1eyedking I dislike MotB and Arcanum and Bloodlines.

[Serus]

So what? CRPG's are supposed to have combat.
...

He was responiding to a statement (first made by sceptic) that Arcanum doesn't have much combat.

 

[Some Moron On Welfare]

Arcanum has at least 2 unskippable big dungeons (BMC, Vendigroth). And most people go through the Wheel Clan dungeon as well.

 

[Forest Dweller]

The problem with the BMC mines is that the monsters are scaled way too highly for that stage in the main quest. Add to that the fact that you HAVE to go through them in order to progress, and that's a big fucking problem.

It's entirely possible to cum without actually having sex.

BUT WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT?!

So you're saying that masturbation is useless?

 

[Some Moron On Welfare]

The thing is, following this analogy, most of the loonies here claim that masturbation is better than sex, i.e. you should play RPGs for the story.

 

[Roguey]

Let me guess, you're going to pick Undersigil as an example of PST having lots of combat?

Undersigil and the mausoleum, Alley of Dangerous Angles, the catacombs, the Tenement of Thugs, Modron's Cube, Undercurst and the prison, the outlands, Carceri, and the Fortress of Regrets are all combat-heavy or sneak/run-away areas. The killcount on my last save is about ~400.

 

[Xor]

To be fair, that's downright diminutive compared to my last BG2/ToB playthrough. Even though BG2 is a much longer game, that's still not much combat by comparison.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Let me guess, you're going to pick Undersigil as an example of PST having lots of combat?

Undersigil and the mausoleum, Alley of Dangerous Angles, the catacombs, the Tenement of Thugs, Modron's Cube, Undercurst and the prison, the outlands, Carceri, and the Fortress of Regrets are all combat-heavy or sneak/run-away areas. The killcount on my last save is about ~400.

Not gonna comment on the others, but the Modron Cube? That one is basically an easter egg and its whole idea is to be a dungeon.

 

[Sceptic]

He was responiding to a statement (first made by sceptic) that Arcanum doesn't have much combat.

Context please. I said Arcanum doesn't have that much combat as to make it unplayable because combat is flawed. I stand by that statement.

Undersigil and the mausoleum, Alley of Dangerous Angles, the catacombs, the Tenement of Thugs, Modron's Cube, Undercurst and the prison, the outlands, Carceri, and the Fortress of Regrets are all combat-heavy or sneak/run-away areas. The killcount on my last save is about ~400.

Not gonna comment on the others, but the Modron Cube? That one is basically an easter egg and its whole idea is to be a dungeon.

You should have commented on the others. To Roguey: Undersigil is optional. What mausoleum, the one you access from the Hive? optional as well. Alley of Dangerous Angles? optional. Modron Cube? fucking easter egg. Lots of combat in the Outlands? where? The others are more or less acceptable. Catacombs is annoying, so is the Prison. The others? you said it YOURSELF that you can sneak/run away. Please explain how a combat system can be annoying in areas where YOU AVOID THE COMBAT.

Arcanum has at least 2 unskippable big dungeons (BMC, Vendigroth). And most people go through the Wheel Clan dungeon as well.

2 dungeons in a game as big as Arcanum is "too much combat"? You've outdone yourself this time Drog.

 

[Some Moron On Welfare]

Two. Big. Unskippable. Dungeons.

There's lots of smaller ones (e.g. the mountain passes, Thanatos, Void, etc) + a shit ton of random encounters.

 

[visions]

So what? CRPG's are supposed to have combat.

Besides, other than the BMC (where I also don't see what the big deal is, just stop being stubborn and play it as RT) where else is there a lot of heavy combat?

The Monkey Island. Edit: Oh yes, and the mountain passes were also very annoying. I found Thanatos and the passes much worse than BMC and even the Dredge.

 

[Sergiu64]

At least Arcanum isn't Final Fantasy with its random encounter every 5 steps.

Besides, if you know what you're doing you can make a party that kills everything without you in Real Time. I played Charisma heavy Temporal Mage, hired the 3 half ogre guys and had the haste spell on. You just run around and they wtfpwn everything around you.

