/v/ - Video Games

Inb4 codex-tier autism destroys the thread

What about synthing voices?

>>16705831

That's not as bad, but, at best, that's annoying. I'd prefer to read the dialogue.

I Played Divinity Original Sin 1, and at the mid of Divinity Original Sin 2, and both are really good Nice gameplay, Story good, and the technical details are nice. One of the few traditional RPGs todays, and being good too.

Are there any RPG similar to the DOS games that I should know, even if its obscure?

>>16705681

You are right in the voice acting 100%. Why bother putting voice to every NPC, when you could just write it? Its not more convenient, but its cheaper too. And Fast Travel for big open world games should be more limited, with maybe it being only possible later at the game/higher levels.

>>16705725

Who?

>>16705831

If it does the work, then I think it would be OK.

>>16705872

Lol.

>>16705681

Outward doesn't have any fast travel, and it sucks past the first few hours. You're in town A. You run to town B and clear everything in the way. You pick up a quest and run to dungeon C and clear everything on the way. You run back to town after clearing dungeon C but the world is now empty, so you just auto run for 5 minutes. Then you run back to town A for 20 minutes, again with auto run on because the world is empty and shit hasn't respawned. It made traveling extremely tedious. At least the music was amazing.

I mean, there's always good shit if you look for it hard enough. AAA RPGs died when fucking Oblivion came out over ten years ago. Off the top of my head, AtomRPG and Underrail are great, Kingdom Cum Deliverance was alright, if you can handle the Bethesda-tier technical side. The Divinity games are both great too. I unironically think that Dying Light 2 might be a good action RPG, if they don't cuck Avellone and his writing like Obsidian kept doing

How is the combat of Baldur's Gate II? I'm meaning to play it and look up some gameplay here and there, but I think it doesn't really help to grasp the idea of it that much. Just saw auto attacking and some spell casting here and there while switching weapons once in a while, but then again, I was actively seeking to avoid being spoiled too much so perhaps I just saw low level combat. Seems like character building is pretty good, but how about combat? Are melee classes fun to play, does the game have enough tactical deep to be engaging? I particularly interested in melee characters. Not much experience with the genre, but after playing midway though Pillars of Eternity, I felt melee characters were kind of boring, with Cleric and Magics being the most fun.

>>16706843

Age of Decadence is a work of art.

>>16707135

Start with either BG1 or PS:T. Going straight to BG2 if you've never played a D&D game is a bad, bad idea. AD&D combat (the ruleset that BG1/2, PST, and IWD1 run on) starts with the physical damage dealers, while casters are in a support role: cast a CC spell here, cast a buff spell there. As levels go up, casters start getting good damage spells like Fireball, more spells per day to play with, and their buff/CC spells start lasting longer. By the end of BG1 or the start of BG2, casters will usually have a few big spells memorized for harder fights, throw in a CC spell or two when needed, and have their defensive spells and party buff spells active - Clerics and Druids will be able to help melee without cutting off their feet. During that time, fighter types will keep getting more and more attacks per turn and accuracy (the infamous THAC0 system), but with the ever increasing amount and potency of buff spells, they'll turn into whirlwinds of death. As you get to the later levels, such as the last third of BG2 and its expansions, casters become the stars of the show and the melee are just there to receive buff and bring down the bad guys. As for how it plays out in practice: it's mostly about positioning, knowing what enemies in [current area] do and planning ahead, and having the right gear/spells for the job. Scout with your Thief and see what's ahead/disarm traps, prepare for the fight, open up with whatever spells you think you'll need, and send in the fighters. You'll eventually have epic caster battles where your casters will be trying to remove the enemy caster's protections so that your melee can actually hit, all the while having the enemy caster summon demons, mind control your melee, and spam AoE spells.

In short: melee will end up doing the bulk of your party's damage, but the casters will carry the load. And yes, melee are mostly fire and forget on normal difficulty. Give them an Improved Haste and tell them to go fetch.

>>16707325

> Going straight to BG2 if you've never played a D&D game is a bad, bad idea

How so? It is difficult to get in?

Thanks for the concise description. I'm not quite sure if I'll like it, I always found combat in these kind of games a bit lacking, but I want to give them an honest try.

>>16707360

You start off with a ton of abilities and systems you know nothing about. It'd be like waking up in a different world where you don't know the language, custom, culture, and common sense. And there's magic. But without the exposition dump that these type of stories usually have.

>>16706827

>it sucks past the first few hours

It's fine, just plan ahead and accept that stuff that is far away is actually far away and you need to account for it. Having to actually use travelling enhancing consumables and camp around otherwise useless places at night because you can't make to every destination on a single day is one of the charms of the game.

There's enough roaming and spawning entities on the map to make sure you can still encounter some enemies on long returning travels, but without having to constantly face infinite bandits.

