Discuss old CRPGs ITT.
I just finished Pool of Radiance, it was my first gold box game apart from Eye of the Beholder. It had a lot of cool stuff, especially for 1988, and I'm quite interested in playing Curse of the Azure Bonds. Any anons that have played all 4 willing to give insight into the series?
I also finished Might and Magic 4 recently, should I take my party through 5 or just skip straight to 6?
Blood and Honor is the best M&M game
Fitght me
Have a cute little hedgehog op :3c
I'm still shit at Wizardry 6.
Imagine sticking your dick into the inner part while he's curled up like that. Do you think he'd grab onto your head and lick it? Gotta cum fast
After I made it through 6 I'm not so sure it's really a skill based game, seems to be mostly about how autistic you can be about reloading to not get fucked by encounters and get good level ups.
I tried playing 7 but the controls are so much worse I had to stop 20 hours in.
Definitely play 5 first. 4 and 5 are two halves of one giant game. It's like Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
Also, posting some of my other favorites.
...
I wish Darklands' font wasn't so eyerapey.
Still triggers me.
I mean shit he put in literal blood elves
I played Wiz 7 a couple years ago, god damn was it a long haul. That game is so broken it's painful to play sometimes. Importing the save to Wiz 8 was cool though, lots of new dialogues.
Don't try to take any demi-human party members through to Pools of Darkness (except maybe a dwarven fighter/thief) as level restrictions will fuck you eventually.
What? I only played Wizardry 7 up to the first town (because ATM I lack the time to dedicate to this game), but from what I have seen the interface is such a massive improvement, it almost made my cry after the disaster the interface in 6 was.
I hated using spacebar to navigate everything, and that there was a slight delay on the cursor moving. 6 had a shit interface but you could navigate it extremely quickly once you got used to it, for me 7 was far worse.
Play Wizardry 4 instead. It's the best entry in the series.
Play Dark Sun: Shattered Lands
It is a game ahead of its time.
I hear a lot of people touting this as one of the best.
Sell me on it.
It is isometric and influenced all the Black Isle/Bioware games of the late 90's. It is interesting to see the influences. Also setting is beyond badass, they used so much magic in the world that they turned it into a wasteland. Basically fantasy post apocalypse crapsack world, everyone is utter badass including elves.
Watch this if you want it in detail.
youtube.com
Looks pretty sick, I'll have to give that a go soon
A must play in my book.
My mouse cursor is just fine, maybe your DOSBox settings are off. I don't know what you mean with the space bar, flip my thumb from the mouse to the enter key on the number block for scrolling away text.
*my mouse cursor is just fine is relative to mouse cursors in DOS games in general, meaning it's not perfect, but it's not worse than any other DOSBox game.
I played with only keyboard controls, if I go back to it I'll try with the mouse
OK, that explains it. I can imagine keyboard-only controls to be a finger breaker. I like that in W7 you can actually just drag&drop stuff. You can click an item in someone's inventory, then cycle through your party by clicking the portrait and then drop the item in that other character's inventory. In W6 I had to do everything by clicking buttons or moving the cursor on top of buttons, it made the simple act of moving one item from one character's swag to another one's swag so much more tedious.
This is slightly off topic but if you like these games I hope you guys all played Master of Magic.
I'm also playing some Daggerfall these days which is old enough (95?) to be considered old school. I never finished a game of Arena, did anyone finish that shit?
What's the best Might and Magic and Wizardy games?
Master of Magic is fucking excellent, good taste there user. Drop TES before it gives you brain damage.
Wizardry 8 is the tightest in the series, but Wiz 7 has some impressive features like parties of NPCs travelling the world trying to beat you to the punch. You want to score the 6-7-8 trilogy at some point, but not necessarily in that order.
M&M - World of Xeen is the best by far, but 6, 7 and 3 are also enjoyable. Don't binge on these games though, they're too simplistic and it'll grind you down.
