Non-linearity and shit

So I've finished this Divinity OS2 thing, and when I tried to start again with different class I realized that I'm going to play the exact same game all over again.
I mean duh it's obvious, but even though fights gonna play out differently, I can choose different answers in dialogues and keep different people alive, I'll still go through the same battles, same locations, same scenes and will arrive at the same "choose your ending" final dialogue box.

Now I didn't play all those old classic RPGs like Planescape or Baldur's Gate or Arcanum to completion, but were they just as linear as this one, or you could go to completely different places, meet different people, fight different fights and get different endings without "choose it after you beat the last boss" nonsense?
Are there true non-linear games where two playthroughs can be nothing alike?

From my experience Way of the Samurai games actually try to do it, and for the most part they succeed, but weird thing about them is that some endings locked behind some other endings, rather than being logically attainable from get go, which doesn't sit right with me.

Probably not.
Why would a game developer do that as opposed to making a completely different game, DLC and selling it? They've largely focused on reducing the amount of content that's gets unused.

Acchievements were a fucking mistake.

That's depressing.

I always thought it as a steam sale or backlog thing. You got a bunch of people who bought on impulse with 0% completion.

Didn't one of the vampire games have this in a way. Where you're still running through the main plot points/mission, but if you selected a certain race, you had to use the swears to travel, and couldn't be seen by normal folk because how ugly you were.

People tend to overstate it. You could walk around on the streets, you just had to be sure not to get near people. You were only forced into the sewers when you had to travel to an area with a heavily populated chokepoint in between. If none of the humans could see you period, you'd get no sidequests.

only true non-linear games i can think of right now are mount and blade, some older MMOs and Kenshi, but all of those are very light on story and more of a "make your own story" shit.

That is how it works but you get these slimy fucks who run all these companies into the ground because they look at raw data with no context and say "Look we don't have to put any work in because half of the people don't even play the game!" and then all their games start to flop because nobody wants to buy a shit game.

That problem really concerns only mainstream devs who make shit games for casual crowds to begin with.
Devs like Larian or CDProject keep making games for people who actually play games and are willing to put hundreds of hours into them.

fug

Age of Decadence (vid related) is one recent game I can think of that had an extreme amount of branching and replayability. I think there were some 4-5 different main questlines you could engage and in any questline there were many more branches depending on the decisions you made and the build you followed.

Also, the Witcher 2 essentially had two different paths branching right from the start.

Lots of people get games on Steam for the sole purpose of getting the trading cards and then leave the game running long enough to get all of them, resulting in a shitload of people having 4 hours played, yet not even a single achievement, even though most games have achievements for pressing a single button. Shit games that cost 20 cents and games that you can get for free for a short period of time are what drives the statistic that very few people ever bother finishing the games they buy. In fact, there's entire sites dedicated to getting as many trading cards as possible. Pic related is a good show of this, for a few days Payday 2 was available for free and as a result you get shit like pic related, the first achievement is necessary to be able to even do anything in the tutorial and the second should be obvious.

Front Mission 3 has two routes that are basically two separate games.

You think it's only PC? You can see console achievement lists have the same, if not worse stats for completion.

Try playing Way of the Samurai 1. It's still the best one and it doesn't lock anything behind endings, if you know what you're doing and are skilled enough you can get any ending. It's a shame all the games in the series since haven't really lived up to the original, partly due to their desire for unneeded complication vs the original which provided a perfect simple Yojimbo-esque situation and feels better for it's simplicity because it's appropriate for the setting.
What game has you do this? Last I checked most games don't work like this, even if they do give the player freedom and choice the player still ends up going to the same locations and meeting the same people. No game designer is out there designing whole continents or characters that only one player gets to see on their playthrough and no one else sees, that's madness. Sounds like your expectations are a bit too high for video games. Even WotS doesn't have you going to new locations and meeting new people every playthrough. Now as for different fights that's another matter and most non-linear games should let you switch up some of the fights you get in to and the order, as well as the story around it, still most games will have a single antagonist who you are on a collision course with regardless, that's just how stories are.