>>16707372

Actually it entices me more to try it out, sounds fascinating and I don't mind reading through the manual and taking my sweet time learning as. The version I download came with a handy PDF manual. Started the game as Cavalier, Human, in Insane difficulty and so far, I'm just after I killed a demon that was protected by a barrier. Died 3 or 4 times for now, but by adapting and changing strategy I end up winning. The combat seems like it can be quite fun, but I still have some reserves about it, probably just needs more time. Also as >>16707377 said, I'm reading the manual each time I find something I do not understand and such. Starting in media res is actually quite interesting, but if I find it too confusing I don't mind playing BG first, but I heard the combat is not as good.

>>16707377

And work on your reading comprehension.

>>16707383

It's just a bit too empty when stuff hasn't respawned, and the travel is a bit too slow.

>>16707430

There's a really nice guide on gamefaqs on the AD&D ruleset. Also, don't play on Insane until you know what you're doing. It will force you rest constantly, which feels super cheesy.

>>16706843

In defense of Oblivion and Skyrim, they're fun with mods as long as you perceive them as open-world games for screwing around, rather than a serious RPG experience.

>>16707508

It's a shame that they're being sold, reviewed and praised as RPGs, though.

>>16705681

>What does /v/ think about the current state of RPGs?

I am about three years behind, and it seems that smaller studios are making the more classical RPGs but are making them for anime series or cutesy lewd. It is better than nothing, I suppose. The remasters of old rpg games might serve a hidden purpose by getting younger gamers used to quality.

I never give up on the idea of something better coming out that hasn't existed before, but I think it is a better idea to remaster old good games than to make new boring and playing it safe games.

>>16707699

[Current Year +4] remasters are going to be inevitably worse than originals, and are going to have stuff rewritten or outright removed because of "today's social climate" or some other excuse. I doubt you'd even have the Fisto quest in the game if New Vegas was remastered today. Much less chance of the pornstar options in Fallout 1/2 if they got remastered.

>>16707377

The manual doesn't help, there is a bunch of stuff a DnD player would immediately pickup on and immediately try that someone new to the game would not. I remember the biggest thing throwing you off is that the inventory doesn't pause time.

>>16708704

That doesn't sound like something that knowing D&D would fix.

I stopped playing rpgs years ago, I was so sick of keeping up with games that always turned out casualized. Has there been anything worth playing in the last decade that's not real time bullshit?

>>16708151

How many webms of this nignog are there? I keep seeing new ones and they're always hilarious.

>>16705872

this is how it should be. every single community should have a fraternity system where the little bitch boys should bow their seniors

only way they learn to respect them

>>16714241

In some ways, a big part of it is how WotC and the D&D CRPGs got involved. Everything started to spin around the cancerous d20 System. While 2E had been the birth of them, the WotC era birthed an entire generation of buildfags - people who came to view RPGs as "character building". Rather than role-play interactions, better to invest points in Diplomacy and let the dice do the talking. Self-motivated adventuring was phased out and replaced with questing-based railroads with linear solutions, and published content encouraged this. This idea would eventually blossom into the modern idea of "it's not a game, it's an experience" - a complete departure from the original.

What needs to be understood is that there's some truth to the premise "RPGs just mean games where you play a role". The progenitors to modern shooters - games like Wolfenstein - trace their lineage back to the old dungeon crawlers and finally back to the original RPG point. The idea that you're not just controlling a pawn, but a character, is a powerful one; notably, a lot of older games explicitly have nameless and faceless protagonists, so you can imagine yourself in that role. Unfortunately, this began to be phased out across the genre, until the idea of premade characters became more common outside of MMOs and a sparse few other games.

So what does all of this point to?

To generate a "true" digital role-playing game, you would need to go about one of the largest projects conceived. The game would need to give you a high degree of interactivity, especially with regards to whatever combat mechanisms were involved. Enemies would need hit-boxes able to register things in a realistic fashion, and varying degrees of "smart" AI to denote higher-level combatants. Interaction with NPCs would have to be handled closer to Arcanum - your limited stats might have a slight impact on dialogue trees, but for the most part, how you handled things would determine success of failure.

The game would be online, and open-world. The developers, much like in the old MMOs, would need to be actively involved - handing down bans on players in-person, running boss fights and NPC factions personally, and similar factors. Naturally, this would also mean allowing full PvP (none of that "no PvP on the role-playing server" faggotry) and persistent deaths. When your character died, unless you had a spell or something, no resurrection - make a new character, and if you're lucky, someone will recognize the old guy and you can go back to him. But it wouldn't be all bad, because there would be no levels - when you start your new character, you'd still retain your own skills, and could rapidly advance to unlock special moves or whatever else by virtue of cutting right past.

In the same fashion as no levels for players, no levels for monsters - a dragon on the 10th level of the dungeon would take as much damage from a hit with a lance from a newbie as a veteran, it's just a matter of who has the skill needed to get in close and avoid getting hit by attacks. If you want better loot, there's no level limits to keep you from going into dangerous places and getting it for yourself. Locked chests? Mini-games, based on real-world lock-picking, so knowing how to lock-pick as a person would actually make it easier as a player. Climbing things would mean finding handholds and knowing where to grab.

