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Atari loses D&D License

Xor

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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Oh man, that gives me an idea. Someone needs to mod DA2 and replace all of hawke's dialog with Duke Nukem lines.
 

Spectacle

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4th ed is way better than the bullshit pile that was 3.5th. 3.0 was good when it came out but they just kept on piling on shit. 4th ed is going the same way recently btw, but they're not there yet.
 

Raghar

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4E is a shit. First it has far less in common with RPG than 3.5E, second look for example at poison.
 

l3loodAngel

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Xor said:
Oh man, that gives me an idea. Someone needs to mod DA2 and replace all of hawke's dialog with Duke Nukem lines.

Or replace DN lines with DA2 lines, just for the lulz :lol:
 

sgc_meltdown

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see that is how the DA series might have worked out great, with the development team not taking it too seriously and just making fantasy spectres killing gethspawn and perhaps punching dragons in the face because something like BG2 is pure inexplicable magic that only happens once in a lifetime baby be realistic you can't make something like that happen again

instead the most lauded character apart from the romanceables turn out to be an idiot savant dwarf who says ENCHANTMENT HAHAHAHAHA OH BOY GAMES ARE THE NEW ARTFORM INDEED LETS ALL GO TO THE RPG LOUVRE AND ADMIRE THE FRAMED TITS COVERED IN BLOOD
 

Lesifoere

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Gee, people still care about the D&D license? There hasn't really been a D&D game of any sort released for a while, has it? MMOs don't count.
 

Micmu

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I wouldn't be surprised if no one picks it up and there will be no more D&D cRPGs. Unless, of course, they make an xbox brawler with wotc intro.
 

Renegen

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Well I went and actually read the story and here are some gems:

Neverwinter has been delayed after all, due not to legal wrangling but to the publisher selling the game's developer, Cryptic Studios, to Perfect World Entertainment.
Neverwinter would let players choose from five traditional D&D character classes. Gamers could then join five-man squads composed of other online players to venture forth into the city's dungeons, completing quests and gathering items along the way.

First the studio gets sold to a chinese MMO developer and second the game looks to be exactly a Diablo 4th edition clone. Yup, better keep the license dead.
 

jagged-jimmy

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Why pay money for a licence to make a game with complicated rules? By todays standards any idiot can come up with a "modern", "streamlined" RPG system.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium

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jagged-jimmy said:
Why pay money for a licence to make a game with complicated rules? By todays standards any idiot can come up with a "modern", "streamlined" RPG system.
Companies get the D&D license for the brand, not the rules.
 

deuxhero

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Honestly, SE the best (realistic) hope for the D&D license. You could easily market a ToEE style game to the FFT fans.
 

tindrli

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can somebody explain me the difference between.... or even just explain to me why the 4th edition is shit?
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

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mondblut said:
Who cares. Not only 4e is WoW offline, but any reasonably large company having a D&D license would only keep a logo from it, replacing the rest with God of War ripoff gameplay.

That said, anything that brings closer the day RPG genre is utterly forgotten and joins wargames and point and click adventures in limbo is good news.

You know, with some decent encounter design and all the abilities from the PHB implemented, a turn-based 4E dungeon crawl could be pretty awesome.
 

kingcomrade

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The only thing I like about DnD 3.5 is a lot of the spells (and the only game most of them were useful in was ToEE). Oh, and of course Planescape. The Torment version of the setting, anyway.

Otherwise I don't really care too much about who has the license. Hopefully nobody will have it.
 

Ebonsword

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deuxhero said:
Honestly, SE the best (realistic) hope for the D&D license. You could easily market a ToEE style game to the FFT fans.

Already been tried:
danddtacticspsp.jpg



And it wasn't exactly a success.

Well, sales wise, anyway. Gameplay was actually pretty good (but WAY too easy).
 

GarfunkeL

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tindrli said:
can somebody explain me the difference between.... or even just explain to me why the 4th edition is shit?

Two reasons:

1.Mechanics - every class is now pigeonholed into a role for either tanking or damage dealing or crowd-control. Spells and special abilities are gone and each class instead has a number of "powers" that can be used either at-will, once per encounter or once a day. For example, magic missile is now a wizard's "at-will power" and fireball is a "once a day power" or something like that. Monsters are divided into minions, normals and boss ones - minions having 1 hp so that even lvl1 PCs can feel like epic heroes scything them down by the hundreds as they make their way to the boss. In essence, it's an offline MMO and blatantly copying EQ and WoW. True, it's way more accessible, easier to learn and balanced than 3.5 but...

2.Lore - they "updated" Faerun instead of bringing out a new setting, like 3.0 did and this time it was much, much worse than the "update" that happened between earlier editions. In addition, the planes in general were fucked up because they "were not fully utilized by players" and other dumbfuckery like that. You can now play as a scaly lizard or as a walking mini-mecha robot straight out of the box. Elves were divided into two - the bow-wielding forest version and the super-kawaii magical version. And so on.

I'm not an expert on 4th edition, you'll need Shemar for that but I see no reason to switch over. Not that 3.5 was perfect - or any edition for that matter - but 4th is definitely the worst one.
 

bussinrounds

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GarfunkeL said:
tindrli said:
can somebody explain me the difference between.... or even just explain to me why the 4th edition is shit?

