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Peas and Rice posted:The marketing guy in me took one look at that box and went "how the gently caress did they get all those licenses from different companies to publish that all in one place?"
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Mar 24, 2012 00:13
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I never played Divine Divinity cause I always thought that it's a lovely, cheap Diablo 1 knockoff, but after reading this thread it turned out that I was very wrong. So I bought it today and so far it seems cool. One thing's annoying though - the light radius around your character is too small, even when I'm on the surface the fog of war is terrible and I see about 10 metres ahead. Also the camera perspective is very weird, it's not standard isometric perspective. It looks like camera is halfway between isometric and side view like in 2d platformers. But like I said - it's ok so far. The graphics ain't so bad, looks good in modern resolutions. Any advice for a DD newbie?
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Mar 24, 2012 00:53
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Peas and Rice posted:Starflight - AKA the best game you've probably never played or if you played it it's the best game you've ever played. I literally skipped like two weeks of school, in high school, and played this game. I had a notebook full of coordinates and notes. When I wasn't playing it, my mother was, with her own copies of the disks. We compared notes. I played SF2 and it was good, but SF1 was everything I never knew I wanted in a game. SF2, perhaps because it was cooler, ran slower on my weak-rear end PC. So I didn't really get into it as much.
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Mar 24, 2012 00:57
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Attention Horse posted:Darklands
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Mar 24, 2012 01:07
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Bought Darklands off GoG because it's just three fukkin bux. Gonna play it all night tonight.
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Mar 24, 2012 01:09
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If anyone is digging a space 4x game, Master of Orion 3 is a pretty good game with some of the fan patches. The AI is still pretty crappy, but while it was half-broken at release most people hated the fact that you mostly set policies the AI follows rather than directly manage everything. Which, don't get me wrong, that is still how the game works, but a good chunk of the initial bad press/criticism was because people hated the style rather than legitimate problems with the game.
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Mar 24, 2012 01:11
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In case anybody doesn't know this, star control 3 is a badgame and you shouldn't play it.
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Mar 24, 2012 01:13
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Attention Horse posted:I never played Divine Divinity cause I always thought that it's a lovely, cheap Diablo 1 knockoff, but after reading this thread it turned out that I was very wrong. So I bought it today and so far it seems cool. One thing's annoying though - the light radius around your character is too small, even when I'm on the surface the fog of war is terrible and I see about 10 metres ahead. Also the camera perspective is very weird, it's not standard isometric perspective. It looks like camera is halfway between isometric and side view like in 2d platformers. I'm pretty sure the fog of war / view radius stuff in all these old games is a symptom of the higher resolution. I just checked out DD again myself and you're right, the fog seems really close in. Last time I played it was the regular CD version, though, so I was stuck in the original resolution and I didn't notice it being a problem at all. If it really bugs you, try knocking down the resolution a bit and see if it makes a difference. There are also skills and items which increase sight range, and I believe that affects fog of war clearing. You could either invest in those skills (or hunt down the right equipment), or just find a trainer somewhere and hack the skills in to make it a more pleasurable experience. For tips, I would say the biggest one is to stick with the game until you finish the first dungeon and leave Aleroth. That's when the game really opens up and starts getting fun. Also, it's really, really easy to cheat, though not needed at all.
