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Thuryl posted:Just as a heads up, if anybody is particularly jonesing for a Wizardry IV LP there's an offsite one that's pretty close to being finished now. It's a straightforward, no-nonsense exposition of how the game works and just how actively and punishingly hostile it is to its players. The LPer is attempting to solve as much of the game as possible without consulting a walkthrough, because he is insane and wishes to be more so. That's actually not a bad LP. I was thinking of doing a Wizardry IV LP myself using the PSX remake in much the same vein (getting killed over and over just to show how much of a bastard the game was but that pretty much shows everything I could. Well, unless I did it using the Arrange version of the game which has New Game+ features and some bells and whistles that make it slightly different than the original Wizardry IV (in some ways easier, in some ways harder)
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Mar 23, 2012 16:13
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Boldor posted:There are actually all kinds of hilarious ways to die in Wizardry 4. It's rather like, say, the Space Quest series in that regard; there are some where the game doesn't even try to be subtle about the "that was really stupid" part. I don't think I've ever seen a collection of those online, though I do have a fairly large number of death screen shots in my personal digital archive. My last runthrough of Wizardry IV PS1 I got eaten by Trebor's ghost before I got a single random encounter in the first room. And that's on Arrange mode which is allegedly easier. I still love the game because even it hates you and will unfairly kill you in a million ways, you know that coming out the gate and without the need to grind, it doesn't take too long to make up for lost progress. quote:These I'm unaware of, but then again I only know the American Wizardry games. I'm not familiar with most of their adaptations never mind dozens of completely new games. I did listen to some of the music for the Japanese Super Nintendo version of Wizardry VI, and that evoked a sense of "that music is just wrong" in a way not matched by anything I've ever heard, other than maybe the Necromancer theme in the Heroes of Might and Magic II: Price of Loyalty expansion pack. I don't mean bad music, I mean utterly inappropriate. New Age of Llylgamyn (which has IV + V bundled together) has an Original Mode and Arrange Mode. Original Mode is the same as the realtime-Trebor-ghost-moving PC version with better graphics. (but you can revert them to the original graphics if for some reason you want to) Arrange mode has some larger differences--in addition to some additional bells-and-whistles flavor text, you have the option of summoning 5 monsters instead of 3, and can actually control them in combat. In each successive New Game+ you get additional monsters that you can summon at each circle, including "boss" monsters from other Wizardry games. And it has an automap, which is surprisingly less helpful than you'd expect. Overall it's still grossly unfair, but a little less so. I've played a bunch of the Japanese Wizardry games and with a few notable exceptions (Wizardry X *cough*) they're all pretty good. The Japanese market really didn't like the 6-7-8 system changes so they tend to stay closer to the 1-2-3-5 systems. Or a mishmash of the two, like having Psionics and Alchemists with their own sets of spells in a Wizardry I style. I'm especially fond of the Wizardry Empire series myself. Wizardry VI SNES was admittedly a low-effort port though. Until its death in the mid-late 90s, the PC-9801 was the platform of choice for Japanese Wizardries. Most games originally on the PC-9801 that got ported to consoles were pretty terrible in their console forms, come to think of it.
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Mar 23, 2012 17:55
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Douche Bag posted:Where would be a good place to start with these old RPGs? I bought Eschalon on Steam and am loving it so far. I want to see where it's roots are. Planescape caught my eye but people tell me that it's not great for people new to crpgs. If you liked Eschalon, you can't go wrong with Spiderweb Software's stuff, which is very similar in presentation and style. (better, too, in my opinion) Planescape and the other Infinity Engine games are good but a departure from most of the older PC RPGs being discussed in the thread. Most of the stuff discussed here is the older turn-based, light on plot and heavy on combat, exploration, and party building stuff. If you're looking on getting into that sort of old-school RPG, the Might & Magic series is good because it's not nearly as punishing as some of the really old-school stuff. 1&2 fall on the hardcore side of the scale so 3 or 4/5 might be a good place to start.
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Mar 24, 2012 19:24
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Quarex posted:Yes. Another of those infamous games where making your characters and getting equipped in the first town was probably more fun than the rest of the game, because it was so unbelievably unforgivingly hard. And time-consuming. I dunno, I loved the hell out of KOL and actually finished the game, and though the initial learning curve was pretty steep I don't think it was really all that hard. Especially once you figure out that it's impossible for your characters to actually permanently die. Time-consuming though, definitely. The thing about KOL that's so unintuitive compared to most other RPGs is that simply picking the stuff with the biggest numbers is not a good idea. A party entirely decked out in full plate is going to die because only the most fit characters can wear that much weight and swing their weapons more than a couple of times before passing out from fatigue. The combat system also heavily favored using the environment to lure enemies into situations where they were at a disadvantage--since each enemy was roughly about the same strength and skill as a party member, straight-up wading into to the thick of things was pretty dangerous. Hiding behind trees to guard from missile fire and around chokepoints where enemies couldn't see you was the order of the day. There's a guide at GameFAQs now for KOL that goes into pretty insane detail onto how to break the game over your knee in other ways too. I had a lot of success in that game fighting as best as I can describe as a medieval commando squad, bunching my characters around doorways, then having one kick in the door and mobbing the enemies inside, or otherwise picking off opponents one at a time and/or luring them into ambushes. It took forever, but I found it hilariously funny to lure unsuspecting monsters into my traps and having four heavily armed dudes cut them to ribbons one at a time before they even had a chance to strike back. Or if they were human, simply walk up to them with my mage, who would simply touch their heads (no to-hit rolls for spells) and make them explode. Battles took forever but it was pretty satisfying. gently caress those enemies that make your characters crap their pants in fear rather than attack them. There's a replayable quest to get an item that nullifies the fear effect but until then, things like giants were a pain in the rear end to fight. Good thing random battles were optional if you had horses.