>>16714244

>>16714241

Hit Points would never advance. You might have a "stamina" pool of some kind, which would come up when climbing, running, swimming, fighting, or other factors; taking glancing hits, like blocking with a shield, would also lower it. Stamina would increase as your character was played and did certain things, and would be only numerical gulf between characters. Internally, in DD fashion, things like character height and weight would impact how much you can carry, how much stamina you have, and so forth.

Much of the emphasis would be coordinated on perhaps a single town and dungeon, but things would be spread far beyond, and the developers could put out new material periodically to add things to explore. Rather than "spawns" in areas, monsters would sometimes move around, or new monsters would eventually move to replace old ones.

Resources would have to matter. You'd need to keep up with food and water, let characters "rest" to recover health over time (so get an alt), and dungeons wouldn't have lighting - bring a torch, or magic, or something else. In a DD-like manner, you could combine things found in the world to make useful goods. If you wanted to learn "skills" like black-smithing, you could go ahead and do it, but you'd have to log out of a character and play someone else while they were working; and of course, have someone train you, and go through the training time.

There's more to it, obviously, but this is a fair enough description of what a "true" RPG would look like. And it will never happen, because the industry is too cowardly to take the same leap of faith that Gygax and Arneson did in creating something truly innovative.

>>16714244

>>16714245

It sounds like you want Rust but with fantasy, NPCs, and real-life dungeon masters. Ambitious is a radical understatement here, because people will spend a literal week burrowing through walls that take hours to destroy in order to fall on people and stab them in their closets. Do you know what people do when they get permanently banned from a game like that? They buy a new copy and do the same stupid shit from the beginning. This means that you'd not only need a high barrier of entry in order to make a new account, but that you'd actually have to run background checks on players before they're allowed to register. It would be a 'no fun zone' of such an incredible magnitude, that it would create a whole new boom of griefing videos, where people sign up for the game and intentionally do stupid or silly shit. The only roleplaying you'd ever be able to carry on would be so low quality that it'd be shitposting by /b/ standards.

Games like Anarchy Online removed dangerous things like dropping loot on PvP death, while games like Shadowbane have gone the way of the buffalo. There were half a dozen open PvP MMOs crowdfunded this decade, and there aren't 100 active players across any of them, let alone the ones that actually released. You implying that developers are 'too cowardly' to try this is disingenuous at best, because it'd only survive as a fun hobby project floated by a benevolent billionaire who was up-front about being willing to burn his entire fortune funding a game that nobody would play and that would never be remotely close to profitable.

To put it into a different perspective, a game of that magnitude might be technically possible, but the funding, good project management, manpower, and staff training would be so incredible, that we would have multiple space elevators on Earth before they had a product ready for the marketplace. That is, unless you're willing to cut a few corners. Make the game played on a 2d with sprites. Oh, but now you can't properly interact, which means you'll need skill values for things like lockpicking, and HP pools to represent how many attacks you'll deflect before struck by a serious wound, etc.

That being said, I don't disagree with your desire for a genuinely high quality digital roleplaying experience. I just don't think you've thought about any of the consequences of the majority of what you've said. We're probably going to have to sit out the concept of erecting a college for the sole purpose of training dungeon masters to a level beyond the majority of their peers so that they can staff offices, spending their days investigating and banning people who continually break into peoples houses so that they can pop out from under their beds with a knife like a fatal jack-in-the-box that screams nigger at you. When this kind of game finally appears, it will first be in the form of people in a high-quality VR experience who are effectively LARPing.

Are there any roguelikes with a limited field of vision? Eg, your view is limited to a cardinal or orthographic direction plus/minus 60°?

It wouldn't be too hard to implement but it'd be cumbersome to look around

>>16707430

>picked cavalier

lol, you really don't know shit do you.

cavaliers haven't been good since the dnd cartoon

>>16705681

Kingdom Come: Deliverance on hardcore mode removes fast traveling and the player marker on the map (among other things) forcing you to use the geography and compass to find your way, it's pretty comfy.

I'm also enjoying Outward like another anon already pointed out, they're also working on a big patch which improves body and face textures, adds a bunch of bosses, new endgame items, fixes some bugs and re-balances both items and skills. Currently it's a whole 2.7gb but only available as a beta on the beta branch.

>>16714533

Gearhead?

>>16714535

As I said in >>16707135, I really have no idea about DnD nor much experience with CRPGs, just picked what seemed interesting, but probably will end up restarting and going some kind of fighter/mage hybrid

>>16705681

Western rpgs have been dead since Witcher 3 and FNV, Kingdom come gets and honorable mention. And no I don't care about fucking Underrail or whatever the hell it's called. Divinity also isn't bad if that's your cup of tea.

Japanese rpgs are alive and well though. I mean, I know they're rpgs in the very broad sense of that word, but the point is I think that currently that's the best we've got.

>>16714520

>because people will spend a literal week burrowing through walls that take hours to destroy in order to fall on people and stab them in their closets

Sounds great.

>Games like Anarchy Online removed dangerous things like dropping loot on PvP death

Most of these online games are loot-dependent, so losing your stuff you spent 3 hours grinding for is awful. This wouldn't be - plate armor is plate armor, you can buy it within maybe 1 hour of playing if you're new. Put bank accounts and inheritances into the game, so you put money in. One character dies, alt has the account in their name now, and can put together a whole new set of gear in 5 minutes.

