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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning?

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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Keep dreaming.

Unless the game file formats of the AoD are especially tailored to be "appendable" (like the various 2da, bcs and ids in BGs), and there is such a tool/programming language like weidu available, i wouldn't hold my breath for AoD to be moddable (much like bloodlines really isn't or Prelude to Darkness).
Mods was more of an example of what PCs have that portables don't, and that sometimes leads to a better experience. Besides, I really hope that AoD won't need mods to be playable.
 

Shannow

Waster of Time
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:salute: :salute: The essence of a true codexer.
Is it? Bitching about bad games is one thing. Ignoring good games because their existence doesn't fit your preconceived perception of the gaming landscape is stupidity.
Before you jumped the whole "*whine* Why is RPGcodex PC centric? Why can't I just post on kotaku or some other console centric site? Why must I whine about the codex being a pc community when it was I who chose to become a part of it? Why must I whine when I actually can talk about any game I want to - PC, console or whatever - eventhough the codex is PC centric? Why did Jaesun move my console game thread to GG? Why doesn't everybody on the codex buy a console/handheld/tablet? Why does the codex show no interest in my console games? Isn't this kotaku? I thought this was kotaku... Why does the codex not care for shitty console gameplay and criticise old PC serieses' movement to consoles at the expense of gameplay, UI, depth and many more features? *whine*, *whine*, fucking *whine"-bandwagon you where on my "potential for bro-list"-list.
Now,...now you're very close to the ignore list. Not that you'd care.
 

MisterStone

Arcane
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Apr 1, 2006
Messages
9,422
Bros, are you still discussing this? I saw screenshots of the game and was like, LOL, they used the WoW color palette: a touch of grimdark browns and greys with florescent blue and green magical shit for extra durr. And I stopped watching the trailer after about 10 seconds when I saw the EA logo appear.

:rpgcodex:
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
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Messages
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Bros, are you still discussing this? I saw screenshots of the game and was like, LOL, they used the WoW color palette: a touch of grimdark browns and greys with florescent blue and green magical shit for extra durr. And I stopped watching the trailer after about 10 seconds when I saw the EA logo appear.

:rpgcodex:

It's not really about the game anymore, just the pro JRPG crowd vs. the anti JRPG crowd.
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
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In quarantine
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
No doubt older games like Wizardy can be perferctly ported, just like Dark Spire shows, but we are in motherfucking 2012, it's not that absurd to ask for a RPG that goes beyond 30-years-old dungeon-crawnling.

There's nowhere to go beyond that. It's the pinnacle of human civilisation.
:rpgcodex:
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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I love them too Mrs. Bee, as I enjoy you LPing them. :hug:

I played Etrian's Odissey to death (countless of them) and was impressed what they did with the art in Dark Spire, but still I want to see what they can do with 2012 hardware and new ideias. I can't but think that japanese RPG developers are being limited by the DS hardware, stuck repeating the same dungeon-crawlers, rogue-likes and JRPGs formulas.
 
Joined
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Gritville
With great forum bling comes great retardation, Alexandros.

I, for one, liked our old Roguelike forum.... but then FartLoveNLoad became a graphics whore. Oh well.
 

Mortmal

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Messages
9,151
There's no pro jrpg crowd here, theres pro quality, jrpg crowd. When they are very good and include features you see in our beloved western rpgs they are worth mentioning ,aka darks souls the western rpg made in japan.You are restricting yourself and missing lot of very good games .
Hey.. Why are you discussing this game ? Cant say kingdom of amalaur is a pc centric game, its exactly like any other console rpg and it screams play me with a pad! Oh theres a pc version yes probably an afterthought versionnot using any pc ressources.If you really interested by this its time to do your " coming out" and admit you are closet console fags!
 

MisterStone

Arcane
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Apr 1, 2006
Messages
9,422
Hey guys, moar like Kingdoms of AnalDurr amirite?

Sorry, my Internet Tourette's wouldn't stop pestering me until I posted that.
 

Wyrmlord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
Bros, are you still discussing this? I saw screenshots of the game and was like, LOL, they used the WoW color palette: a touch of grimdark browns and greys with florescent blue and green magical shit for extra durr. And I stopped watching the trailer after about 10 seconds when I saw the EA logo appear.

