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Quarex posted:Arx Fatalis ruled so hard though. This is exactly why they need to succeed, to bring back that entire genre proper. Yeah, I am not sure why would one call Arx Fatalis a failure, at least in gameplay sense. Now, it may have been a failure in the commercial aspects, that I am not sure. From the perspective of the kickstarter, it's a very niche genre. It will make it's $600K based on Nostalgia, but not much more I feel. I threw down $35, since UW and Arx Fatalis were some of my favorite games of old and the dev pedigree seems good, but for a lot of people, this won't be enough. And yeah, digital rewards are a bit off I feel.
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Feb 8, 2015 22:24
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seorin posted:Definitely agreed on inventory management. Aside from 'immersion' (lol), I have a hard time figuring out what it's ever supposed to actually add to a game. Torchlight became unplayable for me because of that. I wish I could freely talk about the discussion I had with some of the designers behind a-big-popular-mmo-i-cannot-name about inventory junk prior to release. It basically boiled down to 'yes, we realize all this stuff serves no purpose but busywork for the player, we're going to do it anyway'. Months and months later, they added a bunch of stuff I had whined about pre release to mitigate some of the most awful aspects of it. Still sucks poo poo today, same problems. Ugh. Hate it. Hate it. It's becoming pathological, but I don't give a poo poo. It's not fun, rarely adds anything to gameplay, and when you play a game where it is done well, you don't even notice its there, which is exactly what good ui/ux design should be. quote:On the other hand, level progression (in a well designed RPG) serves two major functions: difficulty adjustment and positive feedback. This is a complex topic, not something I feel like getting into a giant quoteathon about, but in brief, I agree with all of you that a) leveling up to become superhuman and smashing stuff is fun b) using levels to 'self regulate' difficulty is a great thing (some of my most memorable rpg runs are ones where I blitzed through the game) and c) level scaling is often very poorly done, but can be a superb tool if used well. My problem with rpg difficulty is closely tied to the same issue I have with games of many genres, that being that difficulty is rarely well designed, and relatively few games are what I consider to be very difficult and challenging in an enjoyable manner. It's doubled up in rpgs, because while you can in theory push through most of them at the minimum character/gear level, often there are hard walls to progress in your path. The good ones (western and eastern both, not just classic wrpgs) give you a playpen and let you break it however you want. The best ones seem to have been built with player competence in mind as much as character power. But those are fairly rare, and far too common are the games where you start out as struggling weenies with very limited tools and options at your disposal in terms of gameplay. And then you pass a hump, and from there to the endgame, your abilities and options widen tremendously... but nothing in the game seems crafted to make you actually use all or (or even a majority of) the tools at your disposal, instead you can mash the metaphorical (f)ight button and win. So I suppose you could argue that I'm simply complaining about bad game design period, rather than difficulty specifically, but that very particular arc of difficulty is something I've grown less and less fond of over the years, and its turned me off to a fair number of otherwise decent rpgs. I don't find it fun to develop a group of supermans and womans if the game never fights back with supermonsters and smart encounters. What's the point of giving you a huge range of interesting abilities and equipment to use if they end up as a few dozen flavors of 'win fight' without any real thought invested? As more 'pure' rpgs tend to be more cerebral challenges than hybrids incorporating lots of action or realtime elements, if that aspect of challenge is on a brickwall/ezmode spectrum, I find the gameplay falls almost totally flat for me, and the game is left standing on its other merits (story, writing, graphics, music, etc, the non 'game' parts of the game). And to be clear, I don't (generally) go into most rpgs expecting that they'll have that level of thought put into their gameplay, and I'll usually look towards other genres or specific games for a challenge that I enjoy, but I can't help but be disappointed when I do pick up an rpg I was anticipating for whatever reason, and running into that same gameplay arc of 'gently caress this is rough to 'zzzzzzzzzz'.
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Feb 8, 2015 22:36
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I tend to like old school RPGs because they aren't over in a day or two. That's what that is to me. Where the grind is just there to be a grind though is where I draw the line, like with DA:I.