Two reasons:

1.Mechanics - every class is now pigeonholed into a role for either tanking or damage dealing or crowd-control. Spells and special abilities are gone and each class instead has a number of "powers" that can be used either at-will, once per encounter or once a day. For example, magic missile is now a wizard's "at-will power" and fireball is a "once a day power" or something like that. Monsters are divided into minions, normals and boss ones - minions having 1 hp so that even lvl1 PCs can feel like epic heroes scything them down by the hundreds as they make their way to the boss. In essence, it's an offline MMO and blatantly copying EQ and WoW. True, it's way more accessible, easier to learn and balanced than 3.5 but...

2.Lore - they "updated" Faerun instead of bringing out a new setting, like 3.0 did and this time it was much, much worse than the "update" that happened between earlier editions. In addition, the planes in general were fucked up because they "were not fully utilized by players" and other dumbfuckery like that. You can now play as a scaly lizard or as a walking mini-mecha robot straight out of the box. Elves were divided into two - the bow-wielding forest version and the super-kawaii magical version. And so on.

I'm not an expert on 4th edition, you'll need Shemar for that but I see no reason to switch over. Not that 3.5 was perfect - or any edition for that matter - but 4th is definitely the worst one.
Wow. I haven't played p&p d&d since the 80's, but that sounds like a true disgrace and pure shit.
 

octavius

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bussinrounds said:
GarfunkeL said:
tindrli said:
can somebody explain me the difference between.... or even just explain to me why the 4th edition is shit?

Two reasons:

1.Mechanics - every class is now pigeonholed into a role for either tanking or damage dealing or crowd-control. Spells and special abilities are gone and each class instead has a number of "powers" that can be used either at-will, once per encounter or once a day. For example, magic missile is now a wizard's "at-will power" and fireball is a "once a day power" or something like that. Monsters are divided into minions, normals and boss ones - minions having 1 hp so that even lvl1 PCs can feel like epic heroes scything them down by the hundreds as they make their way to the boss. In essence, it's an offline MMO and blatantly copying EQ and WoW. True, it's way more accessible, easier to learn and balanced than 3.5 but...

2.Lore - they "updated" Faerun instead of bringing out a new setting, like 3.0 did and this time it was much, much worse than the "update" that happened between earlier editions. In addition, the planes in general were fucked up because they "were not fully utilized by players" and other dumbfuckery like that. You can now play as a scaly lizard or as a walking mini-mecha robot straight out of the box. Elves were divided into two - the bow-wielding forest version and the super-kawaii magical version. And so on.

I'm not an expert on 4th edition, you'll need Shemar for that but I see no reason to switch over. Not that 3.5 was perfect - or any edition for that matter - but 4th is definitely the worst one.
Wow. I haven't played p&p d&d since the 80's, but that sounds like a true disgrace and pure shit.

It's like they have removed or toned down everything that made AD&D unique and turned it into yet another generic system.
 

waywardOne

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octavius said:
It's like they have removed or toned down everything that made AD&D unique and turned it into yet another generic system.
Welcome to 2nd edition.
 

Disconnected

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IMO they should give it to the guy who made Knights of The Chalice. Or maybe to Cyanide, if they can force them to outsource the GUI & netcode stuff to someone else.

Excidium said:
Companies get the D&D license for the brand, not the rules.

Sadly. No incarnation of D&D has been as bad as the best non-licences CRPG system.

tindrli said:
can somebody explain me the difference between.... or even just explain to me why the 4th edition is shit?

There's some cosmetic differences that you may or may not agree with (I don't), but rules-wise, the difference is that D&D is no longer a roll-playing clusterfuck. The various versions of the rules have always been oriented towards crawling & tabletop skirmishes. They just never worked very well. Now they do.

The role play oriented part of them has suffered a bit from the redesign, but unlike the combat mechanics, the role play mechanics are easy to work around or expand on as you need.

Basically, if you think 4ed is worse than the previous ones, D&D was never the right kind of system for you. Try GURPS maybe.

octavius said:
It's like they have removed or toned down everything that made AD&D unique and turned it into yet another generic system.

What things were those?
 

catfood

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tindrli said:
can somebody explain me the difference between.... or even just explain to me why the 4th edition is shit?

A lot of people would tell you that it's WOW on paper. A lot of people who say that haven't even read the PHB, let alone played a single session of 4e. It has a LOT more in common with Magic: The Gathering now.

For instance, you know that MTG cards have certain keywords like "haste, tramble, fly, unsummon" etc. etc. right? Well the powers that characters get read exactly like an MTG card, only they are "slide, knock prone, use healing surge, daze, slow" etc. So for instance each power reads like "1W dmg + mod and you knock the targe prone" or "2W dmg + mod and the target is dazed until the end of your next turn". Now this wouldn't be too bad if the class archetypes would have had their own flavour just like colours in MTG do, however ever class can get powers with all of the available effects. This means that each class pretty much plays exactly the same as the other one. Which means that multiclassing, which lets be honest was necessity for most in 3.5, now loses all of its perks. There is no reason to take levels of another class when you know that you would not get anything different than what you get if you stay straight.

