Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Community The Age of Incline: RPG Codex's 2012-2016 GOTY Results

Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
4,189
RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In
I've never played this game, the Witcher 3, is it any good?

Combat is pretty popamole and polarizing. I've enjoyed it while many others didn't. Writing on the other hand is stellar and perhaps the best ever, especially the first expansion.
 

Azarkon

Arcane
Joined
Oct 7, 2005
Messages
2,989
Not surprised the Witcher 3 won.

It touched the Codex in places where the Codex has not been touched ... in a long time.

Since I never played it, and probably never will (not much of a fan of action cRPG and the setting/art direction looks boooring), I'm curious on how the Codex longed to be touched by an action cRPG? Please explain.

Storyfags
 
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
4,189
RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In
I never understood why people like that hot garbage completely based on inside jokes and whacky references.

i will quote Richard Cobbett

Originally, The Nameless Mod was as goofy as it sounded - a few inside jokes, being put together to entertain the community. Except it grew. And grew. And grew. And finally, it exploded . The final mod took 7 years to create, with two full-length campaigns, five endings, over 14 hours of voice acting, side-missions, tons of secrets, new weapons, and much, much more, to the point that calling it a fan project honestly doesn't do it justice. It's a whole new Deus Ex game, period... only with more jokes, fourth-wall breaking bits and vast amounts of cheery copyright infringement as far as the eye can see.

Just try it. It is very good.

Thanks for the recommendation. I always dismissed it as being "just a silly shit by some forumfags" but now I know I'll try it someday.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Was hoping the general butthurt were by the 800 pages by now, really disappointed. You are declining codex. Now reading the drama between toro, Lurker King and Goral now that is some quality fun. :lol: Makes me remember the old days where skyway, kingkomrade, Drog and Cleve posted more.
 

l3loodAngel

Proud INTJ
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Nov 19, 2010
Messages
1,452
Tags: GOTY 2016; RPG Codex; RPG Codex Awards
Has the "Age of Incline" truly arrived?

In the form of Geralt's cock it seems. It's a retarded question seeing AAA popamole in the 1st place. :hero:
He does not even have a Hyper Weapon.

npUGumo.jpg

Just proves my point :D . Popamole has no cock.
 

laclongquan

Arcane
Joined
Jan 10, 2007
Messages
1,870,144
Location
Searching for my kidnapped sister

Sratopotator

Savant
Joined
Sep 21, 2016
Messages
149
Tags: GOTY 2016; RPG Codex; RPG Codex Awards
Has the "Age of Incline" truly arrived?

In the form of Geralt's cock it seems. It's a retarded question seeing AAA popamole in the 1st place. :hero:
He does not even have a Hyper Weapon.

npUGumo.jpg

Just proves my point :D . Pole has no cock.
Fix for lulz~

OMG, thats so funny, it's like the funniest thing i've read on the webz eva. Like, you know i get it Poles lack cocks, oh my god. It's so true, every Polish mother says to her kid watch out for people with cocks

To balance this noble intelectual discourse, i would add that i'm Polish and I rated Witcher meh. I gave a 3 in the poll, i'm thinking now that a 2 would be better (5 point scale, eh?).
I'm a storyfag, i even love Alpha Protocol, so in theory i should like Witcher3 too. But guess what, apart from few nice atmospheric quests, the game was a slog. The storyfaggy elements were covered in ass-juice way too much for my taste.
I think that the only way to stay away from popamole stuff is to NEVER UPGRADE THE GPU. I'm using geforce 660, so the gfx were serviceable, not too pretty. So my theory is that pretty graphics cloud the minds of fellow grognards, a bit like a 'shitty game stockholm syndrome'.
So boys and girls, stay away from these wicked graphical processors, they are the work of a devil. Devil, jews, mindless drones, jews, big pharma, jaws, prison-industrial-videogame complex. You get the point, stay away!
 

aleam iacis

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
115
Codex USB, 2014 BattleTech
It looks like people who rated Void Pyramid enjoyed it, 15 over 16 players gave it at least 3.
Personally I think it's very cool to have some indie making small free games coming with an unusual RPG (definitely not for everyone's taste) of its own instead of making another roguelike or hack&slash.
The game is compact but interesting in its approach and full of content, more or less what I'm expecting from a free game. :salute:

Just glanced at it on steam, it looks rather good! Actually reminds me of those wacky old SNES RPGs but you can design your own character and there don't appear to be followers/NPCs.
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

Self-Ejected
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Jan 21, 2015
Messages
1,865,419
If AoD outright asked you to rise the skill the moment you fail it eg. "You've failed this persuasion check. Do you want to spend X points to raise your skill enough to pass it? Y/N?" the game wouldn't become more shallow. It would just remove some tedious reloading.