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Mar 24, 2012 02:17
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Adam Bowen posted:Lands of Lore might be the only old-school PC RPG I've ever successfully finished (besides Ultima 1, but that was short and easy as hell). Granted, that was back somewhere between 1998 and 2002, but I tried it again recently and it has held up really well. The interface is a lot less painful than most old PC RPGs and there's voice acting by loving Patrick Stewart. The music in the city of Yvel was incredible once you got that far. Lands of Lore 1 has difficult enough combat to be frustrating, it's an accomplishment to finish. (Those ghosts in the white tower probably caused about a hundred reloads in my playthrough.) Quarex posted:QQP has a place in my mind as one of the most awful game companies ever. This is probably entirely unfair, but I bought some strategy game they made, thinking it sounded in the review kind of like Warlords (my favorite!), QQP was a well-regarded company back in the day, actually. It was just for strategy games, though, and it never developed the reputation that Microprose, SSI, or SSG did. A lot of the anger about Red Crystal was that a lot of people bought it simply on the strength of the company's reputation, which did not go so well. It's true that QQP game graphics can make you think that maybe CGA graphics weren't so bad. quote:Prophecy I: The Fall of Trinadon This is a bit like if the original Legend of Zelda got ported to PC and had quite a bit of RPG stuff added to it. I reached the final confrontation and then developed problems because I didn't realize it overwrote data on your disks like Wasteland and Starflight do, whoops! Camel of the Sea posted:King's Quest II, Populous, Magic Candle III, Might and Magic III, and The Summoning, which I'm not convinced anyone else has ever played. Good stuff. I haven't done more than touch The Summoning, but it's supposed to be pretty good, to the point where a friend of mine who didn't normally play RPGs was heavily into it. What I always was scared off by is its reputation for being stupidly huge for a dungeon crawler that squeezes onto just two floppies. I suppose this might be a selling point for some of you though. 
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Mar 24, 2012 02:57
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One that I don't think has been brought up yet: Magic Candle had an RTS spinoff series. In 1992. Siege Some of the scenarios were hard as balls, but the AI had some definite weaknesses that could be exploited pretty harshly. The great tragedy of the game was that a lot of SB16 cards didn't work with it due to some glitch or another, and thus the game (for most players) featured glorious PC speaker sounds.
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Mar 24, 2012 03:16
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The Bard's Tale Come hear the tale of Skara Brae. A God returned to have his way... Overview Bard's Tale was Interplay's response to Wizardry and Might & Magic. It was a party-based 3D(ish) fantasy RPG set in the town of Skara Brae, overrun by monsters and waiting for a group of adventurers to free it from its woes.  You start by rolling characters in the Adventurer's Guild, choosing from a traditional Gygax stock of Warriors, Paladins, Monks, Hunters, Bards, Rogues, Conjurers, and Magicians. Each class has its strengths and weaknesses, although some are generally better than others. Conjurers and Magicians can eventually multi-class and learn additional schools of magic not available at the beginning, becoming Sorcerers and Wizards.  You travel through the city with a window showing your progress through the 3D streets. The map provided with the game shows some locations you might want to visit: various taverns, the Adventurers Guild, and temples (including a certain temple to a mad god.) In the first game you're locked in the town of Skara Brae, and there are four main dungeons to crawl through: the wine celler and sewers, the catacombs beneath the mad god's temple, Baron Harkon's castle (and the archmage's tower), and finally Mangar's Tower, the seat of the evil mage who has enslaved Skara Brae. It's a dungeon crawling game where you fight monsters over and over, map dungeons with graph paper, and record clues that you find while leveling your characters up and getting them better equipment. In other words, it's very true to its PnP RPG roots in the early to mid 1980s. Why It's Interesting Spells are "incanted" by four-letter codes found in the game manual. Additionally, the map of the city shows where the Review Board is. You'll need this to actually level up: it doesn't happen automatically, only if you know where the guild is. Also Skara Brae is a neolithic village in the farthest northern part of Scotland significant for its state of preservation. This has nothing to do with the game but it's interesting to know where the name came from. Oh yeah, you can save your characters for the next games too (and a shitton of other games as I discovered in this thread). Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight  What's so great about one city when you can explore six, and a vast countryside? The Destiny Knight has you assemble the seven pieces of the Destiny Wand to finally defeat another evil magic user. In The Destiny Knight, mages take the center stage: progress through all four caster classes and you can multi-class into the Archmage, learn a whole new batch of spells, and eventually remake the Destiny Wand.  There are seven main dungeons and the overland map, which is far larger than in the last game. And you can save your characters for... Bard's Tale III: The Thief of Fate As featured in the Smithsonian, settling once and for all the question of video games as art. Or something.  You return to the now-ruined Skara Brae, and rather than the dungeon crawl with minimal plot of the last two games, Thief of Fate features of a much richer plot (written in part of Michael Stackpole of Wasteland fame), alternate dimensions and - yes - more dungeons. And you could import your characters as well.  Although I never finished, Bard's Tale III is probably the closest to modern C-RPGs: you can start to see the shift away from "it's a dunegon crawler like the plotless poo poo you play in your early 1980s D&D game!" to "it's an interesting story that actually has a strong narrative structure!" Even though the underlying mechanic was still "dungeon crawl across a grid." It also paved the way for... The Bard's Tale Construction Set Interplay decided to sell what we'd now call mod tools as a stand-alone element called The Bard's Tale Construction Set (for the low, low price of $50!) The BTCS let you design your own cities, dungeons, puzzles, monsters, and clues: essentially to build your own Bard's Tale game from the ground up. It was about 5 years ahead of its time, because even if you were one of the 0.5% of the population who had a fast enough compuserv or BBS connection to actually upload your dungeons, it would still take you several days - and anyone interested several days to download them. So you could either pass your masterpiece along on floppy disk or just play through it yourself over and over and over and... Get your mitts on it So far the only place to find the games (and the BTCS if you're so inclined) is on abandonware sites. Are they great C-RPGs? Not really - but they're interesting as historical artifacts if nothing else. They had great animated portraits (others didn't), but were otherwise fairly unremarkable - the grids, enemies, puzzles, were fairly generic until Bard's Tale III, and even then it was echoes of future RPGs like Baldur's Gate.  Update You can get Bard's Tale I and Bard's Tale II bundled with the iOS Bard's Tale release! Bard's Tale 3 coming soon! http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-bards-tale/id480375355?mt=8 But hey, in 1987 it was pretty much the only game in town apart from Might & Magic. Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Mar 30, 2012 |
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Mar 24, 2012 04:23
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Daggerfall The follow-up to Bethesda's cult classic Arena and the predecessor to the modern Elder Scrolls games, Daggerfall features an unprecedentedly large game world and a staggering amount of content. Daggerfall is one of the few open-world CRPGs to successfully convey the size and scope of a fantasy world - there's so many places to go and so many things to do that there's people that have been playing Daggerfall since its release in 1996 and still haven't seen everything. A big part of this has to do with the fact that most of the game world is randomly generated: Dungeons and towns that aren't part of the main quest are procedurally made by the game when you enter them. This means that there's no shortage of things to do, but the catch-22 is that there's no FAQ that can help you if you get stuck, since everything's made at random. Unfortunately, Daggerfall's ambition is also its downfall: The game is too big for its own good, the programming is sloppy, and it generally suffers from a lack of polish. It's even possible to fall through the world geometry and be trapped in a colorless void. Unofficial patches have remedied this somewhat, but the best workaround is still just to save often. If you're interested in the progeny of the Elder Scrolls series and a glimpse at the old world design philosophy that once guided the series, give Daggerfall a look. With a game world bigger than the size of England, you're sure to find something that intrigues you. Official link: http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/ Other info: There's a third-party installer, DaggerfallSetup, that can easily make the game run on modern computers. In addition, it also includes a host of official and unofficial patches, including a tweak that greatly increases the draw distance. There's also DaggerXL, an incomplete but promising recreation of Daggerfall's engine with modern technology.
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Mar 24, 2012 05:06
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Two comments, one question.
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Mar 24, 2012 08:12
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Boldor, are you the gaming historian that I secretly wish I were currently studying to become? I hope someone is paying you to be this awesome.
