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JustJeff88 posted: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. FFXIV 1.0 is by far the worst main line Final Fantasy game (its only competition if you include spinoffs is Final Fantasy All The Bravest, which is basically Cow Clicker). From all I read about it, it's bad in ways that people just take for granted in terms of competently creating a product FFXIV 2.0 is basically like MMO best practices: the game Aaaaaaaaaanyway: seorin posted: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. Assuming you are referring to the EGA version of QFG1: 1) If you're not a fighter, you almost never need to actually fight anything. I'm pretty sure I never fought anything other than the occasional goblin or brigand as a wizard or thief 2) You really do need to grind a bit or you really won't be able to fight anything tougher than individual goblins or brigands. 3) If you are a fighter, you will definitely need to grind since there are some tough enemies that you need to fight to progress like the ogre and minotaur 4) The combat is sorta like Punch Out, but since stats affect things you will occasionally miss/get hit despite your efforts.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:58
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JustJeff88 posted: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. Oh, I totally agree. I think EQ talk is very relevant and on-topic. It's at least as janky in its own way as other games of that era and earlier. What I meant was I probably shouldn't derail too much about FFXIV just because it's so much newer and has its own (terrible) thread and everything. jpmeyer posted:Assuming you are referring to the EGA version of QFG1: I picked up the big series pack from GOG and have been trying to get into the VGA remake of the first one. It's rough because the first game in this style I played was the much more recent Heroine's Quest and now I am completely spoiled. As an aside, Heroine's Quest is amazing and it's a loving crime that it gets all the baggage associated with the term "free to play" even though it's more like a normal game that just happens to be free because the dev is crazy and awesome. Everybody reading this thread should play it, then feel bad that you got to play such an amazing game for free and send the dev a donation on his site like I did. ...ahem. Anyway... My character's combat skills are definitely lacking, but even goblins just kinda stab me to death in 4 seconds while I waggle ineffectually. I can't really read their tells at all. I actually tend to be pretty good at combat in games (stunlocking shadowbeasts in Gothic at level 1? Yes.) so I feel like there's some trick I'm missing to get so horrendously massacred by the weakest creatures in the game.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:09
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Pssh Quest for Glory 1; only scrubs play that version instead of Hero's Quest 1  seorin posted: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 think I have now in four or five different MMORPGs, from Fallen Earth to Star Wars Galaxies to EverQuest 2 to uhh Lord of the Rings Online and something else I am not thinking of right now, seen that there was a holiday event coming up, logged in and gotten as many of whatever inane holiday stupidity thing was easily obtainable, and then a year or two later sold those things for enormous profit as of course they were never reproduced. The only problem with my brilliant plan: I hate MMORPGs. JustJeff88 posted: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. jpmeyer posted: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. Anarchy Online was a lot of fun once  Not sure if it was soloable though. I had no idea what I was doing.Ultima Online was probably the only big MMORPG where being A Dude Alone could work perfectly well, but...considering the idea of group mechanics did not exist yet, that is no surprise.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:43
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Quarex posted:Ultima Online was probably the only big MMORPG where being A Dude Alone could work perfectly well, but...considering the idea of group mechanics did not exist yet, that is no surprise. Yeah, my one MMORPG experience was UO in its beginning years (pre-Trammel, post-statloss) and I pretty much did it mostly solo, though I did play a bunch with my roommate when we were both free. We pretty much never played with other random pubbies though. Both of us were pure non-combatants so we did a lot of logging and mining and alchemy and resource-swapping, but that was about it. It was kind of a cool game because you could actually survive and have a really good experience without the grind of fighting monsters all the time. It was a pretty good game for soloing but it had other problems--mostly swarms of shitlords that got their jollies off of killing defenseless players. The introduction of the no-PK world made things a lot better. And said shitlords' endless howling over "Trammel ruining UO" after everyone moved there en-masse to avoid harassment will never not be funny. I don't remember exactly why I quit--part of it was annoyance with the admins' handling of the game. I can't remember exactly what bothered me about it but it was pretty bad. Also I lost my wood income because the brain-dead admins banned my roommate for cheating that he didn't do, and screw being a lumberjack. I don't remember exactly how they thought he was cheating but he fought them for months trying to get them to look into his account. Eventually they did look into it, but by the time they went "sorry our bad" and reinstated his account we had both lost interest.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:03
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Funny that Quarex mentioned the Ancient Cyclops, because I played bard and druid. Druids had good speed buffs and could teleport, while bards moved insanely fast with their travel songs. I never really cared about the AC as a consequence. Right after I started playing again a bit a few years ago, I went to see the revamped Ocean of Tears. I was properly impressed, and I went over to his island, which had changed greatly. He was up on my Tracking, so I blasted him to bits with one nuke and used the ring to multiquest J-boots for my froglok wizard. I never played Ultima Online, but it's fun to hear about. It's nice to hear about a game that allowed people to advance alone and without just killing things. EQ was all about the grand and, since only a few classes could solo for poo poo, it was all about trying to find a group in whatever was the hot grouping zone because it was just about the only way to advance.