It still makes the game feel pretty different, your choices are either stealth everywhere constantly worried about any approaching NPCs or use the sewers safely making them feel very home-like (more so because that same clan also got a bonus to feeding on rats which would roam the sewers). I mean it doesn't do a 180 on the story or anything but for such a small game it's neat that I can play through with different clans and get a different experience with it.

Even good RPGs that actually account for the choices you've made all game usually don't have more to the endings than some different slides. The best RPGs are the ones that make getting there different and fresh for multiple playthroughs.
Even thinking about a bunch of the RPGs I've played, very few of them had the amount of endings that a VN might have.

Also is the game supposed to be this hard? What the fuck am I doing wrong? I keep getting myself into 4v6 fights where I get fucking murdered.

You don't know how the game works, and are thus bad. Don't worry, it's not actually that hard and it's all in your head.
You can reposition party members while one person is talking to someone.

You can become king of the dead and say fuck you to the main questline, among other things. Combat is ass though, and I haven't finished my current playthrough

You can play as a retard or pick Idiot Savant and be your average Holla Forums user. If you pick nonhuman, you will encounter fantasy racism. I dunno if there are separate narratives or endings though because I never get very far in my playthrough attempts, despite enjoying the shit out of the game

Linear game with some choices and a lot of sidequests (I've seen people claim ~200h for Shadows of Amn alone, on a 100% completion run)

That's a relief. I actually like this game a lot because it feels busy and like a lot is going on at once in a fight.

What I don't like is the amount of fucking fire in fights, though. Poison? Lights up on fire. Oil? Lights up on fire.

Blood and water?

CONTAMINATED

And lights up on fire.

Not him, how do I kill the eternal woman? Because this fight is insane. I'm level 13.

Blood and water don't mix, user. But you're right! There's fire all over the goddamn place in this game!

Who are you talking about? Dallis? You're not at the final boss at level 13, are you?

I mean blood OR water, more like.


I just recently started playing as a spooky skeleton necromancer, is it going to get super spooky?

Have you reached the black pits yet?
Have fun, so much necrofire my fps was dropping to around 10.
Oh and my characters had to run away or die.

Its harder to make a game than a CYOA with pictures :^)

You're right, that's definitely the reason why you'd be hard-pressed to find an actual RPG with the amount of branching storylines a VN has. Having an actual game is enough to make up for it. To me, at least.

No, I'm having such a hard time with every fight that I'm still in Fort Joy. I'm fighting Magister Captain Trippel and his gay little archers right now. The paladin gets murdered and I'm left with my group of 4 fighting against a crowd. Fire, poison etc. don't help much because they have fat magic shields.

No.
Rykers mission, black pits, you solve a pillar puzzle and open a sarcophagus. She has several source stalkers, casts rain, casts chain lightning and looks to have perma polymorph wings.
The A something.
Fuck this fight.

Prepare to enter the BONE ZONE.

OH FUK

Oh, that! I blew through that fight no problem, I don't even remember it. Just stick your melee dude next to her while she's yammering on at you and hit her until she dies.


I fucked a lizard chick, woke up to a bunch of muggers, killed them, and the lizard chick was so turned on I boned her again and she gave me my money back because she has an undead fetish

Ah. It gets much harder after fort joy. You will encounter a place where it ends up as an ocean of necrofire, good luck getting rid of it, so big it just respreads. Oh and you fight enemies there healed by fire.
It's easily the worst fight by far.
Doesn't Garath assist? His fight was easy, but maybe it's because I played on classical.

No it's not, the worst fight is in Arx. It has to be either the broken-ass permanent respawning skeletons at the Lizard Consulate, or that goddamn motherfucking demon. That was horrible. I straight-up cheesed it by having my rogue turn invisible and backstab one person to death before running out of the house to do it again.

I fucked her as Ifan. Muggers are friendly.
Undead seems more fun.