:rpgcodex:
I am sure you know better than to step into a thread about a game you don't like and say, "I know the game is crap without even playing it". If this sort of thing wouldn't be tolerated for a Baldur's Gate or Knights of the Chalice thread, why should it be acceptable for this admittedly amateur-ish looking game by Ken Rolston?

General principle is just all I am saying.
 

MisterStone

Arcane
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Messages
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Well if I just posted and said, "I read a couple of articles about this, looked at the screenshots and watched a little bit of the trailer, then decided this is shit" who's going to brofist me, eh?

Seriously, it does look pretty damn weak. I don't know a whole lot about it because about 10 minutes worth of familiarizing myself with it convinced me it sucks so I didn't bother to learn more.
 

MaroonSkein

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The ammount of text & information that Fallout or Planescape have on-screen are simply impossible to fit in any handheld screen, they would have to compromise the character screen & iten description, simplify menus and the UI, and remove the combat log.
Visual novels have been ported to handhelds.
Controlling your party in BG would be impossible, a touch-screen is great, but is still no match for a mouse & keyboard, that's why even Age of Empire DS had to ditch the RTS and became turn-based.
This is actually a good point. I guess there's some truth to what you're saying.
Why does the codex not care for shitty console gameplay and criticise old PC serieses' movement to consoles at the expense of gameplay, UI, depth and many more features?
I understand where your anger comes from, but I assure you that it's misplaced. Consolitis is a myth. What causes the decline is not consoles, but desire to expand the audience of a game. This leads to the cutting of all features that not everyone is going to like, which happens to be every feature with any kind of complexity to it. Releasing a game on several platforms is merely one consequence of this desire to reach the largest possible audience.

To prove my point, let's take a look at how two console franchises, Final Fantasy and Shin Megami Tensei, fared. The high points of Final Fantasy are III and V. Both of these games were released when the series was pretty niche. In fact, these two titles were deemed to be so particularly niche that their original versions were not released outside of Japan. Both were complex dungeon crawlers that allowed you to change the classes of your characters and required you to make full use of this mechanic because all dungeons were specifically designed to make particular classes shine. Then VII came along, became a huge financial success, and things changed. Character advancement systems grew simpler with each game, and tutorial sections became lengthier, culminating with XIII, which doesn't give you full control over the party composition and leveling up of the party members until you're 25 hours into the game. Sounds a lot like consolitis, right? How could such a thing manifest in what is a console series to begin with?

SMT has a very different history. It started niche, and it remained niche. The fanbase is growing, but at such a small rate that Atlus can't risk alienating old fans for the sake of making new ones. As a result, the series keeps reaching new heights even these days. For example, Devil Survivor, released only 3 years ago, has the most complex story structure out of all games in the series and is a must play for any C&C-fag.

Don't blame consoles. Blame publishers and greed.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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The ammount of text & information that Fallout or Planescape have on-screen are simply impossible to fit in any handheld screen, they would have to compromise the character screen & iten description, simplify menus and the UI, and remove the combat log.
Visual novels have been ported to handhelds.
Really? C'mon man, I was taking you seriously until this one...

vnds%20v1.41.png
planescape-torment_armoire.jpg
fallout2_16.jpg


I'm just gonna post this pictures here and hope you realize how it's impossible to port one thing to another without compromising the whole experience and "consolizing" a game.

Consolitis is a myth.
It is not, and it's exactly what Shannow said, "movement to consoles at the expense of gameplay, UI, depth and many more features".

Take the Fallout character screen above for instance, Fallout 3 and NV still use the same system than 1 & 2, but had to use FIVE badly controled submenus (and HD Tvs) just to show what we had in 1997 in one handy screen and with mouse acess. And PC players had to play with that shit too.

Also Tvs are horrible at displaying text, and people sit very far from them, so you can't have huge conversations with tiny letters. KOTOR and Jade Empire still had full dialog anwsers, but the Xbox players complained a lot of how hard was to read on the Tv, so they develped motherfuckig Dialog Wheel in Mass Effect. And again, PC players had to play with the same shitty workaround for consoles.

