Edward_R_Murrow said:
Systemwise, yes. Gamewise, I doubt it. Nostalgia would have to be hanging quite high over your head to consider the Gold Box better in the design department than the Infinity Engine games.
There was design to Baldur's Gate? And here I was thinking they'd just "ported" game rules from AD&D sourcebooks to a kludged real time system. Everything from the 6 second "turns" to the massive dependence on luck for the first 3 or so levels and the horrible system of magic are tailor made for something that is a long way from a CRPG. I have no real nostalgia for the Gold Box series. I owned none of them, and my experience with them is limited to playing them with friends on a C64. At the time, they were mindblowing. Baldur's Gate on the other hand was my first step toward realising glitz and subtance were two very different thnigs.
Not really. They, like their Infinity Engine counterparts were bested by loads of other games, namely Ultima, Wizardry,
I wouldn't say the interfaces of Ultima IV-ish or Wizardry VI-ish were streets ahead of the Gold Box series. A reasonable summation would be to say that each were taking the RPG UI forward in different ways. It would be fair to say that by the end of the Gold Box series' run, Wizardry and Ultima had stepped ahead, both with their seventh installments. It's just a shame that both titles, in 1992 are both at least as good as Baldur's Gate, if not better. I'm playing Wizardry 7 at the moment, and my only gripe with the interface is the way you have to use the journey map kit. My only gripe with Ultima 7 was the act that your backpack would re-sort itself. I have a lot more dramas with Baldur's Gate and Torment, the only Infinity Engine games I could force upon myself.
Now that's just bullshit. Both the Gold Box and the Infinity Engine were pretty much meeting the par in most areas for their times and failing in a few.
Baldur's Gate took the gameplay of an RTS, got rid of the strategic layer, made tactics irrelevant for 90% of combat, and added a bunch of superfluous bullshit, like VO, 5 CDs worth of pre-rendered backgrounds, dynamic loot piles, CG cutscenes. I just don't see how it meets anyone's standards. If I wanted RTS, Total Annihilation was a better option. If I wanted a RTS with a tactical focus, there was Starcraft. If I wanted a squad based tactical combat game, there was Jagged Alliance or even the X-Com series. If I wanted an adventure game with grindy combat and level-ups, Japan has about a thousand better options. If I wanted something that alternately failed at being serious and failed at lulz, there was Jerry Springer.
Baldur's Gate only made par in the same respect that New Kids on the Block managed to carve out a few successful singles - they both represent well marketed mediocrity that appeals to people with low standards. It made me realise that my standards were much higher, and that I shouldn't take true gems like Fallout for granted.
I guess the game didn't click with you then or you likely have never actually given them much of a chance, because this is most certainly not the case in any challenging or dangerous battle, of which there can be many. There's a lot of micro-management involved.
But the fucking micromanagement is generally you vs the interface/pathfinding. If your cockwits actually did what you either told them/scripted them to, there would be little need for micro-management. And if you think it's your mad skillz that got you through tough fights, think again. The fight against that fag at the gigantic castle pretended to be an inn is the classic example. The whole fight was pretty much decided by the result of a single roll when he cast fear against your party. There was never a sense of toughing out a heroic victory against a superior opponent, just the luck of the dice which would seemingly result in either death, or an unscathed victory. Same goes for the kobolds with a single arrow that can one-shot you or... do nothing at all to you. Micromanagement and tactics in general pale in comparison to sheer luck.
Of course that doesn't happen if you never pick up a party and just run around with a couple of guys with swords.
If there was just a single NPC that didn't shit me so much that I couldn't stand to have them in my party, maybe I'd have more than just a couple of guys with swords. Fake multiplayer for the win.
I still don't understand why people yammer on about this and blow it out of proportion when both the manual and the readme file described how to fix this by turning up the search nodes.
Hah! Of course that was my first port of call. I set it pretty fucking high, and it still couldn't manage to navigate a single character around an ally. Even on a beastly computer by today's standards, you just can't set the nodes high enough to stop your party from being fucking idiots.
Involving is an interesting choice of description. Your complaint would lead me to believe that you find in very non-interactive, because you have a certain detachment of control over your character. Funny enough this exists in pretty much any RPG with a solid basis in stats. Take Fallout for example (ignoring called shots). I tell my character to shoot, and watch him do it.
