RPG Codex top 50 cRPG's

[19Yzerman19]

Originally Posted by Luder

I'm surprised the first Mass Effect didn't make the list.

Console. I know, it had a PC version but it was primarily a console game.

[AcGold]

Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate

Totally agree. Just a hack and slash, with no story. I have played BG through 4 times and on a fifth right now with the EE. After which I'll play through BG2 for a 7th time. So much replay ability .... and Icewind Dale sits on my shelf collecting dust. Finished it once just to say that I did. Really rather meh.

is BG2 that good? I had it way back in the day and never really got that far, fun game but found the combat horribly tedious

[Mike F]

Originally Posted by dissentowner

You just described everything Skyrim wasn't. Either you have no clue about rpg's or you never even played the game and are just talking out of your ass.

Originally Posted by Rathji

I agree he was wrong about almost everything, except the companions. They were pretty much annoying and shallow in every respect.

I played the game to about level 45, and have played rpgs since the 80s.

So tell me, what was I wrong about?

Do you really think the story was anywhere near the Baldur's Gate series, KOTOR, etc.? Who were the well written, memorable supporting characters?

Was combat more than run up to an opponent and left-click left hand, right-click right hand? Again, compare that to BG, KOTOR, Fallout, Planescape, Dragon Age, Arcanum, Vampire, etc., etc., where you need strategy to deal with protections, resistances, and often have combat and non-combat ways to deal with encounters. Skyrim was a game where you could focus on magic, melee, or missile, but since it was basically a single player, first person game, every encounter was by necessity beatable by running up, standing in front of any enemy, and bashing it for a while. Trust me, the character I played dual-wielded axes and very soon there wasn't an enemy, be it dragon, mammoth, giant, or anything, that wasn't easily dispatched with the run up & bash strategy. It was boring.

And as for skills, again the difference between playing a 5th level and 45th level character was simply how many swings, shots, spells it took to down an enemy. Were there meaningfully different spells or combat skills introduced? No. The Alchemy skill tree did nothing to change brewing other than percentage changes. Same for enchanting. Smithing did allow different armor, I'll give it that.

I could go on, but won't.

IMO, the story was dull, the characters dull, and the character progression uninteresting and not meaningful.

[AcGold]

you should try mods, nearly everything that you say is moddable. You can change the core gameplay quite drastically, modded mine to have way more spells that drastically changed the magic (ie. giant magic barriers and different archer abilities very much changes the way you can play). You can play with a horde of skeleton warriors helping you out, you can play with an army of followers, you can fly dragons around, you can summon dragons, you can add giant wars, you can add so many dragons it's like they are flies swarming, you can add a marijuana shop or you can even mod the game to be seamless in some parts so there are no loading screens.

Everything you said is true about it, until you mod it. In terms of depth and complexity the mods make it stand out, more work in terms of man hours has been put into skyrim than any other rpg so far. 31000 mods, granted 95% of them are probably crap that leaves around 1400-1500 ways to change the game to be better significantly. Thought the crafting was crap? Well you can change all of it. Though the skill trees were bad, well you can change the entire thing, same with combat. You can mod it to be much more complex and difficult so that running up and bashing won't work. There is a lot of story content as well you can add, some of it probably to your liking.

[kirant]

Originally Posted by Slacker

Is Fallout: New Vegas better than Fallout 3?

Honest question, I truly enjoyed Fallout 3 but got completely bored with NV.

Depends what you're looking for. Fallout: New Vegas was more of a Fallout game in the sense that it was fairly heavy in the black comedy category. Between the Wild Wasteland trait (which is great IMO), Fisto, and the entirety of Old World Blues DLC, the game plays out to be very funny in the way the old games were meant to be.

Fallout 3 is more serious in its take on post apocalyptic feel. The world itself was horribly empty and depressing (written extremely well in this regard as Bethesda knows the DC area). It's an atmosphere game and does that part well. Well, maybe except Liberty Prime. I can't tell if that was supposed to be funny or over the top.

Originally Posted by Mike F

I played the game to about level 45, and have played rpgs since the 80s.

[...]

IMO, the story was dull, the characters dull, and the character progression uninteresting and not meaningful.

I think the problem is that Skyrim was partly designed to be modded. It's so open source that the game seemed to be built on the concept of "here's the tools and a bare world, you populate it with what makes it fun".

Throwing in mods makes the game orders of magnitude better than the original. I only finished the original story once just to say I did. I've never finished any expansion. But I've dropped hundreds of hours into modded versions, where major aspects like eating to survive, tactical combat, a balanced game, and more are taken into consideration. And I've yet to finish any game with all the mods in place since they're so distracting that I'll instead just jump from cave to cave that I'd never explore in the original, since they are now fun to explore.

[CaramonLS]

Originally Posted by AcGold

is BG2 that good? I had it way back in the day and never really got that far, fun game but found the combat horribly tedious

I loved it.

Really memorable characters, tons of stuff to do that was off the main story, the expansion (Throne of Baal) was a really nice addition and made your party feel mega powerful with new spells.

