That’s fair. It’s true it has its own flavor but it’s not exactly literarature. It’s also not funny enough to pass as comedic. I think pairing it with the mediocre voice acting works to its detriment.
But yeah, at least it’s not bland-boring.
@Tuxedo: the game tries its damndest for you to not take it seriously. It’s just what they are going for. Carefree adventure where you hack and slash some monsters.
As for the healing, rotating your party members by having them rest one by one on a bed is slightly faster than healing via casting (although you can’t do that in the field, ofc (unless you can carry a bedroll in your inventory? Haven’t tried if that’s possible))
I’m 100% in the tank for OS, with the exception of Witcher 2/3 it’s easily my favourite RPG of any flavour to come out in like a decade, and it was so good that it led me to a higher opinion of “traditional” CRPGs as a genre, like, “oh, they don’t all have to have janky D&D derivative mechanics that you play the game in spite of”
the post-battle healing is not that bad and the plotting is actually good in a SNES Final Fantasy sort of way!
I’d actually compare the game to Anachronox: western dev trying to do their own Chrono Trigger. I mean, Divinity OS is way more chrono trigger than Anachronox was, and consequently way more successful.
Larian studios is belgian iirc and there’s a real bande dessinée feel to the writing, too. Like, not Moebius but definitely something like Adele Blanc-sec
That’s the common ground between fantasy BDs and laidback DnD adventures: an attitude of ‘whatever entertains the writer at the moment should go into the work’.
Arguing about this game with an aquaintance on Facebook. For one, he’s adopting the mentality that “Kickstarter games are shit” and says that Torment 2 is disappointing and amateurish.
One more concrete comment he made, though, is he described the choice system as “luck based” which seems ridiculous to me. Not sure how branching choices during dialog work exactly in this game. I think you spend some points that get replenished as you rest? I doubt they would just plop a luck system in there for the central system of the game.
Each point of effort you put into a result increases chances of success. With enough effort you can make any given event succeed 100% of the time. But I don’t really think that’s luck-based. Most of the chances are based off of skills and other abilities which often increase success chances dramatically, and in some cases critical successes result in better results (more money, more damage). But so far I haven’t experienced anything that I would call true RNG, like a decision tree that was there for a reason I couldn’t comprehend.
Maybe there is one there, but I think that would be kinda neat?
it’s obviously not that kickstarter games are universally disappointing and amateur, though I think in part it’s true that the studios that are able to clear huge sums on kickstarter are mostly Californian designers who have big names from the 90s but were never particularly strong on the “design” end of things. Double Fine definitely fits in here, as do most black isle / interplay alumni. largely down to the loyalties and purchasing power of gen X nerds.
I don’t understand why Double Fine still have their offices in SF. Why not set up shop in a flyover college town with like 1/10 the cost of living? Works for Volition!
I mean it’s nice to think that games development is still affordable in actual cultural centres – reminds me of how everyone got pushed out of NYC other than avalanche – but I guess SF is its own kind of fucked up
Choice Provisions (formerly Gaijin) had two offices for a while, one in downtown SF and one in San Jose. This was off the proceeds of releasing a dozen SKUs a year for three years running in a much less crowded market… Now they’ve downsized and my pal DANT RAMBO doesn’t work there anymore.
Supergiant’s office is in a hilarious quarter-block of gentrification surrounded by the most pee-soaked alleys of SF
At any rate, I think it’s a rose-tinted view to think that these modern Kickstarter funded revivals are inferior to their predecessors, while the opposite seems true in most cases (?)
I like to imagine an alternate reality where Troika put out all their games without publisher pressure making them release every game maybe a year or two too early. Realistically they’d look basically like Troika games after 5 years of patches and restored content, but it’s fun to imagine Arcanum launching at the level of polish and completion that the average midsize kickstarter rpg reaches.
I think it’s both true that ‘standard design practices circa mid-2010s’ result in better balanced & polished games than the originals and that they’re operating with less than half the team sizes & budget that made these games in the first place. So they can both feel light on content and niceties and full-er than before.
Sorry to reach back in the thread and bring up Wasteland 2 again, but I stopped playing that game when I realized about 50% of my time with the game was spent rotating the camera around. I knew something wasn’t quite clicking with me, but it took me a while to realize what the problem was. I think the interface alone makes Wasteland 2 worse than the original. It’s basically accepted without thought that old keyboard-driven interfaces suck, but the good ones are at least efficient once you learn them.
