The Isometric PC CRPG Thread.

[Finnegan]

Yeah I meant the game not the article. 

 

That and Abandon Ship definitely on my watch list. 

[Uranyl Yellow]

Got the whole Shadowrun kaboodle with enhanced/directors editions for the princely sum of seven quid. I've not played much in the way of the cyberpunk genre, but I have fond memories of playing Arcanum:Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura way, way back. Besides, even if I hate it, the seven quid pales into insignificance compared to the money I've spent on overhyped crap in the past. I'm looking at you Godus and No Man's Sky. I don't even like space/exploration games. What the hell was I thinking.

[Carl the Llama]

2 hours ago, Uranyl Yellow said:

Got the whole Shadowrun kaboodle with enhanced/directors editions for the princely sum of seven quid. I've not played much in the way of the cyberpunk genre, but I have fond memories of playing Arcanum:Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura way, way back. Besides, even if I hate it, the seven quid pales into insignificance compared to the money I've spent on overhyped crap in the past. I'm looking at you Godus and No Man's Sky. I don't even like space/exploration games. What the hell was I thinking.

Good man, had a chance to get your teeth into it yet?

[Uranyl Yellow]

19 hours ago, Carl the Llama said:

Good man, had a chance to get your teeth into it yet?

Started Shadowrun Returns last night, and spent what seemed like several hours trying to decide between playing an elf shaman, human street samurai, or go totally off the wall and try a troll mage. Ended up going with an elf shaman. Didn't get far into the game as after all the time I spent buggering about with a character choice, it was getting late. First impressions are good, the only slight negative is I would personally prefer to cut the street slang talk in the conversations. I realise it's there for atmosphere, but it just feels like something out of A Clockwork Orange on horse tranquilizers.

[Carl the Llama]

6 hours ago, Uranyl Yellow said:

Started Shadowrun Returns last night, and spent what seemed like several hours trying to decide between playing an elf shaman, human street samurai, or go totally off the wall and try a troll mage. Ended up going with an elf shaman. Didn't get far into the game as after all the time I spent buggering about with a character choice, it was getting late. First impressions are good, the only slight negative is I would personally prefer to cut the street slang talk in the conversations. I realise it's there for atmosphere, but it just feels like something out of A Clockwork Orange on horse tranquilizers.

Haha yep RPG's are like 50% time picking your character, 40% time picking your name, 10% time playing the actual game  

[leicsmac]

Just been reading this thread and stuck Pillars of Eternity on my Steam wishlist to wait when it goes on sale. Worth it?

 

Also the Shadowrun collection is low priced too.

Edited 3 December 2017 by leicsmac

[Uranyl Yellow]

Well Shadowrun Returns was pretty good while it lasted. Unfortunately, I seem to have hit a terminal bug in the Universal Brotherhood building that causes the game to freeze up. Highly irritating.

[Uranyl Yellow]

16 hours ago, leicsmac said:

Just been reading this thread and stuck Pillars of Eternity on my Steam wishlist to wait when it goes on sale. Worth it?

 

Also the Shadowrun collection is low priced too.

Pillars is probably worth it even at full price - it's a decent game. Saying that, Steam usually has a big sale over Christmas where pretty much everything gets reduced at some point, so it's probably worth waiting a few weeks

[Uranyl Yellow]

I quite like the look of Spellforce 3. Might give it a few months for the price to drop though.

[Carl the Llama]

On 03/12/2017 at 18:00, Uranyl Yellow said:

Well Shadowrun Returns was pretty good while it lasted. Unfortunately, I seem to have hit a terminal bug in the Universal Brotherhood building that causes the game to freeze up. Highly irritating.

Just seen this, shame.  You moved on to the other games?  The series gets better with each new title, Tokyo being the current zenith of the Shadowrun videogame experience.

[Finnegan]

Seriously, like I said, don't  bother with returns / dead Man's Switch. It's shit. 

