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Build-based divergence in playthrough experience

Arryosha

Learned
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Dec 16, 2019
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138
I am interested in what rpgs you think have the greatest divergence in how you experience a playthrough depending on how you build your character/party. All rpgs by their nature have some divergence, but some have much more than others.

I would construe "build" broadly enough to include properties of your character/party like faction membership. It's harder for me to say what I mean by "divergence in playthrough experience," but I am hoping the idea is intuitive enough. In simplest terms, it is what would give you a reason to replay the game with a different build.

I enjoy rpgs as experiments where I get to make predictions, tweak a character/party, see how it works in the game, and then try again with what I learned. It is for this reason that what I am looking for is narrower than "replayability," since lots of things can give you a reason to replay an rpg besides the reward of trying a new build. I would not consider different endings, for example, to be part of what I am looking for if getting the endings depended in no way on your build.

Some games that seem to have great divergence are Bloodlines, Arcanum, the Fallout games, and the early Elder Scrolls games. I've also noticed that any game with a good magic system tends to have it.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
 

Joggerino

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Maybe Disco Elysium? A lot of the game is you interacting with your skills so it may be pretty divergent.
 

Tigranes

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Disco cannot count - it doesn't have that much divergence in how your game plays differently even at a story level.

I gather that what OP means is that the actual nitty gritty of, say, setting up your party and defeating your enemy plays out quite differently based on your builds, rather than a game where you can choose between 8 different skills but whatever you do you're still setting up the same formation and skewering goblins at the chokepoint.

And I think this is a big part of what makes the 'Golden Era' D&D RPGs so good to return to, despite their flaws - there's quite a lot of variability at the combat level and your parties can fare quite differently. Kingmaker too of course. POE/2 system does allow you to create wildly different party / build sets that play differently, too, though perhaps the difference is that this shows up only when you really get into theorycrafting in their case.

AOD/Underrail are obvious high rankers here, and we can see it by how relatively innocuous enemies can suddenly become incredibly dangerous depending on your build, and vice versa.
 

Joggerino

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OP isn't talking about combat but about "playthrough experience". The story in Disco does stay absolutely the same but your experience would change with a different skill build.
 

Tigranes

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OP doesn't rule out combat anywhere, and seems to include that in the question. Certainly we can and should talk about the broader playthrough experience, and AOD for example would still come out near the top.

I don't think Disco's experience changes enough with different skills. Yes, you can succeed or fail certain skill checks and get different dialogue, but most of the changes tend to be contained within a fairly narrow band of possibilities - e.g. you'll embarrass yourself in front of fat boy and have a different experience, but the larger order of events remains fairly similar, and you can do a bit better or worse in the DRAMATIC CLIMAX but there's also a fairly clear constraint on what you can't do to change the situation. Alpha Protocol is an example of a dialogue / choice heavy game where you really do see that transforming your playthrough.
 

V_K

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Quest for Glory series and follow-ups (Heroine's Quest, Quest for Infamy) - all four classes have their own puzzle solutions and unique content, and you can go cross-class a bit by choosing additional skills at creation. The only downside is probably that character development beyond those initial choices isn't that impactful. I would also put West of Loathing in the same category, even though there's no direct connections, since it's rather puzzle-heavy - and in WoL development has more weight in some ways (e.g. becoming a necromancer).
Dark Disciples 1&2 are criminally underrated freeware RPGs that adapt this approach to a more traditional top-down RPG formula.
Dragon Wars is a party-based version of this, with many solutions to encounters depending on which skills your party has, and also set up as a sort of puzzles, because you don't get a prompt to use a given skill but have to figure out what would work on your own. I guess the original Wasteland should qualify too, but I never played it.
Similarly, all of the better immersive sims - Arx, Deus Ex, Prey - require (or at least allow) you to get creative with how you approach enemies and obstacles depending on what you skills/augmentations allow.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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In Disco Elysium, the effect of different "builds", whether skills or thoughts or other choices such as political ideology, consists largely of changing which flavor text you receive. Actual substantive impact on gameplay is minimal, and the opening post indicated an interest in gameplay, not just meaningless fluff such as flavor text or ending slides.