Also, when did people decide en-masse that the Infinity Engine sucks? I always thought the engine was pretty good, and I thought most everybody else did too! Speaking of Troika though, patched Temple of Elemental Evil is still the best D&D game.
It would be if you fought anything besides bugbears for 90% of it!
Infinity Engine sucks because it combines the worst ruleset of D&D (2nd edition with a bunch of fiddly shit stapled on) with the worst imaginable implementation (real time with pause combat used to be something I was convinced couldn’t work at all because of how much of a chore it was in Infinity Engine games. I don’t think that’s true anymore but I still remain skeptical of most attempts at implementing it)
Actually, I just realized that Dark Suns: Shattered Lands might be the best D&D game. ToEE is up there though.
I don’t agree that 2nd Edition is the worst rule set(I like 3e and 4e less), but I can admit it doesn’t lend itself well to CRPGs, and neither does 1e. That doesn’t stop Dark Sun from being a cracking excellent game though, even with all the worst excesses of 2e tacked on.
On Infinity Engine, real time with pause has its problems, but I think they gave the player enough options to make it work. I don’t want to go too far out on a limb defending Infinity Engine, I just didn’t realize it was disliked to the degree that it apparently is.
Dark Suns Shattered Lands is really good, generally helped by the excellent setting
My DnD edition rankings (yes, let’s just turn this thread into an edition war), only including official DnD games (meaning that I won’t include any of Kevin Crawford’s stuff even though it’s really excellent)
I’m not gonna bother rating 5e because I haven’t played it yet, also not gonna bother rating 0e/Chainmail D&D because I have no inclination to ever play it.
It’s a shame that the video games have only ever adapted terrible rulesets, and the one most suited to a video game adaptation (4e, with its clearly defined abilities and exhaustively playtested rules interactions) never got one.
Knights of the Chalice should be ranked alongside Dark Suns: Shattered Lands and ToEE, btw. It’s a stripped down version of 3.5 focused on providing actually compelling tactics.
(The privileging of “Advanced” D&D over the far superior BECMI rules is the worst marketing shit to ever emerge from TSR’s cancerous days (Ok maybe not as bad as their constant attempts to revive Buck Rogers). The ruleset was a bunch of incompetent Gygaxian rulings mashed together with atrocious writing just to deny royalties and credit to Dave Arneson.)
Anything below Rules Cyclopedia is somewhat arbitrary. 3e and 4e are both extreme headaches to GM because monsters have the same statblocks as pcs. I’ve almost always been a GM so while it’s fine from a player side (I like the idea behind skills even if they’re poorly implemented) it’s obnoxious to run. 2e, being a sloppy mess, is fairly straightforward to run because I can just disregard everything that doesn’t work (nothing works in 2e). While normally, this means I would rate it lower than a coherent rules system, I give it a few bonus points for having a mountain of excellent settings, where 3e, 3.5 and 4e only had Eberron (OK and it had the best version of Ravenloft).
As rules alone, 2e is definitely worse than 3.5 and 4e
I agree with your general ranking, except that I love all that Gygaxian shit, so I put AD&D at the top. I do think that AD&D as written isn’t really a complete game though. It is meant to be viewed through the lens of Basic, otherwise it is indecipherable. Also, it was probably rushed out, which explains the bad editing. As a set of ideas to expand D&D, I think it’s the best. I’m not going to argue though. Your points are well considered.
To bring thing back on topic, I haven’t been able to get into Pillars of Eternity, so that makes me reluctant to try Torment. I liked the original Planescape, but I’m skeptical of attempts to streamline RPG rule sets and/or engines. Does Torment have a faux D&D rule set like PoE?
The Kickstarter RPG I’m most interested in is Serpent in the Staglands, which I own but haven’t delved into yet.
Yeah, I don’t own this one but have been meaning to buy it. I owe it to SB to actually finish Darklands first before playing “modern-day homage to Darklands”
It lost so much from the Cyclopedia, though. Strongholds/Dominions rules, Mass Combat rules, the centrality of Morale as a combat mechanic, a generally elegant combat system, combat maneuvers, naval combat, siege combat, all of this in one book. AD&D is a poor substitute, narrowing BECMI’s rules and scope instead of expanding it. And it manages the impossible, being a game with less options and possibilities that feels more complicated and obtuse.
(it’s been a while since I looked at the 2nd ed books but I feel like morale was dropped to an optional rule if not completely cut out)