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Mar 26, 2012 14:22
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Underwhelmed posted:Up until reading your above comment, I was convinced that there was no actual content beyond about 30 feet outside of the starting village. The best I think I ever did was survive one battle with some bandits after taking minimal injuries. Then I hit some giants on the way back to town. It is totally playable once you get the hang of it. If you can get through JA2 Knights of Legend will probably be a breeze because it's far less punishing in a lot of ways. The two games do play very similarly in the types of tactics you have to adopt, come to think of it. Tip though: Get horses, even the crappiest ones will help. If your entire party is on horseback before you have an encounter you'll get a text message which will allow you to choose whether you want to bother or not. Once you learn which text messages correspond to which enemy type you can always know what you're getting into in advance. Even if you do get stuck in a tough fight, running is entirely a viable option--the only thing you may lose is carried melee weapons. As long as you make sure that your party's melee weapons are sheathed (I don't think bows can be actually dropped) when you run you lose nothing, and always get away. Once you get a feel for the mechanics and realize that you never have to fight a battle you don't want to bother with, the game becomes a lot easier. Though the extra loot/experience helps, I don't think you really ever HAVE to fight any random battles. You could probably beat the game doing nothing but quest battles, which are more fun anyway.
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Mar 26, 2012 16:33
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Quarex posted:This is all very interesting, and it makes me want to add it to the infinite backlog of DOS games to run through again. It definitely seemed like the kind of game that would be super-fun to actually be able to enjoy. And your comment about how you could probably just do quest battles and win the game is hilarious, since it makes sense, even if gaining a new rank in the arena was one of the most alluring level-up systems ever implemented so I would have a hard time not wanting to do random combats. Unless the levelling was related to doing quests, but I do not think it was. IIRC leveling isn't related to quests but could help. I think the way they did it was so the monsters in random encounters scaled to your level but the monsters in the quests remained at a constant level. It might have scaled quest equipment though--I remember one later quest where everything was kitted out in stuff too heavy for them and I literally did nothing but sit at the entrance of the level and wait for all the enemies to die of exhaustion trying to reach me. quote:Which also produced a super-memorable fact about the starting town: the stable-owners were racist against dwarves. Every time I started playing, I weighed the fact that I really liked that dwarves could actually wear heavy armor pretty effectively against the fact that I was going to have to survive long enough to get to a different town to buy my dwarves horses There were a ton of racist/sexist/classist NPCs in that game IIRC. Funniest were the priests who would tell your spellcasters they're going to hell for witchcraft every time you go to get healed. One of my guys got kicked out of half the businesses in the game, I must have picked a bad class for him or something. Dwarves were pretty awesome though, they could wear practically anything since their armor was so light due to their small size. All this talk makes me kind of want to pick it up and play it again but the time sink is a real detriment. When I played it as a kid my dad had an Apple II with some sort of speed-boosting thing that tripled the computer's speed and made it a little more bearable, but in Dosbox or something nowadays it would probably take forever to make any real progress. There should have been some sort of mid-game save function because some of those quests would literally take hours if you're not just looking to grab the quest item and run.
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Mar 26, 2012 18:59
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AlmightyBob posted:The perspective in The Bard's Tale is throwing me off. If I look down the street, the building that I'm standing next to looks like its 1 step ahead of me, but if I turn, I'm standing right in front of it. Those old 1st-person RPGs did that to better give you a sense of where you were. In a true 1st-person view you'd only see the step ahead of you and the walls to its side; if you could see a little bit off to your left and right it made it easier to map. The city in Bard's Tale 1 is a bit difficult to navigate; fortunately there was a map in the inside cover. Dammit now I want to break out BT again. I never did get past that evil dungeon in BT2 where no magic works... Also when it comes to the music, basically with any really old CRPG (or game in general for that matter) made before 1990 or so you shouldn't expect to get much in the way of music at all. Those were the days before sound cards where the best you could get was blips and bloops out of your speakers. Back then the tinny music from DOS games you got with a dedicated sound card was mindblowing.
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Mar 28, 2012 00:14
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Peas and Rice posted:What Bard's Tale (and especially BT2) managed with the PC speaker was loving awesome. The theme song to BT2 is so catchy I still find myself whistling it from time to time. Of course I also hum the soundtrack to the NES game Willow when I'm hiking so take that for what it's worth. True enough. Interesting factoid that you may or may not know--some of the BT music is actually remixed pieces of classical composers. I learned much later that my favorite bard song from BT1 was in fact Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre." Though the music in BT1 may have been great, I like it better on real instruments. 