 

Get HK and Dragonfall. They're brilliant. 

[Uranyl Yellow]

17 hours ago, Carl the Llama said:

Just seen this, shame.  You moved on to the other games?  The series gets better with each new title, Tokyo being the current zenith of the Shadowrun videogame experience.

Actually, I managed to cure the problem in the end. Turned graphics right down, ran it in windowed mode and also used a different fight strategy - not sure which of these cured the problem but I got past the bit where it was constantly crashing. Finished Shadowrun now. Moved on to Dragonfall.

[Finnegan]

Really quite excited for PoE 2 now actually. Going to do my 4th PoE play through so I've got a save 100% how I want it to carry over in to the sequel. 

 

Get those souls back on the wheel for Berath! 

[Finnegan]

On 09/12/2017 at 15:50, Uranyl Yellow said:

Actually, I managed to cure the problem in the end. Turned graphics right down, ran it in windowed mode and also used a different fight strategy - not sure which of these cured the problem but I got past the bit where it was constantly crashing. Finished Shadowrun now. Moved on to Dragonfall.

 

Dragonfall is excellent, really is. 

 

Dead Man's Switch is verging on a waste of time unless you're a hardcore fan of the series but I guess it's too late to discourage you now.

 

I'm a big, big fan of Hong Kong (the real place) and all fiction based there, so I loved HK but it's a bit shallow in story telling terms compared to Dragonfall and I ran out of steam a bit with it. 

 

Love the game play of the games, though. I didn't think I'd like not having loot in the conventional rpg sense but it actually took away a distraction that tends to hold me back a bit. 

[Uranyl Yellow]

4 hours ago, Finnegan said:

 

Dragonfall is excellent, really is. 

 

Dead Man's Switch is verging on a waste of time unless you're a hardcore fan of the series but I guess it's too late to discourage you now.

 

I'm a big, big fan of Hong Kong (the real place) and all fiction based there, so I loved HK but it's a bit shallow in story telling terms compared to Dragonfall and I ran out of steam a bit with it. 

 

Love the game play of the games, though. I didn't think I'd like not having loot in the conventional rpg sense but it actually took away a distraction that tends to hold me back a bit. 

I finished the series a few weeks back, and overall thought them to be very good. I don't share your disdain for Dead Man's Switch, but agree that on the whole Dragonfall was the best of the bunch. I wasn't a great fan of the way they reworked the hacking sub-game in Hong Kong, but I think if it had had a bit more content and hadn't forced me into some bullshit decisions in the end game, then I think Hong Kong would probably have trumped Dragonfall for me, but yeh, the six quid or so for the three games was good value.

[Uranyl Yellow]

Just started Pillars of Eternity 2 - Deadfire. Early days, so it's hard to give a definite thumbs up, but it seems decent enough. Probably not quite up there with Original Sin 2, but maybe it will grow on me.

[Finnegan]

Started last night. Not completely sure I like the power points system yet or the change to health.

 

Imported a save and ran with rogue/cipher multi. The plan is to use the cipher abilities to spam afflictions as I picked the street fighter or whatever its called sub class. Sneak attack for days. 

 

 

[Uranyl Yellow]

9 hours ago, Finnegan said:

Started last night. Not completely sure I like the power points system yet or the change to health.

 

Imported a save and ran with rogue/cipher multi. The plan is to use the cipher abilities to spam afflictions as I picked the street fighter or whatever its called sub class. Sneak attack for days. 

 

 

I'm not so much bothered by the power points system, though I find the way that health just regenerates after battle a bit of an odd mechanic. Maybe I've been a bit spoiled with modern RPGs, but I find the way I can't rotate the camera somewhat irritating. It's been so long since I played the original that I can't remember if it had this feature or not, but I would class it as an almost de-facto standard nowadays. I keep waggling my cursor about to try and determine if there's anything hidden behind the walls. Doubtless somebody will tell me now that you can actually rotate the camera and I've been too thick to find it (a bit like when I first started the game it went to a cutscene and I just  sat watching for about ten minutes waiting for my ephemeral character to do something other than just glow in the middle of the screen. I thought the bloody game had crashed, but then found that I had to actually 'walk' my character down the path).