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Mar 24, 2012 08:13
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Quarex posted:Boldor, are you the gaming historian that I secretly wish I were currently studying to become? I hope someone is paying you to be this awesome. I wish I could be paid for this! Not bloody likely, though, and the only thing I could see myself being paid for at all is a rental of some of my collection for public display. One of my current projects is writing a comprehensive guide on MM8, and the absence of hard data on spell recovery time is a stumper. It's the only major game mechanic I have been unable to determine from the strategy guide, analysis of the program, or by experiment. I posted the Deadly Swarm information partly because it might just be what someone else needs as a Rosetta Stone to decipher the MM6 game code (chances are MM8 works the same way). Part of the reason why I'm covering specifically these games is that other games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Final Fantasy already are extensively researched. Even then, though, it's not as if there aren't stunning discoveries to made in those games, if you would prefer to study those games. I was stunned as everyone else to learn that Final Fantasy 6 can be glitched so hard you can actually make General Leo join your party! And even older games can have light shone upon them; it was many decades before people realized there's a bug in Inky's AI in Pac-Man. Ultima, Might and Magic, Wizardry, etc. are not nearly as well-documented. I'm trying to push the frontiers of knowledge on these games. My latest attempt at a Bard's Tale 3 playthrough was stopped cold by the obnoxious bugs in the IBM version, but I just tried the latest unofficial patch and it seems to work well.
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Mar 24, 2012 09:07
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I tried, but I really could not get into Darklands. I just couldn't figure out what to do after pummeling a bunch of bandits a couple of times, and with no real direction or knowledge of how the skills worked/helped. Maybe I was supposed to stick around a university town to spend all my money gaining an education? Or just do random encounters until I had enough money to spend on most anything? I don't know.
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Mar 24, 2012 09:30
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rope kid posted:This is The Best btw. Darklands 2 Kickstarter.
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Mar 24, 2012 12:20
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Might and Magic 8 investigation This is to show you how investigating game mechanics works. I'm doing this myself because it looks like there's no publicly available data. I'm looking to discover exactly how much time it takes to cast each spell in Might and Magic 8. I'm starting with Might and Magic 6 because I have more information on that game. I searched MM6.EXE with a hex editor, and switching the search parameters to look for 16-bit integers instead of 8-bit integers worked! In retrospect I should have done this in the first place, because some spells like Resurrection have such long recovery times that they are well over 255 (the storage limit for an 8-bit integer). The spell data starts at address 0xBDD7E. I figured out the entire table, which has spell costs and speeds. The Deadly Swarm information the strategy guide had turned out to wrong, and it just so happened there were other spells that behaved similarly. Typical strategy guide, really.  Since my actual current FAQ project is for MM8, I then looked into MM8.EXE now that I knew what to look for. Adjusting my search to account for the fact that MM8 has 4 skill levels compared to MM6's 3, I found the spell table starting at address 0xF4884. This table turns out to have spell damage in addition to cost and speed. Not only does this get me the spell information I want, it showed me that some of the information given in-game is wrong. For instance, Rock Blast is claimed to do 1d8 damage per point of Earth Magic skill; it actually does 10 damage plus 1d10 damage per point of Earth Magic skill. A couple minutes blowing up peasants with Rock Blast confirmed this in-game. Peasants are ideal test subjects for damage spells because they are not aggressive and have no resistances. 
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Mar 24, 2012 12:52
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chairface posted:One that I don't think has been brought up yet: Magic Candle had an RTS spinoff series. In 1992. Siege Siege was awesome. A friend of mine had that and we would spend hours setting up these huge battle scenarios that involved explosive catapult shots, fireball chucking wizards, flying archers, and boiling oil. It was all 2d and it allowed more units on the map than any other game I can remember back at that time (detailed units anyway, the sprites were pretty good by 1992 standards) It would eventually go all Dwarf Fortress on us though, as the longer the battle got, the slower the whole thing seemed to chug, and a good number of the battles we would quit when it got to a certain point of slowness. Might just have been our mighty 8mhz super computers with 1mb of ram. I remember trying to recreate some of the scenarios in siege in Warcraft 2, which never worked.
