Let's have an old RPG nostalgia thread

[Sheepherder]

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

Thinly veiled racism?


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.

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.

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

[glennshin]

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....

[Korachia]

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.

[MournelitheCalix]

This is in spite of the fact that Jon Irenicus (BG2) is my favorite villain from any 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.

[rk47]

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

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.

[Malakili]

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

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

Blood Omen:  Legacy of Kain.

'
YESSSS. Most in that series were great.

[koro]

Blood Omen:  Legacy of Kain.

'
YESSSS. Most in that series were great.

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

[Amaron]

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

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.

[rk47]

Blood Omen:  Legacy of Kain.

'
YESSSS. Most in that series were great.

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

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. :(

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Lucas]

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/

[rk47]

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.

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...

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Maledict]

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)

[Mazakiel]

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.

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...

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. 

[Llyse]

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.



I'll let Flinky detail it more

[WayAbvPar]

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

[Ingmar]

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

[koro]

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

[Rasix]

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

[Ghambit]

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

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Tebonas]

Why not the PC version?

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Tebonas]

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

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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).

[Jimbo]

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...

[Kail]

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.

[dusematic]

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

[Job601]

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.

[dusematic]

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

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.

[brellium]

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

[rk47]

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

[Tannhauser]

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.