Bullshit. You could do that, but you're not going to get far until you're overpowered. Compare that with Baldur's Gate where you select an enemy and then sit back for a minute while your character auto attacks each fucking "turn", until you either win or get one-shotted and have to reload. Is there a reason to move once you've engaged an enemy in Baldur's Gate? There sure as hell is in Fallout.
Same thing with an archer in the Infinity Engine games. The only advantage Fallout may have is the instant gratification and tactile sensation of your character shooting when you press the button. Surely something petty and insignificant like that wouldn't be the reason you deem the combat terrible...
I consider Baldur's Gate/2's combat to be shithouse for the same reason I consider the tunnels filled with ants under Necropolis to be shithouse. There's no fun in going through the motions for a preordained result. The best the Infinity Engine seems to manage to "spice things up" is to throw in the occasional critter that wont' hit you 80% of the time, but when it does, it instantly kills you. Wheee.
Did we play the same games? The voice acting was very well done in all the Infinity Engine games. Though I'm going to assume it was he activation and command sounds given by the characters that irritated you. Funny enough, there was an option to turn them off in the sound options menu, so it's not really much of a flaw.
Oh, I tried very hard to silence those fucks. Didn't really work out for me. Also, I couldn't silence the scumfucks you had to talk to to advance the storyline or various quests, and there were a plethora of shitholes that would force "conversation" with you. Even trying to be fair, I can't think of a single character I'd actually want to hear from Baldur's Gate. I liked Morte in Torment, but not enough to justify dragging myself through the shitty combat just to progress through the IF component.
It's not Fallout, it's not some grim or gritty setting. They were fantasy romps to kill monsters. Does everything need to be Frank Millerized?
I'd be more inclined to say Oblivionised, where objects and buildings that have supposedly been standing for decades or centuries are curiously spotless and shiny.
What in the blue hells have you been smoking? First off, they were only a year apart, and second, you've got to be kidding.
You can judge by year alone if you want, but when one game is released in the beginning of January 1997 and the other in the end of December 1998, I'll take certain liberties and call the 23.5 month gap two years.
As for the graphics - tech wise, they're pretty comparable, but Diablo edges Baldur's Gate out in art direction. Both have their fair share of high-fantasy cliches, but Diablo oozes style and polish. Baldur's Gate wasn't exactly amateur, but there aren't too many sprites I could look at and say "that's clearly Baldur's Gate. It couldn't belong in any other game."
Actually....Baldur's Gate 1 used a lot of the same assets over and over in a lot of places. Just saying.
Yeah, it does. but the environments still look more unique than most tile based games before and after.
Uhhh....what contemporaries? Fallout was in a league of it's own so to say. Diablo was totally different. Ultima....was a corpseraped zombie. Daggerfall was very different.
That's pretty much the whole point of Baldur's Gate. It took a genre that was floundering, put a new and popular spin on it and voila! It still can't match the very few titles it had to compete with.
Character diversity....definitely in Fallout 1, not so much in the combat oriented sequel. Character development of course goes to Fallout. But then again, Fallout was one of, if not, the best. That's not saying much.
Why step back from the best? Why the fuck should it be acceptable to present something that isn't even half as accomplished as its predecessor, or many games that came before? If someone had put a first person shooter without normal/parallax mapping on the market post FEAR, it would have been crucified as "archaic". Why not the same for shit game design?
Three classes beats seven? What? And Diablo's character development was almost as bad as the Dungeons and Dragons leveling as you were gently forced into putting your points into certain places.
Diablo transcended its classes. You'd be fucking kidding yourself if you tried to say your level 10 warrior was the same as mine, and the coercion was gentle at worst. I seem to remember playing an intelligent warrior that was capable as both a mage and a fighter. In Baldur's Gate, you have what, a skill point every second level or so and the occasional spell selection. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.
Class based with possibility of variation between characters depending on race, ability, and some aspects left to choice by the player, almost exactly like the Infinity Engine. Sure, it got deeper as time went on, but that tends to happen after, you know, seven or so sequels.
Again, you had a lot more control over how your Wizardry characters developed compared to Baldur's Gate.
Wow....come on. Stop the hyperbole. That's just a lie.
Why? I seem to remember a vast array of spells, a whole bunch of skills with very distinct purposes, more profound item bonuses... I can't see how any Infinity Engine game beats it. The best the Infinity Engine offers is a broad rage of spells, but can't come close to the stat development or skills of HOMM.