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Feb 8, 2015 22:38
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I apologize for being the person who actually likes inventory management  If it helps I only like it as a means to an end of being overpowered though. Like so many games make it easy to accumulate a comical treasure hoard of nearly-worthless crap quickly which you can then turn into overpowered-for-this-phase-in-the-game equipment which then makes everything more fun for people like me who only like to be challenged in the loosest sense of the word. Well unless I am specifically playing a super-challenging game for its own sake. Clearly this actually speaks to design again, though. If designers did not fill their worlds will trash loot that could be added up to become non-trash-equipment, I would not like it, and nobody else would not have to deal with it.
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Feb 8, 2015 23:00
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Captain Rufus posted:I don't even need to mention the fuckery Wizardry 8 and modern Elder Scrolls got up to. ( I still say scaling encounters is the second worst decision Brenda B. did. The first is marrying John Romero.) I actually kinda liked the level scaling in Wizardry 8, Arnika Road aside.  Every area had an upper and lower bound, and the enemies you actually fought changed as your party leveled rather than just throwing insanely powerful bandits at you ala later Elder Scrolls games. The result was there was a huge range of "appropriate" content available at any moment, and you could still butt heads with a higher level zone or go back and take sweet, sweet vengeance on a lower level area if you liked. I found it the best of both worlds. But it's worth repeating: Arnika Road's level scaling was bullshit. gently caress Arnika Road.
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Feb 9, 2015 01:12
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I've noticed when people mention "old school difficulty" they mean that the game is difficult at all, because most modern games can be played with blindfolds on. Then you start to get into semantics of "hard" vs "challenging"
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Feb 9, 2015 01:21
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Big Mad Drongo posted:I actually kinda liked the level scaling in Wizardry 8, Arnika Road aside. I liked the Wizardry 8 level scaling too. I may be in the minority but I even liked Arnika Road. That's one of the only spots in the game where the difficulty level even begins to approach some of the earlier Wizardry games. The other is Bayjin if you go there too early. The level scaling was nice--and frankly unavoidable--because due to the small game world, you ended up traversing the same areas a whole lot. Wizardry 8 was easy enough as it is--to be stuck fighting the same low-level trash all the time would just make it annoying. Especially when you can't really run from battles the same way you could in earlier Wizardry games. By having the level scaling they ensured that you were at least facing The one unforgivable level scaling practice in RPGs in my opinion is scaling the enemies' stats without actually changing the enemies themselves. Most RPGs that have level scaling will throw different, tougher monsters at you as you gain in levels at the very least. But there are some really bad ones where you're facing the same enemies at level 50 as you are at level 5, they just have the stats to match. That's a really great way to kill any sense of progression. The biggest offender ever I can think of isn't a PC RPG--it's Final Fantasy 8, which was an awful, awful game in many other respects--but it's pretty much the poster child for how not to do level scaling.
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Feb 9, 2015 20:33
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Genpei Turtle posted:The biggest offender ever I can think of isn't a PC RPG--it's Final Fantasy 8, which was an awful, awful game in many other respects--but it's pretty much the poster child for how not to do level scaling. I actually thought of that as well. I stopped caring about Final Fantasy starting from 10 on, but 8 was really disappointing to me after 7 was so enjoyable, and that was a major reason. It completely chokes off the feeling off progression, exploration, and becoming more capable because you are fighting the same mobs from level 5 at level 50... they just have 50k hit points now instead of just 50, or whatever. I have FF9 on my PSP after a whimsical purchase a few years ago. I need to give it a go; I've heard nothing but pleasant things about it after 8 was so divisive.