>here were half a dozen open PvP MMOs crowdfunded this decade, and there aren't 100 active players across any of them, let alone the ones that actually released.

You need intense marketing, or at least cult status, to spread things. You could sell a game like this the same way you'd sell a TES game. You could argue the online part puts it off, but keep in mind that ESO is the biggest MMO out there. Sell it as "to ESO what mods are to Skyrim" and even the biggest normalfags will eat it up.

Griefing? Meh. Lone griefers are hard to catch, but that's why you travel in groups - or get really good, so you don't need to. EVE Online is probably a good comparison there, where common "griefing" is replaced by year long corporate infiltration missions. And at that point, it's no longer griefing - that's true, bona fide role-playing. You just need to provide the mechanisms.

I'm not saying the cost would be immense - it would - but the technology is more or less there. It might be VRchat-tier graphics, and not AAA crap, but you could pull it off. And it could easily make back its money, as long as you handled the marketing well, bribed off some game journalists, and got Redditors and others to eat it up in advance.

>>16705681

>Most mainstream games are shit

have always been, we only remember the good ones..

>>16707989

Instead of realizing people wanted more than just the same trees and grass and fighting Wolf A B and C every 3 minutes, the devs in general realized they could cut travelling altogether and save effort and space. They forgot they were supposed to use that effort and space on the rest of the game though.

>>16714165

Yeah, RPG is probably one of the vastest and least defined genres, almost anything that has numbers in sight is considered an RPG nowadays.

Fast Travel is especially gay because we'd have to ride vehicles and boats otherwise, which is pretty fucking neato. Making a day out of just travelling somewhere in an MMO used to be really fun.

>>16705681

>Fast travel is also absolute shit for open world games

It's actually not. Specially playing beth games without fast travel is an absolute chore and boils down to the description on the beth codex forum, a "hiking simulator".

>the amount of dialogue options and variance is completely limited to the amount a voice actor can do

This is somewhat accurate. But what can you do about it other than having a bigger VA budget?

>>16728629

>having a bigger VA budget.

>not just cutting voice acting altogether.

>>16707989

Fallout 1/2 had fast travel & random encounters. I don't see why you couldn't implement this into a 3d space too and there are probably mods that already that. I also don't see why 3d games can't have a similar mechanic. Instead of just loading a different cell, you are seeing yourself traveling across the map while time passes and have a random (friendly or hostile) encounter once in a while.

>>16728632

>I only want to read texts in a video game, AAA games are all trash because they don't cater to my special 0.0000000000004% of the market taste

How about you just read a book?

>>16728658

>I advocate spending money on useless shit to appease the lowest common denominator instead of improving the aspects of the product that actually matter, like gameplay, or quality control

>>16728658

>>16729071

There are ways to appease both, tehre has to be a middle spot between FF 10's cutscene extravanganza and a text adventure.

What would you think of the old one-person eprspective crawlers, like phantasy star or SMT? Would you prefer something more along those lines, graphically speaking?

>>16728649

because nu fallout works off the same engine that TES games used, probably too difficult and/or todd is too lazy to program it in

this is the same person who said that making spears for skyrim and working ladder animations for fallout 3 were too difficult, and the modding community proved him wrong on both counts

>>16728658

Getting rid of voice acting would let them add a ton more story branches and dialogue options. Even with an unlimited VA budget, it would still take too much time and effort to record lines for everything.

>>16715663

In real life proper plate armor was so expensive that only rich people could afford it and was custom-made for the wearer. Your perception of what is realistic and desirable has been warped by being immersed in non-realistic games. Of course, something being the case in real history doesn't mean that it has to be the same way in a RPG, but this is getting back to the argument about game rules being the physics of the game universe.

A thing that makes griefing attractive is the relative meaninglessness of it all for the griefer combined with the presence of some meaning for the target. Your scenario of disposable player characters with perma-death sound particularly prone to causing griefing potential. A griefer can put his character into great dangers because nothing in the game is really that important to him, while other players are trying to roleplay and would be highly upset about being sent back into character creation, making griefing them all the more attracting.

>>16733816

>In real life proper plate armor was so expensive that only rich people could afford it and was custom-made for the wearer.

All armor was custom fitted to the wearer by the wearer if it didn't fit right, most custom fitted plate is just there to look good and tended to be 16th-17th century stuff. If full plate was really that expensive there would not be tons of squires, who didn't become knights because of the expenses of being a knight which wasn't just armor weapons.

Anyone know some good party-based, turn-based WRPGs? They're a lot harder to find than I thought they'd be. It seems like most WRPGs are either RTWP or fully real-time. The only ones I've been able to find that are both turn-based and party-based are Shadowrun and Blackguards.

>>16705872

this is strangely arousing

>>16739857

Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 games.

>>16739903

Questions about those:

How much of a problem would it be if I haven't played the other Divinity games? Will I not understand a bunch of stuff? Will playing the newer games spoil the stories of the older games if I ever feel like going back and playing those? Also, I think I might have heard that the Original Sin games only give you one companions. Is that true? I was looking for a party of four or so.