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Feb 11, 2015 02:23
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seorin posted:My character's combat skills are definitely lacking, but even goblins just kinda stab me to death in 4 seconds while I waggle ineffectually. I can't really read their tells at all. I actually tend to be pretty good at combat in games (stunlocking shadowbeasts in Gothic at level 1? Yes.) so I feel like there's some trick I'm missing to get so horrendously massacred by the weakest creatures in the game. 2) In QFG VGA, when you run out of stamina, you cannot engage in combat at all. As it, you get one more attack and then you die automatically (in QFG EGA you just would drain health instead of stamina, which at least more or less worked). So, if you don't have the stamina (boost vitality through working the stables, training with the weaponsmaster, etc.), you may consider running like hell. e: once you have the stats, all you need to do is push the attack button.
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Feb 11, 2015 03:33
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JustJeff88 posted:I never played Ultima Online, but it's fun to hear about. It's nice to hear about a game that allowed people to advance alone and without just killing things. EQ was all about the grand and, since only a few classes could solo for poo poo, it was all about trying to find a group in whatever was the hot grouping zone because it was just about the only way to advance. It kind of depended on what you wanted to do though. If you just wanted to bash monsters' skulls in there were lots of places you wouldn't feasibly be able to go alone. UO was set up in a weird way--there were no levels and it basically operated on a Darklands type of skill progression. Combat skills were ridiculously easy to train to the point that you could max them out within a few days tops, and after that most people just went into dungeons and the like to kill the hardest monsters in search of loot drops. Everything else on the other hand was a massive grind. It would take months of play before you could max out some of those crafting skills for example. Which was kind of odd because a grandmaster smith or whatever was massively less profitable than just killing things and taking their stuff, despite requiring a lot less work to get that far. Of course that's UO from the first 3 years or so, it's apparently changed a lot since then.
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Feb 11, 2015 04:00
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Continuing my story from earlier, trade in EQ took place at an informal bazaar in East Commons. It was safe for both good and evil aligned characters, and there was a bank nearby. That was important because money in EQ was heavy, so nobody wanted to travel around carrying hundreds of coins. In looking to finally buy the mithril two-handed sword, the bazaar was the place to go. After a few days at the bazaar (probably only 2-3 hours each day, but still) I couldn't find anyone willing to sell the sword. However, I found all kinds of deals on other items. I'd see something that normally sells for 10 plat going for 6 or somesuch, so I'd buy it and then sell it at a profit later. Nobody (but me apparently) wanted to sit in the bazaar for hours on end, so people paid for the convenience of getting in and out quickly. Still not finding the sword, I headed for the source: Lower Guk. Getting there required going through Upper Guk, which should have been impossible at my level. However, I was still neutral with frog men, meaning most enemies in Upper Guk wouldn't attack on sight. The few things I could aggro (probably) wouldn't kill me as long as I didn't double back, so I had to find a way to get through without getting lost. Since most dungeons were labyrinthine mazes, that was easier said than done. I used a well known exploit of the game's offline tutorial. You could change the tutorial zone to whatever you wanted with a hex editor, allowing you to explore freely with no mob spawns. It was of limited use because you'd instantly fall to your death in many zones, and for the rest you could barely see anything because you were stuck as a human with no light sources and no night vision (humans sucked). Upper Guk was not one of the zones you instantly died in, but it was close to pitch black. Learning how to get through using that method was a serious pain in the rear end, but I really wanted that drat sword. So that's how a level 23 warrior inexplicably showed up in a level 50 dungeon carrying god knows how much platinum. Other players loved it because they could sell or money change without going back to town, which meant more item/exp farming before leaving and losing their camp to somebody else. I helped them avoid encumbrance by buying heavy items or trading a small amount of platinum for a large amount of the copper and silver being dropped by enemies. After several trips, I'd doubled my money and finally found someone willing to sell me a mithril two-handed sword for far less than I'd been expecting to have to pay. They got to keep farming the froglok king, and I got to twink out my level 23 with a level 50 weapon. We were both very happy. That brings me to the story of the boat, which I will save for yet another post.