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Mar 28, 2012 02:03
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Rebel Blob posted:I'm curious if anyone has any impressions about Kult: Heretic Kingdoms/Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition? I was impressed with the demo back when it was released, and I bought a copy of the game, but it is something I never got around to playing. I got it in a bargain bin and played it through a few times and my impression of it was that it was very nondescript. It wasn't bad but it wasn't particularly good either. I remember mostly grinding abilities from equipment and phasing in and out of the spirit world or whatever. It seemed sort of like a very low-budget wannabe-Diablo in a lot of ways. The story wasn't really memorable either--something about a dead tyrant god that used to rule the world and being an Inquisitor trying to stamp out remnants of the old religion to make sure it never comes back or something. Kind of formulaic. But it was good enough that I played it through more than once so it couldn't have been all that bad.
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Mar 29, 2012 01:17
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Boldor posted:The music played in Bard's Tale is system-dependent. I think that's the case for all three games, actually. Which system did you play on? I actually played Danse Macabre in an orchestra and it certainly doesn't sound like anything from Bard's Tale to me. Yeah, I found that out when years later I got the DOS version in the Ultimate RPG Archives and it had none of the music I remembered.  The version with Danse Macabre is the Apple IIe version, the song that boosts your Armor Class while you're wandering around.The main theme of the Apple IIe version is another famous classical piece too, but I forget what it was. Or what it sounded like.
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Mar 29, 2012 04:18
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WarLocke posted:I was reading the Legend of Grimrock thread and kind of bummed that such a sweet looking game is real-time, but somebody brought up Wizardy 8 in terms of a similar dungeon-crawlish game that was turn-based. What's the opinion on that? Good game, bad? Should I look into it? Wizardry 8 is awesome, and ended the main series with a bang, as compared to Ultima and M&M which went out with whimpers. It's the weakest game of the 6-7-8 trilogy in my opinion but it's still a really good game. For a lot of people it's their favorite Wizardry though. Opinion seems to differ based on whether or not you'd played 6/7--those who haven't seem to like 8 better, those who have seem to like their predecessors more. The true answer, of course, is to make your party in Wizardry 6 and bring it through all three games. There's even an easter eggs in 8 for those of us who were crazy enough to do so. edit: AlmightyBob posted:Huh, the Bard's Tale guide I used to make my party said monk, 2 paladins, bard, magician, conjuror, and then later replace one of the paladins with a third magic user. That's a fine party. You don't even need to replace the paladin with a third magic user if you don't want to. Bard's Tale 1 is pretty decent in that it's fairly balanced; so long as you have at least two or three decent front-line fighters and two spellcasters you'll be OK. My original party way back in the day was Paladin-Hunter-Bard-Thief-Caster-Caster and I had no difficulty beating the game. The only time party composition can become problematic is in parts of BT2 and BT3 where balance turns to poo poo. About halfway through BT2 the game starts throwing huge numbers of monsters with ridiculous levels of HP, such that casters become the only classes that have a chance at killing anything within a reasonable period of time. Warriors/Paladins/Monks with their multiple attacks can still often kill a monster a turn, as can Hunters with their critting ability. Thieves and Bards become basically one-trick-ponies for trap disarming and singing respectively, and their utility in battle basically dies because 50 points of damage/round doesn't do much when you're facing a group of 35 monsters with 600 HP each. Bard's Tale 3 is even worse; by the end enemies have so much HP that if a character can't crit them they're basically nothing but a meat shield for your casters. It's also in BT3 that it helps to have a third caster because one of your them is going to have to sacrifice all their spells to become a Chronomancer, which you need to beat the game but has middling spells in comparison. Having only one traditional caster is probably doable but in a game where magic-users are as crucial as they are in BT, I imagine it's not easy. Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Mar 31, 2012 |
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Mar 31, 2012 21:18
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But Rocks Hurt Head posted:I have an original copy of Wizardry 8 that I still haven't really put the time into. Not sure if I want to go back through Wizardry Gold first. Ugh, Wizardry Gold. I have that too but the DOS version is much better. There were some weird-rear end bugs in Wizardry Gold, though it's perfectly playable. Personally if you don't have the DOS version, I'd say play that, otherwise do Wizardry Gold first before 8. You can transfer your characters and it's a better game IMO. It is significantly harder than Wizardry 8 though, to the point that Wizardry 8 will seem ridiculously easy coming from it. quote:Anyone remember this from the manual? Keep in mind there were 9 years between the original release of Wiz VII and the 2001 release of 8: Oh yeah I remember that all too well. I was so jazzed to import my uberparty into Wizardry 8...only to discover that they had been totally neutered.  Something is seriously wrong with my adventurers. Seriously, you had a Blade Cuisinart' and the Cane of Corpus and you decided to leave those behind in favor of some Golden Apples and Moser's Mojo Tea!?