Some of the decisions involving skill checks requires thinking from the players. So it’s not binary as you put it. Besides, many fail-and-go scenarios are also cool. So this “you fail, you die” criticism doesn’t hold in all cases. I think that this “You should some points here” would be cool, but it would be even better after a complete overall of the SP reward system. Otherwise, players will just spend all their points in one skill. I have the suspicion if the game would warn you that you can “deposit” your SPs for a rainy day, the hoarding of SPs would feel better.

Fallout has tons of things that reward metagaming, but if you fail every skill check you can still beat the game. i.e, the ol' "FUCKING CASUALS" debate. VD made a Fallout game for grognards, not really anything wrong with that per se. We just learned that the "casuals" crowd includes lots of people who like to pretend they are hardcore.

There are two differences. First, FOs are combat centric games and skill checks are fluffy for the most part. They add flavor, but you mostly just explore and kill things. In AoD skill/stat checks are taken seriously, as they should. Second, AoD provides more choices than FO -> more choices represent more chances of failure -> more chances of failure represents negativity bias. This negativity is a fair price to pay for many different and believable scenarios.

No they don't have this problem, because in most of them skill-checks are complimentary to the combat-centered gameplay, which makes them manageable. You may miss on some optional reward or fail some quest but it's hardly a reason to reload just to get some better results. In AoD gameplay for non-combat centric characters skill-checks are the core gameplay which makes hoarding and save-scumming a bit of an issue.

Yes, but this mean that the skill/stat checks are very few in number and not taken seriously, which means that the character building is fluffy to a certain point. I think you should acknowledge either that stats and skills determine the choices you can make, or they don’t. If they don’t, make a linear game with pure combat, or make an action game and label it as a cRPG.

What does me being able to "predict skill checks" have to do with anything? Just FYI I didn't have that much of a problem with AoD after I understood that diplomat=persuasion+streetwise and loremaster is diplomat+lore+crafting. I just didn't find it to be interesting. Can we now go back to the original point?

What is interesting is the ton of choices these skill checks provide, besides the boring usual quest design of “kill things for me” and “deliver this”. You have to put this things in consideration when you make this criticisms.

So you went with a combat-oriented character for your first playthrough, liked the combat (I assume) and the ability to avoid it occasionally, and therefore liked the game. No surprises here.

I had a different experience. I'm a sucker for non-combat approaches, so I was overhyped for the fully non-combat playthrough. And ended up utterly underwhelmed and with no desire to come back to the game. Sue me.

But that is a very reductive and simplistic criticism, doesn’t it? In my “combat oriented” playtrough as you called, I did a bunch of crazy things. I invaded Antida’s palace, steal a jewel, got undercover, threat people, hide in the shadows, cut people’s throats, visit an ancient tower, destroyed a robot, etc. In my non-combat playtrough, I manipulated Teron behind the curtains, coned a woman to take her jewels, fooled a religious figure, visited an ancient temple, fixed a machine, opened a portal to another dimension, etc, etc. So I don’t know what kind of your non-combat playtrough was, but this series of events is more richer and interesting from a quest design point of view than most cRPGs offers. And that is without mentioned that the other playtroughs were different too.

In “Quest for Glory” you have death scenarios, but you are always given enough clues in advance to avoid them if you don't act dumb. You have vastly different playstyles for the three (four) main classes, but you can also hybridize a bit with auxiliary skills.

You have this in AoD. That’s what I have being trying to tell, but you are just ignoring the information.

I remember that in W7. Time limits (or turn count limits) are an annoying mechanic. Pointless realism. I think it's fine to let you wander around until they feel like doing the main quest (or choosing between alternate mainline quests) to advance the plot. That's player agency / freedom.

