609 réponses à ce sujet

[Seraphim24]

Skyrim doesn't even  put challenges in front of you while using the map, most areas of the game are completely free of enemies and obstacles, and you easily power creep into not worrying about them anyway.

 

It's a very casual RPG, or game, rather. Perhaps the problem here is categories like RPG or "Side scroller" or whatever. The point is Skyrim is easy, Morrowind is (more) challenging.

 

Dragon Age (was) challenging, then became easier until it was pretty much just a movie.

 

Guild Wars 2 has been one of the few decently challenging PC RPGs I can find these days.

[Nefla]

What does the presence or absence of a world map have to do with sidequests in the next DA?

[Seraphim24]

What does the presence or absence of a world map have to do with sidequests in the next DA?

 

People were talking about Skyrim's quests being exploration based, and Dragon Age being linear. I was saying, no one plays Skyrim exploration wise, that just doesn't happen.

 

Like if you took player data, it's like you would basically see people going to the first town, then to Whiterun, then to whatever, possibility some people go straight to Windhelm or the capital, but whatever happens, they aren't going straight to blackdeep, because you literally can't, because it's outside your level range.

 

A world map probably doesn't inherently mean anything, perhaps.

 

The point is really, one way or another, Skyrim is very easy game, the side quests are often easy, in Dragon Age they were more challenging then they became super easy, for a combination of reasons, until they were easier then Skyrim basically.

[AlanC9]

That's a feature, not a bug.

I'm not a big fan of the randomness part -- at least, not when it comes into play without any effective way to stop it. BG2 is better in this regard; if Confusion wrecks your party it's your fault.

[Seraphim24]

*Sighs* I feel like I'm so unrelentingly negative around here but that's not really my goal, it's just what I see a lot of the time.

 

A lot of the big major RPGs now are fairly casual and not very demanding, like I said there is stuff like Guild Wars 2 etc it still exists.

 

Actually, that could be said for a lot of games, period, but particularly that particular brand of D&D inspired more direclty RPG (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc) just like evaporated completely.

 

Not that it was every super big to begin with, but you could play "RPG-like" things like Secret of Evermore that could be really engaging.

 

Or like the Morrowind expansions were pretty fun, there was just more.

 

Oh well I was getting carried away there.

 

Anyway I was going to try and say something positive which is that pre-KOTFE sidequests, or even main quests, in SWTOR were pretty fun it was like they really put a lot of effort into making them fun and engaging, which they were, and then companions sort of screwed all that up, but well, that was recent, and sort of fun, and actually came from Bioware.

 

Honestly if they just undid like half the changes they just made that would be a pretty cool situation right there, was thinking about doing other character classes but now they really just massively streamlined everything and took away a lot of the intrigue. It's almost like just erasing a painting in the Louvre or something.

[Andraste_Reborn]

Actually, that could be said for a lot of games, period, but particularly that particular brand of D&D inspired more direclty RPG (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc) just like evaporated completely.

 

While they're not D&D adaptations, games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin and HareBrained Schemes Shadowrun games are all Old Skrool cRPGs that are satisfyingly tough if played on higher difficulties. The Triple A developers went in a different direction, but there seem to be enough hardcore cRPG fans out there to sustain some isometric Kickstarter games.

[Realmzmaster]

People were talking about Skyrim's quests being exploration based, and Dragon Age being linear. I was saying, no one plays Skyrim exploration wise, that just doesn't happen.

 

Like if you took player data, it's like you would basically see people going to the first town, then to Whiterun, then to whatever, possibility some people go straight to Windhelm or the capital, but whatever happens, they aren't going straight to blackdeep, because you literally can't, because it's outside your level range.

 

A world map probably doesn't inherently mean anything, perhaps.

 

The point is really, one way or another, Skyrim is very easy game, the side quests are often easy, in Dragon Age they were more challenging then they became super easy, for a combination of reasons, until they were easier then Skyrim basically.