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Feb 9, 2015 20:58
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FF9 is truly awful, I'm not sure how it's gotten such a good reputation recently.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:03
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Genpei Turtle posted:I liked the Wizardry 8 level scaling too. I may be in the minority but I even liked Arnika Road. That's one of the only spots in the game where the difficulty level even begins to approach some of the earlier Wizardry games. The other is Bayjin if you go there too early. My problem there is more that there are just too many respawning fights in general, not that they vaguely scale to your level. And that's mostly a problem because fights can take a really long time in Wizardry 8, even when you are a lot more powerful than what you are fighting. There's enough preset fights in Wizardry 8 that I don't think enemies needed to respawn at all, the game length would have been fine without them. JustJeff88 posted:I actually thought of that as well. I stopped caring about Final Fantasy starting from 10 on, but 8 was really disappointing to me after 7 was so enjoyable, and that was a major reason. It completely chokes off the feeling off progression, exploration, and becoming more capable because you are fighting the same mobs from level 5 at level 50... they just have 50k hit points now instead of just 50, or whatever. If there's one good thing I can say about FF8, it's that the level scaling actively encourages you to NOT fight random battles, and to instead just get the GF that lets you disable them entirely as soon as possible. Unfortunately, that does nothing to help the fact that the rest of the game is completely terrible, but if you're already making the mistake of playing FF8 the least you can do is get it over with as quickly as you can.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:09
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I'm pro level scaling. I'll stop playing a game if I accidentally break the difficult entirely so anything a game can do to try to keep it interesting is okay with me. People usually say it kills the sense of progression if the game keeps scaling everything to the same difficulty but I've never played a game that actually did it to that degree. It's goofy fiction wise that bandits show up in TES4/5 with glass weapons more expensive than the entire contents of some towns, but by that point I'm usually steam rolling them anyway so at least that helps them put up some kind of resistance. I stopped playing JRPGs back at FF7 so I dunno if scaling is so bad in those games. Of course I know some players specifically play rpgs to break them over their knee and so this disrupts that but that's a motivation I've never understood. It's like those boring victory lap eras in a Civ game where I've won but need to grind it out. Better to just restart and get back to something interesting.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:13
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JustJeff88 posted:I actually thought of that as well. I stopped caring about Final Fantasy starting from 10 on, but 8 was really disappointing to me after 7 was so enjoyable, and that was a major reason. It completely chokes off the feeling off progression, exploration, and becoming more capable because you are fighting the same mobs from level 5 at level 50... they just have 50k hit points now instead of just 50, or whatever. 8 killed the series for me and I never played a FF afterwards. To be honest I felt the series started to go downhill at 6, but that's mostly an age thing I suspect. Pretty much every Final Fantasy past the first is targeted at the angsty teenager demographic and chock-full of stupid melodrama. I was nearly 20 when 6 came out so all the characters and dialogue were starting to get pretty eye-rolling. 8 kicked that into overdrive and was a clown car full of terrible design decisions so that was pretty much it for me.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:19
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Adam Bowen posted:FF9 is truly awful, I'm not sure how it's gotten such a good reputation recently. mostly it was just a relief to have the pretenses dropped and go on a wacky fun adventure again
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Feb 9, 2015 21:43
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Adam Bowen posted:FF9 is truly awful, I'm not sure how it's gotten such a good reputation recently. It has always had a good reputation as a game that "returned to the series' roots" but it's way too slow IMO. Everything about it just feels plodding and I get bored whenever I try to replay it. I did like that you could have a 4 person party though. That was cool.
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Feb 9, 2015 21:55
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Big Mad Drongo posted:I actually kinda liked the level scaling in Wizardry 8, Arnika Road aside. The only level scaling scheme I can think of that I enjoyed was Wiz8. I like the idea of splitting up the world into zones with an upper and lower scaling. TES games kind of homogenize the world with their player-based scaling because every enemy can be found anywhere. I'm restarting a level 40 character exactly to get rid of scaling and delevel the world. My favorite thing about Gothic 2 was how unforgiving most of the world was at the very beginning, and how you would slowly be able to visit more and more of the world depending on when you could handle the enemies there. I loved FF6 and really enjoyed FF7, but I'm not really seeing the appeal to FF9 and I'm about 4 hours in. It feels a bit generic, and aimless. Right now I'm just wandering around Lindblum not really sure why I'm there or what I'm supposed to do because I lost interest about two months ago.