While I'd have to be senile or imbecilic to deny the overabundance of combat, it wasn't that much. Try around 65-80% depending on the game (not including Torment) with the remaining gameplay devoted to NPC interaction, exploration, and Bioware's unfortunate love of stupid puzzles that you couldn't just have your mage with 18 intelligence insta-solve.
I'm not counting "exploration" since that basically amounted to mowing the fog of war looking for fights - it's essentially "downtime" or dead wood that the game would have been better off without. The NPC interaction was worse than the combat and best skipped over as quickly as possible.
Subjective and uninformed opinions passed off as fact are always great. There were plenty of well designed and challenging encounters that took strategy spread throughout the Infinity Engine games.
In four, maybe five chapters of Baldur's Gate and the first bit of Torment, I can't recall anythin I would consider tactical or strategic. Maybe once I sent two fighters with stone immunity up against a basilisk while everyone else stood back. I could go into great detail of nail biting and dramatic Wizardry 7 combats I've had in the last
hour.
Which could be easily fixed with the search nodes being turned up via the config file. Or just a little bit of extra effort. It's not like the pathfinding would trap your character in a narrow spot and force you to reload often if you had a party.....
Heh, I was about to say exactly the same thing... except ironically.
Baldurs Gate 1....yes. Any of the dungeons like the Firewine Bridge and the Ulcaster school were pretty awfully done.
Let's say hypothetically you played a game, didn't enjoy a single aspect of it - in fact, found it horribly disappointing as a release from a publisher with a reputation for quality and a couple of top notch recent releases. Where's the compulsion to play the sequel, or other spin offs with the same core gameplay? You won't see too many people rushing out to grab Dungeon Lords 2 in the hopes that it's magically leaps and bounds ahead of it's shitty predecessor.
I'm not exactly getting this one. In fact I'd say it's the opposite. Not enough mechanics were integrated to provide for further depth. Example being non-weapon proficiency, certain non-combat spells, and the like.
That's another part of it. It lacks depth, especially outside of combat. But everything that
is implemented is just chucked in there with little regard for context.
Who? There are no Bioware-alikes. Bethesda follows their own beat, Diablo clones are far more pervasive, and jRPGs just refuse to die. Not one non-Bioware RPG has embraced their ideals.
Bethesda don't follow their own beat, they just go with whatever is perceived to be popular. And right now, that's a pausable real time system not unlike KOTOR. They're also going with the same shitty polarised morality and the same focus on "cutting edge" graphics and linear plotlines.
But I'm not even talking about direct clones, like Drakensang. I'm talking about the general trend of forgoing depth and gameplay for shallow mass-market pulp-fiction bullshit, which Bioware have always had in spades.
None of which can be attributed to the Infinity Engine. Go blame Diablo and jRPGs. Or the Gold Box for spawning the idea that a game with AD&D on the box will sell despite being inferior to most of the games on the market.
Diablo admittedly deserves to cop some of the blame. But there was a time when Diablo was considered an abomination that didn't deserve the RPG moniker. And then there were a whole bunch of games that came along and poorly rehashed Diablo's combat as a frontend to crappy yet "epic" narrative, and they were praised as the pinnacle and saviour of RPGs. Dangerous words and dangerous thoughts.
Okay, what did the Infinity Engine or Bioware do to piss you off so much. Whenever it's mentioned you click into rage mode and go from incredibly well informed type of fellow to guy throwing around a ton of muck, much of which is baseless and ill-informed with some good points in between. Sure, there were a lot of problems, like the huge amount of variability in early game combat like you pointed out awhile ago, sure Bioware really screwed up by placing tons of relatively boring nonsense and saving the good stuff for later in the first BG. Sure, it wasn't Fallout. Sure, the tone of the writing was absolutely schizophrenic in many places and the writing was often...B-movie quality. But it's not that bad if only via the fact that it is a much better RPG than 95% of crap out there.
You could say the same sort of things against Oblivion. It ain't that bad when viewed as just a game. But when you look at it within context of the industry at large, read nothing but glowing reviews for something that is pretty average and the constant suggestion the more, if not all games should be striving to be more like it... well, you develop something of an aversion to it. The Infinity Engine, like Oblivion, is ultimately forgettable. However, the trends that both set and the irreparable damage they do to gaming and game design can't be denied. That's why I embark upon unholy crusades against both. You'll notice I do the very same thing for games such as Doom 3, which dealt many blows to the FPS genre.
