either a third fighter or a second cleric. Two thieves wasn't really orthodox in BG either (there were barely any single-class thieves in the game) but there was so much shit to steal that with my custom party I ended up loving it. By the beginning of BG2 my stealy-specced thief could basically just walk up to shops full of sweet magic items and go "Give me everything!"

There was a project to port BG/BG2 into the IWD2 3E engine, but I guess it never went anywhere. Too bad.

I remember the Bard being a good choice for the last slot. Bard Songs were nice buffs (one gave HP regeneration along with AC bonus and damage resistance if I remember correctly), plus both Healing and Damage Spells without having to decide beforehand (they work like Sorcerers).

I recommend Descent to Undermountain.
Hey, now I know where Kael grabbed most of his leader portraits from!  :drill:

I'd be a lot happier with this party creation if I didn't know that half the stuff that sounds good is just refuse from the pen-and-paper game that doesn't have the decency to let me know it'll never matter here. Three different skills for interacting with NPCs and the first thing I hear from other people is "hack and slash game, fuck charisma lol".

Well, we weren't joking around when we said it was combat centric.  That's pretty much all you do. 

Sorry, you won't be able to write a book with this one.

The most important thing to remember when dealing with NPCs in Icewind is; if you want rewards, never initiate dialogue with a Monk or a Paladin. Paladins will refuse rewards on princiiple and Monks refuse to take material wealth of any kind.

You will get the chance to use the speech options, but generally not enough to worry about. If you want everything anyway, I'd recommmend having a Sorc handy. All of the upsides of high Char scores and none of the "Keep your baubles, good citizen!" downsides.

Also, Fireballs. WHENEVER YOU WANT.

I have a feeling I might not make it past character creation. Does anyone else remember that comic Samprimary did about D&D Online where you're looking at the creation screen and all the options are labeled WRONG, WRONG, FUCK YOU, WRONG?

Okay, example.

Does a dual-wielder need Two-Weapon Fighting and Ambidexterity, or only the latter? Ambidexterity says it eliminates the -4 penalty to an off-hand weapon. Two-Weapon Fighting says it reduces the penalty by 2, but then it says "Special: Ambidexterity reduces the penalty by 4" right underneath that. So is that TWF telling me "Don't take me if you can get Ambidexterity!" or do I want TWF and Ambidexterity both? One of the stupid pre-made characters has both, but I don't know if that means you need them, or if that's just more RP flavor bullshit like their barbarian having 4 ranks of Wilderness Lore that will never matter.

Fighter, fighter, mage, cleric, thief, bard.  I think that's what I beat it with.  I don't remember IWD2 being very hard. 

IWD1 was a lot harder mostly due to the "lol, low levels" D&D phenomenon and a large section with trolls.  Could only kill them with fire after incapacitating them.  Pain in the ass.

If I remember the system right, you had to have Ambi and 2WF to get the -4.  Ambi on its own only reduced the penalty by -2, or simply wasn't available without 2wf. (which would mean the tooltip on ambi is wrong.)  It's been a long time though, so I can't remember it fully.

Wilderness Lore mattered for locating animal encounters, I think.  Maybe detecting 'traps' in the wild... but yeah it was pretty useless.

I'd stick a druid in the party vs another melee or cleric, but I always liked them for their over-all package.  Decent CC spells, backup healing and shapeshifting for when you need more front line fighting.

If I remember how 3e worked, dual wielding without either feat gives you two attacks, one at -4 and one at -8.  Adding ambidexterity makes it -4/-4.  Adding two weapon fighting would make it -2 and -6.  So stacking them both gives you a final result of -2/-2.  

Thanks for the clarification. I'll just take both.

Hmm. I've never messed with druids. I'll have to look into them.

You need both. It is something like -4/-8 with neither feat, -4/-4 with ambidexterity, -2/-2 with both TWF and ambidexterity. Rangers don't need to take it though, they get it as a bonus. (Possibly not at first level, I can't remember exactly which rules variation IWD2 uses.)

There's more talking in IWD2 than there was in IWD1 so it doesn't hurt to have a party face character at all. I think a lot of the people making recommendations about skipping all that stuff are thinking more of IWD1.

