If there is one element of AoD that has greatly exceeded my expectations and, in fact, amazed me, it’s definitely the combat. Before playing it, I was absolutely certain that single-character turn-based combat that wouldn’t be very basic, very terrible or very random was unattainable. I figured that AoD’s “brutal, hard and unforgiving” combat system would simply boil down to praying for crits to go your way, similarly to Fallout & Friends. I was so wrong, I don’t even know where to begin.

For starters, it is amazing just how many tools AoD gives you to handle every situation and tip it in your favour. A typical combat encounter has you heavily outnumbered, with the odds usually being 3:1, but sometimes even putting you alone against ten opponents, many of them using all kinds of dirty tricks. Fights often look downright hopeless, but assessing your situation and adapting to it properly will easily take you to victory. There were many moments where I found myself thinking “that’s it, I can’t beat those gits”. But then I’d take a deep breath, analyse what was going on and what I was missing, and come up with the solution. “A-ha! If I switch to a different weapon, throw grenades all around, cripple that dude and smack the hell out of another one in the first two turns, I should hold out till the end since the rest of them are scrubs”. This is exactly what combat in AoD is all about. Analysis, preparation and planning.​

The question is whether Blood Bowl 2 succeeds in this delicate feat of renewal via reproduction. Did Cyanide manage to balance their new engine with the old systems to craft what is essentially a more polished, more playable, more content-rich, digital Blood Bowl game?

In the absence of an adequate ‘hahano’ gif, I have decided to instead provide you with the following review. Blood Bowl 2 is one-third regression, one-third status quo and one-third minor improvements.​

Some of the elements of Conquistador did get a bit tedious – like the camping system, at a certain point. We got a lot of player feedback, from the Codex, from Steam, from other forums, and a lot of people wanted to see something a little more interesting and engaging. So we put a lot of thought into how we can make that different, but not too different, because we want to maintain the theme of the Expeditions franchise. We don't want to go too “dynamic”... it's not a touchscreen minigame, right?​

AM: That's one of the things I love about the Codex. People are brutally, brutally honest with each other: “Yes, what you're saying is crap!” I read an interview with Chris Avellone, I think it was at PAX… It was a whole group of developers sitting together, and they were all kind of like “oh, oh, the Codex strikes fear in the hearts of developers.” And I read that and I thought: “That's not the way that I perceive the Codex.” I'm sometimes a very blunt person. I'm very straightforward, and I'll swear, but that doesn't mean that I want to hurt people's feelings – I just want to get my point across. So when I read something with a whole bunch of expletives and there's also a point in there, then I just read the point. Everything else is irrelevant. It doesn't really matter how people are communicating, it's what they're communicating. The whole point of the Codex is that it's a place where people can be themselves, and if they wanna be rude, they're gonna be rude. It's a sort of take-it-or-leave-it environment, and there's no reason to be afraid of that. You know, as game developers, we're a bunch of socially awkward people. And when you live and work amongst a bunch of socially awkward people, then talking to other socially awkward people should be fairly easy for you. And you should be a little bit empathetic and understand where they're coming from. I'm not always the most polite person myself, and that's something that I think should be easily accepted [by devs who read the Codex]. But it's important that everybody should have the same level of appreciation. You shouldn't get dragged into an argument, because that's not the point. It's about bringing up the things that you like and dislike about the game, and then be challenged on them. If you go back and forth based on that, then that's exactly the kind of feedback that game developers should wanna have. If you develop a culture of communication with your players where you only listen to the polite people, then you're not gonna get to the root of any of your problems. I mean, people are rude, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.​

To be honest, I've never held a strong opinion on Expeditions: Conquistador either way. The game offered a respectable amount of C&C, but its travel and combat mechanics eventually became too repetitive for my taste; if it hadn't been for its novel and interesting setting, I'd have abandoned the game a lot sooner than I did. By contrast, the setting of Viking seems to be more familiar and predictable; at least for me, it doesn't hold quite as much appeal anymore. Thankfully, Viking's changes to the equipment system and the character development mechanics could potentially make the gameplay more dynamic and interesting than it was in the first game; and if the gameplay is good, what else matters? On the other hand, the super gory kill cams and the animated 3D camp screens are big warning signs for me; all the talk about achieving immersion by means of extreme violence and "showing the world from another perspective" sounds suspiciously like mainstream pandering to me. And then there's the concept of roaming large regions for hours on end without ever camping or advancing the day/night timer, which I really find enormously strange. Let's hope that the Codex gets lots of beta keys, so that we may help Logic Artists to stay on the path of righteousness.​

Next up: Nothing, I'm done.​

“You know this from the cinema.”