 

Actually , I played Skyrim by exploring the entire map on foot going from place to place on the hardest level. The first action I took when available was to traverse the entire map. Did the same action for Morrowind and Oblivion. And yes I explored areas above my level figuring out the best way to defeat the enemy in that area. It is very doable. It is the way I play most if not all crpgs. If you defeat the enemy in the tougher area with a low level character you get more experience and level up faster.

[Seraphim24]

While they're not D&D adaptations, games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin and HareBrained Schemes Shadowrun games are all Old Skrool cRPGs that are satisfyingly tough if played on higher difficulties. The Triple A developers went in a different direction, but there seem to be enough hardcore cRPG fans out there to sustain some isometric Kickstarter games.

 

Yeah...................................................

 

I don't know what Bioware did with stuff like SWTOR and BG but all the kickstarters didn't really grab me...It's weird too because like the less heralded games like Icewind Dale (which I realize wasn't one of those) were pretty interesting even moreso than the great Planescape Torment, or Storms of Zehir (more fun than Mask of the Betrayer) but even the people that made it weren't even so excited about it... hm... anyway they were always pretty fun (and like Chris Avellone seems like a really cool guy, etc) but the way I'm reported to like the things or how I'm supposed to experience them hasn't matched experience.

 

Like the amount of variety and combinations and kind of organic nature of the challenges in lets say NWN hasn't really been directly replaced... NWN2 was I guess when Obsidian games and that sequel didn't really super appeal... I mean they're still pretty fun all things considered but it was never really at the same level...

 

As stated, the more hardcore experiences I've come across were Guild Wars 2 (which really makes you play hard and fast), and even like The Witcher 3 was pretty hardcore.

 

I'm not sure either of those games though (haven't gotten all the way through either) are as challenging as NWN OC or BG OC was.

 

I'm willing to bet like I'm probably the only one here on this entire forum who actually beat Baldur's Gate 1 without cheating.

[Seraphim24]

Actually , I played Skyrim by exploring the entire map on foot going from place to place on the hardest level. The first action I took when available was to traverse the entire map. Did the same action for Morrowind and Oblivion. And yes I explored areas above my level figuring out the best way to defeat the enemy in that area. It is very doable. It is the way I play most if not all crpgs. If you defeat the enemy in the tougher area with a low level character you get more experience and level up faster.

 

How did you even know what "place to place" was though? Why would you bother going N or S or E or W out of the very first town in Skyrim? There is no indication what is in any direction so it might as well have been random.

 

Also if the "first action you took" was to traverse the entire map" that would of, without speed buffs, etc, covering every inch, probably taken like 60 hours.

[Andraste_Reborn]

I'm willing to bet like I'm probably the only one here on this entire forum who actually beat Baldur's Gate 1 without cheating.

 

Erm. No. No, you are not. It's a tough game, sure, but it's not that difficult. I've beaten it at least seven times on core rules, no cheating necessary, and I'm not a particularly gifted player.

 

Sorry you don't enjoy the Kickstarter games.

[Seraphim24]

Erm. No. No, you are not. It's a tough game, sure, but it's not that difficult. I've beaten it at least seven times on core rules, no cheating necessary, and I'm not a particularly gifted player.

 

Well you can beat it sure, I'd imagine it was challenging for lots of people, and yes it is a challenging game.

 

But like fine, two people.

 

Incidentally beating it the next time round is going to be easier at any rate, because you already know the game better.

 

Anyway, nothing changes that particular sphere of hardcore game design and level essentially evaporated, like I say, kind of like a famous painting in a museum or something being erased, well, except in SWTOR.

[Nefla]

People were talking about Skyrim's quests being exploration based, and Dragon Age being linear. I was saying, no one plays Skyrim exploration wise, that just doesn't happen.

 

Like if you took player data, it's like you would basically see people going to the first town, then to Whiterun, then to whatever, possibility some people go straight to Windhelm or the capital, but whatever happens, they aren't going straight to blackdeep, because you literally can't, because it's outside your level range.