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Feb 9, 2015 22:17
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Genpei Turtle posted:8 killed the series for me and I never played a FF afterwards. To be honest I felt the series started to go downhill at 6, but that's mostly an age thing I suspect. Pretty much every Final Fantasy past the first is targeted at the angsty teenager demographic and chock-full of stupid melodrama. I was nearly 20 when 6 came out so all the characters and dialogue were starting to get pretty eye-rolling. 8 kicked that into overdrive and was a clown car full of terrible design decisions so that was pretty much it for me. As much as I liked 7, I could tell that it was starting to go a bad direction in this sort of indefinable way. To this day, I can't tell you what was just not quite right about it, to me. I do not remember 8 fondly, and years ago my mum bought me 9 for PSX for Christmas. I didn't ask for it, she just knew that I enjoyed the series. It was a thoughtful gift, but after 7 a tiny bit and 8, a very big bit, I didn't want to touch it. When I saw how loving loopy 10 was, I knew that the series was dead to me. The last few years, I've started to hear some modestly positive things said about 9. Not "BEST GAME EVER!" things, but pretty good. My PSX and the game are quite possibly in my mum's basement thousands of miles from here, but I found the game for $6 or so on the PlayStation Store for PSP, so I got it. The impression I get from it is that it's a "3D/Modern" Final Fantasy game that harkens back to the early, 2D sprite-based games in how it's done - that's why I decided to gamble $6 on it. I enjoyed most of the 2d games, 1-6. I never really played 2 and am in no hurry to do so given what I've heard. I played the poo poo out of FF1 and utterly adored 4 and 5. However, I'm one of those mutants that thinks that 6 is just "okay". I never had access to 3 until recent years, but I read a long LP of it and I never want to play it now. It's basically the predecessor to 5, which is amazing, but did everything wrong that 5 does right. Long story short is that I feel that 9 deserves a chance. 8 was woefully disappointing and 10 and beyond jumped the shark so hard that they are in orbit now. I actually have FF1 for the PSP. It's a gorgeous remake with beautiful sprites and levels, but it has three major flaws. Firstly, apart from the super bosses, it's piss easy unless you go out of your way to not level. Try to have a go at Lich at level 8 - it's a treat. Secondly, stat-ups at level up are largely random, which encourages save-scumming - that's bad design. Thirdly, the loot system for bonus dungeons, the main attraction of the port, are arbitrary and random. Whoever came up with that idea deserves a slap.
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Feb 9, 2015 22:27
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 Reckon we got ourselves some console-talkers in this here PC RPG thread Be a shame if somethin' happened to 'em
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Feb 9, 2015 22:36
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Quarex posted:
My fault, I made the mistake of speaking of Final Fantasy. Back on topic: Bouchacha posted:The only level scaling scheme I can think of that I enjoyed was Wiz8. I like the idea of splitting up the world into zones with an upper and lower scaling. TES games kind of homogenize the world with their player-based scaling because every enemy can be found anywhere. I'm restarting a level 40 character exactly to get rid of scaling and delevel the world. My favorite thing about Gothic 2 was how unforgiving most of the world was at the very beginning, and how you would slowly be able to visit more and more of the world depending on when you could handle the enemies there. The Gothic formula is by far my favorite form of managing encounter difficulty. Letting you go virtually everywhere, no scaling at all, but you'll get smoked if you go where you shouldn't. For a long, long time--until the mid-90s even maybe--that was pretty much the standard way of handling things. You take a wrong turn, get your poo poo pushed in by encounters that flatten you, and that's the game's way of telling you "you're not ready for this area yet." The Guardian Citadel from Wasteland 1 is probably the classic example. It's too bad that model has fallen out of favor, especially since finally being able to take on that place that crushed you early on is really satisfying. But now that I think of it, level scaling has been around for a really long time. Even the original Ultimas had it in some form or another. Though in really poorly implemented ways--based on the number of moves you made. Good luck starting a new Ultima 3 party when your moves are in the millions. 
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Feb 9, 2015 23:07
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Many of the Final Fantasy games have PC ports now, so I think that you're being a bit pedantic, but I did forget that this was supposed to be PC only. The "RPG Thread" just seems to natter on about 25-year-old Playstation JRPGs that I've never loving heard of, so this is just about the only thread where I can talk about things that I actually know. In any event, Genpiei has about the right of it. As long as the penalty for death isn't too draconian, letting players learn their limits by the fine art of getting stomped into pita bread is a pretty decent system. The problem arises when you have games that encourage exploration but then punish you horribly for the slightest foot out of line. MMORPGs are bad about this. I played EQ during its apex of popularity, and it hated players. Huge experience penalties for death that were hard to get back, and even then only partially. All of your gear on your corpse, so you respawn naked in a town a huge distance away from where you snuffed it. Need to summon a corpse? Only works in the same zone and it requires a specific class with a very expensive component. I played WoW during two stints and, while it may have been a little too forgiving in some ways, it was better than that. The sad part is that some people liked that.