Yep, that sounds correct. As for druids and bards and such- they always seem to be much more fun to roleplay in a PnP setting than useful in a cRPG setting. Rangers too to a lesser extent- so many out of combat abilities...you are better off making another cleric and another fighter or paladin.

I did play both and I can't say that I remember which is which, except for the 2e vs. 3e ruleset, so I probably was thinking of IWD1.  From a min/max perspective I seem to remember that 2 handed weapons are really much much better than two weapon-fighting in IWD2 -- does that seem right?

This thread inspired me to fire up ToEE again. Everyone is still 2nd level and I have to figure out a way to kill a Hill Giant and his pet brown bear (which has 3 attacks. something like 1d12 1d12 3d6 or something horrible). If anyone other than my front line fighters gets hit, they are dead. Not down, dead. Had my 24 HP dwarven fighter catch all 3 from the bear in one round and went from full health to DEAD. I wonder if I am here too early?  :why_so_serious:

There's no big hurry to go mess around in Emridy Meadows, the Moathouse should really be where you mess around first.

Yup. I need to jump back in and finish that game at some point - I'm pretty close to the end...but geez can that game be punitive.

Also, in the IWD games, I normally went Fighter, Cleric, Fighter/Mage, Thief, Paladin, and Bard for face character, as I do in most games when presented with full party generation options. I think in IWD2 I swapped that paladin for a monk.

I remember something about the devs having some problems getting dual wield in the engine at the time.  It was kind of "hacked in".  You couldn't even see the other weapon on the character. 

This makes me want to fire it up again just a little.  I didn't even like the game compared to IWD1, but I'm somewhat of a sucker for the Infinity engine games.

Yep, though I still can't find where he grabbed some of the Evil Elf avatars. Some of those are my favorites.

So yeah, this is definitely true thus far. The music walking around the first village made me think of this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyqc1Hr4g3c).

Edit: So there was this gnome guy with an airship, and a spell to repair the airship, and the spell required a component that he couldn't remember, but it was listed in a book which he had left in his lab... but the ship was already repaired and he DIDN'T need me to find his book. Then I met another band of adventurers in a bar, and they had the usual cocky dickhead attitude, yet there WASN'T a giant adventurer barfight where I could kill them and take their loot. I DON'T KNOW THIS WORLD!

Bahaha. I love the RPG parody worked into the dialogue in places.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/totalboar.png)

I was getting ready to recommend Megatraveller (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/660/MegaTraveller+1+-+The+Zhodani+Conspiracy.html) based on the old sci fi pen and paper game; skill based, full of neck beardy goodness, rules on everything from weapons, to armor to starship creation, planetary systems, jump travel etc, plus a character creation system that is random to the point where you can actually die when attempting to get experience in a military service, or get injured and then die on the operating table.  You even start losing stats from aging if you stay in service too long.  It's got a 150 page plus manual chock full of detail and history and sets you up as ex military people working for the security arm of a megacorp looking to track down a division chief traitor who is supplying illegal arms to dissidents on many worlds, so they will cause unreset and tie up imperial troops while the enemies of the empire launch a surprise assault and start the 5th frontier war...
All that plus a large number of worlds, trading 30+ types of cargo, varied law level and tech level worls where you may have to sneak weapons through starport security.  Sounds good, sign me up.

So, I took an hour to successfully navigate a half dozen characters through creation, covering my starship roles and weapons options, and fire up the game to promptly figure out why i never played it back in the day...the combat.  Instead of being turn based and deep, they made it real time where you have to pause and give simple commands to get your guys to target or move, and the game throws you into a fight as the very first thing that happens.  3 of my characters died before we ever did anything.  Ugh, don't think I'll keep playing this one.  Maybe I'll try the second game to see if it's improved at all.

Megatraveller character creation was wicked fun. I think I never went more than 15 minutes beyond that, though.

This is exactly what I remember about Megatraveller.

What? You need your hand held? Man up!  :grin:








Sorry, reading to many "old games were better threads".

ToEE is a good adaption of turn based 3.5 rules. The fan patch from the cirlce of eight is at the very least required (and works with the GoG version just fine) if not the mod-pack in order to run a relatively bug free game.