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Feb 11, 2015 09:39
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seorin posted:Continuing my story from earlier, trade in EQ took place at an informal bazaar in East Commons. It was safe for both good and evil aligned characters, and there was a bank nearby. That was important because money in EQ was heavy, so nobody wanted to travel around carrying hundreds of coins. In looking to finally buy the mithril two-handed sword, the bazaar was the place to go. That's quite clever; well done. Right before I stopped during my last EQ flutter I was down in the "dead side" of Guk killing zombie frogs for faction, but for the life of me I can't remember why. I actually logged on my highest level character on Test (92 enchanter) last night, and he had the Ghould Lord's Scalp which was a faction-boosting item for guys who were "evil." My enchanter is a gnome but he worships an evil god, so he can use it. I wish that I could remember why I did that. Looks like I missed it, but apparently EQ1 had a thing not that long ago where you could promote, for free, one character per account to level 85 with some cash, good gear and a bunch of AA points. I have 5 characters of various classes and races at that level or above, but I'm sorry I missed that in a way. I only play on the Test server because I'm not paying monthly fees among a dozen other reasons, but before I stopped I created a character of every class, all on separate accounts. Wouldn't have minded bumping those up, but it's a moot point I suppose. Edit: I just remembered; coin is weightless now and doesnt stay on your corpse when you die, so there is basially no reason not to carry every penny that you have. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 16:49
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That bazaar area sounds like West Brit Bank in Ultima Online. Trade in UO was a mix of hawking your goods there, opening gates to your shop if you had one, or dropping runes to said shop for other people to follow. The interesting thing about UO is that there was no zone chat - you could only see people on your screen talking, so there wasn't trade channel spam there is in newer games.
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Feb 11, 2015 18:01
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I actually just logged into EQ this morning for giggles, and they added a new feature to help people "catch up" on AA points. I was super sceptical, but I tried it on my level 92 enchanter and, no joke, I got 4,599 AA for free. Blew my loving mind. Basically, if you turn it on, you automatically get for free every AA for which you qualify that predates the last 3 or 4 expansions and you get all of the newly unlocked ones every time that you level. That is a really good idea to help people "catch up", but since they got rid of the free pass to level 85, it seems odd to do away with one and keep the other. Still, great idea.
