PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,193
I never played the ROA series before, heard some good things about it here and in other places, and decided to give it a try, starting from the first game. Been playing it for a few days, after spending a couple of days just reading the manual and creating my party. And I have to say, so far, I am really disappointed.
First, there is the terrible combat system, which is, in my opinion, a great example of why turn based does not necessarily equate to good. It is so clunky, boring, and most of all, slow as all hell. Even though I leveled all my characters' combat skills as much as I could, they cannot hit anything in melee range. On top of that, everyone also parries once per round, making even more attacks useless. Magic users run out of astral points (mana) after a few weak casts, so really, the only way to do damage is via missile weapons. I outfitted everyone except the tanky front line with bows/crossbows/etc, position them around the enemies, and it still takes forever even with focus fire to kill some lowly bandits. The turn-based combat makes it even worse, because ever time i need to perform actions for every party member. That's on top of really clunky combat interface. And then of course, the icing on the cake, after you spend 2 hours beating on some retard and are close to killing him, he suddenly decides to run, and runs away, because the ranged party members have to be some distance away from him.
Some of the longer combats (involving 6-9 bandits) take a ridiculous amount of time, considering that nothing interesting at all is happening. The tactical aspects of it are also a joke, basically move tank next to target, move ranged behind/to the side, commence... There are some spells I suppose, but at this point I have almost no chance to cast them successfuly, and no mana.
Then, outside of combat, this game tried to undertake a deep simulationist approach. Ok, I love simulations, but there has to be some sort of goal where the simulation leads to enjoyable gameplay. A good example of that would be NetHack, which I've played on and off for years. That game has a lot of similar stuff to RoA, having to eat, weight considerations, equipment being damaged, new stuff you find being as likely to hurt you as to help you. But in NetHack, this is all balanced to be fun. After you get in the flow of it, most of that stuff just adds layers of strategy and depth to the game. In RoA so far (and yes, maybe it gets better later), it just adds a ton of hassle. I trained some of my party members to be good at healing, so what happens? Half the time they give my party members diseases instead of healing their hitpoints. Weapons break all the time, if you try to carry spares, it makes your party heavily encumbered. You need to carry all kinds of shit for various situations that may or may not happen, but all that stuff makes everyone overweight. You end up constantly having to juggle everyone's inventories, through a really shitty interface. Lots of mechanics aren't well explained in the manual or the game. The freaking dungeons don't even show you passageways half the time unless you have someone with a really high perception up front and rub them against every wall.
I am going to continue playing Blade of Destiny for now, want to see if it gets better, but what do you guys think? Am I missing something here?
First, there is the terrible combat system, which is, in my opinion, a great example of why turn based does not necessarily equate to good. It is so clunky, boring, and most of all, slow as all hell. Even though I leveled all my characters' combat skills as much as I could, they cannot hit anything in melee range. On top of that, everyone also parries once per round, making even more attacks useless. Magic users run out of astral points (mana) after a few weak casts, so really, the only way to do damage is via missile weapons. I outfitted everyone except the tanky front line with bows/crossbows/etc, position them around the enemies, and it still takes forever even with focus fire to kill some lowly bandits. The turn-based combat makes it even worse, because ever time i need to perform actions for every party member. That's on top of really clunky combat interface. And then of course, the icing on the cake, after you spend 2 hours beating on some retard and are close to killing him, he suddenly decides to run, and runs away, because the ranged party members have to be some distance away from him.
Some of the longer combats (involving 6-9 bandits) take a ridiculous amount of time, considering that nothing interesting at all is happening. The tactical aspects of it are also a joke, basically move tank next to target, move ranged behind/to the side, commence... There are some spells I suppose, but at this point I have almost no chance to cast them successfuly, and no mana.
Then, outside of combat, this game tried to undertake a deep simulationist approach. Ok, I love simulations, but there has to be some sort of goal where the simulation leads to enjoyable gameplay. A good example of that would be NetHack, which I've played on and off for years. That game has a lot of similar stuff to RoA, having to eat, weight considerations, equipment being damaged, new stuff you find being as likely to hurt you as to help you. But in NetHack, this is all balanced to be fun. After you get in the flow of it, most of that stuff just adds layers of strategy and depth to the game. In RoA so far (and yes, maybe it gets better later), it just adds a ton of hassle. I trained some of my party members to be good at healing, so what happens? Half the time they give my party members diseases instead of healing their hitpoints. Weapons break all the time, if you try to carry spares, it makes your party heavily encumbered. You need to carry all kinds of shit for various situations that may or may not happen, but all that stuff makes everyone overweight. You end up constantly having to juggle everyone's inventories, through a really shitty interface. Lots of mechanics aren't well explained in the manual or the game. The freaking dungeons don't even show you passageways half the time unless you have someone with a really high perception up front and rub them against every wall.
I am going to continue playing Blade of Destiny for now, want to see if it gets better, but what do you guys think? Am I missing something here?