 

[Sergiu64]

But Sergiu! What if I want to play as a loner herbalist who believes in nonviolence?? What then?

I guess then you should be happy that you survived the crash, run past the enemies around the crash to get to the village and then settle down there so that you don't have to deal with the guys guarding the bridge.

 

[Coyote]

Damn, now I'm gonna have to get myself an avatar or something so that people don't confuse me with this Cyclone tard.

So what? CRPG's are supposed to have combat.

So let's not dick around. You guys are complaining about the combat when you talk about the BMC or whatever. Not the fact that there are combat filled areas.

I'm gonna go ahead and respond to this with your own words, slightly altered:

Did you read the rest of the thread where Sceptic explained that he found bad combat in some games more tolerable than in others because it takes up a much smaller portion of the game?

You fucking idiot? You fucking retard did you finish reading the thread before you started mouthing off like a little bitch? Did you read the fucking thread you mouth breathing moron?

Besides, other than the BMC (where I also don't see what the big deal is, just stop being stubborn and play it as RT) where else is there a lot of heavy combat?

Let's see:

- P. Schuylers Residence (which is like, 2 linear levels of low level zombies..)
- The Void

If you play straight through the game, doing no sidequests, there's also the mountain pass to Caladon, Thanatos, Vendigroth, and random encounters.

Since most people like to do sidequests and explore when playing RPGs, this isn't a very representative sample. And when you include side areas, despite what Tarant might lead you to believe, the proportion of the game that is spent in combat drastically increases: there's the crash site, the Bessie Toone mines, the pits beneath Dernholm, the forest infested with Void creatures outside Blackroot, Tarant's sewers, the Boil, the beach with the wrecked submarine on the Isle of Despair, Ashbury's graveyard and haunted castle, the Dredge, Caladon's sewers, the temple where Torian Kel is, the crypt with that elven tombstone required for a quest in Tarant, the lair of Bellerogrim, Kree, the ancient maze and wolf caves near Dernholm, the Pit of Fires, Torrin Quarry, the Place of Lost Voices (I think - can't remember how combat-intensive that is), the Stonecutter Clan, the place where Stringy Pete sends you, and probably several more places around Caladon, Qintarra, and the Bedokaan village that I don't remember. All of these places are 95+ percent combat-oriented, and many are quite sizable.

To be clear, I like Arcanum; I just think that the combat does more to detract from it than in other Codex favorites (except maybe MotB). That's part of why I encouraged you to start the combat overhaul you were talking about in that one GD thread: fixing the combat in Arcanum could easily bump it from a flawed gem to a truly awe-inspiring game.

Compare that to any RPG. FO2 had more combat-heavy areas. So did any of the NWN's. So does any new RPG.

FO2 is a bad example; there's a lot of combat (though I'm not sure I'd agree that there's more of it when you consider the whole of Arcanum), but a much higher proportion of the combat-heavy areas have alternative means of completing them, and FO combat is, for most, more tolerable than Arcanum's. And I doubt you'll find many people here who wouldn't agree that the NWNs could have used a lot less filler combat.

 

[Roguey]

To be fair, that's downright diminutive compared to my last BG2/ToB playthrough. Even though BG2 is a much longer game, that's still not much combat by comparison.

True, but I think it's inaccurate to say that Torment barely has any combat when you've ended up wiping out a small battalion by endgame just by merely playing. I felt deceived. There should be an asterisk: "Torment: Heavy on dialogue, light on combat*!" (*Compared to the average Bioware Genocide Simulator)

Not gonna comment on the others, but the Modron Cube? That one is basically an easter egg and its whole idea is to be a dungeon.

It annoys me that I'll have to suffer through all that tedium again if I want to use that cute computer companion. After the first couple of rooms I gave up on fighting the robots and just paused and ran while graphing it out.

Undersigil is optional. What mausoleum, the one you access from the Hive? optional as well. Alley of Dangerous Angles? optional. Modron Cube? fucking easter egg. Lots of combat in the Outlands? where? The others are more or less acceptable. Catacombs is annoying, so is the Prison. The others? you said it YOURSELF that you can sneak/run away. Please explain how a combat system can be annoying in areas where YOU AVOID THE COMBAT.