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Feb 11, 2015 18:09
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There should be enough background information now that the story of the boat will actually make sense. When the first expansion came out, I wanted to see the new continent but knew nothing about it. I got on the boat at Oasis, arrived at the town on the other side, and promptly got killed by the guards. I didn't know that there were two boats, one for good characters and one for evil. The boat leaving from Oasis was the evil boat, and my little dwarf was not welcome on the other side. At the time I was bound in Halas, which should make any EQ vet cringe. Halas was like the boonies had their own boonies. It was almost impossible to be bound further. Getting back required crossing several zones unsafe at my level, especially since all my stuff got left on my corpse when I died. Including my sword. gently caress. I really had to get to that corpse. So I ran on foot through *deep breath* Everfrost, Blackburrow, Qeynos Hills, West Plains of Karana, North Plains of Karana, East Plains of Karana, Highpass Hold, Kithicor Forest, West Commons, East Commons, North Ro, and finally Oasis. I got on the boat again, hopped off early to swim to the shore before getting in aggro range of the guards, and then got killed anyway. Probably because my character was not level 50 like everybody else, the guards saw me coming from a mile away and would not let me jump off safely. I was going to have to go the long way around. Getting to the other boat was only a couple zones farther, but it dropped me off on the opposite side of Kunark. My corpse was on the other side of even higher level zones completely unfamiliar to me, which meant a lot of guaranteed deaths and exp loss without a very good chance of actually reaching my corpse at all. So like anybody else would have done long ago, I started pestering druids and wizards for a teleport. I didn't know all the available teleports were even worse off. Despite that, somebody eventually responded to my pleas. It felt like at least an hour of winding pathways and levitating over canyons high above the heads of monsters that could kill me with a bad look, but in the end he did successfully get me to my corpse. He didn't ask for anything in return, but I was his merchant buddy from then on. I'd sit in the bazaar to get a good price on whatever he needed, then hang onto it for him until he could come get it. I never asked for more than cost, but I still made a boatload of money trading other items while I was there. When I finally decided to leave EQ for good, I spent several hours in the bazaar selling off all my stuff to amass a ridiculously huge pile of cash. My wizard friend wanted a froglok bonecaster's robe the same way I'd wanted my sword, and I knew I could get it for him if I tried hard enough. It took awhile to find it for a price I could afford even after selling off all my stuff, but I did it. I met my friend one last time to give him the gift, then logged off with nothing except a mithril two-handed sword.
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Feb 12, 2015 06:21
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seorin posted:So I ran on foot through *deep breath* Everfrost, Blackburrow, Qeynos Hills, West Plains of Karana, North Plains of Karana, East Plains of Karana, Highpass Hold, Kithicor Forest, West Commons, East Commons, North Ro, and finally Oasis. Memories of stuff like this is why I only played EQ for three months when it first came out and never got a character over level 20, yet I still remember it vividly years later. It was brutally hard and often unfair but doing stuff like this really was an undertaking, and there was nothing else like it. I remember a friend of mine dying on one side of the world, so I tried guiding him across. Instead of Highpass, we did the Gorge/Runnyeye/Misty Thicket/Kithicor (that's the correct order, right?), and we bumped into a high-level druid who we helped by exchanging all his money into smaller coins and then he gave us some kick-rear end armor he wasn't using anymore and was going to sell, and buffs that allowed us to finish the journey pretty quickly.
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Feb 12, 2015 13:21
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Bruteman posted:I still remember it vividly years later Trauma will do that to you
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Feb 12, 2015 13:48
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victrix posted:Trauma will do that to you No, that's repression. I played Ultima Online for a few months and can't recall much of it 
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Feb 12, 2015 14:34
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My very first character was a paladin, but my first serious character was a druid. I still have him, and he's level 87 now. It's better now, but back then druids sucked. They solo'd well and they could get around with their speed buffs and teleports, but nobody wanted to group with them. The devs fell into the trap with jack-of-all-trades classes where they sucked at everything. The only decent healers were clerics, but shamans had slow spells which were huge damage mitigators, so they were desirable. Druids had decent nukes, but mana regrenned so slowly that it wasn't worth it. Plus, because druid were fun, they were the most common class, so they were almost vermin to some people. Later, I played a bard who were by far the rarest class because they involved constantly pressing buttons, and everybody wanted me for everything. For a while, I was one of about 8 max-level bards on my server, and I was constantly invited to do raids, try out for high-level guilds, and so on. Absolutely night and day. You know, as much as I worry about "pay to win" scenarios, I'm thinking that EQ might be on to a decent idea here. They've made it now where you basically can have free AA up until level 90 (105 is the current cap) and one can buy a well-kitted level 85 character for about 35 dollars US. Thing is, with no longer having to worry about AA grinding, getting up to level 85 isn't so hard because it's just straight leveling. I honestly never thought that they would do anything like this. I have an 82 shaman with horrible gear and I'm thinking about doing his 1.0 epic for fun. I have 6 characters currently (druid, bard, SK, enchanter, necro, and wizard) with their 1.0s and I've helped with countless others, so I am really tempted to do that. The enchanter one is a million different sub-quests and I've always wanted to do the magician one because it was one of the toughest back in early EQ. I don't know why I find those quests so compelling, but I do.
