My online game friend who lived in bay area for 10 years moved back to Chicago and we had an IRL games-meet and became steam family today. I taught him Kenshi and Dominions 5, he attempted to teach me Hearts of Iron IV and oh my that game is nuts. Perhaps I could get down with it as a sandbox.
Other games that are now a part of my family that might be worth a go:
Banished
Deep Rock Galactic
Deus Ex: HR
Don’t Starve
Papers, Please
Raft
Superhot
Wait, what? Isn’t Mask of the Betrayer an expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2?
Reminds me that I still haven’t finished BG1. Should resume it at some point.
also, I suggest actually reading the manual. it has all the information you could possibly need. bestiary wise, just google 2nd edition (i think BG2 was 2nd, right?) D&D monster manual and it will be very helpful for figuring out strengths and weaknesses.
yeah, I read the manual. monster manual would probably be helpful. gonna check that out.
Man, Baldur’s Gate. I tried to get into those games when they came out and I think they were the ones that made me realize that Western RPGs like that and me will never connect. I really tried and seeing how everyone else lifted them into the high heavens I just figured the whole genre wasn’t for me, if they are the gold standard already. Twenty years later and nothing has changed about this
I think it’s technically under NDA, so I dunno how much I can say, but I’ve been messing with the beta of a long-in-development creation game from the developer of a beloved but notoriously clunky series that did something similar.
Hint hint wink wink, etc.
Anyway - it’s cool! I’m terrible at making things (I could see using PSVR + Move controllers being a huge benefit when it comes to sculpting), but playing around with the games people are making is a nice little experience.
I enjoy the little fly-throughs of landscapes and vignettes more than the games themselves. The painterly stuff you can do with the 3D tools is fantastic.
Oh man, if you’re alluding to the franchise I think you’re alluding to, I had so much fun with those games, despite the prevailing SB opinion needing a lot more precision in the mechanics. I even liked the kart racer they came out with.
Basically for reasons nedge has already gone over, I think BG2 is a really poor representative of “the best of CRPGs.” If you bounce off of, like: 1. Fallout (the first one) 2. Torment (the first one) and 3. Morrowind, then yeah the genre probably isn’t for you. But you can’t go off of Baldur’s Gate.
Also even if you hate ALL those games you should still play Alpha Protocol
I agree with this post except the first torment is really not that likable at all and there have been way too many great CRPGs since 2014 for Cuba’s recs to all be stuck then
Fallout 1 yes but like, Witcher 3 over Morrowind realistically and Deadfire or Divinity over P:S
I don’t really like either of these games but strong disagree
The first Torment… is Good
It has like three memorable moments but most of the characters are one sided and the first few hours are a bleak slog, the combat is miserable and tedious, and way too much of its idea of “good writing” is 90s D&D soup
how did your views on PS:T and Marinara get switched around so completely?
I played them both in 2017 and I loved one and was lukewarm on the other
Also, it certainly has something to do with it that I’ve never really liked D&D writing much whereas as we’ve established I had very little experience of the source material that you found marinara to be cribbing from so it at least came across more novel to me, plus I found the world and the characters and the systems and the prose much more engaging
but Marinara IS D&D writing!
well then it’s a different kind at least that doesn’t scan to me as “oh yeah Brogbert and the Hell Realm need you to inflict Pain upon your wisecracking companion in order to learn what pain is right after you’re done manually casting the same buffs for the eleventh time”
Anyway I recommend divinity or deadfire because I have gotten the point that a lot of CRPG heads do not like marinara and fair enough
Planescape commits some overwriting sins but it’s thematically whole in a way few games are. The way the characters (other than the thief) are tuned to slowly reveal their history and with it your own is masterfully done!
There are like two unskippable combat encounters in the entire game.
Numenara is a deliberate soupy everysetting where all there is, is surface. There’s no there but signifiers pulled off a shelf. Planescape has the specific character of the Nameless One to anchor the planelurching to but by going for Just Some Cypher With A Baddad in Numenara leaves you adrift in a sea of “oh yeah that thing” until you pass to the next “oh uh huh.”
passed through a coarse mfa filter
This is the reason why, even though I think PS:T is pretty good, it is nowhere near the pinnacle of RPGs for me. I need way less multi-paragraph character descriptions in my rpg!
The actual narrative expressed in PS:T is complex and full of potent imagery! I’m a sucker for terrible people desperate to change themselves as a thematic through-line, always surrounded by the trauma they caused.
Marinara on the other hand is just some fantasy mcguffin gunk. Gotta fix the magic device to stop your evil dad
A bunch of stuff in Numenara only exists to point back at Planescape.
The whole “endless battle” is just the Blood War. It makes no sense in the setting as presented
The way it shoehorns in “Torment” is like an afterthought, both to justify this as a spiritual sequel and add some kind of weight to your final decision. (“Yeah, it’s not just that your immortal brethren are jerks, they just… give off a real bad vibe, you know? Can’t help it!”) Instead of being an individual who made decisions in the past that have some kind of metaphysical weight because [fantasy cruft] making personal decisions, you’re a newborn babby who’s a variation on these people, off to the side, who made decisions in the past and eventually you stumble to the right point of [science fantasy cruft] to make the decision to decide the world-shaking fate of the earth and
Anyway yeah I thought Numenara was OK but I think Felix is an Alien from the planet You Liked Those Sentences???
you @Felix
edit because no more than 3 consecutive replies are allowed?!:
Divinity:OS has a cat that is also a wizard but I ran into some kind of late game wall and couldn’t progress and had nowhere to go to level so idk