Felipe is a poseur who pretends to like classic blobbers more then he actually does, never actually having completed one
He completed Grimoire. Have you?
All right, now that you mentioned me, I'll bite. That will be a fairly long rant, and something that was bugging me for a long time, so I'll speak it out.
Roguey is 100% spot on, essentially. I wouldn't go as far as calling Felipe or, say, CRPGaddict "poseurs", but their heart is not
truly there. Let me explain.
Up until mid-90s, there were no rules on how to make CRPGs. None. Anything goes. People didn't give a fuck about having "consistent" setting and filled it with whatever they though sounded cool. They didn't lose sleep over why a secret vault sealed for a thousand of years is full of random encounters, or how a bunch of orcs is living next door to a dragon's lair yet hasn't been eaten forever ago. They created whatever RPG systems they thought sounded cool with utter disregard for "realism". They didn't give shit about "balance" and it was common for a green party to stumble into a random encounter they have zero chances to survive against, or for a fully developed party to nail a big boss with one lucky critical strike or uberspell.
Then something happened. Rules were written. Standarts, cliches and stereotypes were set in stone. All of a sudden, there was One True Way on how to design an RPG. Everything setting had to be a srs business carbon copy of Tolkien, or srs business realisticker than thou - and if something was "weird" and "quirky", it went miles out of its way screeching "look at me lookatme lookatmelookatme I am sooooo much quirkier and weirdier than others", explaining its quirkiness and weirdness in gigabytes of boring lore and justifying it in endless self-indulgent fart-smelling rants about postmodernism, homoeroticism or whatever they teach at gender philosophy studies. All rules were either "based on world's best (second best, third best) selling tabletop RPG", or, likewise, realisticker than thou, or copied MMO rules carefully crafted by (((matematicians))) and (((psychologists))) in order to maximize addiction, ingame purchases or whatever else brings profit under a current monetization model.
You may say RPGs have "matured" in mid-90s. I would not dispute that, in so far as being "mature" means being an annoying bore and death of youthful creativity. Fact is, for the past 20 years game design is no longer a field of joyful spontaneity, it's a deeply researched scientific field where everyone does the same One True Proved Thing and anything outside the approved Gender Game Design Studies course is considered an atavism we're better off having outlived it. In short, everybody in the field is a fucking Sawyer. I am not lamenting the lack of innovashun or artfaggotry or something - what I mean is both players and developers who were late (past 95 or so) to the party have very rigid stereotypes over how things are supposed to be done, and anything that doesn't fit their trope vision of a Proper Game Design is automatically wrong.
Case in point, CRPGaddict (that's why I mentioned him in the beginning). I was following his playthrough of Fate: Gates of Dawn, a legendary game I just couldn't find the resolve to play to an end myself. He lauded some things, but mostly he complained. He complained a lot. And the reasoning of his complaints can be summed up to "this awful game dares to do shit differently than I am used to". He might have a (rather silly) ambition of completing every CRPG in existence starting with PLATO programs, but he
still judges them with the eyes of a Fallout/BG/TES player, fully entrenched in the tropes of modern Proper Game Design and incapable of embracing a different zeitgeist when shit could have been done differently simply because there were no rules on how to do that shit.
The criticism of Grimoire, Felipe's in particular, comes from the same sentiment. They see something working in a different way than what they were taught to expect for the past 20 years, and they automatically assume it is broken. They refuse to acknowledge Grimoire is a genuine early 90s game. Heck, if they'd never have heard of Wizardry and were shown Crusaders of Dark Savant today, their criticism would be the same. "Waah, robots in my Tolkien game! Waah, thermal pineapple could be used to kill everything! Waah, critical strikes are overpowered! Waah, I was killed by my first random encounter! Early access, pls hire a bunch of Sawyers to balance it into a grey mire of boredom!". They just
don't get it. They are hardwired to.
If these guys were car vloggers, they'd spend months videoing themselves driving '30s Packards and '50s DeSotos, showing off how much they are into car antiquity - but offer them a modern-day Packard replica, and they'll go ballistic because muh navigational computer and muh hybrid engine and muh current year.
Fuck V2. Love Grimoire the way it is, or accept it that you are a newfag decline scion and play your post-95 designed-by-the-book CRPGs all while whining non-stop how boring and samey they are (gee, I wonder why!).