>>16739912

It doesnt matter. Same setting, but old game dont matter much, and both Original Sin games are standalone, with Original Sin 2 having references and some concepts from its predecessor, but thats it.

>>16739964

What about the party size?

>>16739912

>>16739918

Forgot to anwer this:

>Also, I think I might have heard that the Original Sin games only give you one companions. Is that true? I was looking for a party of four or so.

That is if you take the talent called Lone Wolf, that reduces the party size, in exchange for lots of bonuses for your character.

>>16739969

All right. I'll check those games out, then. I think I might actually have bought the first one already in a sale a while back.

>>16705725

Codex > /v/

"Mainstream" RPG's haven't been coming out very much lately. I really like Kingdom Cum and I think the Xenoblade series is great. They're becoming less mainstream now in favor of RPG-lite action games like Skyrim and open world shit, so any game coming out as a full-on RPG will be trying to appeal to the core audience of RPG players.

This is less of a gameplay criticism and more of a writing issue but if you're going to do romance stuff in your RPG, devs, please make it not shit. It's like every story writer that tries to do this doesn't have any idea what causes people to actually like each-other. I like romantic subplots or at least the idea of them, I think they are a very easy way to humanize and endear characters to the player by showing the characters trying to succeed in a very human and endearing endeavor and adds motivations and impulses to the characters that derive from something other than the characters plot circumstance or their abstract ideals, or at least they would be if they weren't functionally a series of fetch-quests or multiple choice test to unlock a bra-clasp if you pick the right answers.

In fact, piggy backing off of this, do RPG's even do proper sub-plots at all? A side-quest is not a sub-plot. A stories depth isn't determined by how convoluted or complex it's series of events are but rather it's seen how its various elements dynamically interact with one another to give rise to an over-arching narrative of how those elements intertwined to produce their various consequences for the characters, branching quest lines don't produce a depth of story just a width of story.

>>16728629

>It's actually not

It is. If you're making a game about exploration and you fail to make the exploration interesting you fucked up.

>Specially playing beth games without fast travel is an absolute chore

>this shit open world game does a mechanic in a shitty way

Big surprise.

Speaking of Skyrim, is Enderal worth re-pirating the game? I seem to have nuked it from my external HDD. My biggest complaints were floaty and very unsatisfying combat and very basic dungeon and quest design.

Final Fantasy Tactics game. 3D with Valkria Chronicles-ish movement meter, rather than being grid-based.

Instead of having generic units you can customize them to an autistic level, like a waifu sim h-game character creator, so you could potentially make literally any FF character in your party.

>>16755010

Enderal released on steam for free if you bought Skyrim. Effectively that means you can pirate it on its own. As for whether it's worth it, melee combat is still the same floaty shit but character progression has been much improved. Quests and dungeons are much better, but still kind of linear. Essentially, it's impossible to fix Skyrim, but Enderal is as close as you can get.

>>16739857

There's Temple of Elemental Evil. Just get the Circle of Eight mod too, it fixes a bunch of bugs in the game.

>>16755018

You are a gentleman of fine taste. Though I'd like the character customization to be more than for looks: I also want complex build making.

>>16757267

I main issue with Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the encounter design. The encounters are just way too damn easy. Until you get to the end of the game and you have to deal with the wild hunt and a few select bosses, the fights are just plain. There's barely any clerics to fight, and most of them just cast Prayer or summon wolves and then spam their Channel Energy skill. Enemy casters might cast a Slow, or they'll level drain you. Why are there no Clerics summoning high level monsters, or using Harm/Disintegrate/Slay Living or other dangerous spells? Why aren't Wizards tossing out Empowered/Maximized Fireballs + a Quickened Fireball each turn? Then there's stupid shit like Outlank and Seize the Moment which just make melee combat laughable, compounded by the fact that flanking is based on being threatened instead of flanked. Or that enemies aren't pre-buffed with basic spells: a lvl 16 Wizard should be casting Mage Armor and Shield when they wake up while on an adventure. Or that enemies don't use potions or scrolls. Bleh. I did a second playthrough with the turn-based mod and the flanking fix mod, and it significantly improved the combat, but it just went and showed how fucking easy the game is. Sure, I could bump up the game to Unfair, but that's just increasing the numbers to the point so that AC/resists get stupid high, it's a type of difficulty increase on par with making enemies bullet sponges.

I also had some buggy shit happen at the end with companions. In my first game I had banished Ranger dude because he attacked me, and he just showed up at the House like nothing happened. And Linzi dying is just a huge fuck you, since I'm assuming most players used her as a skill monkey for Persuade/Knowledge/Perception checks. Also, it could potentially mean losing your only arcane caster. Shit sucked.

>>16705681

A lack of unique treasures and interesting dungeons killed the genre. Every time I go to some far corner of the world into an optional dungeon, which only differs from other dungeons in terms of enemies found in it and the background and theme, and open a treasure chest at the end of it only to find some generic loot I could have found absolutely anywhere else I die inside.

What the fuck is the point of having a vast world if the things contained within are uniform.