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Apr 1, 2012 03:40
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ShankyMcStabber posted:Funny you mention that. Yep, that's it--give the diamond ring to Bela (where did he go during Wizardry 7 anyway?) and he gives you a massive experience bonus. I can't see how anyone would figure out how to get the ring in VI without a walkthrough though since it's really unintuitive (you have to randomly tell an NPC "I love you") Also since you could use up the ring to get an extra Helazoid treasure in 7 a lot of people who got it in 6 weren't able to bring it to 8 too, I bet. Wizardry 7 is my favorite too. The huge scope of the world and largely nonlinear gameplay (outside of the core quest which you mention) plus all the secrets and treasure really made it great. As good as Wizardry 8 was, the greatly reduced scale of the world (and the nerfed job-change system) was kind of a letdown after 7. Though a least 8 didn't have that nonstop train of NPCs in 7 that would follow you everywhere once you picked up a few maps. It's hard not to kill them simply out of spite. quote:I am a major fan of a REALLY old RPG called Shadowkeep http://www.mobygames.com/game/shadowkeep. It was one of the first games that required you play on copies of the disks due changes being permanently written during play. It is also the reason I started to collect Apple II (and Apple IIGS) Hardware/Software. It's amazing how many Apple II games did that, considering how you could completely destroy your purchase if you weren't careful. Fortunately most of them didn't have the clipped-disk on the side allowing you to write to the masters.
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Apr 3, 2012 16:27
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Peas and Rice posted:Yeah, I'm wondering if the IIGS version is somehow tougher than the DOS version because I'm in the same boat as you. Finally hit Level 4 a couple of days ago and I can still barely make it into the Wine Cellar. Any Barbarians / Nomads means it's pretty much a guaranteed reload. Few games are as brutal as low-level Bard's Tale. Or high-level Bard's Tale for that matter. After losing my 5th party starting out way back in the day I said gently caress it and imported some Ultima III characters to keep my lowbies high enough to get decent levels. Second game I managed to do it from scratch with little effort but that was with previous knowledge of the first. Level 4 is too early to be thinking about mucking around in the Wine Cellar though. You'll want to hit at least Level 5 on your casters so you can buy Level 3 spells. Once your Conjurers can cast WAST and your Magicians STFL your life becomes a lot easier. edit: precision posted:Later in the game when you get access to the "square of infinitely respawning 396 Barbarians" (or was it just 99? who knows) the game becomes trivial though, since one or two casts of, uh, whatever the spell that hits everything is, will give you an assload of XP. "APAR 5N 12E 2U" and the legions of dead berserkers slain by my wind dragon will be forever etched in my brain. Too bad BT2 and 3 didn't have equivalent grind spots (at least that I found) Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Apr 3, 2012 |
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Apr 3, 2012 22:52
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CobiWann posted:Was Stonekeep any good? Yeah, I thought was pretty good. It has kind of an Eye of the Beholder vibe to it. It's very early 90s with its janky live actors and voice acting, but as dungeon crawls go it's pretty solid. You're probably not going to find everything without a walkthrough though. It has some really obscure secrets along the line of "push this one brick in a long hallway full of identical brick walls to open a secret door" points but none are required to beat the game.
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Apr 5, 2012 17:44
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Davos posted:So I think that pretty much the oldest CRPG I've really played and enjoyed was Fallout 1. Do any of these pre-Fallout era RPGs have any real plot or story behind them, or are they mostly dungeon crawling and such? I'm really curious to try some out, heard a lot of good things about Might & Magic games and Ultima VII, but a bit wary about if they might be too dated for me. For really classic CRPGs, your only real option is the Ultima series, starting with IV--the games before that are light on plot. (Especially 1&2, which are about as disjointed as games can get) Ultima VII as you mentioned is probably the strongest in terms of its underlying plot and has a really great, well-developed world but fares pretty poorly in other aspects--its combat and character/party development is kinda bad. I like to call Ultima VII (both parts) a top-down adventure game with an RPG system clumsily bolted on. I found it the least enjoyable of the Ultimas for this reason but I'm probably in the minority there. For the most part though, CRPGs prior to, say, the early/mid-90s are not going to be very story/plot driven. They're much more focused on exploration, party development, loot gathering, and combat. Back then the adventure game genre hadn't died yet so that's where we went to get our fill of story/plot driven gameplay.
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Apr 8, 2012 21:24
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CrookedB posted:Devil Whiskey for sure. And maybe Telepath RPG, although I haven't played it. Being an oldschool Bard's Tale fan I really want to pick this up just for Devil Whiskey, but none of the other games look particularly appealing and lord knows I don't need to expand my backlog any further. Anyone care to sell me on any of these games and show me just how much I'm missing out?
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Sep 11, 2012 23:37
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pigdog posted:Wow, that guy. I remember reading these Usenet threads when they happened. A real blast from the past. Haha, I can't believe that guy's still around. I remember those Usenet threads filled with stories about transsexual developers putting anthropomorphic anuses in Wizardry 8. If you put the video on mute though, the game looks pretty good, and I'd kill for a massive sprawling game in the vein of Wizardry 7. 8 ended up quite good, but didn't have quite the scope or appeal of its predecessor IMO. But no way am I going to donate money to this lunatic.
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Oct 14, 2012 22:34
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CrookedB posted:
Wow, that's interesting--I never knew that Deathlord was once supposed to be a Norse-themed game up until right before release. That actually explains a lot--replaying it relatively recently (I first played it as a kid without knowledge of any Japanese) it's painfully obvious that a ton of the names of spells, places, etc are pulled straight from a Japanese-English dictionary. Like there's one character class where it's pretty clear they were shooting for "berserker" but picked a word that's actually closer to "madman" if you're being generous, though "deviant" (frequently of the sexual sort) is closer. And another class is "sharecropper." (they were clearly shooting for "serf" or maybe "peasant") It seemed kind of odd--if the creators were so eager to make a Japanese-themed RPG why be so sloppy in that aspect? Guess now I know.
