zoog on 6/12/2015 at 21:10
henke, you must be kidding or really hurt yourself playing antipodes of your favourite genre. Or that's i'm too simple to understand such things.
Jason Moyer on 7/12/2015 at 04:02
I can't think of a single old RPG with good combat besides Knights Of Legend, and the system in that was so cumbersome that you'd spend 3 hours fighting a couple goblins and it was tedious as hell. Most of the other RPG's had blob combat which is meh. Dungeon Master and EotB were more memorable for the puzzles. Fallout 1/2 had decent combat, at least when your companions weren't burst-firing into your back. Fallout Tactics showed how tedious Fallout's combat was when it became the focus of the game. Infinity Engine games were better when they focused on the storytelling and exploration rather than micromanaging the space bar. Arena and Daggerfall had an awful combat system, and Morrowind's still wasn't very good. Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah and Oblivion were pre-Mass Effect, so there you go. I guess you could include Diablo, but I don't think that style of click-and-slash was particularly engaging until Titan Quest and Torchlight.
tldr; RPG's have tons of combat, and it's generally not very good.
PigLick on 7/12/2015 at 05:44
You have precisely described my problem with a lot of recent RPG's.
Lets take Morrowind for an example, I actually really like the combat because it is pure dice rolls, there is no physical skill involved. Sure its not "realistic", you just spam attacks and use magic and buff items, but it is really still a pure RPG. Also in Morrowind there was so many ways to avoid combat as well.
Now I was looking forward to Fallout 4 but from the reviews and peoples opinions it sounds like my worst nightmare, never ending battles. Would love to explore the world but honestly it sounds like a lot of tedium.
I recently replayed Mass Effect 1 + 2 and I ended up turning difficulty to "casual", cos you know what? I just wanted to progress through the story, choices and dialogue without having to reload saves after dying, it becomes tedious.
Sulphur on 7/12/2015 at 06:00
I think we shouldn't ignore the fact that ME1's 'combat' model was to take a real-time shooter and slap oldschool RPG mechanics on top, which doesn't work unless your intent is to make each fight feel vaguely stupid. There's a reason why ME2 and 3 went for a more direct combat experience: it feels right.
Volitions Advocate on 1/5/2016 at 05:05
So I'm a member of the Audio Engineering Society ((
www.aes.org)) and our chapter managed to get a chance to visit the BioWare offices in Edmonton on Friday, and we spent all day there talking with the audio team about a bunch of different stuff about Audio specifically, and about their development generally. I'm under NDA so I can't talk about it really, which sucks. But I think I'm allowed to say they showed us tons of stuff from Andromeda, and I am extremely excited for it. It's going to be even better than ME3 in terms of technical excellence. It's too bad I don't know much about the story, but even if I did I wouldn't be allowed to talk about it. Ill just say this: Those people are driven and passionate, and even if you don't like the way they do or have done some things, they are working like mad to give us the best game they can.
It was sweet, would be really fun to work there. But I have to admit, looking at all their stuff, made me want to develop my own games even more. Maybe after Grad school I'll start being a bit more serious about it.
Nedan on 2/5/2016 at 03:51
Whenever I hear news of next Mass Effect... I just can't get excited at all. For the reasons stated in this thread... it took 3 full games to tell one story, which wouldn't be a problem if the 3rd wasn't a big middle finger to anyone who felt their choices in the previous games mattered in the slightest, & the games just didn't know what they wanted to be. A jack-of-all-trades is a master of none as it were & nothing that the Mass Effect trilogy did was particularly great when compared to other games out there.
Jason Moyer, from the list you gave off... I guess you just don't like true RPG's at all.
Most recent RPG's have been moving toward this trend of streamlining the gameplay & make the action flow more smoothly. Unfortunately, this means removing any of the roleplaying from the combat & turn it into some action game. The Elder Scrolls series has become unrecognizable crap because of this. When it comes to the standard from which I measure all other RPG's... my top three have never changed:
Ultima VII: The Complete Edition
The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II - Daggerfall
Planescape: Torment
I'll state it right now that anyone worth their sand claiming to be an RPG videogame aficionado or enthusiast has played & defeated these three games... period. You see, I always compare any others to these games because they are the best at what they do & what they bring to the RPG table is second to none. Are the characters & story as detailed as the ones in Planescape Torment? Is the world interaction & minute details as great as it was in Ultima VII? Is the combat & scope of the game as intricately detailed as Daggerfall? If it at least hits one of these... it'll be on my watch list. But if it hits 2-to-3, an instant buy at release as long as the reviews fair well. Sometimes I'll even pre-order if I trust the developer enough.