 

A world map probably doesn't inherently mean anything, perhaps.

 

The point is really, one way or another, Skyrim is very easy game, the side quests are often easy, in Dragon Age they were more challenging then they became super easy, for a combination of reasons, until they were easier then Skyrim basically.

The first thing I do in a Bethesda game is ignore the main plot and frolic off in some random direction doing things I find interesting and often getting myself killed on enemies that are way stronger than me (the danger is half the fun!) Anyway, Skyrim definitely has a linear plot and DA:I less so in that you can do some of the quests out of order. The way the side quests are scattered around and happened upon is pretty similar (randomly scattered around the world) in both games.

[Seraphim24]

The first thing I do in a Bethesda game is ignore the main plot and frolic off in some random direction doing things I find interesting and often getting myself killed on enemies that are way stronger than me (the danger is half the fun!)

 

Right! But you don't like really want to just die to some super-overpowered thing per se....

 

See in Morrowind frolicking off in some random direction often meant finding maybe challenge, but maybe rewards, maybe items, maybe quests, maybe something other than ZOMG too tough my video character just got owned.

 

In Skyrim, it was just a sea of bandits and animals who either A) Way too powerful for you or eventually B ) Way too easy. So it meant your character got A) owned or B ) random items you didn't really need anymore.

 

Yes Dragon Age Inquisition appears marginally less linear than Skyrim, but also quite similar as you say... ..................................

 

Not really sure what else to add, mostly well I guess side quests in Skyrim are often pretty straightforward and boring/easy oftentimes, ditto for more recent Bioware games (not SWTOR so much).

 

Essentially, they became more a series of chores, less danger and excitement, more just "Are the items valuable enough at this point" There wasn't a question of whether you would actually complete the quest.

 

Even in Skyrim though there are exceptions to a degree like Dark Brotherhood quest-line, but honestly the Dark brotherhood questline in every TES game was challenging so that wasn't necessarily any different, probably was easier in TESV actually....

 

And no that doesn't suddenly mean gobs of artificial difficultly like a bullet barrage game, just like, it's a fair challenge, etc.

[UniformGreyColor]

Right! But you don't like really want to just die to some super-overpowered thing per se....

 

See in Morrowind frolicking off in some random direction often meant finding maybe challenge, but maybe rewards, maybe items, maybe quests, maybe something other than ZOMG too tough my video character just got owned.

 

In Skyrim, it was just a sea of bandits and animals who either A) Way too powerful for you or eventually B ) Way too easy. So it meant your character got A) owned or B ) random items you didn't really need anymore.

 

Yes Dragon Age Inquisition appears marginally less linear than Skyrim, but also quite similar as you say... ..................................

 

Not really sure what else to add, mostly well I guess side quests in Skyrim are often pretty straightforward and boring/easy oftentimes, ditto for more recent Bioware games (not SWTOR so much).

 

Essentially, they became more a series of chores, less danger and excitement, more just "Are the items valuable enough at this point" There wasn't a question of whether you would actually complete the quest.

 

Even in Skyrim though there are exceptions to a degree like Dark Brotherhood quest-line, but honestly the Dark brotherhood questline in every TES game was challenging so that wasn't necessarily any different, probably was easier in TESV actually..

 

And no that doesn't suddenly mean gobs of artificial difficultly like a bullet-r-type game, just like, it's a fair challenge, etc.

 

Err... No middle ground in Skyrim? Really? You think there is not a chance that you run into enemies that are at a level to produce the right difficulty? As far as I recall, there was a mod that made different "zones" different difficulty as opposed to different "creatures" having different difficulty.

 

And lets be honest, the main story arch is not even comparable in Skyrim to DA:I. The reason for that is that in Skyrim you can basically quit in the middle of the main story arch whenever you want and in DA:I you must use the war table to even start the dang thing. No, the two are different enough that it makes making a comparison between the two of them in this regard moot point.

[AlanC9]

Well you "can" finish even Skyrim blundering around but it would take possibly thousands of hours without the map.