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Feb 15, 2013 20:07
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Peas and Rice posted:Is Richard Garriott actually Lord British? I didn't realize Lord British was supposed to be his avatar character. Pretty much, yeah. Lord British in the Ultima games is basically Richard Garriott's self-insert. He even voiced him in Serpent Isle and (sorta) Ultima 9. For the very earliest Ultima games at the least, he was always credited as "Lord British" in the credits too, as opposed to his real name. Apparently it derives from a nickname of his or something. It's kind of weird, but then Richard Garriott's kind of a weird guy. Not like a bad weird, but weird nonetheless.
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Mar 8, 2013 20:43
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Forgedbow posted:If you are really hurting for exp and money, just go to one of the towns, Yew seems to work best for this, and just attack everybody there, avoiding the guards. When you leave and return, the town will be restored to normal, allowing you to grind them until you are fighting fit. This is much faster and simpler than fighting random encounters. Yew is the best for this because it doesn't have any guards to avoid.  Ultima III seems to depend a lot on which version you play, I think. As a kid I remember getting murdered all the time on the Apple II version, but I gave the DOS version a whirl a few months ago and it threw so few monsters at me that I had to roam the map aimlessly, desperately looking for something to fight. Later on I ended up cheating in a ship when I got tired of waiting for pirates to spawn. So if it seems too hard try another version maybe? Or just murder semi-defenseless priests for fun and profit in Yew over and over again. Then move up to murdering guards. The early Ultima games really did reward you for acting like a complete rear end in a top hat.
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Mar 13, 2013 02:06
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Maxwell Lord posted:It's the GOG version (so DOS) and the problem is the scarcity of good encounters. In that case, hit the dungeons. There are two right around LB's castle that aren't too tough, especially if you hang out on the top few levels. You're far more likely to find something worth fighting in there than on the overworld map.
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Mar 13, 2013 03:24
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Big Mad Drongo posted:This is true. I'm a huge Obsidian fanboy, but M&M is all about exploring the nooks and crannies of the world, seeing what's there, then killing it and taking its stuff moral quandries be damned. They benefitted from their simple plotlines, because the real fun was finding and exploring the next dungeon and the stories were largely excuses to do just that. That sums up about what's great about old-school PC RPGs in a nutshell, I think. Most of the old greats--the Wizardries, Ultimas, M&Ms, Wasteland and what have you--had threadbare stories but great sandboxes with a ton of content to just mess around with. Your only limitation was whether or not you could survive in a given area--and being able to clean out a dungeon that destroyed you earlier was pretty awesome. It's kind of too bad that kind of design has fallen by the wayside. I guess Bethesda RPGs kind of come close, but they don't quite scratch the same itch. Mostly I think because for all the content they have, it's far too spread out and easily overlooked, as opposed to those older games where the smaller game worlds meant the content was far more heavily packed. Well that, and the fact that for the most part you don't really have parties or large areas blocked off to you because they're too hard for you at the moment.
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Mar 21, 2013 03:01
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Clever Spambot posted:Morrowind had alot of neat rear end areas with a bunch of cool hidden stuff all over the place that made exploring worthwhile (the only one of their games to do so really), if you thought that one was bland bethesda games are not for you. Morrowind is pretty much the only Bethesda RPG that got that aspect right, I agree--and though it was big, the content wasn't that sparse, though it was kind of pushing it. And while it did have a lot of cool places, a lot of the areas were really kind of cookie-cutter. (yay, yet another Kwama mine/smuggler hideout/tomb with skeletons) At the beginning it even had that "some places will murder you if you go in too early" feel but after you got a few levels under your belt the scaling got out of control. Actually, now that I think of it, there are a handful "modern" RPGs that capture that old-school feel--in particular the Gothic games (and the first Risen) have the sense of a world packed with content and loot that slowly expands as you gradually grow in power and are able to handle nastier stuff.
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Mar 21, 2013 17:01
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fenix down posted:Is it essential to play Gothic 1 before starting 2? No, but it's a really good idea. You'll get a whole lot more out of the second game if you do. Most people prefer Gothic 2, and they're pretty close in quality, but I actually slightly prefer the first one. The prison colony and its immediate environs/shanty town made for a more interesting setting for me. The gameplay refinements in the second one are definitely nice though. And for all it gets maligned, in its current state with fan patches Gothic 3 is pretty awesome, though still not as good as 1 or 2. 3's expansion and 4 do not exist and we shall speak nothing more of the matter.
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Mar 21, 2013 18:49
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Glimpse posted:Brian Fargo already made a fourth Bard's Tale. It wasn't quite what you wanted. It's not that bad a game though. Even if it has nothing to do with the previous games. I would unironically like to see another Bard's-Tale style dungeon crawler with the old-school round-based, enter-commands-and-see-what-happens type of game, with big enemy groups and massive battles. I'm probably the only one on the planet that felt this way, but I was a very slightly disappointed when Wasteland 2 turned out not to have that. (Though realistically speaking I knew drat well this would never happen, and it didn't stop me from emptying my wallet into the Kickstarter) We really could use another game like that. But not another actual Bard's Tale. Don't get me wrong, I have a long history with The Bard's Tale--I played the series to death when it first came out and loved every minute of it. Just last month finally, finally after more than 20 years I finished BT3 with a party brought through all three games. But goddamn the last game and a half in that series was terrible. The first game was really good, but midway through the second it went off the rails into crazytown with lovely, sadistic dungeons and monsters with ludicrous HP values and never recovered. If Bard's Tale is to come back it needs a major remodeling. What we really need is a new Wizardry 6-7 style game, but preferably one not made by a crazy person. I can scratch the Wizardry itch with the ample Japanese Wizardries that still come out but they don't have the same appeal.