“There's no inventory; we want to make something simpler this time.”

“There will be puzzles, but they will be easy and streamlined.”

“It's trial without error; you can't do anything 'wrong'.”

“Experience the story!”

“Not everybody will like this.”

Silence is the sequel of The Whispered World, a charming little point and click adventure from a time when Daedalic were still capable of producing good and complex games on a small budget. And they didn't just make good games then, they also made them quickly: Chains of Satinav, a fine, well-crafted game with an impeccable sense of atmosphere, was released in June 2012, and its sequel Memoria came out just 14 months later in August 2013. Memoria had good gameplay and a great story; it's one of my favourite adventure games of all time. As recently as 2013, Daedalic seemed to be doing everything right. And then, they changed. It's hard to shake the feeling that something horrible and traumatic must have happened to these people, warping their company philosophy into something unrecognisable. Is this what going mainstream looks like? Daedalic is certainly not suffering from a lack of funding: Uli proudly declared that Silence was the developer's “biggest project to date”, having already spent four years in development and needing at least another half year to come out just right. For comparison: Broken Age took roughly three years to develop. Book of Unwritten Tales 2 took two and a half years and was 20 hours long. Four and a half years is an utterly absurd amount of development time for an adventure game from a large studio, especially from one that used to pride itself on quickly and cheaply producing very good games just two short years ago.

Where have all the money and effort gone? Into “the most beautiful trailer we've ever made at Daedalic... at least so far!” And into the in-game graphics, of course. Uli was not shy to point out how stunningly gorgeous the game was in every aspect of its existence: it was “on a whole different level of quality from [their] previous games, really detailed,” with “fantastic looking” 3D backgrounds (more precisely, projection mapped 2D images) “offering the perfect scenery to capture the characters and their emotions” by means of “emotional close-ups,” “fast cuts,” and “unique hand crafted animations,” with “seamless transitions between cutscenes and in-game scenes.” Of course the story will also be “so, so complex”, but this complexity is only made possible because the game just looks so damn gorgeous. With these brain meltingly beautiful graphics, Daedalic can emotionally engage the player on a whole new level, and truly immerse them in the action. All distracting and disruptive elements – otherwise referred to as "gameplay" – have been filed down to a minimum.
​

A few weeks ago, Larian's PR department sent out a call to European gaming journalists: “come to Ghent on the 20th of August and see Original Sin 2 in action for the first time!” Or at least that's how I imagine it went for the other invitees. For me, contacting Larian involved cornering Swen Vincke in a darkened Gamescom doorway while he was under massive time pressure, and pestering him with convoluted questions until he asked me for a Codex staff contact to organize “an event in two weeks.” Swen first suggested contacting “the man in Australia”, but I already anticipated that Dark Underlord would be too busy with his numerous law suits (and possible jail time) to take care of such petty things. Instead, I suggested that Swen talk to Crooked Bee, who then promptly handed the entire matter off to me. Thus, I was off to the magical metropolis of Ghent on an all-expenses-paid three day trip, from the 19th to the 21th of August. Indeed, I will forever remember Ghent for its abundance of highly aromatic public pissoirs, a startling lack of traffic lights, and the tens of thousands of dead eyed tourists staggering through its crumbling streets. To be fair, the city also had lots of very nice restaurants, where I thankfully got to fill my tummy free of charge. Speaking of which…

Hey Bubbles, what's it like being bribed by a game developer?

Feels pretty good, I'd say. Of course, free transport and accommodation are perfectly normal when you've been invited to a press event, so it was quite sensible that Larian should cover these costs. In my case, they amounted to €228 for first class train tickets and €248 for two nights in a lower-middle-class hotel, plus the cost of a couple of taxi rides. Then, there was the cost of the free food and drink I received on Thursday. However, Larian had to accommodate a dozen journalists as well as a respectable amount of their own staff at these outings, so they couldn't afford to offer quite as top-tier a menu as one might have expected for such an occasion. Between a two-hour lunch, a four-hour dinner, and a four-and-a-half-hour pub crawl, I estimate that I did not consume more than 160 Euros in solid and liquid merchandise, which is really an utterly small amount for the circles that I was moving in. Still, I eventually became aware of the fact that my enthusiastic approach to fine dining was, to a certain degree, open to misinterpretation. My precise moment of epiphany came around 11 PM, when Swen, fresh off his fifth refill of a 2010 Château de Lussac (a pleasant, but rather ordinary vintage), whipped out his cellphone, snarked “Looks like the Codex got corrupted!” and photographed me while I was munching on a delicious cherry-ginger chocolate ice cream cake confection. I mention this incident here both to head off the inevitable tweeted exposé of my indulgence, and to forcefully assure the good Codex community – my friends, my comrades, one and all – that I maintained a clear and critical eye throughout my entire visit at the studio. In fact, I bring you many exclusive scoops, one of them Roguey-related, directly from Swen's mouth. You don't believe me? Then read on, brave readers, and soothe your troubled minds with some twelve thousand words of undiluted, fully objective information.​

