Hargenx
Member
I agree, but is sad when you look back and remember that all this give us DA2, what the hell?!
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Pillars of Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment (Kickstarter) [Up: Teaser]
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I agree, but is sad when you look back and remember that all this give us DA2, what the hell?!
It was challenging, it was unique and I loved every bit of it. The second one is garbage, but Origins rocks from start to ending.
Shame that BioWare won't make anything like it anytime soon.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I think they said it explicitly but I really really hope Eternity does some fun stuff with this.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
That's stretching the definition way to far to suit a purpose. It's simply not an RPG by any definition. I'm not long for a "well, technically it's a MMORPGFPSQTEWWF" type discussion, but DOTA is simply not an RPG - it's a competitive multiplayer game, something that the type of CRPG we're even discussing here have never been.
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
im 100% confident that there will be skill/magic use outside of combat. Is there even an Obsidian game released that doesnt?
Nope.jpg
It's a shitty ass LotR clone with a boring story and setting and a crappy Battle System with shitons of trash mobs.
MotB is the best old-school isometric RPG of the last years, and it isn't up to debate.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
Someone in the comments of the latest update gave us our OT, I think.
Project Eternity |OT| I'm rolling a Crossbow Diplomat
Project Eternity |OT| I'm rolling a Crossbow Diplomat
Last Hearth
Member
The Fade was awesome. People who whine about the Fade section in DAO have bad taste.
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
Its very hard for me not to go Diplo-sniper when i replay Fallout 1/2.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
"God, the Deep Roads, the section of the game set in a neverending labyrinth that spans the entire world, was too long. Ick."
...
It's interesting that people only mention MotB when it comes to praising NWN2. Maybe people were too put off by the blandness of the vanilla game to bother with the expansion?
If the previous games by Obsidian are anything to go by...
I haven't played it but Dungeon Siege 3?
Vulcano's assistant
Banned
This is what I'm currently playing on NWN2
Vulcano's assistant
Banned
The first 30 hours of NNW2 felt like a chore, but it suddenly became great in the last hour of the first act. I have not gotten MotB yet to .
edit: damn it, I was sure someone would post fast enough.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
For the first ten years of my RPG life, I was the guy that always tried talking first.
But if talking failed, everyone in the room had to just fucking die.
The only thing worse than the Fade were the DERp roads. And only because they made a mod that let you skip the Fade.
God, DAO was such a disappointment. BG2 heir my ass.
Me too
I also sort of feel like one of the flaws with NWN (both games), is that it's stuck in that limbo between 2D pre-rendered graphics that aren't beholden to polygon and texture resolution limitations, and modern 3D that looks great scaled down to isometric.
My main problem with DAO was the class system. It was a mess with embarrassingly low build variety. Only the mage class had some variety. The cheesy writing (plot, romances etc) was always expected from BioWare.
One thing that always amused me about the Dragon Age class system was clerics. They are completely powerless, and the real "clerics" as we think of them are actually spirit healer mages.
This is probably out of nowhere, but I just remembered a Chris Avellone interview I read a year or so ago that I found very interesting at the time. He talks about some very interesting ideas that I hope Obsidian uses now. Like 'Honeycomb" mission design and dialog without speech checks.
Lets not forget that it seemed like it was balanced by a blind monkey, or the fact that once you hit about lvl 7 or so you can pretty much go through the same motions of abilities over and over and walk through the game.
Almost nothing in the game required you to break out of your routine.
Last Hearth
Member
DAO didn't have a cleric class, it has Warrior, Rogue, and Mage.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
DA:O's greatest strength was the promise of what was to come out of future, less challenged development cycles. I mean, a return to classic RPGs? Sure, it was a 3 class game, with few skills and none that mattered outside of combat. Okay, so the enemy variety was nonexistant. But hell, that's minor shit they can fix in a sequel.
lol
lol
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
Do it now.
edit:
As someone who greatly enjoyed DA:O and was interested in the sequel before the reveal, its hard to argue this lol
I meant "clerics", as in members of the chantry. Priestesses etc. In the D&D world, they would get powers bestowed upon them similar to mage spells. Whereas in DA, they're stuck praying to the Maker with no special abilities to show for it.
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
I love DA:O too. It had issues, but it was a glass of water in a drought. Time will not be kind to it though.
May as well I guess. Hopefully after I beat Borderlands 2 I'll have enough time to get to it before Dishonored and Xcom come out. That's a tight 3 week window to do both of those things.
I started yesterday. Grit your teeth, learn to control a lvl 18 character right off the bat, and get through the boring first hour. Try not to mind the horrible UI. Endure.