Depends how you do it. This doesn’t fit in a sandbox type of game with hundreds of quests, but can be implemented in other games. The thing is, is an important mechanic, so the whole game must be designed taking this in consideration.
 
Last edited:

toro

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 14, 2009
Messages
14,031
If AoD outright asked you to rise the skill the moment you fail it eg. "You've failed this persuasion check. Do you want to spend X points to raise your skill enough to pass it? Y/N?" the game wouldn't become more shallow. It would just remove some tedious reloading.

Play AoD!

Fallout has tons of things that reward metagaming, but if you fail every skill check you can still beat the game. i.e, the ol' "FUCKING CASUALS" debate. VD made a Fallout game for grognards, not really anything wrong with that per se. We just learned that the "casuals" crowd includes lots of people who like to pretend they are hardcore.

Play AoD!

No they don't have this problem, because in most of them skill-checks are complimentary to the combat-centered gameplay, which makes them manageable. You may miss on some optional reward or fail some quest but it's hardly a reason to reload just to get some better results. In AoD gameplay for non-combat centric characters skill-checks are the core gameplay which makes hoarding and save-scumming a bit of an issue.

You again? Play AoD!

What does me being able to "predict skill checks" have to do with anything? Just FYI I didn't have that much of a problem with AoD after I understood that diplomat=persuasion+streetwise and loremaster is diplomat+lore+crafting. I just didn't find it to be interesting. Can we now go back to the original point?

Still here? Play AoD!

So you went with a combat-oriented character for your first playthrough, liked the combat (I assume) and the ability to avoid it occasionally, and therefore liked the game. No surprises here.

Play AoD!

In “Quest for Glory” you have death scenarios, but you are always given enough clues in advance to avoid them if you don't act dumb. You have vastly different playstyles for the three (four) main classes, but you can also hybridize a bit with auxiliary skills.

Wait for it ... play AoD!

I remember that in W7. Time limits (or turn count limits) are an annoying mechanic. Pointless realism. I think it's fine to let you wander around until they feel like doing the main quest (or choosing between alternate mainline quests) to advance the plot. That's player agency / freedom.

Play AoD!

Fxed.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
What is interesting is the ton of choices these skill checks provide, besides the boring usual quest design of “kill things for me” and “deliver this”. You have to put this things in consideration when you make this criticisms.
I wouldn't call a "click a dialog option" design much more exciting than those two.
But that is a very reductive and simplistic criticism, doesn’t it? In my “combat oriented” playtrough as you called, I did a bunch of crazy things. I invaded Antida’s palace, steal a jewel, got undercover, threat people, hide in the shadows, cut people’s throats, visit an ancient tower, destroyed a robot, etc. In my non-combat playtrough, I manipulated Teron behind the curtains, coned a woman to take her jewels, fooled a religious figure, visited an ancient temple, fixed a machine, opened a portal to another dimension, etc, etc. So I don’t know what kind of your non-combat playtrough was, but this series of events is more richer and interesting from a quest design point of view than most cRPGs offers. And that is without mentioned that the other playtroughs were different too.
But it's all about story, not gameplay. From a mechnical point of view all these exciting things boiled down to choosing one dialog line over another. That's what I found underwhelming.
I'm not contesting that AoD has interesting story and setting, but I don't play games for stories. And mechanical elements in a non-combat playthrough are severely lacking.

But that wasn't even the point of my criticism. The point was that a game, built around replayability, should make sure that first playthroughs are exciting enough to hook the player, and the non-combat ones in AoD certainly aren't. So I don't know, maybe it would be better for AoD to go the ToME way and have only combat backgrounds available initially, with non-combat ones unlocked in the course of the game for further playthroughs. Would add additional incentive for replays also.
You have this in AoD. That’s what I have being trying to tell, but you are just ignoring the information.
Not really, no. The amount of no-turning-back scenarios in AoD is much larger. And there are essentially only two playstyles - fighter and talker (because all non-combat classes are mechanically identical), the former being mechanically much richer and more exciting than the latter.
The approach to hybridisation is also completely opposite: in QfG having non-class skills makes your life easier (because you get all the class-specific ones anyway), while in AoD it's impossible to pull off without at least some knowledge of the game.
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

Self-Ejected
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Jan 21, 2015
Messages
1,865,419
But it's all about story, not gameplay. From a mechnical point of view all these exciting things boiled down to choosing one dialog line over another. That's what I found underwhelming.