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Feb 9, 2015 23:17
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Oh I know how easy it is to get off-topic in a thread when you forget which one you are reading; the Traditional Games chat thread just suddenly started talking about New England blizzards and I nearly posted a big thing about Vermont before being like "wait... wait no what has happened to this thread help" I did kind of assume only Final Fantasy VII and uhh whichever the two MMORPG ones are were available for PC, but I do imagine anything after about VIII would likely not even qualify chronologically for this thread regardless, haha. Also agreed about Gothic having a fantastic difficulty curve. And the perils of discovering Ultima III's level scaling, particularly as a kid who did not understand how to save and so kept making new parties  And EverQuest really did introduce a wonderful new world of "punishing you for playing the game" (though I am sure someone here can cite a MUD that had the exact same setup in the 1980s or something). Ultima Online was kind of awful too but at least you had the choice between (probably) losing your stuff or (definitely) losing a little of your skill progress. But in a game where many skills could be macroed back up in a day or two that was not quite as big a deal, either. Speaking of Wasteland...man, macros. So simple and effective and yet I still struggle to think of any other game that came with such functionality built-in.
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Feb 9, 2015 23:55
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I don't mind if it strays off topic a little bit. If it carries on for like 2 pages that'd be an issue, but a small derail is fine.Bouchacha posted:My favorite thing about Gothic 2 was how unforgiving most of the world was at the very beginning, and how you would slowly be able to visit more and more of the world depending on when you could handle the enemies there. ...or you could just run around everywhere anyway, abusing AI and geometry to slowly clear through enemies one by one, even the ones that only pull in groups.  Since it just came up, King's Field is another game where you have a lot of freedom to start but tough enemies prevent you from going everywhere. However, there are still locked doors and such that block off certain areas until you've found the key. It's actually kind of a middle-ground between Gothic and the more linear RPGs, giving it a sort of metroidvania type feel. Finding new keys or spells opens up entire new areas and then the levels you gain from there make other areas possible, opening up the world even more. I really wish more games would steal that formula. JustJeff88 posted:I played EQ during its apex of popularity, and it hated players. This is a pretty accurate description of EQ. I did have fun exploring, though, until I got on the wrong boat and was immediately derailed into a multi-hour cross-country journey to retrieve my corpse. I didn't play that game for much longer after that.
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Feb 10, 2015 01:58
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seorin posted:This is a pretty accurate description of EQ. I did have fun exploring, though, until I got on the wrong boat and was immediately derailed into a multi-hour cross-country journey to retrieve my corpse. I didn't play that game for much longer after that. They had a game with a lot to explore, but to keep people subscribing they made it necessary to grind oneself stupid and instituted huge punishments for the slightest mistake. Hell, not even a mistake. I can't tell you how many times I died due to a simple lag spike. I clearly remember a whole raid being wiped because a boss got stuck in a wall. I had to have a friend fish my body out because I had to go to work. DM's did gently caress all, of course, even though it was an obvious bug. I actually had another flutter with EQ a few years ago during a period where I had a lot of free time. It's a lot less hateful than it was (even though you can still de-level from dying, which is inexcusable) and it was fun exploring areas that I never got to see previously. I also relished being able to destroy old raid bosses solo with level 80+ characters, but there's no community anymore and there was so much content I would never see again because of either ridiculous camps or nobody to raid with. I did do several epic weapon quests while I played; some old, some new. I did the necromancer "duckstaff" quest which was incredibly hard then but was easy now, and all 3 Shadow Knight epic quests. I also did the enchanter quest for the 1.0 epic, which was still a PITA even so many years later with a level 90 character. So many parts to that quest...
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Feb 10, 2015 02:13
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:My problem there is more that there are just too many respawning fights in general, not that they vaguely scale to your level. And that's mostly a problem because fights can take a really long time in Wizardry 8, even when you are a lot more powerful than what you are fighting.
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Feb 10, 2015 02:54
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seorin posted:This is a pretty accurate description of EQ. I did have fun exploring, though, until I got on the wrong boat and was immediately derailed into a multi-hour cross-country journey to retrieve my corpse. I didn't play that game for much longer after that.