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Feb 12, 2015 16:17
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Bruteman posted:Memories of stuff like this is why I only played EQ for three months when it first came out and never got a character over level 20, yet I still remember it vividly years later. It was brutally hard and often unfair but doing stuff like this really was an undertaking, and there was nothing else like it.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:31
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Quarex posted:That aspect of EverQuest is indeed part of its enduring appeal I think. I still sigh wistfully when I think of our friend who finally agreed to start playing EverQuest again on a new server with us but only under the condition that he receive "safe passage to the Misty Thicket," a phrase that will always be synonymous with trying to find the safest places to level in the game, haha. EverQuest was so far ahead of its time that it could get away with that, honestly, but today it would never work. There is plenty of criticism that could be laid on WoW, but I give it credit for finding a reasonable "sweet spot" that appeals to a lot of people. The people I don't get are the ones who want to play EQ99, which is basically a perfect remake of EQ in that year. I can understand wanting to play the game when it was simpler and smaller and when there was no Alternate Advancement, but they brought back all of the horrible aspects of it: waiting 15 minutes to regen mana, having all of your items on your corpse which is lost in the wilderness and accompanied by a massive exp. penalty and, perhaps my personal favourite, hell levels. For those that don't know, back in the first many years of EQ, the character levels of 30,35,40 and 45 were "hell levels", meaning that they took more experience to get through than several "normal" levels combined. Back then the level cap was 60-65, levels 51+ were relatively slow, but they were at least consistent. The hell levels were sprinkled among lower levels that went by comparatively quickly. They were incredibly tedious and unpleasant in a game that was already fairly tedious and oftentimes hateful. Years later, I don't remember when exactly, they took them out and said that they were a mathematical error on their part. Now, the EQ team has had a long history of not fixing poo poo that's obviously hosed up for years, but I still think that they were lying. I think that it was a deliberate attempt to pad out progression time and get people to keep playing and paying, but I can't be sure. That's one thing that I remember very clearly among a lot of stupid design issues. I will say this, though... anyone who played EQ, even a bit, during the early years should have a look again. I'm not encouraging people to play "seriously", I just think that people should see how things have changed. There's a lot of fear about the game because of the recent sale of the group that created and maintains the game, but it's different enough now that it's worth a second look if only to go "Wow, what a difference." I get a certain humour out of how they've effectively gutted the power-leveling market for EQ. A fully geared 85th level character can be bought for no more than $35 American, and basically all AA points up until 90 are free now. I don't blame them for doing this, despite crying from libertard posters weeping about "entitlement", but I grin when I think about how much money has been spent on in-game property over the years.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:50
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JustJeff88 posted:EverQuest was so far ahead of its time that it could get away with that, honestly, but today it would never work. Serious question: What was it about EverQuest that made it so far ahead of its time? I never played it so I know very little about it in practice, but everything I've read seems to indicate that it was basically just a generic DikuMUD with a graphical interface put on top. ed: should note I don't mean that in a disparaging way, there must have been something different since DikuMUDs had been around for ages. Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 19:06
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I think it was a right place right time kinda thing. A lot of games back then pretty much succeeded on good graphics alone. MMOs were advancing and gaining popularity, and dedicated graphics cards were becoming more common. It just perfectly filled a newly forming demand and became immensely popular enough to succeed on a social level independent of its quality as a game.Bruteman posted:Memories of stuff like this is why I only played EQ for three months when it first came out and never got a character over level 20, yet I still remember it vividly years later. It was brutally hard and often unfair but doing stuff like this really was an undertaking, and there was nothing else like it. It's sort of a relic of the time - something that could only exist at that time and place. I think it would be literally impossible to recreate that same experience nowadays, no matter how hard you tried. The average gamer doesn't have the same amount of time or patience, and there's a lot more competing for their attention (games and other things). In a way, though, that makes me glad I got to experience it and understand what it was about. JustJeff88 posted:hell levels I had succeeded in forgetting about those until just now. 
