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11 most epic RPGs at UGO
- Thread starter Vault Dweller
- Start date
Zetor
Arcane
Mmmmhmm. Maybe I didn't explain myself clearly enough...
Certain design aspects can be fun or unfun depending on how they're executed. I'll just show some examples that hopefully illustrate why I disliked the Arkania series [I still played through Star Trail... mostly].
Good micromanagement: JA2 -- it was fun and challenging to group the mercs that liked each other together, ensuring they all had a sidearm with proper ammo at all times, little touches like making Barry run around large bodies of water (he can't swim!), etc. Weapon maintenance was hassle-free, but you had to calculate the required time for that into your strategy.
Okay micromanagement: Final Fantasy Tactics -- discovering that boss_x was a certain zodiac sign and therefore putting the character with the compatible zodiac sign to damage the boss full time, in order to achieve maximum damage output. Since zodiac signs were pretty random and you didn't know the signs of the enemies before fighting them, this was more of an "opportunity" thing than anything else.
Bad micromanagement: Tactics Ogre -- having to ensure that everyone stayed at exactly the same level, and figuring out explicit 'kill orders', effectively having the weakest character get the killing blow (often in a convoluted fashion). If someone accidentally gained a level from killing an enemy too early, you had to level up the other 9 on a practice map / random encounter, since enemies scaled to the highest level character; a 1-level difference was enough for them to focus fire a healer and gib 'em right away.
Same with Disgaea and trying to level up healers, good luck banging on the enemies for hours with a 1 damage weapon, setting up the rest of the characters in formation so you could hopefully land a combo! Or grinding out enough 'practice' spells so they can use level 1 attacks, which was slightly more powerful, until they ran out of mana.
The RoA equivalent would be having to carry around eighty billion different herbs (just in case you randomly caught frostbite), warm clothing and blankets (okay, you're going adventuring in the mountains, I'll agree with this one), grappling hooks, ropes, pickaxes (again, these are fine, but why are they taking up half of my bag space and 3/4 of my encumbrance?) and who knows what else.. it's been 6 years since last time I played those games. But I didn't particularly enjoy spending 15 minutes of inventory-rearrangement-fu when a character got overloaded from some loot, or having to re-buy and re-distribute all those essentials AGAIN after the characters' gear got confiscated 1/3 through the game.
Good skill development: Wizardry series (closest equivalent to RoA I could find) -- if you use a skill, it goes up. The speed it goes up with depends on a lot of factors, but you are always in full control of your characters' growth.
Annoying skill development: Betrayal at Krondor -- the base system was sound, but the 'tag' system was pretty much broken. You either gamed it and spent 30 seconds before every skillup rearranging your characters' skill tags to get the maximum benefit, or ignored it altogether, which hurt your characters. It didn't matter though, the game was easy either way.
Bad skill development: Realms of Arkania (Schwarze Auge system?) -- OMG. Whoever came up with the idea of 'you get 10 skillup chances every levelup, and can use them to TRY to improve skills' needs to be stabbed with a rabid gerbil. I don't care how 'realistic' this is (hah), having a warrior who only uses swords being unable to improve his sword skill because I happened to roll a 10 three times while trying to improve the skill is silly. Especially since 3 failures in a row locked you out from further attempts that level.
Leave the randomness to character generation (if that, I still prefer point-buy), and if you have a hard-on for random char development, give skills a x% chance to improve every time you do something (Krondor) or simply increase stats by a semi-random factor every level (AD&D based games -- note that if you bumped up the chars' constitution, they would get more HP even if you got unlucky). But do not, EVER, arbitrarily 'block' a path of advancement from the player just because he missed a random diceroll.
Good randomness: Special encounters in Fallout. They did have a noticable effect on the game, but by manipulating your Luck score and appropriate perks/traits, you could all but eliminate 'bad' encounters and maximize your chances of encountering a 'good' one.
Bad randomness: Having your entire party die of thirst because your elf failed his 'hunt' roll 3 times in a row in the mountains. Or having someone lose a crucial item to a random occurence (drain room in the dwarven pit), never being able to get it back. Or having someone's boots get worn away randomly, get a random foot disease that'd kill them before you could get back to town.. of course you could just carry spare boots! Hope it fit in your bag along with the 20 other mundane items you needed to lug around 'just in case'.