I didn't know that, I'll definitely be trying out 7 with mouse. 6 played quite well once you adapted to the keyboard controls and you could do everything relatively quickly
Anyone here played the Exile or Geneforge games from Spiderweb? I'm particularly interested in Geneforge, the premise seems pretty neat.
As a child Macfag, Vogel's games were definitely among my favorites (I'd rank them Nethergate, Geneforge, Exile 1-3+Blades, Avernum 4-6, Avadon.)
Other lone wolf Mac RPGs I recall fondly were Realmz, Taskmaker, two different RPGs called Odyssey (one much more compact and puzzle-heavy set in ancient Greece, another more combat-heavy and set on an archipelago), Shadowkeep, and Cythera. Also interesting, but somewhat unfinished, were Prince of Destruction and Sword Dream. Honorable mention to the unlicensed Mac remake of Ultima III, which hit the perfect sweet spot between modernization and accuracy.
I've since gone back and played all the commercial games from other platforms that evaded me back in the day because they never got Mac ports (stingy bastards), but I've always wondered what I missed out on in the way of their obscure shareware gems.
Any IBM/Amiga/Atari/etc oldfags got some low-end RPG goodness you can dredge out of your memories?
Ishar is more iconic, but Perihelion is probably the definitive Amiga exclusive rpg, You might want to check out Hired Guns too, it's not a full blown rpg but close enough and it's deffo one of the best games on the system.
I started playing 8, but found that I didn't optimize my guys well enough and even in the same area monsters started getting harder. So is there any advantage to starting with 7? Six doesn't carry over right?
Right now I'm also trying to play Arcanum since everyone seems to heaps praise on it. I'm starting to get into it.
Who plays Elona? Holla Forums has had more Elona threads than any other rpg I think. I never got into it myself.
What is the best AD&D adventure from the early era? Weighted heavily for playability?
6 carries over to 7 which carries over to 8. You don't really have to optimize in 8, the game can be soloed even with a gimped character. The beginning is the hardest part, once you leave the sanctuary run or stealth your way to Arnika and it's easy from there. You'll have the opportunity to grind there if necessary. And yeah, lingering in the sanctuary isn't a good idea even if you have a great party since it boosts the encounters on Arnika Road which are pretty deadly to begin with.
Are you playing with Drog's patch?
Fug meant to reply to
I'm just playing the GoG version of Arcanum.
Are you saying player files from 6 can be carried all the way to 8?
Yeah, you can import from 6 to 7, though you have to change the file extension (you can google this and find a thread on the steam forums about this) and then from 7 to 8
I remember playing a shareware version of something that looked like that, in 1995…
I remember been so into it.
There's a decent amount of extra content in 7 and 8 if you go all the way through with this. Different start points, dialogues, items, FMVs. Some subplots you'd think were loose ends get resolved, too. I wouldn't sweat it though, it makes a bigger impression on your second run.
Get the patch for your next run, it brings back stuff that Troika didn't have time to debug before release. Mostly quests and dialogues, but I think there are more endings too. No OC, it just unlocks data already in the game.
You mean this one?
lairware.com
It is commercial and Since the DOS version is being sold on GOG I doubt they would let someone get a way with selling an unlicensed port. Personally I think the high-res sprites don't really fit the game's aesthetic, they look too clean and cheap. But apparently you can swap the tileset according to the screenshots, so at least you are not forced to use it. The graphics from the Exodus patch are perfect in my opinion:
exodus.voyd.net
Huh, I always thought it just flew under the radar all these years. Apparently he got permission from Lord British & EA way back in the day, and has just been faithfully maintaining it ever since then:
web.archive.org
Go all human warriors (and maybe a ranger and paladin) until they're at maximum attacks per combat round, then switch class to mage all the way to the end of the series. Result is massively melee powered mages with AoE everything spell casting. AC is a non issue later on as you get all the magic trinkets you need for -10 armor class. Having 150+ hitpoints on your mages also helps.
Only way to play, really.