>>16739863

I think it has something to do with the simplicity of the art style combined with the embarrassed and shy personalities of the figures.

>>16757327

Yeah, I've been barreling through the game on normal difficulty and can get through most encounters with haste as the only buff. If I have trouble I just use all buffs and summons and steamroll through multiple encounters with my super fast mini-army. I remember having a lot more trouble in BG2, while in this one I just let the stupid AI mop up the enemy. Compared to Pillars of Eternity, which is the latest game in this vein I played, this was very good. I bingeplayed this one and am just now starting to see the multitude problems with it.

>>16757352

This bothers me a lot too. One of the main things I love about Dark Souls is that there is unique loot hand placed in dungeons. I don't really understand trash loot, where every container has some lint, a screw and a broken sword that serve no other purpose than to be sold to a vendor for 1g when the cheapest items cost 500g. Hand crafted items hand placed in hand crafted dungeons would be very nice. Instead you get Fallout 4 and Skyrim style AI generated shit.

>calling any fallout game past 2 an rpg

They are shooters with a "deep" story, don't kid yourself OP. That said it is a shame that the fucking Neptunia series is the closest we have to a traditional console rpg. Fuck, even the witcher is more of an rpg than oblivion with guns and it's hack 'n slash as fuck.

I'm too pleb to enjoy old RPGs. I've been spoiled rotten by the likes of Witcher, Fallout NV, Kingdom Come, Dragon's Dogma and others to the point I can't get into the cRPGs that are so beloved. Feels bad.

>>16705681

Agree with VAs, but I'd replace fast travel with quest compasses.

>>16763121

Sounds like you have never played a real RPG. If western cRPGs like Baldur's Gate are too much complicated mechanics with not enough reward for you, try some SNES era JRPGs, they are usually pretty accessible.

>>16763124

Quest compasses have a purpose though, and it's a bit irrating that nobody really cares to understand WHY they even came to be except with a quick snide about casuals.

If you have a logbook that has all the information you need to reach a specific location, that's the most immersive way to go about it but also the most intrusive. Having to stop playing the game AND look at a menu that takes most of your screen to read a few lines of text is distracting from the game itself and quite off putting. You're not supposed to be reading a VN, you're supposed to be going on an adventure.

That's how mini-maps came to be. A convenient way to give the player information without forcing him to interrupt the game with an extra menu.

But this is a flawed method since now the player is fixing his gaze on the minimap instead of the world around him since that's where the usefull information is and he ends up missing out on the environment and details that are around him. As a result, no matter how well designed or well modeled the world is, the player will feel bored anyway.

That's where Quest Compasses\Arrows have. Just enough information to get the player going in the right direction without having to interrupt his game but not enough that it actually takes most of his attention and detracts from the rest of the game.

>are you seriouly defending Quest Compasses

Yes and no.

For immersive games that want to transport you into a fantasy realm and interact as much as possible with it, they are a terrible choice since they make the whole experience feel artificial as fuck and take away from immersion.

But if it's a game about following a specific narrative or the focus is more on the gameplay than in the lore and the world itself, like most hack&slash games for instance, it's perfectly fine and adequate.

My point is that there's a time for demanding the player pay attention to details and learns the way of the land he's currently in and there's a time for not getting in the way of satisfying gameplay that isn't really enhanced by requiring that you read quest logs or journals.

It's only when these are mixed or switched that there's a serious problem.

WOW ruined the rpg

>>16763258

If you're going to make that argument, at least say Diablo ruined the RPG. It was already fucked when WoW came out, it just greatly extended the magnitude of it.

I think one thing that's been missing from RPG's in general (especially open-world one's) is a background simulation for the world.

I'm not even saying it needs an in-depth simulation where the bowel movements of the castles peasants are calculated.

A while ago I played a (very flawed and very good) russian game called Space Rangers 2.

It's this weird 2D space-sim, with a small economic/warfare simulation going on in the background. While your character goes around, it simulates some 300 other characters doing their thing.

>The Rangers fight Dominators

>They can lose, and Dominators conquer systems

>They can win, and take the scraps to Scientists so they improve the general Tech level of the galaxy

>Tech level spreads according to planets wealth and proximity to Science Stations

>the Space Army plots agressive attacks against the dominators

>or plots defensive ones if they're losing the war

>pirates actively search for high-trafic sectors with lots of merchants

>merchants answer genuine supply and demand, avoid sectors with too many pirates

For instance, these last two points: the it's a cat and mouse system, where the merchants will constantly change their routes, and the pirates then change too.

If the player gets involved as a Merchant, you can take a chance and #YOLO it, or you can talk to other characters, find out where it's safe and not. Same goes for being a pirate, you can talk to other pirates, follow them to see where they're raiding, or you can invest in a better sensor, and try to find a place packed with merchants and little security/competition.

It's a very small feature that involves and immerses the player into the world quite well.

Imagine, I dunno, Elona for instance. Or any open world RPG.