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Feb 14, 2015 01:15
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seorin posted:It's sort of a relic of the time - something that could only exist at that time and place. I think it would be literally impossible to recreate that same experience nowadays, no matter how hard you tried. The average gamer doesn't have the same amount of time or patience, and there's a lot more competing for their attention (games and other things). In a way, though, that makes me glad I got to experience it and understand what it was about.
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Feb 14, 2015 01:28
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It was right place, right time, and would never work today. I will say this, though... it was truly an "epic" game like no other before or since, in my admittedly limited experience. I had fun during two stints of WoW, but it never felt like that. I didn't miss the sadistic difficulty, but WoW never had a "wow factor" like EQ. No pun intended. The masochist "hard-core" crowd is too small, and these days it is all about big money titles. The weirdos who do play EQ99 are of a small number, but a lot of them feel that having such a brutal game "builds tension and gives a sense of reward" - I feel that they are nutters and should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. I myself would give 99 a go if it had these modern conveniences: - Kept resting, which allows anyone to get back to full health and mana within a few minutes if they are not attacked and don't move. Filling up on health and mana in old EQ could easily take 20 minutes of doing nothing. - Got rid of having all of your loot on your body, so you respawn a huge distance away with no gear. - Exp loss for death and losing a level to death still exist. I would get rid of those entirely, but I could live with them as I did in recent years because one can hire mercenary clerics that can resurrect the dead for modest fees, plus one can buy a corpse summon from NPCs as well. No more of having to rely on clerics to get back huge death exp loss. - Speaking of clerics, balance the game so that loving clerics are not all-powerful. They aren't good at anything but healing, but no other healing class could come close. WoW did a great job of having 4, maybe 5 now with monks, healing classes that all played somewhat differently but were all viable. Nothing in that game coudl come close to a cleric. They admitted that clerics were too important after a while... three years after the game first came out, and all they did were give druids and shamans some big heals like clerics. Resurrections for experience recovery were still almost entirely their province. - I'd like to say "let every class solo to some degree" like in WoW, but that will never happen. - Stop making vital quests and such with ultra-rare spawns that get constantly fought over - I saw an entire guild on Rodcet Nife, back around 2001, get perma-banned for that. It just creates resentment and hatred like any other shortage of opportunities. Killing a dragon is bad enough; having to race the whole server to the dragon is bollocks. - And yes, get rid of hell levels... seorin posted:I had succeeded in forgetting about those until just now. We should start a support group. We'll all sip experience potions (they have those now) and frequently moan the number 45 like we are suffering horrible agony. (45 was by far the worst hell level in the game, even worse than 59 when 60 was the level cap)
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Feb 14, 2015 03:04
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Science will one day figure out how JustJeff88 could talk about Level 45 like that and explain how horrible it was to do it over and over again and how other people could get to the point that it was hard to level in a single night and decide the game sucked. Not that I speak from personal experience once I hit level 20ish in all those games or anything. I actually was kind of sad that I hated the grind so much, since all my friends were playing EverQuest at the time and I was not able to keep up with them because it was just so awful to watch the orange bar go up so slowly
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Feb 14, 2015 04:34
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Quarex posted:I actually was kind of sad that I hated the grind so much, since all my friends were playing EverQuest at the time This is exactly what I meant when I said it hit a certain popularity threshold. It's probably the thing I miss most about WoW - in its prime, it was so absolute with such little competition that it seemed like everybody played. It ceased being a purely virtual world and evolved into a strange kind of shared culture that reached far past the boundaries of a game world. It became its own industry with businesses based entirely around its fan base. It spawned an entire genre of youtube videos with its own subgenres. When fans are making stuff like this, it's grown into something more than just a video game. I don't have a good word for whatever that something is, but it's kind of amazing in its own way. Letting yourself get swept up into it is enjoyable purely for the sake of being a part of something so huge, like when a TV show catches on and it's fun to watch even if you don't really like it just because you can talk to everybody about it the next day. The more it dominates your social circles, the more pull it has over you, and the more fun it is to participate.
