/v/ - Video Games

>guys what's better, AIDS or EBOLA?

Play Age of Decadence.

>>16855133

>straight D&D CRPG with a decent interface but insufferable character arcs, at least they keep the dialogue mostly brief and the moment-to-moment party interaction is sometimes fun. still has all the balance issues you'd expect from a D&D CRPG

or

>D&D inspired CRPG that has purple prose out of my ass which made me stop playing the first game after the first few hours out of sheer exhaustion from reading awful text

I enjoyed Kingmaker, but I gave up on trying to talk to my own companions for backstory pretty early. At least you can roll your own group like in the classic games.

>>16855148

ok cool i'll go with pathfinder

Pathfinder is glitchy as hell when it comes to the relationship segments, just a warning.

>>16855169

Go with >>16855143 or Underrail.

>>16855169

Beneath the Stolen Lands, which you asked about in OP, is dlc for the main game. It adds a superdungeon that can be accessed standalone or midcampaign

the game itself is one of the few unity games that can be modded. just for tweaks-sake, I recommend Bag of Tricks and the Turn-Based Combat mod (the best part of tbc is the author made it toggleable so you can switch it off for quick mook mopup). There're also mods that add new classes and mechanics, some of which have been adopted into the game proper

>>16855188

how applicable is that statement to recent versions? The dev team has, after all, been doing god-tier maintenance since it's glitchy as fuck release

OP here. Started both (pirated copies of each) and PoE2 is pretty nice, has a built in console code menu so i used the money cheat and god mode.

Pathfinder is also really nice, good setting and atmosphere.

>>16856350

and oh yea, Pathfinder can be buggy as fuck, i had to google a fix for the loading screen freeze bug, and now i had to delete the saved games from the previous version cause it was crashing it

fucking incompetent game devs, jesus i hate game devs. Game devs are fucking scum who want unions? Fuck you, try making a game that works or doesn't suck, then maybe you can have a union you entitled little fuck

jesus fucking christ, Pathfinder simply doesn't fucking work. Holy shit how can the game devs be so fucking incompetent.

I installed the newer version of Pathfinder before but it didn't have a working cheat engine table so i deleted and installed an older version

FUCK this game. And FUCK the game devs too. Fucking scum

>>16855274

>how applicable is that statement to recent versions? The dev team has, after all, been doing god-tier maintenance since it's glitchy as fuck release

I played the game 3 months ago, baited by the promise of turn-based combat. My save bricked when the gnome event refused to spawn. I was able to continue on and complete the troll chapter, invading the abandoned mountainhome and killing the troll king and tartuk, but the nigger also didn't spawn. Events referring to both of these characters continued to appear, like the troll child encounter. The troll chapter wasn't flagged as complete, despite me successfully moving on to the space between the next chapter, and the troll cataclysm would inevitably happen. I tried using every save editor and cheat tool I could find in order to set those quests to appear or to get the NPCs forcibly into the party. None of them could do it. It was an enormous waste of time.

That was the third time I tried to play the game, and the second time my save was bricked after the troll chapter, despite it being a different reason. The first time I played, I quit because none of the side quests worked, and all of my clerical powers were placeholder icons without any effect, and most of my spells didn't actually function. My only regret is that I even tried to play the game, because I wasted a real fuckload of time for nothing.

>>16856370

It had CTD bugs at launch which they patched to simply memory leaks that 'only' stopped the game and dropped you back to the main menu.

The Kingdom management shit was broken throughout and would stack repeated 'quests' over and over while you were on actual game missions so you'd come back to find '20 table quests/incidents' you never knew about cos you were out of town that all expired/went against you because your advisor fucked up 10 times in a row despite your autistically managing the built towns to cover resources/needs, No, Fuck you, you lost the game. Turn off Kingdom management and now you just have to deal with the poz, faggotry, the annoying characters (of which there are many) and the telegraphed plot you could see coming from the first instance of getting dream invaded.

The one place you could trade for decent shit was open ONCE and then closes forever upon your leaving with no warning. Oh and despite all the build-up of 'muh city' Pitax was like 3 screens with next to fucking NOTHING to do.

Also aren't there weapon proficiencies for weapons that don't even exist in game?

>>16856589

No. Everything that has a proficiency exists. However just because it technically exists doesn't mean there are any good weapons of that category.

>>16856370

>Installed older version

>Uses hacks

>Complains game doesn't work

I think you might be retarded. Anyway there are plenty of cheat mods for the game you absolutely do not need to use cheat engine even if you are that much of a filthy casual.

>>16856579

>It had CTD bugs at launch which they patched to simply memory leaks that 'only' stopped the game and dropped you back to the main menu.

it's worse when you consider it uses unity. how hard do you need to fuck up that even fucking unity of all things can't handle it?

>>16856589

>>16856681

In D&D and PF, if it doesn't have any decent magical weapons available, then it might as well not exist.

>>16855143

I don't even know what that game about but this.

>>16855242

underrail would also be better

>>16857607

I remember Temple of Elemental Evil suffered from the same fate. You could have brandistocks, half-pikes and great clubs, but in terms of magical weaponry most of it was longswords since loot is fixed.