[Finnegan]

You can't rotate the camera, I wouldn't want you to tbh. It's a neo-Infinity game, the environments should be isometric not 3D, that's the fun tbf. 

 

It's also partly why it's so beautiful and how they can make it so massive with so many different environments and towns as opposed to three real areas in DOS2. A lot less to render with only one angle. 

 

For hidden objects, tab is your friend. 

Edited 11 May 2018 by Finnegan

[Guest]

Never played a game in this genre before but Divinity Original Sin 2 was heavily recommended to me by a friend. Recently finished our two-man playthrough and it's probably one of my favourite games of all time.

 

The same person has been eulogising Pillars of Eternity 2 so I'm going to dive into that as well. Any particularly important story/gameplay concepts I'll have missed out on from the previous game?

[Finnegan]

17 hours ago, Guest said:

Never played a game in this genre before but Divinity Original Sin 2 was heavily recommended to me by a friend. Recently finished our two-man playthrough and it's probably one of my favourite games of all time.

 

The same person has been eulogising Pillars of Eternity 2 so I'm going to dive into that as well. Any particularly important story/gameplay concepts I'll have missed out on from the previous game?

 

Gameplay, not really, I actually never played an old infinity engine game multilayer for more than one dungeon so I'm not sure how it'd be with the pause mechanic. 

 

The fundamental difference is that the combat isn't strictly turn based in the same manner so it's up to you to pause to issue commands. In tougher fights, you'll literally pause every few seconds to micro manage. 

 

Might be weird with two of you but people do do it. It's definitely not set up for multilayer in the same system though. 

 

If you're going to playing solo then ignore all that haha. 

 

Story wise, yes, there is a LOT you'll be missing. Personally, I'd just go and get the first game and play it. To be honest, I think it's much better for a start, but a lot of the plot and world will go over your head. At very least go read a full summary of the plot of the first game but then you kinda ruin the twists if you ever play it. 

 

I'd call poe 1 a 10/10 and poe 2 a 7.5/10.

 

Some of the reviews are going very overboard saying its improved on things the first game did well but personally I just think they've dumbed it down and made it too easy. Honestly. 

 

For some perspective, I played 100 hours of the first game in the blink of an eye when it came out and have finished two other runs since. I was incredibly stoked for the second game, have played about forty or fifty hours and have stopped at the start of the final act because I've gotten bored by how easy it is and because the story isn't gripping me. 

 

It's weird, it's still a good game it's just I've sorta run out of momentum and would have been happy if it was just 50hr long. All of the side missions, factions and distractions just seem shallow and uninteresting especially when the main story is so compulsively, world ending urgent. It feels silly to be prattling around with half baked ship content for in game months doing fetch quests for people I don't care about on empty islands. 

 

It does that Fallout 4 thing of confusing having a geographically large world with having a better world. Like if we make it unspeakably huge it's a good game even though there's nothing to do in most of it, that make sense? It feels flat and shallow. Poe was physically smaller on the surface but much deeper and thus had a lot more mass and content. That's how it felt. 

Edited 30 May 2018 by Finnegan

[Uranyl Yellow]

I would definitely echo that PoE2 is much easier than the first game. There were only a few fights where any of my characters were  remotely in danger of dying (or getting knocked out I suppose), as opposed to the first game where a few encounters were absolute wipefests. Has anybody played Tower of Time? Just seen it on Steam and it looks interesting (and not overly pricey either).

[Guest]

On 30/05/2018 at 07:27, Finnegan said:

 

Gameplay, not really, I actually never played an old infinity engine game multilayer for more than one dungeon so I'm not sure how it'd be with the pause mechanic. 

