Roguey said:
DraQ said:
Edwin said:
Divinity Emo Draconis(or what):I dunno,killed a few chickens,found a big village(the 2.) and just got bored
The part before you reach Talana is the undisputed lowest point of the game.
The flying fortresses and any dungeon with jumping puzzles are worse. The former's pure timesink padding, the latter's just shit.
Except the former happens before the game manages to establish any atmosphere and feel. It's just "hurr-durr kill derpy goblins" which is perfectly legitimate reason to shelf the game if you expect there won't be much more to it.
Fortresses are at least located far enough for the atmosphere to solidify, have certain distinct if surreal art style and atmosphere even if the gameplay is lacking making them fairly palatable.
Sceptic said:
Infinitron said:
MMXI is of course correct and the rationalizations of the morons retroactively hating on Baldur's Gate because they hate modern-day Bioware are pathetic
Dude... some of us played BG1 back in '98. Back when we thought it was internally developed by Interplay and the first time we saw the Bioware logo we went "who?"
This.
BG was just as uninspired in 1997 as it is now.
It's better than oblivion, but not by all that much.
Infinitron said:
The necessity for full party control adds exponentially more challenge
Especially when party members left to their own devices for but a second immediately engage in derpiest suicide attempts possible.
The only good attempt at RTWP I've ever seen was Homeworld.
BG was pathetic.
So was PST, but it was at least salvaged by kickass story, atmosphere and characters.
MMXI said:
And that's exactly why I made the comparison. Why focus so much on the main quest? The main quest in a TES game is about a 5th of the game's content and DraQ loves that series (well, Morrowind at least).
Except I hate oblivious with the rage of a thousand suns.
Apart from other things I hate it for being fucking linear.
It's actually nearly the same (~10%) in Baldur's Gate if you include the expansion pack areas. When you sit back in your chair while the credits roll up the screen, do you only consider the exact steps required to get you there, even when those steps are such a small portion of the product? With Ultima IV you have to go to all the dungeons and get all the stones. You have to visit all three altar rooms. You have to get the bell, book and the candle. Yes, you can do them in any order, and that's one of the reasons why the game is so great, but it changes absolutely nothing in terms of the gameplay or the story. Do you still remember which order you collected those items in? I don't, and I last played the game a couple of years back. Do I still remember the way in which I whipped around the Sword Coast when I last played Baldur's Gate, knowing full well that 90% of those areas have nothing to do with the main quest? Yeah, I actually do, especially as those optional areas provided a ton of high quality loot that made a huge difference to my party's combat prowess, the only thing to actually give a fuck about in D&D games (and most RPGs for that matter).
If the game is a loose collection of linear quests, it's still linear.
There is still no room to do stuff differently and the best thing you could count on in BG was usually a biowarean moral non-choice.
To make your game nonlinear you need to introduce branching, introduce substantial freedom regarding the way player's goals are achieved, or way for events to affect each other.
If your game consists just of isolated bits of linear content then it doesn't matter how many bits there are or how big the world is - the game is still linear, because it would lose nothing if those bits of content were linearised by merging into single predetermined sequence. If those bits of content, however, affected each other fair bit of the game would be destroyed by linearisation.
Aand, to make things worse, BG doesn't even have proper exploration, because exploring needs no involvement on part of the player, you just wipe the blackness off, monotonously waving your cursor so it passes over every pixel of the map, to not miss any cleverly hidden item.
Morrowind is, at the very least, a successful exploration sim.
Do you even need to get the water chip in Fallout to complete the game? If not, that entire arc taking you to the majority of the zones in the game is completely optional and thus has no impact at all on the game's (non)linearity (according to you and DraQ, apparently).
Except skipping it would require meta-knowledge, so it has no impact on normal gameplay.
Plus, side content has impact on non-linearity - when it's nonlinear.
The bit with underage Umberlee cleric and follow-up alone weren't bad for instance, too bad they were an exception rather than rule.
Well that's a load of crap. If the game is more than one giant mandatory linear quest then you do start to have freedom. And why does the fact that you have to ride rails from time to time automatically make something linear? In fact, I can't think of many cRPGs in which you don't have to ride a rail at least once during the game. What matters is how big that part is in relation to the whole game. How often do you find yourself in a position in which you can only do one thing. Because I can tell you that for the vast majority of Baldur's Gate you do have the freedom to do other things. In fact, the only times you're put on a rail is the chapter endings (Nashkel Mines, Cloakwood etc.) and the final section of the game (the return to Candlekeep to the end game) that you seem to prefer over the rest.
So it's like Doom, the nonlinear shooter - it has secrets and stuff, you can play it differently by refusing to use certain weapons, it even has secret levels and the only times it puts you on a rail is
chapter level endings.
? IMO, not really.