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Mar 22, 2013 04:09
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rope kid posted:I still remember most of the spell codes. If they allow "normals" to play it without typing in the codes, gently caress it, I'm out. Bard's Tale 1 edition: C5YMCA C5GRRE C5MALE C5SOSI C5MACO Bard's Tale 2 edition: C5BASP Bard's Tale 3 edition: C5BASP MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA ...later in the game... NUKE NUKE NUKE NUKE
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Mar 23, 2013 02:27
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Armor-Piercing posted:Is there any simple program for drawing maps when playing old first-person dungeon crawlers? I'd like to play through Might and Magic 1, for example, making my own maps instead of using the cluebooks, but drawing them on grid paper bothers me because I have to leave tons of space in every direction to make sure the map doesn't go over the edge. This is a dumb reason, but it's enough to make me avoid the games and instead dream of a program that is pretty much the map-drawing part of the Etrian Odyssey series. Gridmapper is the closest thing you're going to get but it's quite bare-bones and you'll still need to leave space since you can't cut-and-paste areas or expand the map after the fact. For M&M1 though you won't have to worry since every single area is an even 15 x 15 square.
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Mar 23, 2013 04:34
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Noricae posted:Have you played any Might & Magics or Wizardry games? They're open ended in the same way as the above two yet do not want to make you poke your eyes out like Gothic 1/2s UI (disclaimer: I got 45 minutes into gothic 1, but all 45 minutes of it was trying to figure out how to pick up items and open my inventory :/). Wizardry 8 was great, long, lets you play as a dragon race (w/ flight, but I think it's a hidden unlock), etc. I rarely hear anyone mention this game or these two series but they're worth playing (note: still reading through the thread front to back, so likely lots of people mention it -here-). (Skyrim made me miss Wizardry 8). (And agreed with the scroll - M&M 7 was the best, but I like the Wizardry series better). I love the hell out of MM and Wizardry but they're pretty much nothing like Gothic. Also the only open-endedish Wizardries are the last three. (And Dracons definitely cannot fly--where did you hear that?) As for Gothic, my only advice is to stick with it. Once you get used to them the combat controls are actually pretty good, but it does take a bit to get used to. If you're getting one-hit killed you're doing something that you're not supposed to. Powerful monsters that murder you nearly instantly are Gothic's way of telling you that you're poking around somewhere you shouldn't be yet. Eventually you'll become a whirling dervish of death but the road there is very gradual.
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Mar 25, 2013 13:03
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Zereth posted:Risen 2 is also not nearly as good as 1, although some of the problems I had with it have been addressed in a patch. What problems? I'm curious. I just finished Risen 2 recently myself and I'd concur that it isn't nearly as good as Risen 1, even taking into account the lackluster last two chapters of that game.
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Mar 25, 2013 14:05
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Zereth posted:For one thing, at launch you couldn't parry anything other than other people using swords. Like, you know, animals. A patch after I beat it changed this. (This was also true in Risen 1, but there you had shields.) This meant that other human beings fighting you with swords were the least threatening thing in the entire game. Interesting that you mention that--being able to parry animals struck me as a really bizarre decision, as that's something you've never been able to do in a Gothic game. (and let's face it, Risen is basically Gothic without the name) I actually really disliked that change because I felt it made the game far too easy. In all the Gothic games anything without a weapon was something that you had to avoid (and usually had attacks that left openings large enough to have that feasible) where as those with weapons were things you had to parry, since the arc of their attacks would catch you if you tried to dodge. Having essentially immortal companions that would distract enemies and take hits for you made it even worse. Now that I think of it, this discussion is kind of getting the thread off track...Gothic's not really an old-school PC RPG and Risen even less so. So, speaking of hard old-school PC RPGs and since I haven't seen it discussed much here, I recently finished Dragon Wars for the first time after getting murdered continuously at it in my youth. It's a very, very unusual RPG. Kind of like Wasteland and Bard's Tale had a weird mutated baby. It flies in the face of a lot of RPG conventions--your characters barely change at all from when you first make them even if you level them up a lot. You'll probably start with 16-17ish HP per character and probably never go any higher, as how many HP you can have is mostly dictated by your best character's Bandage Skill minus 10. I realize now that the reason I was always dying back when I played it on the Apple as a kid was that I built my party all wrong. If you're not very, very careful about how you distribute your skill/stat points, you can create absolutely worthless characters that won't be able to get any better. Fintilgin posted:I really, really need to play through Wiz 8. I got part way through, but just never finished. Should I put in the effort to play 7 first, or just go straight to 8? The true way to get through 8 is to create your party in 6 and take it all the way through all three games.  On a more serious note, play 7 first. Because not only will you get to import your party into 8, but it's a substantially better game. Don't get me wrong, 8 is an awesome game, but 7 is pretty much the pinnacle of that series. 8 feels so tiny and limited after 7. Genpei Turtle fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Mar 25, 2013 |