>Big bad wants McGuffin Stones to break free

>player can find McGuffin Stones

>so can the EVIL Scouting Parties

The game suddendly provides with with several avenues of approach: you can follow and stop the Evil scouts, you can search for the McGuffins yourself, or you can directly attack/steal the Big Bad Guy.

The only major problem with this is finding a market for it: Marvel/Disney/Warner dominate the cultural landscape, and movies or "experiences" are prized and valuable by most of the market. That's one main reason why the least interactive games (while retaining the appearance of interactivity) sell extremely well.

For instance, as strange as it may sound, Death Stranding had TOO MUCH GAMEPLAY for the current market. Mark my words: if they dropped half the mechanics and speed up the walking of the character, it would sell twice more, because the average normalfag can quickly hop from one cut scene to another while feeling accomplished and rewarded with the next story bit.

Can I get some good short RPG recs? Less than 15 hours, preferably.

I just beat Underrail, and that took 200+ hours. I'm a bit exhausted of super long games.

There needs to be a way to cheapen the cost for voice acting across the board, since this is often the time and money draining element in production that causes cutting potential dialogue.

If there was a way to standardize npc voice acting on some sort of website for customers to voice act, so that even while the game is out the content gets updated with this voice acting. Give em some rewards for a good job etc..

I have no problem with reading in some rpg's, but in an immersive first person world I think the added realism of voice acting is certainly a big plus.

But I fully agree on fast travel being shitty. Add to this quest markers, enemy scaling, lame see trough walls detective vision and even pausing for potions use etc.. So many casual shit game design creeping into nearly all rpg's.

>>16777175

VtM:B

>>16777175

Nier: Automata

>>16705681

Does that pic even apply to traditionally individual activities like RPGs?

Fast travel is fine so long as it is somewhat limited or based on lore. Morrowind's system with boats and striders and portals was pretty good. Just opening a map and instantly teleporting is lame though, but if a game is going to do that they need some type of animation at least. I'm surprised how much better the teleporting in FFXIV feels compared to GW2 simply because it has an animation.

Also, RPGs need more RP. Games like SS13 have much more RP than most RPGs today. Even class choice doesn't often impact much of the game.

>>16706301

>liking divinity original sin

>>16777269

Indigo, tell your shills to be more subtle. I like the project come the fuck on.

>>16777250

>>liking divinity original sin

what's wrong with it exactly? the story is good enough and the gameplay is great. There is that one lesbian couple in Arx but that's hardly an issue in all of your likely 30 hours of gameplay.

>>16777629

Some anons REALLY hate the combat.

>>16777193

While good VAs charge a shit ton per hour, they don't take that long to get lots of work done. It's hiring 100s of artists/animators/modellers/textures/mocap people for months or years that runs up the bills.

You're right though in not all VAs need to be expensive, and Mr Collect Ten Bear Asses guy doesn't even need to be voiced at all.

>>16777695

I assume they're the same anons who can't beat the magisters you have to fight to get that key out of the dungeons, because the combat is fucking amazing. Apart from a few fights which get a bit tedious and autistic.

SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU LITTLE TOY GNOME MOTHERFUCKER GOD DUMB FIGHT

>>16777625

Oh, you like it? You must be a shill then

>>16777629

>one lesbian couple

>hardly an issue

I didn't even know that, I just dropped it off my radar once the devs started censoring it.

>>16778027

It may be high expectations from DMing tabletop, it may be that there's less world detail available from 20 years ago than there is today, it may just be that it's low level play and the world feels thus.

It could just be the lack of dragons in a game called Dungeons & Dragons.

It could just be that the Sword Coast is less interesting for vidya than the Moonsea region in the goldbox games

Either way, play to the end and export for BG2, because the sequel is a notable step up in every way.

I feel like a lot of people are shitting on fast travel. for the wrong reasons. Fast travel is a thing because these games fail to make it fun to travel "the way back" from point A to point B.

If they want to make an open world RPG without fast travel fun they need to have

>multiple routes from point A to B with actual stuff do see/do/explore

>a very very long table of random or semirandom encounters that will not exhaust itself or get very repetitive

>Traveling NPCs

>huge and diverse list of enemies

Its much easier for devs to just put fast travel in the game, just with some sort of associated cost, so players will be encouraged to go back on foot if they have a task conveniently planned on the way back (like an unexplored location or an npc to meet with).

>>16728649

>Random encounters

Fallout 3 had them too. They would occur after you arrived at your destination after using fast travel.

>>16752588

>Sub-plots

Witcher games did it, especially the third one. Geralt finding Yennefer, Ciri, and dealing with the wild hunt was the main one. Side stuff was the war, witch burning, and succession issues in different nations.

>>16777250

>Morrowind's fast travel

>boats

>striders

>portals

Not only that. Almsivi and Divine intervention were great ideas that I am surprised more games did not copy. They were teleports, but had an element of surprise to them, as you were teleported to the nearest temple. This could have brought you to a brand new city encouraging player to explore or making it a neat shortcut when you are in a middle of wilderness.

Mark and recall were pretty useful too.

Last one I enjoyed was Arx Fatalis. It made me want to try Ultima Underworld, but I just couldn't get into it. Couldn't get into Underworld Ascendant either. I just can't get into them.