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Feb 10, 2015 04:49
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Quarex posted:Haha. And all of us who know exactly what the "wrong boat" probably was wonder whether your body was stuck in Erud's Crossing or the Ocean of Tears. My bet is on the former. Nobody wanted to go to Erud from ... YES I HAVE FINALLY FORGOTTEN THE MAIN CONTaww no dammit Antonica My personal favourite was getting killed on a boat in the Ocean of Tears and losing your body somewhere in the vast ocean... usually because somebody trained a cyclops and the game's pathfinding and collision detection was so bad that you would get ganked by a mob in the next postal code. Another fun one was lagging out in Timorous deep and getting eaten by raptors over nothing but featureless water, or to be kiting those buggers and get devoured by Faydedar the dragon. Bastard spawned only once a week for a few hours, yet somehow that happened to me twice. They did revamp the Ocean of Tears a few years back along with Freeport and a few other old worlds zones... OoT does look very impressive now. Also, I finally had the chance to finish the Plane of Sky to the top island. Never did that in the old days because that raid took literally days.
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Feb 10, 2015 05:44
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JustJeff88 posted:Another fun one was lagging out in Timorous deep and getting eaten by raptors over nothing but featureless water, or to be kiting those buggers and get devoured by Faydedar the dragon. Bastard spawned only once a week for a few hours, yet somehow that happened to me twice. MMORPGs, if nothing else, do tend to have some of the most delightfully sad tales attached to their nostalgia.
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Feb 10, 2015 05:50
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Has anyone played Elminage Original? It's a PSP Wizardry clone that is immune to any and all attempts at documentation. A lategame brawler can do a chain of wrestling moves intense enough to require multiple screens of text, and thieves can steal ANYTHING off anyone. But getting to lategame is beyond me.
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Feb 10, 2015 05:51
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Quarex posted:MMORPGs, if nothing else, do tend to have some of the most delightfully sad tales attached to their nostalgia. That sounds like it's story time. The level grind and exp loss made EQ pretty impenetrable for me, so I played that game in my own way. All I ever did was run around everywhere playing merchant. EQ had a pretty thriving player market because it predated soulbound equipment, so players were always selling off their used equipment after finding or buying upgrades. My game consisted of one-third exploration and two-thirds buying and selling stuff to try and twink myself out with high level dungeon loot. I remember I had pretty good armor, but what I really wanted was a mithril two-handed sword. This thing was expensive because it dropped from a max level dungeon boss, and dungeons were not instanced so there were only so many times per day he could be killed by anyone at all, let alone by someone willing to sell the sword if they got it. I was obsessed with its haste effect, though, and I wanted it more than anything. There was a crafting exploit at the time that let you make miniscule amounts of gold crafting pie tins from vendor bought materials and then selling the finished product to an NPC. I spent hours grinding out pie tins in my pursuit of that sword, and probably would have given up long before getting the sword because of how drat slow it was. However, the developers wanted to fix the exploit, and they did this by changing the vendor cost of the pie tin sketches. After hearing about the fix on the test server, I created the max number of characters for my account, filled their bag slots with the biggest bags I could get, and then filled every slot in every bag with nothing but stacks upon stacks of pie tin sketches. Then I logged out and waited for patch day. I logged in excited to see if my scheme would pay off ... and it did. I don't remember the exact amounts, but I know that in about 5 minutes I made more than ten times the amount of platinum I'd made from hours upon hours of grinding. I could finally afford the sword, just as soon as I found someone selling one. I'll stop there just due to length, but I can continue later if someone out there actually wants to hear about the bizarre way I played EQ and the boat incident.
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Feb 10, 2015 10:07
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My bizarre secret is that I played Everquest for like a year and my highest level dude was like 18. I have no idea what the gently caress I was doing, but I was having a blast doing it.
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Feb 10, 2015 11:07
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I'm sure it's been posted before, but in case you guys are unaware, a dude from RPG Codex is making a giant history book about CRPGs: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/
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Feb 10, 2015 13:32
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Commander Keenan posted:I'm sure it's been posted before, but in case you guys are unaware, a dude from RPG Codex is making a giant history book about CRPGs: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/ How much unexpected racism is planned for the book?