Spellcasters are really lame now that other characters get everything that they can do. So magic doesen't feel that "magical" anymore. It's a real shame. What they should have done is give fighters a mechanic similar to the one they have now, but let the spell slingers have their own unique mechanics and let them feel like they are actually wielding magic powers. They REALLY dropped the ball with this one.

Leveling up is extremely linear. Every class receives levels up the same way now. At 2nd level everyone gets to pick a feat, at 3rd everyone gets a new power and so on. In the end everyone is about the same. Saving throws are defences and they increase by 1/2 your level for every class, which is again very lame. I do like the fact that your AC increases as you level because it denotes not damage reduction but damage avoidance and it makes sense that you get better at dodging as you grow in experience.

Skills are pretty fucked up. They have reduced the number of skills to 14 from, was it 30 in 3,5??, and since a character can know about 4, it means that 3 or 4 adventurers can have them all covered. They condensed a lot of skills, some with good results some with bad. For instance there's just one "stealth" skill now but you pretty much needed both "hide in shadows" and "move silently" if you wanted to sneak anyway. But there is bullshit as well, such as "Thievery" which covers "open locks", "pickpocket", "disable device" etc. They too increase 1/2 your level so you can end up at lvl 30 with a barbarian with 15 in "arcana". Yeah..

Speaking of skills, there is a new bullshit mechanic called "skill challenges". Basically what it's a sort of out-of-the-game encounter where the DM tells you which skills you need to use to pass a certain obstacle like convincing someone to help you, or escaping from your enemies, and you need a certain number of successes until you fail. It's basically a way of handing out XP for roleplaying without having the players to think, just roll the dice. Now I'm not saying it can't be fun (the one where we were chased by guards through town was cool because if we failed we would have had to fight them and they were pretty tough so it was pretty exciting) but for the most part they are really shitty. DON'T use them if you plan on playing 4e.

The argument against the new races is completely retarded since all of the old races are there plus new ones, so if you're a "purist" just torrent the fucking character generator with its latest update and there you go. I think people who get butthurt about this issue (or should I say NON-issue) are those who can't sleep at night knowing that someone somewhere is playing the game other than how the D&D god intended.

Not sure about the settings, but I'm sure there's a workaround for them.

I don't HATE the game, in fact I play it and we're having fun since D&D is first and foremost a social activity, and if you're having fun in general with a people you play with then the game does it's job of providing fun. It's also easy to learn and run and that's always a plus in my book. Ultimately my biggest complaint about it is the samey-ness of the classes. They listened to fan's complaints about class balance so now each one is TOO balanced. It takes a chink of fun out of the game especially after playing it for a while.
 

Grunker

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LOL @ anyone who defends AD&D and rages against 4th ed. I don't particularly like 4th ed., but at least it doesn't contain an almost auto-level-up system with next to no choice or modularity.

2nd ed. was good because it was what we had back then, but character customization is about choice; about customizing your character in different ways. For this purpose, 4th ed. beats AD&D with ease.

Pathfinder is easily the best D&D-system released, followed by 3.5 ed. But 1st and 2nd ed., fun though they were and despite the fact that I love to play them out of nostalgia, are not near as well-designed.
 

octavius

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Grunker said:
LOL @ anyone who defends AD&D and rages against 4th ed. I don't particularly like 4th ed., but at least it doesn't contain an almost auto-level-up system with next to no choice or modularity.

2nd ed. was good because it was what we had back then, but character customization is about choice; about customizing your character in different ways. For this purpose, 4th ed. beats AD&D with ease.

I dunno. For me AD&D, at least the computer version, is about a party of highly different characters with specific roles combining their strengths to overcome their problems.
While the later editions make for more customization of the individual characters it seems they tend to end up more generic and less specialized then the characters of earlier versions.
I actually like the restrictions and unique abilitites of the classes in earlier versions. For me that was what made it AD&D and not som generic RPG.
But then my experience is mainly with the computer version, not so much the PnP version.
 

Grunker

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octavius said:
Grunker said:
LOL @ anyone who defends AD&D and rages against 4th ed. I don't particularly like 4th ed., but at least it doesn't contain an almost auto-level-up system with next to no choice or modularity.

2nd ed. was good because it was what we had back then, but character customization is about choice; about customizing your character in different ways. For this purpose, 4th ed. beats AD&D with ease.

I dunno. For me AD&D, at least the computer version, is about a party of highly different characters with specific roles combining their strengths to overcome their problems.
While the later editions make for more customization of the individual characters it seems they tend to end up more generic and less specialized then the characters of earlier versions.
I actually like the restrictions and unique abilitites of the classes in earlier versions. For me that was what made it AD&D and not som generic RPG.

Wat

How is limiting each class to being standard (that is, a fighter is a fighter and a mage is a mage) more fun? If it's just different tactical roles you want there's no need to play an RPG - different units with different abilities is the core of most strategy games.

Character customization is fun, I can't see why you'd want less of it on purpose.
 

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