Morrowind, if the directions from quest givers weren't perfect, is much easier on the whole.

You can progress much more easily through all of Morrowind because investment was put into making the world feel organic and natural, and quest givers etc (including the main quest giver) would describe how to get there.

Oh, that's what you're talking about. Doesn't this have a lot more to do with Morrowind being unvoiced while Skyrim is voiced? I don't see any conceptual problem with giving directions to a location in Skyrim if I was allowed to burn as much wordcount as they did giving directions in Morrowind.

[AlanC9]

I'm willing to bet like I'm probably the only one here on this entire forum who actually beat Baldur's Gate 1 without cheating.

That's .... profoundly silly. At the very least you should have been able to guess that Sylvius and I had.

Honestly, I had a harder time with DA2 than with BG1.

[Sylvius the Mad]

How did you even know what "place to place" was though? Why would you bother going N or S or E or W out of the very first town in Skyrim? There is no indication what is in any direction so it might as well have been random.

 

Also if the "first action you took" was to traverse the entire map" that would of, without speed buffs, etc, covering every inch, probably taken like 60 hours.

I designed a character backstory where the PC was from Riften, and she was returning to Skyrim to find her family (from which she had run away as a youth).  So the first place she went after escaping Helgen was to travel overland directly to Riften.

[Sylvius the Mad]

That's .... profoundly silly. At the very least you should have been able to guess that Sylvius and I had.

Honestly, I had a harder time with DA2 than with BG1.

I had a harder time maintaining my interest, certainly.

 

But, to tell the truth, I've never actually finished BG1.  I've never even finished Chapter 5.  I've played that far literally dozens of times, but once the game gets linear I kind of lose interest.

 

I don't expect the end would be difficult, though.  I understand that Sarevok's magic resistance was toned down with TotSC installed, and I only ever played the game with TotSC installed.  I also never killed Drizzt, but I always killed Shandalar.

 

I did finish Durlag's Tower.  That was a lot of fun.  But then returning to Ulgoth's Beard always got me killed because of my 4 wizard party.  We couldn't survive those assassin attacks.

[AlanC9]

Well,you were going against the explicit design intent of the ruleset there. As you no doubt knew.

AD&D always struck me as one of those games that is hard to learn but easy to master. Once you learn what counts, how to count it, and how to ignore stuff that doesn't count, it's easy to slot in more information.

[Seraphim24]

I designed a character backstory where the PC was from Riften, and she was returning to Skyrim to find her family (from which she had run away as a youth).  So the first place she went after escaping Helgen was to travel overland directly to Riften.

 

Was that the second time you played it though? I'm saying the very first time, no prior knowledge of the map, etc, you wouldn't have known where Riften was at that point.

[Seraphim24]

That's .... profoundly silly. At the very least you should have been able to guess that Sylvius and I had.

Honestly, I had a harder time with DA2 than with BG1.

 

And yet Sylvius hasn't! Your ultimate BG1 fan never finished the game. Sorry Mr. C9 it's just you and me, and Andraste, I guess.

 

I don't know what caused you have to have a harder time with DA2 than BG1, but frankly a lot of "easier" games can be harder if you are used to challenging games because they just kind of are so obvious you are looking for the challenge and it doesn't exist.

 

At any rate, regardless of what you feel, BG1 was a more challenging, interesting, demanding game, from a game perspective, and frankly just from an everything perspective.

 

NWN was quite a bit easier, Dragon Age was another drop off from that.

[robertthebard]

Well you can beat it sure, I'd imagine it was challenging for lots of people, and yes it is a challenging game.
 
But like fine, two people.
 
Incidentally beating it the next time round is going to be easier at any rate, because you already know the game better.
 
Anyway, nothing changes that particular sphere of hardcore game design and level essentially evaporated, like I say, kind of like a famous painting in a museum or something being erased, well, except in SWTOR.