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Mar 25, 2013 15:09
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Fintilgin posted:/\/\/\ Actually, I've got a soft spot for grids... You'll get the most out of the trilogy if you start with 6 as all three games tie together, but 6 is rough. It's ugly as sin, the interface leaves a lot to be desired (IIRC it forces you to use the mouse in a lot of places you'd just want to use the keyboard) loot is sparse and the game is quite hard. The puzzles are pretty tricky and there are items like the diamond ring you'll never find without a walkthrough. On that note, playing with a walkthrough is not a bad idea if you do. It's a great game IMO if you can look past those things, but it hasn't aged well. Wizardry 7 cleans up a lot of the issues 6 has and improves on them. In neither game are you going to get a lot of guidance though. They're very old-school in that vein. Wizardry 7 has a more forgiving start as there's a newbie dungeon right near where you start. (unless you imported your game from Wizardry 6 in which case you don't need a newbie dungeon) A lot of both of it and 6 are just wandering around seeing what you can uncover. One word of warning about 7 though is that there are at least a dozen or so NPCs that are out to find the same quest items you are, and if they get to them first you'll have to track them down and get them back. This is easy enough if you get a couple of quest items yourself as they will start trying to track you down, but it's possible for a critical item to find its way into the hands of an NPC you can neither barter with nor kill in which case you become dead-ended. This is fairly rare, though it has happened to me, in which case you'll need to cheat. Speaking of which, there's a fan-loving-tastic Wizardry 6,7, and 8 editor called Cosmic Forge that you owe it to yourself to tinker with if you own any of those three games.
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Mar 25, 2013 16:13
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Peas and Rice posted:I'm sure i've mentioned it here before but the iOS Bard's Tale includes the IIGS versions of all 3 games, with the ability to import your parties into the later games. Actually it has the Apple II version of BT3 on it. Complete with a right-before-the-last-boss save game so you can quickly complete it and see the ending if you want. And I don't think you can import parties either--I tried the import option in 2 (obviously 3 isn't going to work) and it only found the default characters. (which I had deleted in BT1) I haven't looked that deep into it though. In terms of playability, it's really not that great on the iPhone form factor. It's much better on the iPad. Especially if you have a bluetooth keyboard, which works flawlessly. (Except for the ESC key on mine, which quits out of the application)
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Mar 26, 2013 00:06
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Waltzing Along posted:Someone mentioned Deathlord earlier. I played this in the 80s and it was rough. I'd have to say it was probably one of the hardest games of its time. The Dark Souls of the classic days of RPGs. I've played Deathlord, back in the 80s on my Apple IIe, and then again more recently in emulation since my disks died. Still have the box and manual though. I definitely never finished it. Deathlord was just too hard for its own good. I love hard RPGs--I even unironically like Wizardry 4--but Deathlord takes that to new heights. In retrospect I did pretty well for a 13-year old kid; I explored a couple of continents, got my party to a respectable level, even found a few of the legendary items. Eventually I gave up when I stumbled into a dungeon and a bad encounter with some undead drained my party of half its levels, and my last backup disk was far enough back I didn't want to bother. It had some good things going for it--the wealth of character creation options, a ton of places to explore, and a huge world, but it got bogged down by unfair difficulty both in battles and dungeon design. And some design decisions were just stupid because they didn't make the game necessarily harder, just more tedious. Stuff like fishing for keywords in towns (because NPCs gave you jack in terms of information) and the impossibly huge seas with no effective navigation method that had you wandering through empty waters forever desperately trying to find land. I'm kind of enjoying it now with the help of maps from the Internet but I don't think I'd ever try it without them. And it annoys me that there's no good information as to what weapons are better than others so I can never tell if I'm throwing away something good in favor of something crappy.
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Mar 26, 2013 01:43
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Well, automapping is a pretty massive improvement, so if the negatives to the DOS version aren't that big, I guess I'll try getting the windows version to work. Otherwise I probably will just skip 7. I don't want to have to deal with mapping anything by hand ever again. Stay away from Gold. As mentioned earlier the DOS version also has an auto-map, it's just not in a separate window. The differences between the two are negligible. The character portraits in Gold are higher resolution, all the text in the game is voiced, and the automap appears in a separate window, and that's pretty much the extent of the differences. But in Gold, the Diplomacy skill is broken, which can totally screw up your game. There are a bunch of wandering NPCs that have information and sometimes critical items. When you first meet with them you can't interact with them like a normal NPC; you have to use Diplomacy first to get on their good side, and only then can you talk to them/buy their stuff/etc. In Gold, you can never, ever do this because you can't get past the initial Diplomacy screen, no matter what you do. Also Gold has some irksome bugs like text speeding by before you can read it.