 

The fundamental difference is that the combat isn't strictly turn based in the same manner so it's up to you to pause to issue commands. In tougher fights, you'll literally pause every few seconds to micro manage. 

 

Might be weird with two of you but people do do it. It's definitely not set up for multilayer in the same system though. 

 

If you're going to playing solo then ignore all that haha. 

 

Story wise, yes, there is a LOT you'll be missing. Personally, I'd just go and get the first game and play it. To be honest, I think it's much better for a start, but a lot of the plot and world will go over your head. At very least go read a full summary of the plot of the first game but then you kinda ruin the twists if you ever play it. 

 

I'd call poe 1 a 10/10 and poe 2 a 7.5/10.

 

Some of the reviews are going very overboard saying its improved on things the first game did well but personally I just think they've dumbed it down and made it too easy. Honestly. 

 

For some perspective, I played 100 hours of the first game in the blink of an eye when it came out and have finished two other runs since. I was incredibly stoked for the second game, have played about forty or fifty hours and have stopped at the start of the final act because I've gotten bored by how easy it is and because the story isn't gripping me. 

 

It's weird, it's still a good game it's just I've sorta run out of momentum and would have been happy if it was just 50hr long. All of the side missions, factions and distractions just seem shallow and uninteresting especially when the main story is so compulsively, world ending urgent. It feels silly to be prattling around with half baked ship content for in game months doing fetch quests for people I don't care about on empty islands. 

 

It does that Fallout 4 thing of confusing having a geographically large world with having a better world. Like if we make it unspeakably huge it's a good game even though there's nothing to do in most of it, that make sense? It feels flat and shallow. Poe was physically smaller on the surface but much deeper and thus had a lot more mass and content. That's how it felt. 

 

Nice one, cheers. I'm only a couple of hours in but it does seem very dense on the lore front. I appreciate the little tooltips you can call up, Civilopedia-style, for the key concepts/gods etc, means I'm not entirely lost. Not entirely sure how I feel about the combat thus far, given that it's my first time with a real-time/pause system. Letting the AI handle my party for now whilst I sort myself out, though I suspect that might not do when the going gets a little tougher. My crowning achievement at this point has been hitting a panther with a holy greatsword so hard it exploded.

 

Liking it overall though, the art style and music are nice and the party members I've recruited so far seem a good bunch.

[Carl the Llama]

Having devoured Baldur's Gate my rpg history lesson continued recently with Fallout 1.  Decided to try making a stealth/melee ninja style character because I rarely do up close and personal combat based characters so I thought I'd branch out a bit.  Big mistake.  Stealth simply gives you the opportunity to get the first hit, there are no damage bonuses to be found and the game is not designed for low endurance, high agility melee characters in the slightest, even with 9 agility and strength (left 1 off each so I can level them during the game, probably shouldn't have) my unarmed damage is woefully poor on all but the gooniest goons - admittedly I opted out of the perk where you get extra damage at the cost of criticals thinking I was being smart, again I was not.  If you want to engage in hand-to-hand combat in this game you have to be an archetypal brute with hitpoints for days and that sodding perk whatever it's called.   Trouble is I've sunk enough hours into the game thinking that combat would improve as I levelled up that starting from scratch and slogging through the poorly optimised pathfinding (when you venture too far offscreen and the game insists that you can't reach the other end of a straight, empty road for the thousandth time it starts to get old) with a better optimised build is too offputting, game's going on the backburner until I rekindle the motivation juices.  I think for the next stop on my classic rpg tour I'll do away with crpgs entirely and enter the world of Oblivion, Skyrim was my life for a good couple of years and I really enjoyed Morrowind so I'm hoping for less of a disappointing experience on this one.

[Uranyl Yellow]

Just started Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I spent longer just in the character creation section than I have playing some games. I hope the actual game is as deep.