>>16777847

Voiced protagonist only works in games where the protagonist has already been defined by the game.

>Kingdom Cum

>Witcher

>Risen/Gothic

>Not Mass Effect

>Not fucking Fallout either

There are 3 different camps of RPG's when it comes to player freedom and character customization. I'll talk about them if you want me to.

>>16763506

That's pretty fucking neato anon, actually sounds interesting.

Dorf Fortress world sim when? Just need to insert waifus and sell it to isekai fags

>>16781793

>Dorf Fortress world sim when?

When Toady finishes DF and someone adds multiplayer capability to it.

So fucking never.

>>16781793

>Dorf Fortress world sim when?

Probably never. Not with good graphics at the very least.

Something this complex would require that it's either some top-down sprite based game like classic roguelikes so the graphic representation doesn't shit itself when trying to display so many different elements, or you'd need a very serious team working on the models and animations for a properly simulated world.

The first option isn't likely to succeed financially which means the second one won't be feasible unless the devs feels like losing money too.

I mean, I'd pay 10$ for a proper DF world sim game, especially if it was fully moddable or open source, but how many would do the same? I doubt it would even get that many traction in RPG Codex where you'd think the autism alone would make them buy it.

>>16777193

maybe stop hiring the same 5 fucking people to do all the voices in everything.

pretty sure most of the world can talk, right? then why is it that voiceactors are always the same clique of kikes who get all the voice acting jobs at a premium fucking price?

>>16782933

>pretty sure most of the world can talk, right?

Yeah they can talk, but not act. A lot of people act awkward when pretending they are playing a role or pretending they feel an emotion they don't have(anger, sadness), even with a script in front of them. Don't believe me? watch english dubbed anime or play JRPGs with the enlgish dub, especially those from the 90s.

>>16718172

Most WRPGs are fucking garbage to be frank, I've never liked Black Isle games, Bioshit or Obsidian. About the only ones I care about are the Troika-developed ones like Fallout 1/Arcanum or the older blobber ones like Wizardry clones or Might and Magic, or the Looking Glass offshoot games like SS2 or Deus Ex. Special mentions to Kenshi and Eastern Europe for Atom RPG and Underrail.

>>16783034

That doesn't include the simulation ARPGs like Bethesda games, they're more open-world theme parks than anything relating to RPGs. And Diablo clones aka monster pinata clickers have been a dead genre since the first two Diablo games since none of them are especially any better than a couple of games two decades old by now.

>>16707989

I think you have it backwards: if devs could make travelling interesting and pleasant they'd drop fast travel in a heartbeat because that would allow them to inflate playtime, use distance as a way to discourage certain actions, and generally get away with less content in the main areas.

But devs can't do that easily, be it for time or budget constraints, so they then implement fast travel to spare the player the need to stick around their soulless empty "open" world for a second longer than strictly necessary.

Look at modern open world games restricting fast travel (most Ubisoft titles, for example) to see how the exploration is fucked anyways.

>It seems to me modern "gamers" seem to have no patience or appreciation

Get your head out of your ass, modern gamers love challenge to the point their demand far outstrips the supply and we get tons of mediocre roguelites and souls-clones, and even the extremely corrupted and unskilled journos had to praise Sekiro in the end.

What modern gamers don't have patience for is mediocrity, because they have plenty of older games to choose from and piracy is always easy, so they're going to drop and refund your no fast travel game within a couple hours if they don't see something to convince them otherwise.

>>16783004

if you make a casting with 20-50 people you can probably find at least one capable of putting emotion behind words, come on. its not a superpower.

the VA scene is a tight knit circle of nepotists who don't hire outside the circle.

I hope and pray Realms Beyond (SRD hex and turn based CRPG) becomes the next NWN. It's being made with modability and user made content in mind, with an editor similar to NWN, with the best iteration of D&D combat as the basis for the ruleset (3.5e). If it doesn't have any gigantic flaws I may try to use it to get into making stuff myself. I feel like NWN was really ahead of its time, and I hope Realms Beyond really gets that idea of an easy to make CRPG foundation right.

>>16781744

Do it.

>>16781744

Do it.

>>16784749

Show me them.

>>16784742

NWN is kind of shit to be honest, even looking back at old modules the engine itself is ugly mmo sandbox garbage.

>>16784742

it does have a gigantic flaw

its based on 3.5e

>>16784808

NWN was, I think, early on intended to be a more of a vehicle for people to make their own campaigns and use the multiplayer DMing thing to do whatever, rather than a real game experience on its own. I think that they realized somewhere early in the process that nobody was going to do that and that they needed to ship an actual game with it, but at the same time didn't want to completely give up on the idea of being a host-your-D&D-campaign-online game. I mean, did anyone actually use the multiplayer features that came with it?

>>16784939

>I mean, did anyone actually use the multiplayer features that came with it?

Everybody? I don't think people played it for the single player fan modules, it looked ugly as shit on release. Whenever I hear people mention it all I ever hear about is mp servers.

>>16784813

The closest to good version of D&D

If only it was GURPS. Hopefully that can be modded in.