General RPG discussions Options

[SubRosa]

It wasn't that bad. I have been using Windows 10 on my laptop for a couple of years, so I got all the surprises out of my system. The update itself was simple. Afterward I had to go through all the usual things of creating new file associations, setting desktop colors, wallpapers, and the like. The same as any time you install Windows. Thankfully it has been out long enough for people to create programs to fix the largest things I dislike, like the inability to customize the start menu, the removal of the recent items list, and putting the file properties window on the side rather than the bottom. I had to reinstall several games to get them to work. But they did eventually work.

Well, there ya go! With Total War Amazon done, might it be time for you to be our guinea pig for Horizon Zero Dawn on PC?

Not yet. It was on sale over the holidays, but not by enough for me to want to buy it. Maybe in the future it will come down more, and I will give it a chance.

[SubRosa]

I started playing Sword Coast Legends again last night. It has been a long time since I tried playing it. I actually finished the tutorial for the first time, and am in the beginning of it. The game got lambasted, but it is ok. I would not say it is great however. But is is far from bad.

The voice acting is good. Lots of different accents. So far the characters are interesting too.

You can save anywhere at anytime. But there seems to be only a single save game. As you cannot go to a Load screen and choose to load a specific one. You click on Load and it just starts up from the last time you saved. So that is asking for your game to be ruined by save file corruption.

There are no console commands, or save game editors. Which disappoints me, because I like to use them to customize my characters, and do things outside of class structures. Like give January some kind of lightning bolt attack. I did find some Trainers, which among other things will give you lots of points to spend on attributes and perks. So maybe I will experiment with that.

The camera will not let you zoom in much to see your character, and there seems to be no way of using custom portraits. The graphics are good though.

It is very heavily team-focused. You start with a group of 3 NPCs with you, and seems to be how it goes through the game. I don't think you can create your own custom NPCs like you could in Pillars of Eternity. But they do start you with a Fighter, a Rogue, and a Cleric. A Wizard/Necromancer joins soon after. So far you can only have 4 total characters in your party. But that might change later.

I find the combat to be really fast, and hard to keep track of everything everyone is doing. It is also brutal. I had to lower the difficulty from Medium to Easy. I also had to spend a lot of time micromanaging the cleric to keep dishing out healing during the battles.

The rule system seems to be based on D&D. But it is very video-gamey. I have not played table top D&D since version 3.5, so I cannot be sure if 5.0 is like this or not. uses. Like a lot of crpgs it gives you branching trees of perks to buy, all based on your class. Said perks all have a cooldown time between. So it feels a lot like say Dragon Age that way. But the various races and classes are all straight D&D at least.

Jan and company fight a Mimic, which was pretending to be a treasure chest

[macole]

Hate those Mimics.

[Renee]

Yah me too. I added Mimics into Oblivion via Maskar's and they're just annoying. Well, they're supposed to be, that's their whole point! But I eventually removed them because they just feel like they're coming from outside the Elder Scrolls universe / aren't supported by lore books at all. Thank goodness MOO makes it easy to remove anything we don't want, while keeping stuff we do want.

Sword Coast Legends looks rather Baldur's-y but only because it's isometric. Looks as though it's not turn-based, is what I mean to say. More action-y.

Doncha love it when everybody's saying some game is bad, then you try it and lo, it doesn't seem as horrible? I assume by 'lambasting' you are talking about critical game reviewers, not so much gamers themselves, but still. Maybe bad ratings can cause some sort of a launching pad within our minds. We read it's bad, expect that it'll be bad, and so on,

Then again, when I discovered Oblivion it was due to a game review in which the guy gave it A+, and to this day I feel like that reviewer nailed it pretty good. Not so much the rating, but the way he described it as 'do anything / go anywhere', which is exactly what I love. I still feel the same way about that game as I did in 2008.

Sorry. Rambling. Maybe I should start gaming.