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Mar 24, 2012 13:08
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One other noteworthy bit I enjoyed about MM6, was the 'secret level' you could get to in the beginning town. It's been awhile, but there's a levitate scroll you find early which you can use to get up on top of one of the buildings, which has a portal to the NWC offices. Along with a bunch of npc's named after nwc employees, there was a ton of potion bottles and all the ingredients to make the black and white potions. Craft all those up and you start with some great stat boosts, but there's one last one to mention. Exiting the offices teleports you to the best shrine in the game, giving +20 to all stats. Unfortunately, it's surrounded by about a million dragons. It's pretty hilarious running like holy hell through an absolute barrage of dragons at 1st level, but I do it everytime.
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Mar 24, 2012 13:40
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Quarex posted:I heard a lot of complaints about Martian Dreams' sameness and tedium, though also compliments on its atmosphere (I know I played it, and I think I even finished it, but I cannot remember anything about it). Martian Dreams was amazing for the following reasons. Character creation was done through being analysed by Sigmund Freud You got from Earth to Mars by your shuttle being fired out of a huge cannon. Buffalo Bill, Marie Curie Nikola Tesla and Rasputin were all NPCs on Mars. I really liked the Ultima games of this era, but Martian Dreams was especially awesome due to its alternate versions of historical figures on GODDAMN MARS.
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Mar 24, 2012 13:57
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Friendly Fire posted:Martian Dreams was amazing for the following reasons. The best part of Martian Dreams was how the final confrontation is resolved. It takes place in a dream world inhabited by the Big Bad Guy. It is possible in dream worlds to dream up objects into existence, but it is only possible to create objects that you know exist in the real world. The Big Bad Guy taunts you claiming that no weapon you can dream up can harm him. Unbeknownst to him, however, you are a time traveler from a century later. You dream up a powerful weapon into existence, and one-shot him.
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Mar 24, 2012 14:19
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Booted up Temple of Elemental Evil last night for the first time in aaaaages. Can't believe it's nearly 10 years old.  Personally, I think it still looks great. I miss Troika.Got to second the love for the World of Ultima games. Any game set in a non generic fantasy world will almost certainly win my affection. Plus, you could do cool stuff in Savage Empire like harvest the materials for gunpowder from the world around you and make crude grenades and muskets.
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Mar 24, 2012 15:15
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Peas and Rice posted:The Bard's Tale 
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Mar 24, 2012 16:24
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EL Skirvo posted:One other noteworthy bit I enjoyed about MM6, was the 'secret level' you could get to in the beginning town. It's been awhile, but there's a levitate scroll you find early which you can use to get up on top of one of the buildings, which has a portal to the NWC offices. Along with a bunch of npc's named after nwc employees, there was a ton of potion bottles and all the ingredients to make the black and white potions. Craft all those up and you start with some great stat boosts, but there's one last one to mention. Exiting the offices teleports you to the best shrine in the game, giving +20 to all stats. Unfortunately, it's surrounded by about a million dragons. It's pretty hilarious running like holy hell through an absolute barrage of dragons at 1st level, but I do it everytime. There's even better stuff than that. Hidden in every single level in MM6 is a fragment of apparent gibberish that gets noted down in your journal when you find it. When you find all sixteen, it describes the location of a hidden treasure trove (under a random stone in the same dragon-infested desert -- I think it isn't collectible unless you have all the fragments, to block early FAQ users) which gives you millions of experience points, hundreds of thousands of gold coins, and several artifacts. The first time I found it, it was glitched and gave you the experience and gold every time you opened it. I think that was eventually patched, though. I wish modern RPGs had dungeons like the one in that game. With a few exceptions they were all incredibly non-linear, and there were inevitably tons of ways to sequence break them or sneak/run your way through dungeons above your own level.
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Mar 24, 2012 16:40
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I remember getting Might and Magic III as a birthday present probably in 1992, being as super stoked as only 11-year old can be for it. Only it didn't work with my computer running MS-DOS 4.0, not enough memory... It took me half a year to get warez 5.0 on my computer, and boy did I pour time on that game then, even if I never got to play it through. Might have been the proper start of my English learning, remember having my mother's couple of decades old English-Finnish dictionary by me when playing the game.
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Mar 24, 2012 16:55
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Boldor posted:Two comments, one question. Boldor, you are seriously the best. As someone who just finished up back to back runs through MM6 and MM7 (hoooly god why did I pick a Monk) I'm so glad to see their profiles rising again. They're two of the most fun RPGs I've ever played, and I say that with fully tinted rose-colored glasses from playing them as kid.
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Mar 24, 2012 17:46
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'Day wow, a lot of good games here, but nobody mentioned Realms of Arkania? The story in first two was pretty dismal (get the mcguffin!) and there was a lot of potential for a bad character build, but the gameplay was pretty fun right? Who after all does not want to be starving in a wilderness, while shaking with typhus?
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Mar 24, 2012 17:49
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rope kid posted:This poo poo blew my mind in 1985. Seriously. I still have my graph paper maps of the various dungeons and (somewhere) the hint book for the Destiny Knight, which cost about as much as buying graph paper and had maps already drawn out for me.
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Mar 24, 2012 17:53
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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.
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Mar 24, 2012 17:59
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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. I would start with baldur's gate II, if you dig that then the other infinity engine games will be fine (Baldur's gate, icewind dale/icewind dale II, planescape). Fallout and fallout 2 are similar era and also very good, you would probably enjoy those as well. The interface is somewhat clunkier than that of the infinity engine games though so keep that in mind. If you want to go older-school than that I would pick up might and magic 3/4/5 (they're available as part of a bundle from GOG) as they're very approachable and a lot of fun if you like dungeon crawling.
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Mar 24, 2012 18:15
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evilmiera posted:I tried, but I really could not get into Darklands. I just couldn't figure out what to do after pummeling a bunch of bandits a couple of times, and with no real direction or knowledge of how the skills worked/helped. Maybe I was supposed to stick around a university town to spend all my money gaining an education? Or just do random encounters until I had enough money to spend on most anything? I don't know. Yeah, I ran into the same deal. A getting on your feet guide might be good.
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Mar 24, 2012 18:19
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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. Fallout 2 is really playable by today's standards and it's on sale for $3 on steam today. Though it's not really old, Knights of The Chalice is probably the most fun I had with a videogame D&D system. Spidersoft's newest game Avadon the Black Fortress is pretty good and it's included in the latest humble bundle for $6 VVVV DrManiac fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Mar 24, 2012 |
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Mar 24, 2012 18:22
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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 18:24
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I feel like Eye of the Beholder is a really good introduction to old school dungeon crawlers. I can't explain why exactly, just after numerous attempts to play old RPGs it was the one that was the easiest to grasp for me. It also doesn't hurt that the graphics still look pretty drat good today.
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Mar 24, 2012 18:29
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DrManiac posted:Fallout 2 is really playable by today's standards and it's on sale for $3 on steam today. Though it's not really old, Knights of The Chalice is probably the most fun I had with a videogame D&D system. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the fallout 1/2/tactics collection is on sale for 6.79! That's a steal.
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Mar 24, 2012 18:32
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I have them on Gog anyway but people in the Steam thread would probably like to know what the mod situation is with the Steam versions of those games.