Suggestions made in previous posts have focused on "choice & consequences", where the player can choose different paths through dialogue, influenced by skill selection and other aspects of the character's "build". However, there are also a number of combat-focused CRPGs, in which the bulk of the gameplay differs greatly depending on the player-character's combat abilities. For example, Dragon's Dogma has three basic "vocations" (i.e. classes), three advanced vocations, and three hybrid vocations, with replayability due to the combat gameplay varying greatly across these classes, offering the player a substantially new experience for at least three playthroughs. Similar are the Demon's/Dark Souls games, Salt & Sanctuary, etc.
 

laclongquan

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Silent Storm and SS Sentinels: Pistol users are mostly possible in lesser difficulty. In higher difficulty, specifically bigger HP, pistols cant kill fast enough so the gunslinger experience is lost. YOu can raise difficulty to only a point (around 2.xx level) until you have to raise enemies HP too (for 2.5 and higher diff).

UFO Aftershock: again, at higher difficulty, or higher level enemies with bigger HP, pistols become much less useful because it cant kill fast enough. Even for specialist build (dual wield) and full modded SMG, it's still cant kill fast enough. Unlike shotguns with their effect of stunning targets lightly in crits.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
I am interested in what rpgs you think have the greatest divergence in how you experience a playthrough depending on how you build your character/party. All rpgs by their nature have some divergence, but some have much more than others.

I would construe "build" broadly enough to include properties of your character/party like faction membership. It's harder for me to say what I mean by "divergence in playthrough experience," but I am hoping the idea is intuitive enough. In simplest terms, it is what would give you a reason to replay the game with a different build.

I enjoy rpgs as experiments where I get to make predictions, tweak a character/party, see how it works in the game, and then try again with what I learned. It is for this reason that what I am looking for is narrower than "replayability," since lots of things can give you a reason to replay an rpg besides the reward of trying a new build. I would not consider different endings, for example, to be part of what I am looking for if getting the endings depended in no way on your build.

Some games that seem to have great divergence are Bloodlines, Arcanum, the Fallout games, and the early Elder Scrolls games. I've also noticed that any game with a good magic system tends to have it.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
If you add self-imposed limitations to the concept of 'build', then the Deus Ex games do quite well in this regard. Even the new ones can be played melee-only, for example. And of course there's the alternative means of progressing if you are unable to hack or missing a key. The first one can even be completed without the use of any item that goes into the inventory through clever use of environmental items like boxes and TNT crates.

The much-maligned Deus Ex: Invisible War actually did this aspect quite well by handing the player 3 augmentation canisters that could be used in any slot, including maxing out a single augmentation at level 3 from the start of the game. Finishing the game in under an hour with a maxed run speed aug is a very different second play-through. But less drastically different approaches are also supported.
 
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Arryosha

Learned
Joined
Dec 16, 2019
Messages
138
Actual substantive impact on gameplay is minimal, and the opening post indicated an interest in gameplay, not just meaningless fluff such as flavor text or ending slides

That's right, though I'm realizing I wasn't clear in my original post, as I wrote that I'm looking for "
divergence in how you experience a playthrough depending on how you build your character/party.

which would include CYOA games where the ending slides depend on your characters stats. While this sort of divergence could make me want to replay a game, I am really looking more for gameplay divergence. I suppose I really should try out Disco Elysium to see for myself, as I like the idea of "social combat" (if that's what it is), but the codex has given the impression that it is more along the lines of a stat-based CYOA, which sounds like it involves little in the way of gameplay.
 

Arryosha

Learned
Joined
Dec 16, 2019
Messages
138
Dark Disciples 1&2 are criminally underrated freeware RPGs that adapt this approach to a more traditional top-down RPG formula.
I keep hearing good things about these games (though maybe always from you and I can't remember!). I will have to check them out, thanks.
 

Crichton

Prophet
Joined
Jul 7, 2004
Messages
1,210
I think the gold standard here has to be Arcanum; not just in terms of the tech/magic axis but high low karma and the degree to which high persuasion "talky" characters play differently and the differences in NPC reaction based on race. (elves and dwarves go through several quests differently than humans or other races)
 

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