Geneforge is the best series because the setting is fascinating and the writing is filled with interesting choices
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yeah my buddy loves those!
fwiw my list wasn’t supposed to be an exhaustive list of The Good CRPGs, but more The Ones That Work For Me Because I Have A Low Tolerance For Really Bad Mechanics And D&D Writing
(this is also why I don’t begin from “you have to play planescape torment” because as great as it was, it has its share of both)
Arcanum still remains one of the very best CRPGs (and videogames overall) ever made despite the mechanics being kinda shit.
Realms of Arkania 2 was a game I first saw recommended on this very forum and I want to pass on this recommendation, it is a rare, mostly unknown pleasure.
These aren’t Wizardry likes! They’re Dungeon Master likes!
Dungeon Master is very good and feels ahead of its time in its rejection of legacy D&D mechanical cruft (always cruft from the worst editions of D&D too) in favor of transparency and austerity.
I don’t think the Wizardry games have ever been very good. They may have established the video game dungeon crawl genre but the dungeons are almost uniformly shit (of the ‘fuck the players over while cackling’ school of shit design that thankfully mostly died out by the early 90s) and the games are just not enjoyable experiences.
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I should have clarified: a friend of mine has spare keys for Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numera. The odds of me playing multiple crpgs in the next decade or so is slim and I’d rather have someone else get a shot at a key they may use rather than me hoard one.
So! Other crpgs recommendations are duly noted and thank you for them, but in this particular case the options are limited to just these two games. Felix suggested Torment (and I recall him seeming to legit dig the game in its thread), anyone wish to argue for Pillars or is that the clear better option?
Which one was made by the guys who did Alpha Protocol?
Pillars.
I’ve heard nothing good about Pillars even from people who normally love obsidian games
(I haven’t played it yet in part because of that. Maybe it’ll be critically re-evaluated by yours truly when I end up getting a copy on sale and finding it to have just as much potential points of interest as alpha protocol)
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no
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definitely play torment in that case! I didn’t mean to be down on it, I liked it a whole lot and I thought the reception to it was actually too harsh many places, but do bear in mind that it does have tons of (excellent, and not just D&D-excellent) text and fairly poor combat.
I am a noted obsidian disliker though, for the decade that no one but them and bioware were making typical CRPGs and they were supposed to be the good ones I found them consistently dry and clumsy. BioWare are terrible at making CRPGs (though BG2 isn’t exactly bad if you can handle the genre trappings) but their bombastic jRPG-leaning stuff is still more fun in my book than obsidian’s output.
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I think Jorg Weed Man of super bunnyhop liked it? He did say it was a damn book of a game though.
Have any videogames made fun of hotep lads yet?
Anyone played any of these Excave games? The third one at least is made by LightWeight!
Are there any drugs available to help suppress terrible nightmares? I haven’t been able to get a full nights rest in a while and it’s starting to bug me.
not that I’m aware of, but if there is, I imagine it could be made from my blood
I’ll try anything once
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So you know, it’ll remove the good ones too. And the mediocre ones, and the strange ones.
is it worth triggering the secret final boss + ending on my first time through nocturne?
I just got to the fifth kalpa and I understand that I can avoid it if I don’t bother clearing the fifth kalpa until after I’ve entered the final dungeon, which is tempting because I don’t think I have a superboss in me (plus I’m missing a few magatama and I don’t really want to have to get masakados too to make the fight tractable)
nb I suspect I’m underleveled (I’m 60 and dante is 80) and I’m not sure how much effort I want to put into correcting this
On one hand
- I remember the fifth kalpa being relatively painless to go through compared to the others
- The last kalpa boss is cool
- You’ve come this far
On the other hand
- You need Pierce on the main character. If you removed it, forget it, you’d need to get it on a demon and it’d only lengthen the battles
- The extra boss is not very compelling, it’s a very long battle against a Dragon Quest style boss and a worse climax than the regular final boss right before
- The ending is like 30 seconds long
I’d say skip it