When you show up in the Outlands, a bunch of monsters attack you on sight and you have to fight your way through them and/or run to that house. Then you have to navigate your way through that demon-infested map.

I wanted to experience all the content and get all the experience I possibly could and it never crossed my mind that I should have just run away from all those boring encounters like a cowardly diplomat since I was steamrolling through them. After all, why would they put all those enemies in my path and give me all those spells unless I was meant to fight them? When/if I go through it again, I'll know better.

 

[1eyedking]

The Wheel Clan, Mountain Clan and Nasrudin's island sure were memorable moments in Arcanum.

GOD MOTHERFUCKING THIS.

The Mountain Clan made me quit the game in rage and just fucking uninstall Arcanum. You do a bad MAIN dungeon in a game and it's like screaming out loud that you don't fucking care about the player's entertainment. You do two bad MAIN dungeons and it's a downright insult. (and I'm cutting Arcanum some slack here because every single goddamn dungeon without exception sucks massive balls)

Shit went like this when I played it: "Fine, The Wheel Clan sucked, it felt like they grabbed the scenario creator and just plastered random rooms together and maze-like corridors that make no sense and grabbed a 'trap' brush and just started painting random traps in the editor everywhere, added an NPC near the end of another maze-like corridor that uttered two words, added a quest flag, and sent you to another errand."

"OK that was bad. Lazy and bad. Let's do some more questin' in Tarant though I don't really need to since I'm already level 50 (shit that was quick!) and head over to this Mountain Clan to help the Mastur Bater guy or something." I reach the Mountain Clan. "What the fuck is this, the same shit over again? For fuck's sake why did I even bother solving quests to get XP to get thrown into another lame-ass dungeon, don't these fuckers understand anything about RPGs?"

When you don't get your basics right, you aren't worth the trouble. The world seemed cool, even if the whole WORLD WAR OF MAGIC VS TECHNOLOGY didn't quite seem very tangible and actually there wasn't something as basic as a faction for each group, but not even that could save the game from being a terrible game.

But who cares, VD praised it, it must be good, right? God forbid sitting down and judging the game on my accord (besides spamming OH GOD THE SETTING). See no evil, know no evil, I guess.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

About ToEE... I think that the main problems with that game were:
1) Someone thinking that a bunch of armed men walking from house to house in a village and solving random people's banal problems is a great roleplaying experience and a great start for a dungeon crawler.
2) Not allowing to create a party above level 1 that could skip the 1).
3) Allowing to create party at all, when a single character would have much better reasons to do 1) and when there are recruitable characters that allow to skip 1) and allow to emulate the tabletop roleplaying experience much better (cNPCs as other players).
4) Lack of kiddies making constant mentions about NPCs families look jarring when 1).

 

[1eyedking]

1) Someone thinking that a bunch of armed men walking from house to house in a village and solving random people's banal problems is a great roleplaying experience and a great start for a dungeon crawler.

Hamlet Hommlet was pathetic. Quests were dumb. "Oh, I am a lonely widow, nobody loves me." "And oh, I am a hard working farmer and I have hardly time to look for a fiance, I just want somebody to take care of me!" After running around for 10 minutes: "Thank you for uniting us! You are truly a hero!"

Coupled with the snore-inducing music it almost made me fall asleep. In a dungeon crawler. Something's terribly wrong...

Targos is how you roll a starting town, goddamit.

2) Not allowing to create a party above level 1 that could skip the 1).

I prefer this over Hommlet, definitely, but I like my low level encounters - particularly in systems like D&D that go to shit once you hit the double-digits - a lot, thank you very much.

3) Allowing to create party at all, when a single character would have much better reasons to do 1) and when there are recruitable characters that allow to skip 1) and allow to emulate the tabletop roleplaying experience much better (cNPCs as other players).

Companion NPCs were boring as hell. If they were interesting like in Torment, OK. But Troika doesn't make interesting NPC, with a few exceptions. That stuff is better left in MCA's hands.