Not to mention stuff like "it's hard to control party members on the console, so let's take the control away from the player", "old inventory screens are hard to use on the console, let's just list the itens", "RTS ports baddly to the console, so let's just kill the genre", and many others....Can you see a pattern now?

Don't blame consoles. Blame publishers and greed.
I blame publisher's greed in making every game for consoles and only half-assed ports to the PC. And that's why PC gamers hate console.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Makes you wonder why Fallout 3 and NV never got a SkyUI style UI upgrade. Or did they?
 

MaroonSkein

Augur
Joined
Dec 28, 2011
Messages
347
Location
St. Petersburg, Russia
Really? C'mon man, I was taking you seriously until this one...

vnds%20v1.41.png
planescape-torment_armoire.jpg
fallout2_16.jpg


I'm just gonna post this pictures here and hope you realize how it's impossible to port one thing to another without compromising the whole experience and "consolizing" a game.
I don't see anything that won't fit on Vita's 960x544 screen. A DS Fallout game would require a new UI, true, but I don't see how it's a problem. Just because you have to split one screen into several doesn't mean you have to cut any attributes, skills and mechanics. As long as the PC version of the hypothetical game uses a different UI, everyone should be happy.
Take the Fallout character screen above for instance, Fallout 3 and NV still use the same system than 1 & 2, but had to use FIVE badly controled submenus (and HD Tvs) just to show what we had in 1997 in one handy screen and with mouse acess. And PC players had to play with that shit too.

Also Tvs are horrible at displaying text, and people sit very far from them, so you can't have huge conversations with tiny letters. KOTOR and Jade Empire still had full dialog anwsers, but the Xbox players complained a lot of how hard was to read on the Tv, so they develped motherfuckig Dialog Wheel in Mass Effect. And again, PC players had to play with the same shitty workaround for consoles.
So the problem here is developers failing to create a custom UI for each version of the game they make. There was nothing preventing BioWare from using larger fonts in the Xbox version of Jade Empire, and there was nothing preventing Bethesda and Obsidian from redesigning the Pip-Boy interface in the PC version with PC displays in mind.
Not to mention stuff like "it's hard to control party members on the console, so let's take the control away from the player", "old inventory screens are hard to use on the console, let's just list the itens", "RTS ports baddly to the console, so let's just kill the genre", and many others....Can you see a pattern now?
These are all valid points, but remember that this discussion started when I said that handhelds were a traditional RPG heaven. There's nothing traditional about RT RPGs.
I blame publisher's greed in making every game for consoles and only half-assed ports to the PC. And that's why PC gamers hate console.
The first sentence makes perfect sense. The second one doesn't make any.
 

Stinger

Arcane
Joined
Aug 13, 2011
Messages
1,366
Makes you wonder why Fallout 3 and NV never got a SkyUI style UI upgrade. Or did they?

Skyrim's UI was flash based so that's why it was easier to overhaul it. Redoing the PipBoy UI takes effort but hey, people would rather make a mod that turns it into a PDA instead of fixing the inherent issue with it (though at least stuff like MTUI allows more text to fit on the screen and therefore less scrolling).

A DS Fallout game would require a new UI, true, but I don't see how it's a problem.

I'd say the Fallout UI would fit quite well on the DS since you could fit a whole lot of it on a separate screen. The main issue is whether people want a system like Fallout's on a portable console like the DS. Even Devil Survivor only has like 4 base stats (strength, magic, agility and vitality I think?) from memory. It might be executed very well with an interesting and challenging combat system but it still isn't as extensive as Fallout and others.

there was nothing preventing Bethesda and Obsidian from redesigning the Pip-Boy interface in the PC version with PC displays in mind.

Judging from the Skyrim UI I don't think Bethesda was even designing their interfaces with console displays in mind.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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I don't see anything that won't fit on Vita's 960x544 screen. A DS Fallout game would require a new UI, true, but I don't see how it's a problem. Just because you have to split one screen into several doesn't mean you have to cut any attributes, skills and mechanics. As long as the PC version of the hypothetical game uses a different UI, everyone should be happy.
So the problem here is developers failing to create a custom UI for each version of the game they make. There was nothing preventing BioWare from using larger fonts in the Xbox version of Jade Empire, and there was nothing preventing Bethesda and Obsidian from redesigning the Pip-Boy interface in the PC version with PC displays in mind.
Publishers/money is stopping them.

