What is the most insanely difficult CRPG you've ever played?

[crufty]

nethack/crawl endgames are pretty ridiculous. ascend a level, only to get tossed back three. All the more painful when you die because you weren't careful with the (c)ockatrice, is you have to start...all...over...

Also, I thought dragon warrior was savagely difficult.

In terms of commericial success though, wizardry for teh win.

 

[Grog]

War in Middle Earth was a bitch. Stupid Nazgul killing my hobbits...

The game installed to c:\wime\ and sure enough, every time I played it I found myself screaming, "Why me?"

 

[Slylandro]

If you count roguelikes, I have to concur with the choice of Nethack. I'm sure it gets easier down the road after your millionth death but until then I'll be bashing away, usually dying by some totally random mishap. ADOM seems actually easier with respect to the beginning and the middle game but I haven't beaten it yet either.

 

[suibhne]

I can't remember the difficulty of all the games I played as a kid, honestly - including the original Wizardry and some of the M&M titles. The only difficult RPG I've played in the last few years was Wiz8, largely because the combat was nearly non-stop and ate a lot of party resources. ToEE could've been more difficult imo because it's one of the only RPGs in recent years with a combat system that actually rewards intelligence.

 

[Elwro]

ADOM seems actually easier with respect to the beginning and the middle game but I haven't beaten it yet either.

The lower Orb temples have been tweaked in the last versions and are a bit more difficult now. (Though they weren't too easy before, at least not the Chaos Temple.)
And the new, bad, experience tables make playing the combinations of race and class which advance slower almost impossible in the endgame. My trollish barbarian died on the LAST level of the game before even achieving experience level 30. So I'd recommend trying a previous version.

 

[Roqua]

Not really an rpg but JA'2 wildfire was pretty fucking hard.

 

[Twinfalls]

manic miner

 

[Zomg]

ADOM seems actually easier with respect to the beginning and the middle game but I haven't beaten it yet either.

The lower Orb temples have been tweaked in the last versions and are a bit more difficult now. (Though they weren't too easy before, at least not the Chaos Temple.)
And the new, bad, experience tables make playing the combinations of race and class which advance slower almost impossible in the endgame. My trollish barbarian died on the LAST level of the game before even achieving experience level 30. So I'd recommend trying a previous version.

Are you aware of how the speed stat influences XP gains? There is some algorithm that decreases/increases your experience when your speed is higher/lower than that of the killed opponent. If you had done one of the speed pump areas like the quickling tree or bugville that could be part of the problem. Even then, you can use the Slow Monster spell on yourself and clear out a greater vault or something to pump out a few levels.

 

[Elwro]

Whoa, I've been playing ADOM for about 9 years now and I didn't know about that. And I'm sure experience was handled differently in the previous versions, as I usually play speedy characters. (With this barbarian, though, I didn't even go to the quickling tree iirc.)
I'll check the Guidebook to read about the speed / experience dependence. Thanks.

 

[Zomg]

I can't recall if I read about that in the guidebook or the newsgroup. I find it annoying, and especially because it makes the seven league boots even more obviously the best item in the game (since they reduce energy per step rather than messing with the speed attribute directly, they don't change your XP per kill). If I get the 7LB without a wish I feel like the entire game switches into a wacky easy mode. I still always manage to die in the midgame, though.

It's too bad that Biskup doesn't do a few little touches here and there, since the game has a lot of little tweakable balance issues that he should have nailed down before he walked away from the game.

 

[Elwro]

it makes the seven league boots even more obviously the best item in the game

Yeah, I thought about it, too. In the last version I find it more important to wish for scrolls of chaos resistance, though. When I can't even reach lvl 30, I can't visit the White Unicorn, so I have to deal with corruption otherwise.

 

[FrancoTAU]

Wizardry 7 gets my vote. Wiz 4 might've gotten my vote, but it was so long ago and I remember not playing very far into it.