Early last year, the esteemed Brazilian Codexer felipepepe took on the monumental task of compiling the RPG Codex’s Top 50 RPGs of all time. That in and of itself was quite the challenge, considering people were voting for games made over a thirty year long span. After the flamewars discussions finally died down, the result was a Top 72 RPGs Of All Time list. As I looked through this admittedly well rounded list, nostalgia began to take over.

[...] Since so many of these promises for a return to “old-school” boxes were turning out to be empty, I decided to return to the true old-school games of the past. As a collector of computer games, I already owned many of the Codex’s Top 72 RPGs, so I decided to track down the ones I was missing and create a photographic archive of each one's box. In the process, I realized that in this digital distribution age, we've lost a piece of what made PC gaming great. Those old boxes did a lot to enhance our enjoyment and dare I say “immersion” in those game worlds that we spent so many hours exploring.

I have tried to collect only IBM-PC versions released in the US, as well any Collector’s or Special Editions which were produced for each game when possible. For each game, I've photographed its box's front and back cover artwork and original contents, as well as any clue books/strategy guides, tie-in novels, pre-orders, etc, that were also an important part of the overall experience. I hope you enjoy this trip down nostalgia lane as much as I did while documenting it. In the process, maybe you’ll also see that we have lost a little something along the way.

Readers, I present to you a visual record of the RPG Codex’s Top 74 RPGs of all Time “Boxed Edition” (it’s 74 rather than 72 since I had to include Blade of Destiny and Chaos Strikes Back in honor of Crooked Bee!). I’ve included some general notes and observations about many of the games as well.​

Ah, Daggerfall. Both stunning in its depth and a hot mess when it comes to its glaring bugs. It's a game which doesn’t deserve the hype lavished on it by its nostalgic fans, despite being groundbreaking for its time. I spent months playing it, and my feelings continually wavered between frustration and amazement. I found Arena to be more fun, but Daggerfall to be better structured. I found Morrowind to be more immersive, but Daggerfall’s main plot to be more interesting. There is one thing that most of us can agree upon, though - it’s a better game than Oblivion.

[...] No review of Daggerfall is truly complete without mentioning the massive amount of pixelated boobs that this game provides. And no, I’m not talking about fools. I’m talking tits, jugs, gazongas, hooters, knockers, fun bags, bazoombas, cha-chas, num-nums, cantaloupes, flapdoodles, mounds, torpedoes, rack, neeners, soombas, mammaries and milk bombs. They are simply everywhere, although they do change from location to location. If you're a religious type, the finest examples can be found in temples dedicated to Kynareth, goddess of air, and Dibella, goddess of love (and there are also barechested men in Dibella’s temples for all the female gamers out there). The sophisticated aficionado can also find a varied assortment of bare sweater puppies in personal chambers inside castles, at some mage guilds, on monsters in dungeons and among the daedra princesses. Unfortunately, we would have to wait until The Witcher to get in-game collectible cards, but there’s always CTRL-F5 in DOSBox. I used to think that some of those Oblivion mods went a bit over the top, but after playing Daggerfall, it's tempting to view them as a return to form.

[...] I will admit that some of the side quests are complex in clever ways. One quest that stood out for me was a Knights of the Dragon quest where I was asked to help a witch hiding in the depths of a dungeon. Upon finding her, she tasked me with locating and delivering a young girl to her to so that she could become the witch's apprentice. I took up the quest, but when I approached the girl she screamed for help and I found myself in a running battle with the nearby guards who followed me all the way to the dungeon. After delivering the girl, I still had to fight my way out of the dungeon, I took a reputation hit with the local people, and the next time I talked to a random child I was told off by the little tyke. All this was quite clever, but also a bit messed up. The leadership of the Knights of the Dragon distrusts magic-users, so why this was one of their faction quests is still a mystery to me. Once I realized I was kidnapping the girl, I could have turned her over to the authorities and asked for forgiveness, but that would have resulted in a loss of reputation points with the knighthood for the failed quest, instead of being rewarded for making the more moral, citizen-friendly decision. Also, the witch was near an underwater cavern, so to get to her I had to swim through a crowd of soldiers who were standing in place waiting for me on the pool floor without drowning. Have I mentioned that the citizens of Daggerfall's cities can walk on water? In summary, the copy-and-paste nature of Daggerfall's side quests and dungeons leads to an endless stream of glitches and nonsensical moments that emphasizes the game's design flaws, harming immersion more than it helps it.​