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Feb 10, 2015 14:09
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:How much unexpected racism is planned for the book?
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Feb 10, 2015 14:16
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seorin posted:That sounds like it's story time. I enjoy all EQ stories. I look at that game now, as it was during the early years, like a bad romantic relationship. I know that it had to be worth something but, years later through the mists of time, I cannot for the life of me remember what the gently caress I was thinking. It's reverse nostalgia, basically. I realised not that long ago that the reason that MMOs are dead to me is because I am an explorer, but I tend to think of video games as a solo hobby. MMOs are built around the concept of not being able to do anything by oneself; that's why I stopped playing EQ a few years ago even though the game was much less adversarial than it had been. There was so much content that I had missed, but I would never be able to enjoy any of it because nobody cared to raid it. It will never happen because it's no longer a hot enough IP, but if they made a single-player EQ where one player controlled a party of six, I would buy it in a second. The world is loving enormous after 20 or so expansions, and there is so much interesting lore and history.
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Feb 10, 2015 17:33
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Quarex posted:Oh my god you have finally clarified that I am not crazy to have believed I was randomly killed (and subsequently lost all my stuff) to a dinosaur killing me out of nowhere in the Ocean of Tears. Pre-post edit: Oh, wait. No, I have immediately learned you were indeed still talking about the Timorous Deep. I am apparently talking about Allizewsaur, who must have glitched onto or near to the boat at some point since I never even made it past level 24 in EverQuest so clearly I would not have been chilling where he existed. Oh hell I have no idea; EverQuest was all downhill for me after they changed the pit next to Erudin to actually take you to The Hole instead of teleporting you back to your bind point, so of course I lost all my stuff by hopping in there after a few months of not playing and then was pretty much done for good. I never could get into MMOs back in the day, but I've been engulfed in FFXIV since release 18 months ago. One of the things that I really love about modern MMO encounter design is that it's got a great balance to dealing with the issue of how to handle difficulty in encounters with their continually increasing (and usually regimented) player/gear levels. World class players can beat stuff within days/weeks, less skilled players can spend time gearing up first to make things easier, and much less skilled players can do easier versions of content. And it's also fun to go back to fights that were insanely hard at release and just curbstomp them through the combination of greatly improved skill and higher level.
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Feb 10, 2015 19:43
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jpmeyer posted:I never could get into MMOs back in the day, but I've been engulfed in FFXIV since release 18 months ago. One of the things that I really love about modern MMO encounter design is that it's got a great balance to dealing with the issue of how to handle difficulty in encounters with their continually increasing (and usually regimented) player/gear levels. World class players can beat stuff within days/weeks, less skilled players can spend time gearing up first to make things easier, and much less skilled players can do easier versions of content. And it's also fun to go back to fights that were insanely hard at release and just curbstomp them through the combination of greatly improved skill and higher level. We must be playing different games. Every MMO I have played has been about putting in the grind time to get mathematically girded enough to kill Whatever It Is; skill has very little role to play. There is quite a bit involved in multi-man raiding, but the solo game in MMOs, at least for me, has always been about getting big enough numbers. I'm actually almost irritated by how impatient I am for the remake of Avernum 3, Ruined World (I think). I was pleasantly surprised when Escape from the Pit came out, and I didn't get really excited about Crystal Souls until November of 2014, but I am chuffed to bits for 3 and I'm kind of bothered by that. The game isn't even his next project and I don't see it coming out any sooner than spring of 2017, but I keep thinking about it. Exile 3, when I was a lad, was the game that I had as shareware. Nowadays a demo lasts about 13 seconds, but Jeff's unregistered versions have always been huge, and Exile 3 was the one that I played a ton. I never owned the full version as I was very young and couldn't afford it, but it still is quite big in my memory. That, combined with my OCD to finish the trilogy, is probably why I'm so impatient for it even though it's a long way off.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:18
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Genpei Turtle posted:Bards Tale 3 rant I played the game when it was new on an Apple 2. I didn't have any of these problems. The one problem I ran into is that the final dungeon was far too difficult until I found a workaround. Somehow I was able to turn a quest in repeatedly to spam huge numbers of levels. But up till the final dungeon the game was balanced just fine. Looks like other versions were total crap. Shame. BT3 was the best of the series.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:50
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JustJeff88 posted:We must be playing different games. Every MMO I have played has been about putting in the grind time to get mathematically girded enough to kill Whatever It Is; skill has very little role to play. There is quite a bit involved in multi-man raiding, but the solo game in MMOs, at least for me, has always been about getting big enough numbers. That's basically why I never could get into them back in the day, and yeah to the best of my knowledge I can't really think of any MMOs that have any kind of rich solo play experience rather than just bear asses until you hit the level cap.