More than that. I never cheat a game until I've beaten it a few times, at least. Some games I never cheat. The forum I was on at the time was full of people like me, that would beat it at least once before looking for cheats. However, the "I bet I'm the only to beat it w/out cheating" is more of a throw away comment to me. There's no way you could possibly know what everyone's doing with their games. I'm sure a lot of people cheated, I know I eventually did, although it was more like the export thing on my 4th or 5th wizard/wizard based toons. Games like BG were where people started learning "Save early, save often".

[Seraphim24]

More than that. I never cheat a game until I've beaten it a few times, at least. Some games I never cheat. The forum I was on at the time was full of people like me, that would beat it at least once before looking for cheats. However, the "I bet I'm the only to beat it w/out cheating" is more of a throw away comment to me. There's no way you could possibly know what everyone's doing with their games. I'm sure a lot of people cheated, I know I eventually did, although it was more like the export thing on my 4th or 5th wizard/wizard based toons. Games like BG were where people started learning "Save early, save often".

 

Lol of course it was a bit of a throw away comment! Dear god lol I wasn't like submitting that as a statement of serious fact, besides I even put "I bet" and didn't put any $ on that it turns out one way or the other, but it turns out it pretty close to home I'd say.

 

But my sense is one way or another, it's tiny handful of people one way or another, most people I know at the time didn't beat it, mostly just played it. So far, nothing here has controverted that fact.

[Seraphim24]

Well,you were going against the explicit design intent of the ruleset there. As you no doubt knew.

AD&D always struck me as one of those games that is hard to learn but easy to master. Once you learn what counts, how to count it, and how to ignore stuff that doesn't count, it's easy to slot in more information.

 

Wouldn't say AD&D was hard to learn per se, you had a character sheet, you had class options, it was pretty clear cut, to be honest, a lot of modern games (Heat resistance!) are actually the ones that are somewhat gibberish, where the numbers are just numbers and there isn't any meaning.

 

I'm assuming then you haven't played it, but in terms of "mastering" the possibilities are extremely varied so it's not quite like that.

 

For instance, I remember spellfire sounding so powerful but spellfire isn't like a spell you just get, you would have to become a chosen of Mystra or something specifically which would require the DM specifically building something based around becoming an acolyte or whatever and then becoming a very powerful character or something. It wasn't always like "get to level 15"

 

The hardest thing about D&D was it was hard to actually the people to play, you had to kind of physically get everyone together for a session and all that, and invariably people just weren't there or you were missing someone etc.

 

When Baldur's Gate came out, it felt like you could finally just have a sort of accessible D&D game, and it really captured the kind of hilarity and silliness and intrigue with which people often played D&D, in the case of Minsc for instance that's totally something someone would of made up at some point or another.

 

I think then Bioware established more of an identity with NWN, KOTOR, and really probably finally Dragon Age that kind of was like "Yeah, we like and played hardcore games," but our identity is much more like something in this category, at least, that's my guess.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Was that the second time you played it though? I'm saying the very first time, no prior knowledge of the map, etc, you wouldn't have known where Riften was at that point.

I would if I'd looked at a map in advance. I'm a big fan of lore and mechanics being available prior to playing the game.

That said, my first character was the same first character I always play. Leaving Helgen, he initially went back to Helgen to see what he could salvage. Then he retraced the steps of the wagon that brought him there, looking for signs of how he was captured. Not finding any, he ventured to the nearest large town (Whiterun) for news. There, he learned of the mages' college in Winterhold, and headed directly for it (northeast across the wilderness - I almost never follow the roads in Skyrim).

It was a bit like the start of Oblivion, where I escaped from prison, and was immediately told to seek out the captain of the guard of the King who'd imprisoned me. That sounded like the dumbest idea ever, so I made a point of never visiting that town.

In Baldur's Gate, Gorion tells me to go to the Friendly Arm Inn, but he also just led us into an ambush, so I decided instead to leave the road and head south. As such, I didn't meet (until much later in the game) any of the companions who were supposed to tell me to go to Nashkel. So the main quest remained hidden from me for quite some time.