See the pattern? Uncontrollable randomness that the player can't do anything about sucks. That was what I disliked about RoA (which are still a decent series, mind you).
-- Z.
Certain design aspects can be fun or unfun depending on how they're executed. I'll just show some examples that hopefully illustrate why I disliked the Arkania series [I still played through Star Trail... mostly].
Good micromanagement: JA2 -- it was fun and challenging to group the mercs that liked each other together, ensuring they all had a sidearm with proper ammo at all times, little touches like making Barry run around large bodies of water (he can't swim!), etc. Weapon maintenance was hassle-free, but you had to calculate the required time for that into your strategy.
Okay micromanagement: Final Fantasy Tactics -- discovering that boss_x was a certain zodiac sign and therefore putting the character with the compatible zodiac sign to damage the boss full time, in order to achieve maximum damage output. Since zodiac signs were pretty random and you didn't know the signs of the enemies before fighting them, this was more of an "opportunity" thing than anything else.
Bad micromanagement: Tactics Ogre -- having to ensure that everyone stayed at exactly the same level, and figuring out explicit 'kill orders', effectively having the weakest character get the killing blow (often in a convoluted fashion). If someone accidentally gained a level from killing an enemy too early, you had to level up the other 9 on a practice map / random encounter, since enemies scaled to the highest level character; a 1-level difference was enough for them to focus fire a healer and gib 'em right away.
Same with Disgaea and trying to level up healers, good luck banging on the enemies for hours with a 1 damage weapon, setting up the rest of the characters in formation so you could hopefully land a combo! Or grinding out enough 'practice' spells so they can use level 1 attacks, which was slightly more powerful, until they ran out of mana.
The RoA equivalent would be having to carry around eighty billion different herbs (just in case you randomly caught frostbite), warm clothing and blankets (okay, you're going adventuring in the mountains, I'll agree with this one), grappling hooks, ropes, pickaxes (again, these are fine, but why are they taking up half of my bag space and 3/4 of my encumbrance?) and who knows what else.. it's been 6 years since last time I played those games. But I didn't particularly enjoy spending 15 minutes of inventory-rearrangement-fu when a character got overloaded from some loot, or having to re-buy and re-distribute all those essentials AGAIN after the characters' gear got confiscated 1/3 through the game.
Good skill development: Wizardry series (closest equivalent to RoA I could find) -- if you use a skill, it goes up. The speed it goes up with depends on a lot of factors, but you are always in full control of your characters' growth.
Annoying skill development: Betrayal at Krondor -- the base system was sound, but the 'tag' system was pretty much broken. You either gamed it and spent 30 seconds before every skillup rearranging your characters' skill tags to get the maximum benefit, or ignored it altogether, which hurt your characters. It didn't matter though, the game was easy either way.
Bad skill development: Realms of Arkania (Schwarze Auge system?) -- OMG. Whoever came up with the idea of 'you get 10 skillup chances every levelup, and can use them to TRY to improve skills' needs to be stabbed with a rabid gerbil. I don't care how 'realistic' this is (hah), having a warrior who only uses swords being unable to improve his sword skill because I happened to roll a 10 three times while trying to improve the skill is silly. Especially since 3 failures in a row locked you out from further attempts that level.
Leave the randomness to character generation (if that, I still prefer point-buy), and if you have a hard-on for random char development, give skills a x% chance to improve every time you do something (Krondor) or simply increase stats by a semi-random factor every level (AD&D based games -- note that if you bumped up the chars' constitution, they would get more HP even if you got unlucky). But do not, EVER, arbitrarily 'block' a path of advancement from the player just because he missed a random diceroll.
Good randomness: Special encounters in Fallout. They did have a noticable effect on the game, but by manipulating your Luck score and appropriate perks/traits, you could all but eliminate 'bad' encounters and maximize your chances of encountering a 'good' one.
Bad randomness: Having your entire party die of thirst because your elf failed his 'hunt' roll 3 times in a row in the mountains. Or having someone lose a crucial item to a random occurence (drain room in the dwarven pit), never being able to get it back. Or having someone's boots get worn away randomly, get a random foot disease that'd kill them before you could get back to town.. of course you could just carry spare boots! Hope it fit in your bag along with the 20 other mundane items you needed to lug around 'just in case'.
See the pattern? Uncontrollable randomness that the player can't do anything about sucks. That was what I disliked about RoA (which are still a decent series, mind you).
-- Z.
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