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Mar 26, 2013 12:25
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FuzzySlippers posted:Yeah I preferred the larger size of the older M&M games and since I adore character creation giving me more character creation is always a good thing. Maybe they are emphasizing replay value on the new M&M? They did mention a much shorter game than the old ones and if there is gameplay variety on replays being able to pick from a large class selection will emphasize that. I agree on the point about liking more people in the party buut... 6 party members was too much in M&M 3-5. It was fine in M&M 1 and 2 because you were frequently facing off against large groups of monsters at once. That's why 6 party members work in Wizardry and Bard's Tale as well. In 3-5, though, you'd rarely be facing more than two or three monsters at a time, and unless they were way more powerful than you were, it felt like overkill. Most of the time enemies were little more than speedbumps in those games and always outnumbering them contributed to that feeling. The best solution, I think, is to allow the larger party size for the variety and bump up the size of encounters to balance it, (just don't overdo it, roaming packs of 60+ monsters in BT3 for example sucked) but it doesn't look like M&M X is going that way so a smaller party is more fitting I think.
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Mar 28, 2013 22:10
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Quarex posted:Great offense taken; revenge planned. The Japanese Wizardries still do it in the form of resting at the inn, but yeah, it doesn't happen often. I actually like the mechanic in some instances--because if I feel like being a cheap bastard it allows me to scum for good level-ups. That is, for games that have randomness in how you're going to level, it's easier to scum for good levels when you have a degree of control for exactly when your level-up is going to occur. If they're not random you have no reason to of course. Other games (like Infinity Engine RPGs) allow you to activate your leveling in such a way that's good, too. The worst though were the Gold Box games where if you didn't go train immediately, you wouldn't gain any more EXP until you did. The aforementioned Deathlord (which I've started up again, god help me what is wrong with me) had that too.
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Apr 5, 2013 21:27
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Not that it really fits in with the thread 100% but drat it I have to share somewhere. It took me 25 years but I finally beat Deathlord. I'd say this is tied (maybe even beats out) Wizardry 4 for the most bullshit hard CRPG ever made. I honestly think this game is nigh-unbeatable without some form of cheating and/or prior knowledge of the game. Like, the zillions of teleport traps that give no indication of you ever having been warped, and with no spells or abilities to find your relative position in the dungeon no way to even tell that you've been warped. And the totally opaque way that equipment works. Plus, a lot of the information out there about the game is partial or wrong and I don't think I would have won if I didn't use a hex editor and memory viewer to piece out some of the more arcane mechanics of the game. Still, it was kind of satisfying. Considering how brutally difficult combat generally is in the game, building an endgame party capable of murdering anything is pretty awesome. It would have been even better if I had picked a party lineup that wasn't terrible. I actually kind of enjoyed this game, though it might be Stockholm Syndrome talking. Also the banners on the castle read "Godzilla" and a name of someone who I didn't recognize. I looked her up, and apparently she played the heroine of the second Godzilla movie. The third banner only has one legible character so I don't know what they were going for, maybe another actor. So I guess the devs were big Godzilla fans or something.
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May 13, 2013 19:14
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Waltzing Along posted:I've wanted to finish Deathlord for years. I played it at release and didn't get very far. How long did it take to complete? I've been playing this particular game on and off since 2010. Despite the huge size of the game world, if you knew exactly what you needed to do and had a sufficiently strong party, you could beat the game very quickly. Most of the places in the game are just filler to find loot and cash to pay for training and level-ups. There are six items you need to complete the game (all of which are in towns) and seven words you need to yell at gates in the last dungeon. Each of the seven words is at the bottom of a dungeon, 5 of which are among the most bullshit dungeons ever devised. If you looked up the words on the Internet, just grabbed the items and did a ton of grinding to get levels you could probably beat the game in a few days tops.
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May 13, 2013 21:26
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Honestly I think they're all worth playing, even the much-maligned Ultima 9. (Which is crappy as an Ultima game, but patched is passable as a 3rd-person-actiony RPG sort of thing) Ultima 1-3 are all about the gameplay and very light on story. 1 and 2 are basically unbeatable without a guide because of the unintuitive things you need to do to go forward, but with them they're enjoyable romps to explore the land, beat up stuff and take their loot. 3 is similar except it has a better fleshed-out world and you have a party. You'll need to do a lot of grinding for gold in 3 though, and early/mid-game you'll have to wander a lot looking for things to fight. At the end of the game you'll just end up murdering lots of city guards. 4-6 are the ones that hit the sweet spot between story and world/gameplay. 4 does require a lot of grinding for gold but it really sets the tone for the rest of the series. 5 is my personal favorite as it's got a huge world to explore, nice mechanics, and an interesting story. 6 is pretty good too but its clunky interface and claustrophobic view (you can only see a couple steps away from your party no matter where you are) hurt it a lot. 7-9 are where the gameplay mostly takes a back seat to story. 9's story is terrible and 8's is inappropriate for an Ultima but isn't bad, and it has an interesting world. 7 and 7.5 are widely regarded as having the best story and world, but the gameplay is utter garbage. I honestly think it's the worst in the series in that respect. Combat is an absolute joke, there's no meaningful feeling of character progression, and you have to deal with annoying AI-controlled characters that go tearing off into the woods on a whim to chase something you can't even see. It's best approached as a very, very good adventure game with an RPG system awkwardly bolted onto it. 8 is similar in a lot of respects but it has kind of a pseudo-actiony feel to it that makes it fun in a mindless kind of way. Oh, and while we're talking Ultimas, there's also the World of Ultima games and the Ultima Underworld games. World of Ultima is interesting, it's basically Ultima 6 in a pulp-fiction wold. The Ultima Underworlds are simply masterpieces and everyone should play them.
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May 16, 2013 14:10
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