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Feb 14, 2015 07:43
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I only played WoW for two months, but I'll always remember the sea lion quest. I hear they changed it so I'm a little saddened, because it felt like such an epic journey for my lovely low level night elf druid. I only played EQ for a day so I don't have too many memories of that, other than a broken quest.
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Feb 14, 2015 20:01
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One thing I loved about Everquest PVP is that it was all open world, and there was practically no balancing whatsoever. Certain classes just fuckin owned in PvP, and if you saw that class you got the gently caress out of there and come back with friends.
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Feb 14, 2015 22:29
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Ever crack. I'm just going to bitch here. Tried all day to beat the fall of steadwick in the HoMM3 stock campaign. I finally win because the AI sent the big bad dude guarding the castle to a windmill for +500 gold and I was able to waltz in and kill 30 pikemen and some griffons. I thought this was supposed to be the pinnacle for fantasy TBS game design.
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Mar 2, 2015 04:40
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To interrupt Everquest conversation (man, that's some painful memories), Ultima Underworld kickstarter is at $650K and needs another $100K for Lizardmen, $150K for pets and $200K for cooler music, graphics, sound effects. Being that this is the Old School RPG thread I hope everyone backed this!  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/othersidegames/underworld-ascendant
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Mar 2, 2015 05:01
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SYSV Fanfic posted:Ever crack. What difficulty were you playing on? The AI isn't usually THAT dumb.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:33
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SavageMessiah posted:What difficulty were you playing on? The AI isn't usually THAT dumb. Normal. There was a hero there, and he had an army. It just couldn't hold up to a stack of 15 archdevils and black dragons. I had lost several times because the general had 255 griffons, 40 cavaliers/crusaders, 80 zealots, etc. I couldn't figure out how to crack that nut because I am new to the genre. It was quite a surprise to ride up on day 1 of the week and see him at a windmill.
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Mar 2, 2015 21:45
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SYSV Fanfic posted:Normal. There was a hero there, and he had an army. It just couldn't hold up to a stack of 15 archdevils and black dragons. I had lost several times because the general had 255 griffons, 40 cavaliers/crusaders, 80 zealots, etc. I couldn't figure out how to crack that nut because I am new to the genre. It was quite a surprise to ride up on day 1 of the week and see him at a windmill. Bizarre. If you had a very high movement for whatever reason maybe it didn't consider you able to make it to the castle before it got back. In my experience the AI won't budge off a town if there's a strong hero around.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:22
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SavageMessiah posted:Bizarre. If you had a very high movement for whatever reason maybe it didn't consider you able to make it to the castle before it got back. In my experience the AI won't budge off a town if there's a strong hero around. I still have no idea how you are supposed to beat this map in a non cheese fashion. By the time you can clear the garrisons (anti magic barrier) that guard steadwick it will be at least one month into the three month limit. Then this rear end in a top hat general has a huge death army and an unlimited supply of griffons. There are three castle towns (no champions though), an inferno and a dungeon. Its hard to build large stacks with three different types of towns. At most you can amass 15 black dragons and still have time to get to steadwick. Arch Devils are worthless - they wipe out 20 or so zealots before being cut down by the other stack and the griffons. The 40 crusaders will shred your black dragons by turn three. I tried it with a magic hero, a might hero, etc. No matter what I did I got owned. The only thing that made it even attempt-able is he would attack heroes near steadwick, so you didn't have to do a seige. If it hadn't been for the windmill thing I was going to try to get armageddon at the inferno town and cheese it that way.