Developers can't even finish their games and get rid of the bugs before shipping, they can't afford to add a whole new UI and some redesigns for the platform the sells the least. Just look around, some games like Skyrim are going beyond, completly ignoring the mouse and asking the PC player to plug-in a Xbox controller for "best experience"! They are clearly saying that they won't bother with the port, that PC gamers should "get on with the times" and "consolize" their PC! Can you see where all the hate comes from?

Besides, you are only looking a the changes in the surface, like the UI. Dialog and text has been reduced & dumbed down in games to work better on consoles. Just look at how the dialogs now are always short and even full-texted player replys can never exceed one or two lines.

devil-survivor-12-149.png


Devil Survivor is great, but think of much the text was edited to fit the screen. Anwsers are shorter than on twitter, it's hard tell a good story this way. MCA's writing in PS:Torment would require you to scroll like 3 times just to see ONE of your 4 possible anwsers if ported to a DS. And we just can't ask MCA to be brief, can we?

Sorcerer.gif
b0a9dc7b7004286f320c1a5f2b6060c4feecd61e_large.jpg
auraofflamingdeath.jpg


Look at those descriptions, you know that we are never going to get anything like that again, unless on a PC-exclusive title. Things like party control, inventory, character screens, dialog, UI, combat logs, all are made with a different concept in mind when on handhelds or consoles. Those are core changes that not even the best port will change. The same way that consoles & handhelds can't manage RTS, there are some RPG elements that will never be done on them, like Baldur's Gate real-time-with-pause combat.

And that's the whole point of this debate, PC gamers know that they aren't getting the full potential of the RPGs, they know that if any of those games where done with the PC in mind they could have been better, more complete, even if just the writing, the controls or the graphics. That doesn't mean they are bad, just that some people find the incomplete, inferior or simply put, :decline: . Since you are on a PC gaming forum where most of the posters think that, (and also dislike JRPGs), it's easy to see why posters will just ignore handhelds as the "Heaven of RPGs".

I still enjoy playing them, but can't stop to think on how many good games and ideas have died because they aren't fit for consoles & portables.
 

MaroonSkein

Augur
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St. Petersburg, Russia
I'd say the Fallout UI would fit quite well on the DS since you could fit a whole lot of it on a separate screen. The main issue is whether people want a system like Fallout's on a portable console like the DS. Even Devil Survivor only has like 4 base stats (strength, magic, agility and vitality I think?) from memory. It might be executed very well with an interesting and challenging combat system but it still isn't as extensive as Fallout and others.
That's just how Japan usually rolls when designing RPG systems: low number of stats, high number of spells and special abilities. It has nothing to do with technical limitations, and I'm certain we'd see a higher variety of systems if Western RPG developers made games for handhelds.
Points made. Allow me to clarify my position a little: if you are a combatfag who likes TB dungeon crawling and has little interest in description porn and flavor dialogue choices, handhelds are the way to go.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Bunch of interviews with Amalur personnel: http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/big-huge-wednesdays/


Ken Rolston said:
GF: Obviously, Skyrim is the RPG on everyone’s mind right now. One of our readers’ biggest complaints about Skyrim was that the PC version was an obvious port. How is 38 Studios structuring the PC version to avoid the issue, and will there be PC exclusive content? Also, how does Reckoning differ from Skyrim; what makes it unique?
KR: Hmm. Personally, I was perfectly happy with the Skyrim PC experience. But remember… I LOVED Morrowind and Oblivion… and loved seeing them on consoles. In fact, I feel they were too slow to embrace the potential delights of the console interface.
Am I the enemy? Do you hate me?
That would be bitter… because I was always a hardcore PC gamer, and had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from the PC towards the Xbox for Morrowind. I credit Todd Howard with the Genuine Visionary Lunacy to inspire that transition, and I am ashamed that Tood often had to drag me along behind him, on his Pilgrimage to the Promised Land.

:hmmm:
 

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