By that definition, the only gameplay we have in cRPGs is combat. To interact with the environment by clicking this is not gameplay, 99% of what happens in “Darklands” is not gameplay, “King of the Dragon Pass” doesn’t have any gameplay. That’s and arbitrary and simplistic definition of gameplay.

The point was that a game, built around replayability, should make sure that first playthroughs are exciting enough to hook the player, and the non-combat ones in AoD certainly aren't.

It's not excting enough because you are being purposely obtuse and ignoring the examples I'm presenting. You can do a billion things and this is not good gameplay, but somehow a shallow, poorly writen and superficial game such as Shadowrun has good gameplay? The exploration is poor, the combat is poor, the itemization is poor, everything is poor, but you give it a 5. Go figure. The wonders of rationalization.

Not really, no. The amount of no-turning-back scenarios in AoD is much larger.

You obviously don't know the game you are trying to criticize. The main quests provide you with tons of opportunities, but you are just dissmissing the whole thing because you don't care. At least posters like Toro don't pretend to have any arguments and are openly irrational. They don't make us lose our time and don't pretend to have a interest in a meaningful discussion.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
4,189
RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In
Some of the decisions involving skill checks requires thinking from the players. So it’s not binary as you put it. Besides, many fail-and-go scenarios are also cool. So this “you fail, you die” criticism doesn’t hold in all cases. I think that this “You should some points here” would be cool, but it would be even better after a complete overall of the SP reward system. Otherwise, players will just spend all their points in one skill. I have the suspicion if the game would warn you that you can “deposit” your SPs for a rainy day, the hoarding of SPs would feel better.

Even if it's not competely binary it's still much more limited than combat scenarios, which I hope makes you see while re-loading combat bothers people much less.

Yes, but this mean that the skill/stat checks are very few in number and not taken seriously, which means that the character building is fluffy to a certain point. I think you should acknowledge either that stats and skills determine the choices you can make, or they don’t. If they don’t, make a linear game with pure combat, or make an action game and label it as a cRPG.

In most RPGs stats determine what your character can do or not, but most of them just don't rely only on skill checks since there's combat involved. If you fuck up negotiations in Fallout, Bloodlines or Arcanum you can always rely on combat which makes hoarding-points less of an issue. Diplomat characters in AoD are pretty much always fucked in combat, so save-scumming+hoarding is almost always the most beneficial strategy and there's little reason to ever try anything else. Except for some sort of self-impossed challenge of course. In most other RPGs hoarding is limited by making you weaker during combat encounters.

What is interesting is the ton of choices these skill checks provide, besides the boring usual quest design of “kill things for me” and “deliver this”. You have to put this things in consideration when you make this criticisms.

I wasn't criticizing the options, I was criticizing the notion that "predicting skill checks" is somehow a core gameplay of most RPGs. Also most quests in AoD as a diplomat are "go there and pass on of a few skill-check", which is also not that interesting. I've enjoyed Legionnaire's and Assassin's gameplay much more enjoyable because it's not as simple.
 
Last edited:

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
To interact with the environment by clicking this is not gameplay
It is because the environment doesn't make all you options immediately apparent. You still need some lateral thinking to figure out what they are and what skill/item you need to activate them.

You know, I just realized that AoD's non-combat gameplay could be easily saved without radically changing the structure of the game: just make it parser-based. Have the player type the options himself instead of choosing them from a list. They'd have killed two birds with one stone this way: the non-combat gameplay would become much more involved and cerebral, and the players would be far more likely to roll with non-ideal outcomes (because they wouldn't have been shown that there were other options). At least I know I would love a game like that.
 

gaussgunner

Arcane
Joined
Jul 22, 2015
Messages
6,151
Location
ХУДШИЕ США
Wait, where is Roxor from? I thought he was one of those Eastern European CDPR lovers.

Nah, I looked. His tastes lean toward AoD. TW3 only merits 3 stars from him. What's surprising is that he gave Eternity a 2, not 1. He doesn't hate EVERYTHING about it. :lol:

I'm doing some fanboy cluster analysis on the raw data... will post if I discover something I didn't already know.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom