The Long Journey Home, this thread might as well have been created just for this game!!! :(
That game had a lot of problems that prevented it from being fun. It wanted to be Starflight so bad, SO BAD.
Divinity: Original Sin. Two reasons:
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I guess the one-character-fights-at-a-time thing just isn’t for me. Seems to be popular with a lot of folks, but I find it boring as hell. I know all game combat is one kind of abstraction or another, but this I eventually found mind-numbing.
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If you’re going to make what looks like an open world, make it a damned open world! I didn’t so much mind the warnings that the monsters in such-a-such area may be too tough for my party, if I could still try it for myself. But when that annoying wizard/cat/person thing suddenly pops up and says “Oh no, no, no! You don’t want to go here yet, you want to go there instead,” I was pretty much over the game. It just completely deflated the story. I was thinking, “If you know so much, what the hell do you need me for?”
Anyway, as a result, I’ve no interest in the second game, despite all the glowing reviews it has received.
No sentence could highlight how uninteresting those games are better than that sentence. Those numbers are just goofy and pointless. I miss AD&D +1 long swords.
I really just want an RPG, even just a dungeon crawl, with action-oriented combat, like the original Diablo (and the genre until recently). Not a numbers accumulator or fashion show.
Heheh. I remember playing Baldur’s Gate after playing Diablo. It was my first exposure to any kind of D&D. When I saw a long sword+1 at a vendor, and it was so expensive, I said “I guess I’m supposed to be really impressed by +1”. It was a mind-boggling concept coming from Diablo 1 and Fallout 1.
(I was not impressed).
Diablo is great, but I also like games in which the loot actually sustains the believability of the world you’re in. I think if mobs in an Elder Scrolls game dropped blingy Vegas greens and blues and purples, it would sort of kill the mood.
There’s something to be said for a game in which, when you kill a rat, what you get is a dead rat. At least IMO.
To be fair, D&D numbers get super fucking goofy in their own way, esp. in the 3/3.5/4E era. Once you stack all the multipliers and added bonuses and situational things and ability procs, you’re watching a Barbarian hack away at baddies at 200HP a swing with his 2d6 sword and just kinda shaking your head at the insanity of it all.
If anything, D&D moves the heavy numerical lifting off the weapons themselves and relies on a mixture of abilities, feats, spells, and other kinds of gear to get there. . . but it still gets there, relatively speaking.
I agree - and I don’t think Elder Scrolls games need to become a lootfest, but the games do need to give you more incentive to go into dungeons and caves.
If you make your way through a tough dungeon there should be a worthwhile reward, be it a sack full of gold (not 5 gold coins) or a rare weapon that is either extremely powerful, or has some unique attribute or effect, not a basic steel sword. Loot in the ES games has always been dull and pointless. Not that EVERY single dungeon should have THE MOST AMAZING LOOT EVER, but Bethesda need to step up their game.
Not a Bartle Achiever bone in your body!
All the ARPGs are extremely achiever-focused, the random loot mechanic is central to their gameplay. They aren’t role-playing games like Pillars of Eternity. Diablo 1 was the same way, just less evolved. I guess you could give Grim Dawn a shot; it’s more narrative than Diablo’s endgame certainly, but still a lot of stats, build customization, and loot collection.
Endless Legend.
The P&R forum
SPAZ 2, I cheated a bit to finish it this week, giving myself a ton of scrap to reduce the what seems like 20+ hour mid game grind. Only to build up a decent size empire / have a bunch of friends and allied ship captains, and have none of it matter for the end game. :|
It turned out frustrating, boring, and un-fun! The trifecta!
Disagree - it was a style that perhaps evolved from Diablo 1, but that game and earlier action RPGs weren’t as different from other RPGs at the time other than in their combat style: Gateway to Apshai, Intellivision’s D&D, the Nethack games, the 1st person dungeon crawls like Dungeon Master (which the original Diablo has as much in common with as it does its successors) and Eye of the Beholder. Gauntlet in the arcades wasn’t mainly about looting.
As well as even subsequent games, like Divine Divinity (a Diablo clone that evolved differently to be more like Ultima 7) and Sacred. The Souls games definitely have a lot of loot, but it all has substantive functions/different movesets, etc., rather than just countless derivatives adding a zillion numbers, and more RPG elements too. Even the Dark Alliance/snowblind engine games, and derivatives like X-men Legends/Marvel Ultimate Alliance etc. -none of them are so loot driven.
It’s just a style that really matured with action-RPGs as of Diablo that some people find really addictive and satisfying 2 (and MMOs, but they’re different, since they need prolonged gameplay incentives), but I find as interesting as slot machines.
Nethack, Gauntlet, and Dungeon Master are simply not what we typically call ARPGs these days. Yes Grimrock 2 is realtime and yes it’s a RPG, but nobody calls it a ARPG. That specific genre descended from Diablo 1, third-person isometric view realtime loot cascades.
If you call all RPGs with realtime combat ARPGs, you’re just being contrary.
Well, in that case, I don’t feel Diablo 2 was much about the loot either. The loot just helped you survive until the end. It’s only with Diablo 3 that the loot became the main way for your character to get unique builds.
What’s interesting is that I was pretty immune to the charms of Diablo 3’s end-game, since I don’t care about loot in ARPGs either. But when fellow Qt3 denizens taught me that the loot actually helps build a unique character build, and how it does it, suddenly the game became really interesting again. It’s not that the loot is the end-goal, even in that situation. It’s that the loot is what enables you to create character builds, since all skills unlock for all characters in Diablo 3.
I don’t - I’m solely talking about games with common origins that demonstrate different evolutionary options - you can’t exclude progenitors of the genre like Nethack and Gateway to Aphshai when talking about what a Diablo game could/should be, since it was designed to modernize those games expressly.
Dungeon Master, etc. are more tangential - they evolved from that genre (and turn-based dungeon crawlers starting with Wizardry) after it became technically practical to have a real-time first person perspective dungeon crawl, but they show an alternative evolutionary option.
As do the other more current isometric perspective action-RPGs I mentioned, like Divine Divinity/Sacred etc.,
You’re saying earlier and contemporary RPGs weren’t so much about loot, while Diablo 1 was. I agree, Diablo 1 birthed the ARPG genre. Not sure what point you were trying to make, though? If you want a graphical nethack, such things do exist, we just don’t call them ARPGs.
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