Ok, I’m getting annoyed now! First Lionheart takes a large step backward what we’ve come to expect from a CRPG. (Can’t write on maps, no alt key to find goodies, can’t pause and give orders, click til your hand is shaped like a claw, too damn short, yada yada)
Now comes TOEE which is perhaps TOO faithful to pen and paper. By the way, pen and paper is WAY overated. That’s why we use computers so often! Where’s the info on items you identify? Where’s the max HP option? Frankly the whole AD&D thing is now getting stale for me. It’s time for a new (old) paradigm!
I challenge devs to quit cutting corners on usability! Your games don’t exist in a vaccuum; they will be judged against previous games like BG2, Fallout or Divine Divinity and found wanting. Who’s with me?
Actually, it’s kind of amusing. ToEE uses this innovative radial menu widget which is about 1000 times worse than the Planescape:Torment radial menu, which after a little learning process was actually easy to use. Why bother coming up with a clever GUI concept if you’re not going to implement it properly? It’s harder to use the ToEE radial menus than it is to use the usual dashboard mounted widgets or popup rectangular menus, or, really, almost any other approach they could have taken. Of course the ToEE menus have a tendency to crap out when the engine is overwhelmed with off-screen monsters trying to make their detection die rolls or whatever it is they’re doing, but that’s an aspect of usability.
The industry-wide problem is that everyone is writing these directdraw/directx games that take over the entire screen and then they reimplement their own GUI features from scratch for their shiny new engine since they can’t use conventional GUI packages. Of course using conventional OS windows and widgets results in incredibly ugly-looking GUIs, so it’s easy to see why people use directdraw for their GUIS, just on esthetic grounds. But the same devs who are working on GUIs are also working on other core game system features, since they are after all directdraw specialists and as the game’s completion deadline approaches, there are other things for them to be doing than merely making the game useable… Every once in a while some dev team implements good reuseable GUI features, but of course they don’t get shared with other teams in other companies, (even if they wanted to license them, the engines would be different and the code unuseable) and when that particular studio folds or its staff moves on, the whole cycle begins again. This tendency of dev teams to constantly reinvent the wheel occurs in other areas too of course, viz. the horrible pathing in most games and the lame from-scratch AI, but GUI features seem to be the most obvious example.
Yeah, why doesn’t anyone use the Directx equivalent of standard windows dialog boxes? I mean, they could jazz them up and shit, obviously; does DX actually support this sort of thing?
There are some pretty good RPG UIs. I thought the NWN and Morrowind UIs, although very different, were great (other than the journal in Morrowind, which was significantly improved by the expansions). Diablo 2’s is great.
But Troika pretty consistently produces terrible UIs. The graphics in their prior games weren’t good either, but they addressed that point in TOEE, so hopefully they’ll keep getting better with UIs as well.
Now comes TOEE which is perhaps TOO faithful to pen and paper. By the way, pen and paper is WAY overated. That’s why we use computers so often! Where’s the info on items you identify? Where’s the max HP option? Frankly the whole AD&D thing is now getting stale for me. It’s time for a new (old) paradigm!
I’ve seen that point a couple of times here, and guess I’d like to discuss it further – how is TOEE “too faithful” to pen and paper D&D (the identify spell is actually -not- faithful to the 3.5 tabletop game, which provides you with full details on magic items).
Bioware and Black Isle always did, I think, a good job at culling out rules/spells, etc. that they thought wouldn’t translate well to the computer, and just made wholesale changes when they thought it would improve things (like going with real-time combat, which worked better in the Second Edition AD&D than it does with 3rd Edition D&D, in my opinion). I also completely understand the fact that quite a few gamers think that the D&D system is pretty outdated, even as revised, compared to some of the systems that have been created expressly for computer games. I don’t disagree with either of those perspectives.
But that all said, since D&D is such a popular system, and a lot of people buy the games just because they are D&D (as discussed in another thread), isn’t it about time that a developer decided to give those fans a very accurate, faithful translation, without trying to second guess the game’s balance, etc.? I think a lot of RPG fans have been wanting to see a faithful D&D adaptation for a loooong time, and TOEE is clearly the most faithful one yet. I’m really happy that someone has finally done a game like TOEE.
Desslock, I think that a faithful adaptation is ok up to a point. When it becomes tedious or doesn’t use the capabilities of the PC, it’s just annoying to me. I guess I’m just spoiled by the great games in the past and wish they wouldn’t cut so many corners in this year’s crop.
I agree with your sentiment to some extent. I think we should be given options to max HPs, etc. Those who are “hardcore” may choose not to use them, but those of us who don’t want to be screwed over by randomness can play it the way we want.
Of course, I disagree with you that P&P games are overrated, unless you are just talking about the systems that they use. Even then, some are good and some are bad. I thought the GURPS system was very efficient, while the Shadowrun system, especially combat, was pretty weak. The White Wolf games are somewhere inbetween. But if you are saying CRPGs are better than P&P in every sense, then I have to assume you have never played a P&P game or never played one with a good group. CRPGs aren’t even close to real roleplaying, at least not yet. But I think from context that you mean the game system itself, especially since you are saying computers do it better. It IS nice to have all the dice rolling and such going on behind the scenes. The combat is much quicker!
but I like TOEE for a change of pace. I LOVE that it is turn-based, for instance. That allows for actual tactics! Baldur’s Gate had made me forget what those were :).
I don’t think the radial menu is so bad. It’s nice not to have access to your inventory constrained by quick-item slots. Or not have to scroll past pages and pages of spells represented by icons I haven’t memorized requiring me to hover the pointer over them until a help thing pops up with the name. It’s not like there aren’t interface problems with the Infinity Engine games, or NWN.
I was at EB the other day (picking up ToEE) and looked at a used copy of Divine Divinity. It was marked at 24.99. I went up to the counter and asked if the price was serious.
“Yep.”
“So, five bucks more than a new copy?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll pass.”
I’m the official “I wanted to love DD SOOOOO MUCH but just couldn’t deal with the constant crashing” schmuck here, so I’ll say that by buying DD, you’re sort of rolling the dice and hoping they come up sevens.
But it WAS great fun when it was working. Does it deserve being ranked amongst the likes of Fallout or BG2? I dunno. Action RPGs are a whole different vibe for me than more traditional ones, so I’m not sure comparing the two styles is all that useful. Then again, perhaps that’s just me.
I’d rather say that barring the technical problems, it’s the best action RPG I’ve ever played. It isn’t as pretty as Baldur’s Gate:Dark Alliance or Nox, and the controls feel the slightest bit “clumsy” so it doesn’t have as much of a “visceral” feel as Diablo 2 or BG:DA, but it does everything else much better than other games of this kind. The quality of the dialogue and the large amount of little miscellaneous things you can do really impressed me.
The folks at Larian finally patched DD a couple of months back, which seem to have fixed all the really horrible bugged quest and sound issues. Of course, it took about 6 months to get there, and a lot of gamers moved on.
I faced some bugs, but it never crashed on me. DD is a GREAT game, but so is Diablo 2. I got many hours of enjoyment out of both of them. DD is more of an RPG, though it uses a similar system to D2 in many ways. It just has more quests and more of a story feel to it.
