Trails in the Sky- the one area it doesn’t fit is that there are rails, but within those rails there’s a lot to explore and find out- enough to keep you interested.
Combat is pretty light until the end of the 2nd game.
Excellent indie RPG Ember, which has not yet been mentioned in this thread I believe, is only $1.49 as the Daily Deal on Bundlestars today.
Also, @FinnegansFather, it’s not exactly in line with your listed bullet points, but given your love for The Hobbit as stated above, have you tried Lord of the Rings Online? It’s honestly the best video game adaptation of Middle Earth I’ve ever played, and I’ve played pretty much all of them. Sure it’s a 10-year-old MMO, but that just means that it’s now easily soloable all the way through, making it a very nice single-player game that just happens to have other people running around in it. The atmosphere of locations from The Shire to Moria to Mordor, the sweeping theatrical-style musical score, and interesting and lore-steeped quests from the main storyline that has you parallel the Fellowship to side quests that dig deep into lore and regions only lightly touched in the books all make for an amazing experience for fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
I tried to play Witcher 1 3 times and the action aspect of it, i.e. managing your clicking via combat just kind of ruined the whole RPG aspect for me…is it better in Witcher 3?
By millions of miles =) I haven’t tried TW3 on computer, only console, and I only ever played TW1 for an hour or so, but I remember the swordfights to be ridiculous. It’s a completely different game.
Yeah this is pretty good fun, but I am not entirely sure why. The voice acting is dreadful (acceptable for a budget game I guess), the story is nonsense (I’m a couple of hours in and don’t really care about any of it), there are loads of fetch quests, and the combat is pretty much just a case of spamming your skills (at least on the normal difficulty). Yet somehow it feels good. I suppose it’s because it is unashamedly retro and that clicks with the part of me that wants that kind of game still.
Infinitely.
The Witcher 1’s combat is a horrific nightmare. So bad that I put it down to the easiest level after a while and just played for the story.
Witcher 3 I played on 2nd hardest and enjoyed it through the whole thing.
It’s funny, I actually enjoyed the rhythmic stance sword fighting of The Witcher. When I dabbled with The Witcher 2 I was disappointed to see it had turned into more of a traditional hack and slash. The worst thing about the rhythmic sword fighting was that you had to stare at the pointer for the cues which meant you couldn’t watch Geralt’s moves or pay much attention to your enemies. That was a shame, but the idea I think worked really well with the lore of the Witchers and their alleged fighting prowess.
Thanks for voicing this because busy work is one of my pet peeves, whether it’s Breath of the Wild or, in this case, The Witcher 3. I feel particularly sensitive to it these days. I just don’t like to feel as though my time is being wasted on the same fluff.
I really ought to check out Age of Decadence though, it sounds fascinating.
And you give 5 minutes to some games before uninstalling them? Sorry Ultrazen, I couldn’t resist! :P
I love the sound of this. I remember some goblins giving me a really hard time in Dark Messiah and when I did finally manage to best them, the last one ran off. I chased him and found him hiding in a corner on his knees begging for mercy. I was too angry for mercy so, naturally, I did what any Dark Messiah player would do and I kicked him into the next life. I wish more games would give their creatures and enemies some personality and sense of self-preservation. Remember the Houndeyes running away from you in Half-Life? Or the Paramites in Abe’s Oddysee being cowards alone but vicious in packs?
Eschalon 1 or 2 are worth more than 5 minutes. :-) The sense of exploration, semi-realistic mechanics and relatively low fantasy world I think fit with Tolkien’s aesthetic.
Speaking of games with dreadful combat ;)
I liked the world and story until they blew it at the end but that game made me feel like I had the laziest adventurer of all time. Constant resting after most combat, especially with a mage where it’ll usually take half my mana bar to kill anything. And there’s lots of monsters.
Oh I’m not disputing that! I was just laughing at the thought of only giving one game 5 minutes but then spending 2 hours in another just rolling die for better stats at startup. It was just a cross thread tease :-)
I agree. The fighting mechanics in Witcher 1 were much more interesting and IMO, manageable. I haven’t played 3 yet but the change going into 2 was a nightmare and I had to eventually use a mod and the lowest difficulty to get through, whereas I played the first game entirely unmodded.
Not for me, I had the same problem with both of them. The clunky, horrible combat, combined with the annoying movement, where you are always overshooting your target by 3 feet really turned me off to it. I’m most certainly an outlier when it comes to the Witcher games, but the feel of them just drives me nuts to the point they are unplayable.
And that’s the thing…I can spend hours happily plunking away trying to get a better starting character to try another class combo, but “molasses” game mechanics just instantly drive me nuts. It’s just a feel thing…the combat in the Eschalon games is without a doubt simplistic and largely horrible, but it’s not horrible in a way that makes me want to throw my controller, and even though there is a lot of combat, your build is more important than your actual moment to moment combat, which is the real difference.
At the end of the day, it really is a feel thing. It’s one of the things that I tend to love about Blizzard games, they are very very good at “feel” and timing. I’m a musician for a living, so maybe it’s something that bothers me in a different way than it bothers other people, but it’s a huge factor in games for me. I hate when games feel “behind” me.
Well, I have been playing Witcher 3 and it ticks a lot of the boxes I was originally looking for. Battles take up more of my time than I’d like and they distract somewhat from the sense of exploration – but as a sign user at the lowest difficulty, the most of the fights are over quickly. And I never minded the occasional significant battle, it’s the sense of mowing the lawn that’s really a negative.
The biggest problem with the exploration, ironically, is that quests are done in such a way that you really need the HUD to track them, in order to move on at all. But looking at the HUD works against the sense of exploring an interesting world.
But it is true that the controls strike me as absurdly set up. Just getting my horse up to speed and keeping him there makes for a very odd finger configuration – and that’s just the start of it. Given the overall quality of the game, I cannot imagine what they were thinking.
That aside, though, the game is a lot of fun. Thanks to the many who suggested it!
I think the controls work way better with a controller, despite my usually being a mouse and keyboard person.
Bite your tongue. You didn’t like Baldurs Gate. Are you a communist?
I don’t like Baldur’s Gate either. I remember playing it and getting stuck in this area where I was surrounded by kobolds then I defeated them, but every time I found a place to heal up and camp, I kept getting ambushed my kobolds. I noped right out. Hey! That probably counts as a rage quit right? I finally got one!
The first time I played it I quit after a couple hours. But later I went back and I now consider it one of the best games ever made. I know many prefer BG2 but for me it will always be Baldurs Gate.