>>16857629

That's what >>16857607 was getting at. All DnD based CRPGs (probably most or all RPGs with weapon skills, actually) have the "best proficiency" problem since they all have fixed artifacts or endgame weapons that simply outclass the others. If the best weapon in the game is a flail, then you're probably going to find knowledgeable gamers taking flails as a proficiency. FAQs will tell you to take flails on your warrior and don't even consider axes. It's really a large but not extremely impactful replayability problem for RPGs. Nobody wants to get to the endgame and not be able to use the best weapon because they have the "wrong" proficiency. At the same time, new players aren't going to know that, and so it creates this unfair-in-hindsight meme where a player feels disadvantaged or even outright cheated for taking the "wrong" proficiency. It's really a tough problem to solve for developers. They want to give the player some choice in how they play the game, and they want those choices to be meaningful, but they also have limits to their ability to create stuff to suit every possible playstyle. There's also the fact that players do a LOT more thinking about and playing of any game than the devs do, meaning that it's more or less inevitable in a large enough game that players will discover optimum builds and so on. If those optimums are too easy to realize, too powerful, or whatever, the developers get blamed for not having in foresight what the players have in hindsight. Sure there are lots of examples where it's probably deserved criticism, but the dev teams can't think of everything.

Fuck off little diamond

>>16857877

>If the best weapon in the game is a flail, then you're probably going to find knowledgeable gamers taking flails as a proficiency.

That's not really a problem so long as the other weapon types have comparable weapons, even if a little worse.

OP here. Really enjoying PoE 2.

>>16857877

>>16857629

It's really a problem that was first caused by D&D, and since there are so many RPGs that just ape D&D with zero imagination, it's a problem across the RPG genre. Magic items are really a sticky subject in game design, specifically with random loot tables, because they give an unknown character an unknown new ability or power boost. You don't know who's going to get the magic item or what it will be, if you use random tables (many DMs did on tabletop, especially back in the day, because it was the only way the players and DM could agree on a "fair" treasure haul). And D&D, of course, has extremely powerful magic items that can completely change how the party approaches encounters. Even something as seemingly-simple as a wand of cure light wounds can upset your dungeoning experience. There's usually just too many radical effects for the DM or game developers to account for. Having the right weapon proficiency is really just the tip of the magic item iceberg.

Of course, it's a tough problem to solve because magic items are fun to use and their effects give them a ton of charm. Some games limit the types of effects to simple ones like elemental damage. Others will only make the ones with truly radical effects only the rarest items in the game.

>>16858109

Thing is, in a tabletop game the DM can always just fudge the results and at least nominally has total control over what happens in every adventure. If a group gets something that's too powerful, something can come up later in that or the next adventure that screws with it or eliminates it, and the DM only has to placate four guys if they don't like his balancing attempt, unlike your average CRPG dev. Aside from patches, CRPGs don't have that kind of flexibility. Also, a CRPG is (barring expansions or DLC or whatever) a fixed experience. There's no "next adventure" unlike with a tabletop campaign or world where a single group might go through multiple modules with different characters. The best weapons or items in a CPRG are, barring procedural generation and mods, both fixed and determinable. Maybe you can randomly get or not get a certain one during a certain playthrough, but it's not like a tabletop game where a DM can start altering things on the fly if the characters seem like they're getting unbalanced one way or the other. The game that gets made has to work for first time players who might know the genre and the setting but nominally don't know the specifics of the game itself (they didn't read the module ahead of time, so to speak), but it's also going to have this secondary audience of people who'll keep playing and talking about the game long after their first playthrough. Tradiationally, the second group are the folks who'll give a game its long-standing reputation, because they have the loudest voices even if they aren't necessarily the majority of people who bought the game. Morrowind is a good example: it has its reputation as a completely broken game because of the folks who sussed out the brokenness of the potioncrafting system and the ones who played the game with that in mind afterwards. I don't mean to blame them for that, but they're the ones who resulted in it having that reputation by exposing ways that the gameplay was (not necessarily obviously) broken.

I guess I'm getting away from my main point, though. The human judgement of a DM really isn't able to be replicated in CRPGs, meaning that when autists break the game and talk about it online, it stays broken in the minds of the wider gaming public. This happens faster in this day and age because of the ways that gamers talk about and read about games nowadays. An actually managed tabletop game, barring really autistic players, is constantly able to be adjusted to account for the DM not thinking of everything. CRPGs don't get that benefit, aside from the worst bugs and exploits probably getting patched out, and sort of have to stand as they after after release. CRPG devs also don't necessarily get more time to playtest their game or more in-depth playtesting in any way (if anything the genre seems to be prone to getting rushed out the door), even though I think there are often more ways to break a CRPG than other genres. I guess it's a little disingenuous to compare DMed tabletop games to CRPGs, though, since the latter's a commercial product with developers whose time costs a company money, whereas the former's virtually always a single neckbeard's pet project done in his leisure time (not the module being used, but the actual DMing of the campaign).

>>16858360

NWN came extremely close to solving this problem with its extremely good DM client and toolset. It's a shame it had other specific flaws, like being able to only have one NPC companion at a time and almost all of them being uninteresting. Deekin was a mere "okay" because of his annoying voice, but I kinda liked his character arc of getting away from the white dragon.

From my experience playing Pathfinder with random loot tables (we agreed on this ahead of time because it was our "low effort" campaign which ended up being high effort), things basically spiral out of control around level 10. We had a bag of holding full of scrolls including a fair few that were circle 7 or higher, almost any wand you could give a shit about, and several unique items that are devastating in certain scenarios like a mace of smiting which we used to annihilate almost every door we couldn't open. My character had a fucking nine lives stealer as well. This is roughly similar to almost every D&D/PF CRPG I've played so I have to imagine that most people think this is how D&D "should" be played. On the one hand it's great to have options, but there's a reason most D&D players consider levels 5-10 to be the "Sweet spot" because the number of options isn't unmanageable or tedious and the DM isn't forced to field instant death enemies or other bullshit in order to make it a challenge for you.

>>16858423

I should also mention we were playing with a loot generator found online, designed for Pathfinder, with everything set to "normal" yield. Sometimes we would skew the types of items that would appear to make the loot more interesting than "a bunch of utter junk you're going to have to haul out and sell" but never did we increase the loot value.