Unlike most games these days, difficulty levels up to Hard don’t change the rules or the enemy stats in any way. Instead, you get tougher variants of enemies in bigger groups — adra beetles in addition to stone and wood beetles, shadows upgraded to shades, shades to phantoms, guls to darguls, darguls to fampyrs, and so on. Only the hardest level, billed as a special challenge for the truly hardcore, adjusts the numbers.

That’s a shame, because on Path of the Damned Pillars plays a lot more like it ought to. Status effects start biting. Enemies have hard enough defences that attacking them with the right combinations is often a requirement. They hit hard enough that repeating good-enough tactics won’t always cut it. You start paying serious attention to consumables and crafting. And even so, some of the optional fights are truly punishing, at least if you go into them early.

Pillars suffers from the design decision to produce difficulty levels by changing the encounter composition rather than adjusting the numbers. Casual players who can’t be bothered to learn the mechanics at all will find Easy frustratingly hard, whereas more experienced players will soon snooze through Hard by mechanically applying a good-enough strategy they happened upon. There are more efficient and more fun ways to play, but the game leaves it up to you to discover them.

The game would likely have been received a good deal better among the hardcore crowd if Hard had been more or less like Path of the Damned with, perhaps, the mobs a little smaller, and another, even higher difficulty level above it, or a second difficulty slider tuning the numbers so it would have been possible to play against Hard enemies with Path of the Damned rules. As it is, Path of the Damned is the most enjoyable difficulty level in the game, but it doesn’t live up to its billing as a Heart of Fury spiritual successor.

[...] Baldur's Gate would likely have been forgotten had it not been for Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment. If Obsidian can build on Pillars' success, improve on the areas that need improvement while maintaining its strengths, Path of the Damned can point the way to Path of the Incline. Pillars is a first, somewhat faltering step to reviving a near-stagnant genre. A few years ago, the very idea of a Baldur’s Gate 2-scope, top-down, isometric, party-based cRPG from a major studio seemed like a pipe dream. Whether this new flowering can survive between the siren song of a mass market and the grumbling of the grognards — let alone come close to making both groups happy — hangs on the followup. For some of us, Pillars delivered. Others are still waiting. The space it and the other big-ticket Kickstarters has helped clear benefits us all.​

A lot can be said about The Witcher series - it manages to combine excellent ideas and their successful implementation with ideas that are nearly equally as poor. It is a series of games with a curious amount of trials and errors, and with an unexpected amount of ambition. A lot could be said about the series, but its introduction at this point is ridiculous - instead, let's see whether The Witcher ends on a triumphant note, or whether it's a sad and mangled mess that no-one has really asked for. However, if you do want to read up on some of the things already said about the series, head on to Witcher and Witcher 2 reviews and take a look. They're probably shorter than this one, too.

[...] What can be said about the writing of Witcher 3, then? Well - simply put, it is one of the best-written games to have come out in well over a decade. Perhaps even the best-written RPG since Torment, tackling serious topics and pulling no punches, placing the player in a position of one of the last sane men in an increasingly insane world and never shying away from showing what insanity actually is while avoiding the pitfalls of cheap shock value. The mundaneness of cruelty; the commonness of greed, treason, cowardice; the quiet acceptance of murder, rape, despair, racism and hate - Witcher 3 is all about that. Witcher 3 is about total war without its typical glamor.

[...] The atmosphere of Witcher 3 does its best to support the writing - and succeeds to do it almost perfectly. Visual and audio design serve to reinforce the writing and create a sense of place. The world hardly feels like a theme park - instead, it is a fairly logical, if occasionally repetitive.

[...] Many of the smaller stories, be they a monster hunt, a secondary quest, or a "chance" encounter are well-voiced, thought-out and placed into proper context. Some of the lengthier ones can actually be surprising - and many of these little stories actually offer you a choice. Will you let a lynch mob kill a Nilfgaardian deserter? Will you do what seems to be the right thing, and help him out, causing four times more deaths in the process? The choice is yours.