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Mar 3, 2015 03:36
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Version 3 of my Grid Cartographer software is now available: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/ The main highlights are: * Hexagons for tabletop gamers and mapping games like, erm ... Fallout? Earthbound?  * Completely rewritten Mark Tool and a new Paint Selection tool (see below) * Coloured labels * Constrained drawing on square grids by holding down the <shift> key. * Optional "Ground Floor"  I thought people in this thread would be interested but the project is in bit of a weird state right now. Hexagons and complex selected areas was a serious amount of work for me but probably doesn't benefit people using this thing only for game mapping. So, now that it's done I hope to return to adding some smaller cRPG focussed requests like wall switches, etc. I do think that there's room for improvement with the game mapping side of things, but it'll be smaller stuff like that. Hidden Asbestos fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 00:05
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Hidden Asbestos posted:Version 3 of my Grid Cartographer software is now available: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/ I downloaded V3 and gave it a run but I have to concur with you that for those only using the tool for game mapping this version isn't much of an improvement. Don't get me wrong, I love Grid Cartographer and really appreciate all the work you've put into it, but to be brutally honest I don't think there's enough new in version 3 to warrant buying a license for the third time unless you really needed to do some hexmaps. I think if I was a tabletop wargamer I'd eat it up though. Have you thought about forking the project into two different programs? Or offering a higher-priced permanent license, like the UnReal World guy used to do? I'd happily pay $15 or so for a permanent license for it, but am a little leery about having to re-buy it every time a major numbered release comes out. (As a side note, in version 2 my maps keep getting "stuck" and refusing to switch from tiles to walls until I save the map or reboot the program. Is this a bug or am I inadvertently doing some sort of keypress that I'm not aware of that permanently locks things into tile mode?)
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Mar 6, 2015 01:31
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I haven't really thought about permanent licenses, I've been limiting major releases to roughly a 12 month cycle though. Feels like a good balance and not too gougey (not that you were accusing me of that  )Genpei Turtle posted:(As a side note, in version 2 my maps keep getting "stuck" and refusing to switch from tiles to walls until I save the map or reboot the program. Is this a bug or am I inadvertently doing some sort of keypress that I'm not aware of that permanently locks things into tile mode?) Hidden Asbestos fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 01:47
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Genpei Turtle posted:I downloaded V3 and gave it a run but I have to concur with you that for those only using the tool for game mapping this version isn't much of an improvement. Don't get me wrong, I love Grid Cartographer and really appreciate all the work you've put into it, but to be brutally honest I don't think there's enough new in version 3 to warrant buying a license for the third time unless you really needed to do some hexmaps. I think if I was a tabletop wargamer I'd eat it up though. To that end I've now addressed one of the things that v2 does poorly - its inability to easily mark out complex effect zones in games like The Bard's Tale. A feature I've just added (and available in the next free update to Pro Edition users) is to extend the existing darkness system with three generic 'field effect' overlays. Basically you can now draw red / green / blue colours over the map tiles to mark out anti-magic, HP drain, silence, etc. (you decide what colour a means) and since it's using primary colours it'll even handle overlaps like mixing paint, as you can see here. Hidden Asbestos fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 01:06
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You may be interested in this, a Kickstarter for Seven Dragon Saga, with a number of SSI veterans on the staff (such as David Shelley). I only heard from it through Matt Barton's Matt Chat, so I think it isn't getting a lot of coverage. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/537511454/seven-dragon-saga-by-tactical-simulations-interact Pool of Radiance is still one of my favorite CRPGs, if this is remotely anything like it as they claim, I hope it succeeds. But I'm concerned. 
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Mar 19, 2015 15:59
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Daler Mehndi posted:You may be interested in this, a Kickstarter for Seven Dragon Saga, with a number of SSI veterans on the staff (such as David Shelley). I only heard from it through Matt Barton's Matt Chat, so I think it isn't getting a lot of coverage. I was going to post this earlier but forgot. I heard about it when it first came out; I'm really excited to see that they've got their kickstarter going. I hope they do well, it's been a great medium so far for getting out new old school games (see Wasteland 2). Matter of fact Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity is due out like next week.
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Mar 19, 2015 16:39
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Does Pillars support 1440p? I just got a 1440p monitor and I'm hopeful.
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Mar 19, 2015 16:52
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| # ? May 16, 2024 19:36 |
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Cloth map? DIBS
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Mar 19, 2015 23:20
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