This post has been edited by Renee: Jan 17 2021, 06:13 PM

[SubRosa]

I played some more Sword Coast Legends. I think the multiplayer parts of it no longer work, since the developer went out of business and Steam delisted the game (you still need Steam to play however). But in addition to the two single player campaigns there is a mode to play a random dungeon. You say how many levels you want it to be, what kind of monsters, etc... and the game generates the dungeon for you and off you go. You can go alone, or bring up to 3 NPC compaions from the single player campaign. I tried that a bit, and leveled up some of my companions.

It also has support for user-created dungeons. I have not looked to see if any are out there however.

[SubRosa]

Tamriel: Zero Dawn

[Acadian]

Aloy!

[ghastley]

Three types

[mirocu]

I started playing Sword Coast Legends again last night.

You can save anywhere at anytime. But there seems to be only a single save game. As you cannot go to a Load screen and choose to load a specific one. You click on Load and it just starts up from the last time you saved. So that is asking for your game to be ruined by save file corruption.

Ugh. Exactly what happened to my playthrough of Shining in the Darkness for the Genesis/MegaDrive. Had made some good progress, levelled up my crew nicely and alluvasudden BOOM! Save file was no longer loadable

[SubRosa]

Three types

I have a plain old office chair.

[TheCheshireKhajiit]

Three types

I have a plain old office chair.

Same. That being said, if I had more time to game I might would get a fancy chair.

[Kane]

Elden Ring looks pretty cool.

[Acadian]

Thanks. I checked Elden Ring out. Release Jan 2022. Looks like it could have potential. Single player Medieval fantasy open world rpg with character customization, mounted combat.

[Pseron Wyrd]

I haven't really been playing attention to Elden Root until today. And I have to say, I am intrigued. Here is an interesting video that attempts to predict what Elden Root may be like, based on Miyazaki's past work:
Elden Ring Classes, Races & Stats Theory: Character Creation and Progression Gameplay Discussion

[Kane]

I'll have to give that a lookie-loo on my lunch break. I, too, am wholly unfamiliar of the game outside of the E3 trailer they released yesterday.

Edit: website is up now and is more descriptive. https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/elden-ring/elden-ring

This post has been edited by Kane: Jun 11 2021, 12:22 PM

[SubRosa]

I just finished watching the original Alien movies. Watching Resurrection made me yearn for a Alien RPG. It would be squad-based, isometric, tactical style game, like the Baldur's Gate games, or the Pillars of Eternity ones. You would have your main character, plus up to 5 companions. They might be NPCs you meet with their own backstories and quests, or generic adventurer's you can create yourself (like in the Pillars games), or a mix of both.

The story might be that you are on a world infested with Xenomorphs. The goal, survive and escape. You work your way through the game world, meeting people and recruiting them, or fighting them. You pick up weapons along the way, maybe find gunsmiths where you can upgrade them at certain points, etc... Plus all the usual leveling up with skills.

Your team ought to be a variety of types or "classes". Mercenaries, pirates, scientists, engineers, doctors, thieves, and so on. Each ought to have something they can add, and offer different ways to resolve problems. An engineer might be able to hotwire a door, a soldier might be able to blow it open, etc...

[Renee]

Yes! Alien and Alien 2 my two favorite sci fi movies. There's so many background themes in those movies... it's not just humans versus monsters. I can still remember the looks on Paul Reiser's face after he tries to lock them all in, but then he's the one who gets eaten.

I am surprised there isn't already some sort of Alien game. Oh I see, a game which is isometric, like Baldur's. Yeah that would be kick ass.

[Kane]

Alien: Isolation is supposedly a fantastic game if you like a tinge of horror in your game life.

[Kane]

Anyone see the SW: KOTOR news? I never played the original, so I'll probably grab the remake for sure.

[SubRosa]

I had no idea what you were talking about, so I looked it up. This is interesting. Aperion was a group that previously worked on a fan-made update of Kotor 1 using the old and open-sourced Unreal engine. They got a lot done before Disney shut them down with legal threats. Maybe someone got it through their thick skulls that being good capitalists and selling people what they want is a better more than being litigious?

Now Sony is onboard. I wonder what that will mean as far as what engine the game will use. Is that a sign that it will run on something owned by Sony?