The game has a decent amount of talking and some quests cannot be finished certain ways unless you have the right conversation skills. There are entire plot lines for evil/neutral parties but they're hard to get to work sometimes. In addition if you're good this means the last part of the game can be kinda dull.

The game suffers from all the same problems that 3.5 PnP combat suffers from with the exception that since they tend to throw so many combat encounters at you, buffed fighters tend to do pretty well (Either the special sword, or polearms/combat reflexes/enlarge person). Mid to late game crafting becomes overly powerful. Archery is weak, especially in the early game until the late game where it becomes kinda useful for taking out enemy wizards.

There are some traps but not many(and they can all be bypassed), so rogues aren't necessary. Wizards/Clerics tend to rule the roost due to combat buffs and offensive spells/control spells being good against the horde of enemies you're likely to face.

The game pulls a few "dick moves" on you, like the afore-mentioned hill giant (you have to know its there pretty much, and sight ranges mean that you can't get any engagement advantages), and an ogre with class levels in the first dungeon.

But it is overall not a bad game, especially with the fan patch.

I think you only have a party of 5 in this one, right?

Web. Entangle will ensure victory. Of course you still have to buy everyone crossbows and bolts. There's just no way to melee that thing in early game except cheesing with bless and immobilize.

Got to 3rd level and tried again (several times). Finally got him with a couple of Summon Monster IIs to do extra damage while my cleric kept the front line guys up with Cure Moderate and Cure Light. Tough fight, but damn that dude was rich! No magic, but a bunch of gems, 497g and 20p.

I fired up TOEE myself a couple months ago, I forgot how godawful stupid the henchmen looting was.

Yeah I am leaving all the henchmen out. More loot and XP for me. Also, more reloads, but I can live with that. Just had it crash and hang on me for the first time. Hope it doesn't continue.

I found the game to be mostly stable, if not somewhat buggy in the UI.

The UI  is a travesty. There are some hidden tricks and shortcuts, but it is laborious to use for the most part, and really interferes with the game. Up to 4th level now, and just got into the Temple itself for the first time. It was really a good combo of a short cinematic, a couple of pages of flavor text (which is one of the things I like most about the adaptation- the descriptions of each new area really feel like something a DM would read to the players), and some good graphics/level design.

All in all, really glad that Co8 'finished' it, and glad this thread reminded me to go back to it.

Despite its flaws, I love ToEE.  Co8 also did a "Keep on the Borderlands" mod, but I have no info on it.  If anyone has an opinion on that shit let me know. 

/archery is weak
//fireballs vs. goblins are hella fun

Been playing X-com terror from the deep ( The best one ), Does it count for this thread?

I had forgotten how hard it is at the beginning to keep your people alive, my current game is like a part time MacDonalds hiring scheme.

I checked out Keep on the Borderlands.  I haven't gotten all that far in to it yet, but if the tutorial is anything to go by, it's not going to be worth the effort.  In the tutorial, you're introduced to an npc that joins your party.  The text indicates that it is Ariel, a wizard.  Except it's not Ariel, it's some druid.  Who can't use the wand of fireballs they give you to blast a group of zombies with.  And since you can't rest in the tutorial, she doesn't have any spells, making her pretty useless. 

The graphics could use some work, as well.

I'm still bitter that the armor in Ultima:Exodus had no effect other than wasting the time I spent acquiring it.

Man I had forgotten exactly how overpowered mages are in endgame Throne of Bhaal. All that talk in FAQs and stuff about party composition and gear acquisition, and the only real question is "Can the other five guys clean up whatever is left after the mage throws the kitchen sink at everything?"

Improved Alacrity, Time Stop, Dragon's Breath, Horrid Wilting, Horrid Wilting, Horrid Wilting, then everything else I have memorized for good measure. Time Stop ends, rest of party mops up a few staggering survivors. Insane.

Hah, I remember that. I used to try and avoid using wizards too much because Grrrr *finger twiddlers* but every now and again I'd just have them unleash hell on a room. Of course then I'd try and kill one of the dragons or similar and of course it turned into a magic game of, "What the fuck should I be trying to dispell or pierce or whatever now because it just insta-killed my fighter with the anti-magic sword?"