One of my absolute favorite RPG's the had an excellent combat system, that actually came out way before Mass Effect, was The Temple of Elemental Evil. The unfortunate side effect was that this game need a ton of patches for all the bugs left behind after Troika fell. Another one of my favorites for it's combat system was Icewind Dale II. I loved Icewind Dale to death & could not stop playing it. Icewind Dale II just took everything that made the original great & refined it.
Currently, the RPG's I'm looking forward to the most are... Cyberpunk 2077, Torment: Tides of Numenera, The Bard's Tale IV, & Underworld Ascendant.
Jason Moyer on 2/5/2016 at 04:11
Quote Posted by Nedan
Jason Moyer, from the list you gave off... I guess you just don't like true RPG's at all.
I've played basically every noteworthy western cRPG since the first Wizardry and there are plenty of them I like. Saying that the combat in the vast majority of them is somewhere between mediocre and terrible isn't an opinion I would consider particularly unusual among old-school cRPG fans.
As far as your top 3 cRPG's go a.) I haven't played far enough into Ultima VII to really give a reliable opinion b.) Daggerfall is great if you like needlessly awkward action-oriented combat and massive, randomly generated environments c.) Torment was fantastic, but it doesn't do anything to contradict my opinion that combat in most cRPG's is rubbish. On the other hand, saying that the combat in the Icewind Dale games is great is kind of a no-brainer (which is odd, because combat was tedious as hell in PST and large chunks of the BG games).
Thirith on 2/5/2016 at 05:24
I love Ultima VII, it's one of my favourite games of all time - but in terms of many roleplaying virtues (no pun intended) it's pretty shallow. Combat is a joke (which I don't mind, since I never played RPGs for the combat), character development is minimal, and the Avatar gets to do little in the way of decision making. In many ways it's more of an open world graphical adventure with RPG trappings. Using it to uphold old-school RPG strengths IMO doesn't make for a particularly coherent argument.
Nedan on 2/5/2016 at 05:43
Your problem with the combat in PST or the BG games is your focus or, to put it in better terms, your reason for playing the games & not the combat system itself. With the exception of Icewind Dale II (which uses a modified version of the 3rd edition D&D ruleset), if you had a basic understanding of how the combat system in one game worked, you could hit the ground running in the others relatively quickly.
With PST, the story & the characters is what draws you into the game, the combat gets in the way. Not because it's lacking or more tedious compared to Icewind Dale, but because it stops the constant flow of story. With BG, it's relatively the same reason as PST oddly enough. I'm going to go out on a limb here & state that other than some small changes... there's not a whole lot different between the combat systems. ID1, BG1+2, & PST all use the 2nd edition ruleset of D&D fairly well (with some changes & a small exception going to PST in that it takes a few liberties with the rules mostly involving the nameless one & his immortality... but that's an entirely different debate for another time).
Instead of posting a fast reply to this post... sit back & ask yourself
"Did I dislike the combat because it was tedious... or because I was more interested in the story/characters?" Why do people set the difficulty in recent rpg games to easy? It's the same reason that some "Let's Plays" are getting prevalently dominant on youtube. Now some people watch Let's Plays on youtube because the person playing adds some character to a game (people like Markiplier or PewDiePie for example). But for the rest, it allows you to experience the story & characters without all the so-called tedious grind that comes with true rpgs.
Anybody that has ever played a tabletop rpg game of D&D can testify that the grind is the main part of the whole experience. Having all your friends gather around a table, grinding away & leveling up your different character builds, trying to prepare yourself & your friends for whatever dick move ;) the DM wants to throw at you next is the heart of all true rpgs. Most of the time... the story takes a huge backseat to all of it. But with video games, the story & characters take a bigger part in all of it because a lot of the time... these games are mostly singleplayer with multiplayer given as an after thought if at all. That's why Icewind Dale has great combat... the story takes a bit of a backseat &, other than the townspeople, there is really no characters to interact with as the combat is the main driving force behind the entire game. That's also why games like (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)) Rogue are still getting ports or modified versions to this day because the combat & grind is the entire game.
Jason Moyer on 2/5/2016 at 06:18
You're mistaking "disliking" with "not understanding". I had no problems completing any of the IE games, in fact I found all of them fairly easy using whatever the normal difficulty is (the core rules one). That doesn't mean the combat was remotely enjoyable most of the time, outside of IWD 1/2 which were consistently good combat-wise. Much of BG&BG2 and the latter part of PST were just nothing but endless trash mobs that took no effort to kill and just interrupted the flow of the game. People complain about the Dark Roads in DAO, but as far as I'm concerned that was entirely faithful to Bioware's attempt at creating a modern BG. Same with the endless combat in Pillars.
As far as tabletop D&D goes, after rolling our characters we very rarely used most of the dice-based mechanics in our games. It was all about, you know, roleplaying and when the wargaming shit got in the way of that we ignored it.