[...] at a glance, Witcher 3 provides a robust Sawyerian stat system of +5% stat increments that are apparently the pinnacle of RPG design at the moment, and you definitely can get through combat by left-clicking a lot, just like in Pillars of Eternity.

[...] The animations, too, are needlessly drawn-out and, once started, impossible to interrupt with anything short of rolling away, thus offering Geralt more chances to acquire extra scar tissue. This issue extends to just about any type of animation, from swinging a sword to quick-throwing a bomb and is a good source of rage.

[...] Witcher 3 is a bit of a mixed bag. Weak in its gameplay yet surprisingly strong as a story and a game world, console-centric but intelligent, it is likely to be a very divisive game for many, on the Codex in particular, and yet, when the dust will settle, it is likely to end up as a game to ride to a rather high position in the local pantheon of story-heavy games.​

The past year has given us strong evidence to suggest that the RPG industry would be tremendously helped if our Canadian friends were to cease operations immediately and released all their herded up talent into the indie wilderness. Stoic, the studio behind The Banner Saga, follows in the tradition of other ex-BioWare developers who, upon leaving the company, suddenly began to exhibit a talent for making good role playing games (Daniel Fedor's NEO Scavenger being the most prominent other example). In fact, the crowdfunded Banner Saga is more successful at offering a “BioWare experience” than anything that company has put out since Dragon Age: Origins. This game features a compelling story, well-drawn characters operating under a constant threat of perma-death, choices with a wide variety of consequences, and a surprisingly complex and novel combat system that prevents the battles from feeling like repetitive trash combat. It is also very pretty.

[...] After close inspection, I can attest that Stoic's C&C system is quite cunningly implemented. Let us start with what would normally be the worst consequence of them all: you lose a battle against a horde of merciless enemies. Your heroes all fall unconscious on the battle field, and all hope is lost. What happens now? Reload to last save? That would be the bland, safe choice, allowing you to simply redo the battle until you get it right and can reap the rewards of victory. So, no, that is not what happens. Instead, a text window pops up and tells you how you got saved. Usually, some of your nameless supporting troops rushed to your aid and hurtled themselves onto the spears of your enemies, thus paying the ultimate price in the service of a smooth gameplay experience. Rarely, one of your less important companions made a heroic sacrifice, forever removing himself from your party roster in the process. Sometimes you wake up, battered and defeated, without really knowing what happened. Much e-blood has already been spilled over this mechanic; many of the game's harshest critics absolutely abhor the fact that it is (almost) impossible to get a game over screen from a party wipe. Other, more tolerant and progressive minds have come to appreciate the advantages of this implementation.

[...] The Banner Saga has a good battle system. Before the game's release, the system was tested in a multiplayer Free-to-Play game – The Banner Saga: Factions – which was released a full year before the single player game. Being able to study their players in a competitive environment provided Stoic with ample opportunities to discover the weaknesses of their systems design; the result has been a highly polished battle system that feels well thought out and fully coherent. That is not to say that this system is uncontroversial; in fact, it is probably the most hotly debated aspect of the game.

[...] The Banner Saga is an immensely unique, and, by no coincidence, immensely good game that combines great artistic design and robust C&C mechanics with a highly entertaining and deceptively complex battle system. The Banner Saga has only a few outright flaws; the shoddy dialogues and the constant need to click-click-click through them line by line are a blemish on an otherwise engaging narrative. Moreover, the startling lack of enemy variety and the relatively dumb AI keep the battle system from realizing its potential for true tactical greatness. The game's system of choices and consequences also has far less of an impact on the story than Stoic's PR department has been trying to claim; nonetheless, it still offers an engaging and immersive range of decisions that will directly influence your battle performance and can occasionally result in major character deaths.

I suspect that The Banner Saga will always be the subject of great controversy; it has a kind of self-assured swagger, flaunting all of its little weirdnesses and weaknesses without making much of an effort to look like a typical tactical cRPG or a typical casual story game. The game features heaps upon heaps of idiosyncratic gameplay systems, like the strange combination of a broad C&C system with a fully pre-determined linear story, the fact that you will rarely if ever be able to see a "game over" screen, the "sit back and immerse yourself" approach to map travel, and a whole slew of novel and deeply unrealistic combat mechanics. You may choose to accept or reject these mechanics according to your personal preferences; all I can tell you is that all of these elements stand in the service of a fully coherent and extremely tightly designed gameplay experience that I deeply enjoyed playing through.​