(It's pretty great so far.)
It's a . . . Bioware game. Remember when Irenicus ripped out the player's soul and ran away cackling? And then you spent days upon days just adventuring helping out random folks in Chapter 2? The justification for doing so was flimsy and after an early milestone, you could ignore it completely. Sometimes, it's fine being a videogame.
Warrior. Play the game in easy mode, and let the casters do their stuff. Just remember to cast a powerful dispel magic thingy on mages and you should be fine, at first. (Or learn to master the mechanics, but that will take some getting used to)
WanderingWind
Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Yeah, I'm still looking for a game that doesn't do the same. Every CRPG does the same stuff (even Avernum, which at least gives you a reason to be doing sidequests) every JRPG does it (Meteor coming to wipe out humanity? You killed my main squeeze ? I will wreck upon you terrible, final vengeance! Right after I play snowboarding video games!)
It's how games tend to work.
Yeah, that's why New Vegas was refreshing. "Someone nearly killed you, now do your stuff. No pressure."
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Man I was so hyped for DA:O. It was supposed to be the herald of the return of old school rpgs. A counter to the push to more streamlined action oriented RPGs. Sadly EA/Bioware managed to destory all that with DA2.
Now like you said time is not going to be kind to DA:O not kind at all.
Yeah I started it yesterday as well. Damn though does that game have some major obstacles at the start like you mentioned before you can get into it. It doesn't help for me that I was also in the middle of another FNV play though(finally managed to get all the DLC recently).
I will force myself to at least put in a few hours this week. Hopefully I will get to a point where it clicks.
Edit.
Looks like a the $20 slots are taken now. That was faster then i was think when this first started.
That's the right attitude. I told myself "get that Dove character everyone raves about, and see if it clicks." It did!
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Yeah, I think it works better in games like Avernum where there isn't anything going on in the plot that carries an immediate sense of time-pressure. This limits the kinds of stories you can tell though
I'd love a reactive world where events progress even when you're off doing unrelated exploration or sidequests. It's great that you went into those catacombs and found a neat sword, but the bad guy killed the lord you were supposed to warn about a pending assassination plot.
Say you're chasing some character relevant to the main plot. As you're pursuing him, there's a burning building nearby, and you hear some kids inside or whatever. You could chase down the other character, get the info you needed and continue on your quest. Or, you can go help those kids, but then the other character escapes, and you end up in a dead end and have to find out other ways to investigate whatever the main plot is. Being a 'good guy' ends up being more hurtful to the player - you don't get any awesome loot, or anything. Instead you just made your quest a lot harder. That's what deciding to be 'good' should be, not being artificially rewarded by the game.
Say you're chasing some character relevant to the main plot. As you're pursuing him, there's a burning building nearby, and you hear some kids inside or whatever. You could chase down the other character, get the info you needed and continue on your quest. Or, you can go help those kids, but then the other character escapes, and you end up in a dead end and have to find out other ways to investigate whatever the main plot is. Being a 'good guy' ends up being more hurtful to the player - you don't get any awesome loot, or anything. Instead you just made your quest a lot harder. That's what deciding to be 'good' should be, not being artificially rewarded by the game.
Good interview. Amazing that it took 11 years for dialogue to evolve from Torment to Alpha Protocol.
And then Exile 3 happened. God I hated that. I would use the editor program to keep dialing back time to prevent world decay.
speech checks going away or at least hiding the [speech 76%] flag could make conversations a lot more interesting. Like said it highlights that option as a win button. Alpha Protocol had a great system of reading the other character. That type of script may not translate to the older model of RPG as well though because it usually had very long conversations with several short dialog choices while older games have the silent protagonist and the talking head speaking paragraphs at a time in fewer speech nodes.
Does anyone support random chances in spoken dialog or is that one done for good?
I like conversation as a puzzle, even if that requires quality writing/design to be good. While i know a lot of RPG fans like stats i'm not a big fan of them for conversations.
What i like least is random chance. That just means a lot of reloads. It works in PnP but i don't think it translates well into games.
Well if anyone can pull it off it would be Avellone and the others at Obsidian.
As for random chance I hope it is a thing of the past. Something that was just a hold over from pen and paper. Mostly because I would end up save scumming in those system till I got a successful roll.(I am weak like that) I prefer FNV system where either you had enough for you didn't. That would actually force me to find another path.
In a perfect world they would do what Avellone talked about in that interview and make it so you actually had to do some work to pull off the diplomatic route. As someone who plays usually as "sniper diplomat"(or equivalent) I think it would really help make the game better.