They have the same final boss though


Langrisser

I meant so far.
Honestly I'm wishing I went undead, so I could use deathfog. I already plan to do that next time, my skelly will be named Zyklon Ben. As long as I find more deathfog it will all work out.

I wish you could build your party of 4 from the get-go, without having to play with other characters. I want a team of 4 skeletons.

Steambot chronicle, you choose to be good or evil midway through the game. Choosing the bad guy locked your outfit to a military style, you get to fight a different enemy which is the your companion in your good guy playthrough. Theres a secret bad guy HQ that you can access only if you choose this path, different final boss battles and of course, different ending

Replayability faggot, thats the whole point of making different path/story in your game.

Does anyone as link to the new hotfix? Divinity.Original.Sin.2.Update.v3.0.146.969 ?

Well technically yes, you fight the same guy and his pet pals, but fights take place in different places, at different times, and Lukav pilots different mechs.
In one route it's Gundam-esque winged mech with laser canon and in the other it's fuckhuge quadroped mobile armor.
So no, it's actually different boss battles.

You surely mean Der Langrisser, because the first one also known as Warsong is 100% linear.

Anyone know if this game still emulates like pure shit?

It doesn't matter, because eventually you'll see everything there is to see. It doesn't matter how much content there is (quantity over quality.)

This is why I love RNG systems so much, and also why I hate Numale's Sky for borderline ruining its reputation despite the RNG having little to do with why the game was shit.

Short length doesn't bother me that much. Contra can be beaten in a half hour and replayed endlessly if you want because the gameplay is so good. I played Persona 3 and 80 hours into it I wanted to kill myself. I only continued after the 40 hour mark despite being sick of it because I had already sunk so much time into it. As I played I could literally feel myself dying, every second that ticked by was one I was never going to get back again. I opted for the shorter bad end instead of playing for another in game month because I just wanted it to be over already. I haven't played a Persona game since. 5 - 10 hours seems great, RPGs will be longer of course but most of that time is spent navigating an empty pointless "open world" or mindlessly grinding.

I think he meant Langrisser 2, not the weird snes port

The JP version of Ace Combat 3 has entirely new missions for its 5 different endings.
Also Umihara Kawase has a handful of different paths to take which can even connect to each other if you take the right doors. This is more like optional levels than it is story paths.

Games make a lot more sense when you start at one point and split off once you understand that you are splitting off. Otherwise you may not know there's more to be seen, and you'll never get curious. Imagine The Stanely Parable without any branches, and you pick your ending from the very first room. Now it becomes even more like the walking simulator it is, only with 0 exploration and experimentation. I'd rather go through a familiar first few levels or rooms before I start picking some new path to follow, to keep it from feeling like a checklist of endings.

Shadow the edgehog

Arcanum and Fallout are usually worth replaying as a low int character.


Have you played Age of Decadence yet? It has a shitton of branching paths.


Arcanum combat is also ass. And I say that as a guy who is just starting Arcanum. I think there are some ending slide variations depending on how you resolved quests in the base game. Arcanum is fantasy steampunk fallout 2 for the most part anyhow. The main variations in campaign style are probably not tech vs magic but good vs evil.

Some how I will just about always love this anyway. As long as it tells me how the world was different because of my choices, and also didn't backload all the possible choices to the last possible fucking second, I'm happy. I really liked Dungeon Siege 3 because of this. The choices were pretty great. There was one entire area of the game, a steampunk city, where if you made two specific choices, the city would get pissed and tell you to fuck off at the end of the quest line. And the choices that are "morally wrong" still give you good reason to choose them. There was even one minor sidequest that allowed you to choose a "middle ground," except after choosing it it would reveal you basically ruined the life of both sides for refusing to choose.

I found it serviceable, and not buggy. Its leagues better than Torment even if it isn't the best. Torment has basic animations break hard and you're not given a non-melee-slugfesf option for far


Found your mistake right there. That game is ass. Its hilarious to me that Persona got popular on the same console that had Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga, both of which are much better games that let you control your whole party. I suppose P4 can be blamed more than P3 though
too long

How did I fuck that up?