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Mar 24, 2012 18:37
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Peas and Rice posted:
Nah it wasn't nearly that bad; BTCS came out in 1991, by which time pretty much everybody had at least a 2400 baud modem (which could transfer a full disk game in an hour or two); 9600 baud was already pretty common and wikipedia tells me the first 14.4 modems came out in 1991. It was probably more of a combination of BTCS never being a super-popular game, plus the user base being split among different platforms (PC and Amiga), and BBSs were pretty fragmented and insular. Another game I LOVED was Adventure Construction Set, which came out a few years earlier and let you built top-down tile based RPGs. The editor was really easy to use, there was a decent selection of prefab artwork, and you could build something cool and playable without a ton of learning curve. I wish there were more games like this nowadays; I understand that games in general are more complex but it'd still be possible to make something that's polished and accessible to non-programmers. Peas and Rice posted:But hey, in 1987 it was pretty much the only game in town apart from Might & Magic. Ultima  vvvvv no kidding, I'd never heard of ACK, checking it out now. h_double fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Mar 24, 2012 |
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Mar 24, 2012 18:45
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Any of you who liked Adventure Construction Set would probably enjoy mucking around with Adventure Creation Kit. The guy who made this was a fan of ACS and programmed his version in the '90s; about two years ago he decided to update it somewhat for modern systems. If you're a fan of Ultima IV, he also created a parody sequel to show what the program can do.
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Mar 24, 2012 19:38
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Peas and Rice posted:Seriously. I still have my graph paper maps of the various dungeons and (somewhere) the hint book for the Destiny Knight, which cost about as much as buying graph paper and had maps already drawn out for me.  Nova Bizzare posted:Yeah, I ran into the same deal. A getting on your feet guide [to Darklands] might be good.  Darklands Fan Site - http://www.darklands.net/ I won't focus on metagamey stuff like making 80 year-old alchemists for their sweet potion stashes and then ditching them at the Gasthaus in the first 5 minutes. I'll just focus on a "good" party and normal game flow. Party Composition  Your party should probably consist of people between 30 and 40 years old (maybe 35-45 if you want to push certain skills). This produces a good range of skills without suffering excessive END and STR degradation. You will likely want two folks who are heavier fighters, then someone with a high Virtue(!!!)/Heal(!!!)/Religion ("cleric") and someone else with a high Alchemy/Speak Latin/Speak Common. If you want to make a thiefy- or rangery-type character, you can stack up one of your front-line dudes on Woodwise, Streetwise, Artifice, and related skills, but it isn't vital. Virtue and Heal are skills that are relatively hard to raise and very important. Heal, specifically, only increases benefit in coarsely granular chunks. If your dudes only regain 1 STR a day, your Heal sucks and the game will be very hard. Get your Heal high enough to heal 2 STR a day, if not 3 (though that may only be possible with a 45 year-old character). Stats  STR and END are important for EVERYONE. They are obviously most important for front line fighters, but practically speaking, everyone winds up in melee, so don't skimp on the STR/END for a gimmick mystic of affective piety build. STR and END should also be fairly close to each other. With armor on, END will typically get chewed up much more quickly than STR, but if max STR is significantly lower than END, guys will die instead of being knocked out (this is bad). Equipment  Use gear that your characters are best at using! Check your weapon skills and equip accordingly. Early on, javelins can be a good thing for (especially) alchemist characters to use. It will raise your Throwing skill, which will become important on that distant day when you have more than two potion bottles rattling around in your pouches. Darklands has a learn-by-doing system that slows naturally with skill gain, so even characters who are horribly incompetent quickly become "okay" with a weapon if they stick with it. Early on, everyone/things' armor is terrible, so you can practically use whatever weapon you're skilled with that does good damage. You will eventually want characters who are good with hammers or polearms to deal with heavily armored enemies (e.g. Raubritters, Templars, Gargoyles). Dress everyone in the heaviest armor you can afford. gently caress traditional class roles. Alchemists in Nürnberg plate ASAP. Doin' Thangs  What do you do in Darklands? Well, it's an open