 

[Lord Chambers]

Since the OP asked about puzzle solving/quest difficulty and not combat, I would say Daemon's Gate is the hardest one I've played. You start the game in a city besieged by daemons and you have to find a way to sneak out. You know that your mission in the game is to find a way to stop the deamons. And poof, that's all you know. You can go around and talk to lots of random NPCs, and they'll occasionally drop a clue as to how you can get out of the city, but there is a crucial item that you can only concieve of by being really really sharp, or, which I would wager the majority of people have to do, by stumbling on one tiny building in this miles-wide cityscape.

And that's just the start. The rest of the game follows pretty much the pattern, telling you what to do next but not how to do it. Most times in games, and most times in life, if you're way off track you have some sense of when you should stop going and turn around. Say you're headed for Seattle and you start seeing signs for CANADA. But in Daemons Gate, you don't know if you're in Canada or if you just aren't in Seattle until you find one NPC in a random bar somewhere in, again, a miles-wide city scape. Give up, or keep looking harder?

 

[talk2farley]

Since the OP asked about puzzle solving/quest difficulty and not combat, I would say Daemon's Gate is the hardest one I've played. You start the game in a city besieged by daemons and you have to find a way to sneak out. You know that your mission in the game is to find a way to stop the deamons. And poof, that's all you know. You can go around and talk to lots of random NPCs, and they'll occasionally drop a clue as to how you can get out of the city, but there is a crucial item that you can only concieve of by being really really sharp, or, which I would wager the majority of people have to do, by stumbling on one tiny building in this miles-wide cityscape.

And that's just the start. The rest of the game follows pretty much the pattern, telling you what to do next but not how to do it. Most times in games, and most times in life, if you're way off track you have some sense of when you should stop going and turn around. Say you're headed for Seattle and you start seeing signs for CANADA. But in Daemons Gate, you don't know if you're in Canada or if you just aren't in Seattle until you find one NPC in a random bar somewhere in, again, a miles-wide city scape. Give up, or keep looking harder?

Sounds like that's "hard as a consequence of bad design," as opposed to "hard by design."

 

[RGE]

Since I play games for fun, and X-treme hardships aren't usually much fun, I've never finished any insanely difficult games. I did finish Bard's Tale II though, and made my ownl guidebook out of my maps and puzzle solutions. Never beat BT1, even though I cheated, and I was never able to defeat the seven grey mages in the iceworld of BT3. Possibly because I didn't have an optimal party. To me roleplaying has always been about playing the characters I want to play, not the characters the game requires me to play.

I also wandered until I got lost in the Ultima V underworld. I think the game may have crashed too, since I didn't want to risk my game discs and therefore played it on copies of those discs. Could never figure out exactly what to do about those moon wraiths. Someone was going to get a glass sword shoved up their butt, but who? And when? Mysteries.

I also had trouble finding Max in Wasteland, but after a long break I somehow managed to come up with the solution. Couldn't really do much of anything without finding him, since he was the only one who could point the party in the direction of the heavy armours that would let them survive an assault on the Guardian Citadel. Tricky, but apparently not insanely difficult.

I use a similar design as Daemon's Gate for my PnP RPG scenarios, except I'm too lazy to flesh out the details of the gameworld. No wonder no one wants to play with me. I'm so stupid.

 

[Jim Kata]

"Never beat BT1, even though I cheated, and I was never able to defeat the seven grey mages in the iceworld of BT3."

What hung you up in BT1? I loved that game, though it was so primitive.

In BT3, you are almost forced to have a thief and use him to sneak up and backstab during certain encounters. It is a tedious way to play, though.

 

[drexciya]

The other game wa some crap SSI game. Bear the start of the game the answer to one quest was white zinfandel. It wanted you to type it in correct but the person who tells you its white zinfandel spelled it wrong. That fucked me for days. I didn't get that it was a spelling error so I tried about everything and then figured I check a dictionary.

I liked games a lot more before walkthroughs.

Now, for real rpgs and just overall pure challenge throughout, I'd say wiz 7.

I've played that SSI game you mention, but it wasn't that hard. Prophecy of the Shadow was the name of that title by the way. Not great but enjoyable. The EoB series was way better, except for EoB3.

Games were more fun before walkthroughs and so on on the Internet, but maybe it's also because I don't have so much time anymore.

Wizardry 7 is so huge and hard, I've spent quite a lot of time on this game, never finishing it, making some huge maps as well. Are there any programs to make those on a PC by the way?

 

[Binary]

Since the OP asked about puzzle solving/quest difficulty and not combat, I would say Daemon's Gate is the hardest one I've played. You start the game in a city besieged by daemons and you have to find a way to sneak out. You know that your mission in the game is to find a way to stop the deamons. And poof, that's all you know. You can go around and talk to lots of random NPCs, and they'll occasionally drop a clue as to how you can get out of the city, but there is a crucial item that you can only concieve of by being really really sharp, or, which I would wager the majority of people have to do, by stumbling on one tiny building in this miles-wide cityscape.

And that's just the start. The rest of the game follows pretty much the pattern, telling you what to do next but not how to do it. Most times in games, and most times in life, if you're way off track you have some sense of when you should stop going and turn around. Say you're headed for Seattle and you start seeing signs for CANADA. But in Daemons Gate, you don't know if you're in Canada or if you just aren't in Seattle until you find one NPC in a random bar somewhere in, again, a miles-wide city scape. Give up, or keep looking harder?

Yeah Daemonsgate was pretty tough. And I think it's logical that the hero doesnt automatically know all the cities surrounding him.

What was that item that had to be found in Tormis? I never finished it, but I don't remember ever finding any special item

BT3 was pretty hard, even with a walkthrough

Ishar 2 was hard due to bad design. Missed an item 20 hours ago? Tough! Find a backup savegame or start again.

 

[Lord Chambers]

What was that item that had to be found in Tormis? I never finished it, but I don't remember ever finding any special item.

It wasn't a material object so much as a concept. You have to connect the gossip that the Theives guild knows a way out of the city with the idea that you should go check out the city militia. Personally, I don't go "aha, theives guild, I'll go talk to Sergeant Scarbladder at the milita building" but I suppose a sharp puzzle solver could have thought "thieves? I'll check with the police authorities." But of course, making that connection is useless since you don't know where the "authorities" are and need to wander around aimlessly until you find the building.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

I haven't played most of the great oldschool RPG's, so my answer is soloing BG II & ToB. :S

Urgh. Agreed. I had no trouble at all with Arcanum, Fallout, Fallout 2, Planescape etc., but BG2... tough.

 

[Moggs]

I haven't played most of the great oldschool RPG's, so my answer is soloing BG II & ToB. :S

Urgh. Agreed. I had no trouble at all with Arcanum, Fallout, Fallout 2, Planescape etc., but BG2... tough.

You soloed Planescape: Torment? Please tell me you played it properly first? Please? You're going to make baby Jesus cry.

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

If he hasn't played torment with a party, then he hasn't played torment.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

I haven't played most of the great oldschool RPG's, so my answer is soloing BG II & ToB. :S

Urgh. Agreed. I had no trouble at all with Arcanum, Fallout, Fallout 2, Planescape etc., but BG2... tough.

You soloed Planescape: Torment? Please tell me you played it properly first? Please? You're going to make baby Jesus cry.

Of course I did. I soloed on my third playthrough.

 

[Moggs]

You soloed Planescape: Torment? Please tell me you played it properly first? Please? You're going to make baby Jesus cry.

Of course I did. I soloed on my third playthrough.

Phew, one less person to worry about when I lie awake at night thinking about all the people that missed out on the shear brilliance of PS:T.

 

[X-Gun]

I thought both system shock games were pretty difficult on the highest difficulty. Especially with the time limits. But I guess the first one wasnt a rpg