[Mike F]

Originally Posted by AcGold

is BG2 that good? I had it way back in the day and never really got that far, fun game but found the combat horribly tedious

BG2 is my favorite and most re-played game of all time.

What do you mean by tedious? It was designed to be a pause & play game where you had to employ strategy for many encounters, buffing your party, removing protections from enemies, etc. rather that a faster paced, real-time combat game.

If you find stopping and starting, semi-turn based combat tedious in principle, it's probably not for you.

[AcGold]

It was the stop and start aspect combined with how they would seem to be unresponsive to certain commands having to goad them over and over to do something, maybe I was just bad at it I don't know.

I really liked the setting and the story but found the tediousness in that all my good skills and spells would get depleted so fast and I'd have to end up resting so often that it felt a little ridiculous to be resting all the time. That and that I could never get the thieves to auto detect traps and stuff very well, I guess I just wanted it to be easier to traverse certain parts more quickly. Maybe I had a bad party set up I don't know, I just always found it extremely hard to keep my party members alive, a lot of loading, resting, dying, pausing to make small amounts of progress.

[Blaster86]

New Vegas gets a lot of bonus points for falling back on mythos that people knew. FO3 was very much so an entirely new story line that played off very little that had happened in 1 and 2. NV re-immersed people who played the originals back into what they knew.

[Mike F]

Originally Posted by AcGold

I really liked the setting and the story but found the tediousness in that all my good skills and spells would get depleted so fast and I'd have to end up resting so often that it felt a little ridiculous to be resting all the time.

That's the nature of Dungeons and Dragons - spells and skills usable once, then you have to rest.

Lots of people felt the way you do, thus the move after to go to a regenerating time based system. Now, going back can seem a bit jarring.

Originally Posted by AcGold

That and that I could never get the thieves to auto detect traps and stuff very well, I guess I just wanted it to be easier to traverse certain parts more quickly. Maybe I had a bad party set up I don't know, I just always found it extremely hard to keep my party members alive, a lot of loading, resting, dying, pausing to make small amounts of progress.

Another feature of that era of games - they were hard. I like it, as it makes beating an encounter a real feat, but, again, if you're used to today's more forgiving games it's a bit jarring.

[CaramonLS]

Originally Posted by AcGold

It was the stop and start aspect combined with how they would seem to be unresponsive to certain commands having to goad them over and over to do something, maybe I was just bad at it I don't know.

I really liked the setting and the story but found the tediousness in that all my good skills and spells would get depleted so fast and I'd have to end up resting so often that it felt a little ridiculous to be resting all the time. That and that I could never get the thieves to auto detect traps and stuff very well, I guess I just wanted it to be easier to traverse certain parts more quickly. Maybe I had a bad party set up I don't know, I just always found it extremely hard to keep my party members alive, a lot of loading, resting, dying, pausing to make small amounts of progress.

Yeah, in BG2 there definitely were fights that were very difficult to beat without significantly losses on the first try. I still get angry when I think about the level drain vampires.

Lots of reloading and strategy, but IMHO, that made victory all that much sweeter. Mages are a lot weaker in the beginning of the game too, so you will find yourself resting to heal them up. But later, when they have 7th circle+ magic, they can become destructive bad@sses that don't always need to rest a ton.

Also remember that buffs and debuffs do make a huge difference. Not every battle can be won by simply loading up 10x magic missiles or 10x cure wounds. You need to use a lot of different spells. Like casting things like blessing or things that do saving throw +1 vs creatures makes a really big difference, especially to your front line tanks.

It isn't all about damage.

[AcGold]

I tried the buffs I had at the beginning but they all sucked and didn't really do much besides haste. The stoneskin or spell like it didn't really help that much, I'd always end up getting poisoned/held in place and killed quickly.

[Erick Estrada]

Somebody has a hard on for Fallout. New Vegas shouldn't even be top 30.

[Erick Estrada]

Oh and any list that has KOTR II ahead of KOTR is hard for me to take seriously.

[AcGold]

New Vegas is definitely top 30. The way you can do literally anything you want and things will have realistic outcomes is worthy of it being in the top 30. You can spend hours tracking Benny down, doing his missions or walk in the casino and blow him away. There's so much hidden lore and interesting little things that make it special, it was glitchy as hell on release but can be fixed/modded to be much better.

[dammage79]

Baldurs Gate 2 was amazing. Loved that game

[AcGold]

Is it worth starting with bg1?

[Mike F]

BG1 has a lot of character and story development that makes BG2 more enjoyable, and the new BG Enhanced Edition improves on some of the things that made it less enjoyable originally.

[AcGold]

NWN 2 has 2 mods for it, Baldur's Gate 1 and Icewind Dale. Those old games in 3d with higher definition. Maybe someone will do BG2, I'm definitely going to play the mods

[GreenLantern]

I've been waiting for the BG 2 enhanced edition to show up on a steam sale. Either I missed it or it hasn't yet..