world, but extraordinarily punishing to the unwary. Here's the basics: First you get the thieves, then you get the Rep, then you get the missions. Stay in your opening town for a while. Every night, go to the "Gabled roofs of the crafts district". Keep going in and out of this area until you encounter thieves. Beat the hell out of them over and over and over again. As long as you don't do dumb poo poo like try to break into businesses or skulk around the cathedrals, you shouldn't encounter the city watch (breaking curfew is bad). During the day, go back to the inn. Have your characters Regain Strength (this is why the Heal skill is very important) and have anyone who is not injured Earn Money. Every once in a while, sleep in the wooded area inside the city for a night or two to avoid having your rep drop by staying at the inn excessively long. Sweet Medici Cash  When you have slaughtered enough thieves, your local Reputation will start creeping into the teens. This is good. Since you are unloading a shitload of gear from this endless army of thieves, you will be visiting merchants all the time. Whenever you go to the Markt, visit every merchant, even if you don't need to. Fuggers, Medici -- everyone. Eventually, when you leave a merchant's shop, you will get a business proposition. Accept it, whatever the hell it is. Remember to write poo poo down. This game was made in 1992, for Christ's sake. These missions vary, but usually involve one of the following things: getting a Tarnhelm, getting an old book, or killing a Raubritter (robber knight). Sometimes, these missions will send you way, way, way across the Holy Roman Empire. Even if you can't do them immediately, keep them in a list to do later. Of the three, Raubritters are the most likely to be proximal to your current city. They are also, by far, the most immediately dangerous to undertake. When you get your first Raubritter mission, do not go on it immediately. You may try the others if the destination is not hundreds of miles away. Raubritter Scams  So, when do you pursue your first Raubritter? Well, here's a good strategy. Once a city's merchants have told you to pursue a Raubritter, they will give you a location. Don't go there, but go to other cities near the Raubritter's castle. Do the same thief-killing, Rep-building activities in these cities that you did in your first city. Eventually, you will gain bounties on the same Raubritter from up to three cities. As these bounties can often be many Florins, this is extremely lucrative. By the time your characters are universally rolling with 25q+ gear, scale armor, two upgrades of weapons, and at least four Essence of Grace potions, you can probably safely pursue a Raubritter. I won't tell you how to defeat a Raubritter, as there are many ways, and it is enjoyable to figure them all out. When you defeat one, you will get some nice armor and weapons (usually), and can go back to all of your clients to collect sweet, sweet Florins. Killing a Raubritter is a gateway to killing more Raubritter, which is also a gateway to exploring more of the world and completing those obnoxious early "get a Tarnhelm" quests that directed you from Ulm to Hamburg. Where's the Story, Bru?  When you decide that you want to follow "the story" in Darklands, there are a lot of places to begin. It all starts with visiting tiny villages. Do this until you find one that is full of Satanists. Defeat them and they will say something like, "We will have our revenge <direction> of <city_name> on <next_solstice_equinox_day>." Write this poo poo down this game was made in 1992. Did you already forget?! Go to that place at that time. There is no leeway, so don't think you can show up a day late and still check it out. If you do, you will have to repeat the earlier steps. When you get there at the right time, you will see a witches' sabbath. These own bones. "Deal with" them and you will be pointed toward the next steps (or receive a dream that does -- I can't remember. Just keep following the leads and you will go on a grand adventure. Other Things to Remember  Your party leader always speaks for you, so set your high Speak Common or Speak Latin character as the party leader before chatting with people when that stuff matters (e.g. cathedrals, universities). Get as many saints as possible for your high Virtue character. These are super important, especially as the game goes on. If you have a second character with moderately high Virtue, there are plenty of low-Virtue saints you can call on. Just check the required Virtue before learning their mysteries. Virtue can be raised during the game, but very slowly compared to other skills. Write down where you find various alchemical ingredients or just use an online guide. Alchemy is really important in the long game. If you don't put effort into tracking down the ingredients, it's just a headache.
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Mar 24, 2012 19:55
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