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Feb 10, 2015 21:02
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Waltzing Along posted:I played the game when it was new on an Apple 2. I didn't have any of these problems. Er...I know that post was long but did you read through the whole thing? I was specifically referencing the Apple II version when I wrote that--that's the version I played too. That's why I added that extra paragraph about how the other versions were even worse. (I've played a lot of them as well, but that's because I'm a masochist) All the other problems I listed are part of the core game design that are consistent across all versions. The non-Apple versions had additional problems but the underlying gameplay, monster stats, EXP per level etc. for is the same in all versions of the game. I kind of suspect I know why you ran into a roadblock at the last dungeon too--Malefia is the first place in the game where enemies have enough HP to survive multiple NUKE spells. (For those unfamiliar with BT3, NUKE is one of four useful spells in BT3, and does 2500 HP damage to every monster facing you. As a point of reference, a high-level warrior kitted out with the absolute best equipment in the game will deal about 800-1000 damage to a single enemy per round. You routinely face 50+ monsters at a time.) I'm guessing like most gamers back then (myself included) you discovered that NUKE lets you murder everything and used it over and over again until it stopped working. The presence of NUKE (and DIVA) keeps Bard's Tale 3 from being hard, but that's a pretty far cry from having good balance. You literally have a party full of worthless mooks except for the dudes in the back row with a big "I WIN" button.
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Feb 10, 2015 21:55
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JustJeff88 posted:It will never happen because it's no longer a hot enough IP, but if they made a single-player EQ where one player controlled a party of six, I would buy it in a second. The world is loving enormous after 20 or so expansions, and there is so much interesting lore and history. Like jpmeyer, I've been into FFXIV since its release (18 months, really? god, has it been that long?). I'm actually finding it's pretty popular among older gamers, somehow. It's far from a perfect game, but it seems to capture some of that ephemeral magic from MMOs of old without being too filled with excessive bullshit like actual MMOs of old. Anyone who enjoyed EQ or WoW should probably at least check out the free trial. I'll stop derailing the thread about that, though, and return later to continue e: Also more on topic, does anybody have tips for dealing with combat in Quest for Glory? I'm not sure if it's just really bad or if I am. I am open to the possibility that the answer is both. seorin fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 22:28
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seorin posted:Like jpmeyer, I've been into FFXIV since its release (18 months, really? god, has it been that long?). I'm actually finding it's pretty popular among older gamers, somehow. It's far from a perfect game, but it seems to capture some of that ephemeral magic from MMOs of old without being too filled with excessive bullshit like actual MMOs of old. Anyone who enjoyed EQ or WoW should probably at least check out the free trial. MMORPGs, for all their problems, are PC rpgs like any other. I see no reason why we can't talk about them as we would Bard's Tale, Wizardry, or Ultima just because they involve dealing with mostly human nitwits instead of AI ones. I ran away from FFXIV because of three reasons: 1) The whole FF series jumped the shark hard no later than FFX 2) FFXIV got HORRID reviews when it was released and was an utter disaster 3) The first FF MMORPG was a God-awful grind-fest that required 200 people, at least 40 of which were the all-powerful White Mage, to do anything (so it was a lot like early EQ and clerics) Don't get me wrong - I enjoy playing games with other people who aren't total wankers. I just hate knowing that I cannot do certain things without the right number and type of other human beings, and that's a big part of the MMO experience. You're correct, though, in that I've no right to condemn a game that I haven't played, and FFXIV seems to have gone through a sort of renaissance since it's... let's say "inauspicious" debut. Perhaps I will give it a go after mid-May when I have more time.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:50
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