Has there ever been a BIG open world RPG that was also QUALITY?

[JarlFrank]

If you have relatively static gameplay (all you do is explore dungeons populated by monsters), proc gen can't offer engaging content for long enough to make the game gripping.

I look forward to your thrilling roguelike that is the same every single time so you can write a TAS for it.

Roguelike gameplay is static in the way that the world doesn't act on its own and doesn't react to your actions much, unlike a strategy game where AI nations do their own thing and the world state changes dynamically. Once a dungeon level has been generated, that's what it looks like.

And since procedural dungeons are never as fun as unique hand-made ones, roguelikes don't grab my attention for long.

There's more variety in different playthroughs of a Total War or Paradox game even though those are set on pre-made maps than there is in roguelikes.

Funny, I find the exact opposite. Of course, it varies by game, but the difference between playthroughs, even the the exact same race and class, can be quite radical in a roguelike depending on what gets generated. Dealing with a dragon is quite different than a ghost phasing through walls, or being polymorphed into a dog or a level overflowing with explosively breeding monsters. And even those same threats are wildly different depending on your gear. Do you have access to invisibility? Teleportation? AoE wands? Can you alter terrain by digging tunnels or conjuring walls? Can you tame the dragon and make it your pet? Is there a temple the ghost cannot enter? Roguelikes generate a lot of interesting situations. Brogue also nailed the terrain bit; things like burnable grass, pools of lava, exploding swamp gas, collapsing bridges, various traps... certainly more memorable than most hand crafted dungeons I've seen.

Strategy games otoh, are pretty much paint by numbers. Make a doomstack, roll over cities, curse and make a garbage clearing stack for the gnats trying to retake stuff you conquered 30 turns ago. The map itself never really even matters. I think the only location in Total Wahammer I cared about was that one city that gave a huge discount for dragons, and that only matters for high elves. Anything else is just some arbitrary amount of gold and a chunk of map to paint. You can use the same 3 or so strategies anywhere on the map with any faction. Hell, you can use it in multiple GAMES and it'll still work. Something like "1/3rd melee 2/3rds ranged, wait until it's as big a stack as you can command then move out and attack cities whenever the stack is at full health" describes probably 75% of the Total War franchise. Whether the vampire counts have skeleton spearmen or skeleton swordsmen doesn't really make a difference.

Eh, I tend to play TW games with mods and improved AI and some of those give real different rosters to different factions, so it does matter which guys you're fighting. Also in Paradox games it's fun to see the world develop differently in each game. Crusader Kings 2 is the best example for that kind of emergent gameplay. It really creates some interesting and unique situations. I once played as an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, managed to unite England, had a nephew marry a Byzantine princess. He had a daughter who inherited a weak claim to the Byzantine throne. So when the Byzantines were in a civil war, I declared war on them to press the little girl's claim. Cause their armies were busy elsewhere, I managed to occupy Constantinople and get them to accept peace. So an 8 year old girl of English culture and Catholic faith became the Byzantine Empress. Of course, the Byzzie nobles weren't very happy with an underage girl of foreign faith and culture ruling over them, so only a year later a usurpation war started which the girl lost. She ended up in the dungeons and was kept there until she was 16. At some point I noticed that she had returned home to the small Irish province her father was governing, and she was missing her eyes! The Byzantines had blinded and released her. She spent the rest of her life as duchess of an Irish backwater province.

Meanwhile in roguelikes the only variation I get is... fighting random enemies with random equipment. Meh. It becomes repetitive to me very quickly, and roguelike gameplay is pretty limited anyway due to its single character nature as compared to strategy games where you command multiple units, or a party-based RPG (are there any party-based roguelikes?). I've played many roguelikes but none of them managed to even remotely compete with the hand-crafted dungeons and encounters of BG2, ToEE, KotC, Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, etc.

 

[TemplarGR]

Yes. Plenty of them. Fallout 4, Skyrim, Witcher 3, are awesome CRPGs and the pinnacle of CRPG design in general, and they are big openworld with tons of quality. But most of you already knew that (your hundrends of hours played can testify to that), you just can't admit the truth in public because the Codex Cult (tm) is going to excommunicate you.

 

[Ash]

If game marketing preaches how big the map is to the point of craziness, I become very skeptical. I've played a bunch of good open world games. The common factor among them is they were all smaller sized worlds.

 

[JarlFrank]

If game marketing preaches how big the map is to the point of craziness, I become very skeptical. I've played a bunch of good open world games. The common factor among them is they were all smaller sized worlds.

Similarly, if number of words in the script is a bragging point, there'll probably be lots of dreadfully overwritten walls of text (Numanuma comes to mind).

 

[Darth Canoli]

Yes. Plenty of them. Fallout 4, Skyrim, Witcher 3, are awesome CRPGs and the pinnacle of CRPG design in general, and they are big openworld with tons of quality. But most of you already knew that (your hundrends of hours played can testify to that), you just can't admit the truth in public because the Codex Cult (tm) is going to excommunicate you.

I withdraw my statement from the "trigger" thread, you're still in business for 2020's title ...
Just stick to your guns, you can make it!

 

[TemplarGR]

I withdraw my statement from the "trigger" thread, you're still in business for 2020's title ...
Just stick to your guns, you can make it!

Never forget your lube for that butthurt. It will make it more palpable.

 

[Zlaja]

while exploring a Dunmer stronghold got a glass dagger (even forgot my usual trip to Suran´s pawnbroker for that one

Is that the skimp with 5000 in cash reserve? I usually use a mod which removes his ability to barter 'cause it makes it to easy to get rich and powerful early on.

I'm also in position to say most quests are hardly challenging when it comes to finding your goal

I never said most quests are challenging in finding your goal. But those that are tend to be memorable for me.

And I have to agree with AW8: you could cut the world down to a third of its size, and the quality of the game would have been noticeably better

You're both wrong. Condencing all of Morrowind's regions, cultures and different architecture to a map that is only 1/3 of the original size would turn the place into a less immersive uncanny valley.

 

[Sigourn]

You're both wrong. Condencing all of Morrowind's regions, cultures and different architecture to a map that is only 1/3 of the original size would turn the place into a less immersive uncanny valley.

When you put it like that, you are correct. But I've personally would have done without the seamless open world aspect, introducing hubs much like how Fallout and particularly Final Fantasy XII (since we are talking about a non-isometric RPG here) did. That is, you can travel to towns, cities, and wilderness without having the player walk through lots and lots of it; just having a good few maps of desert is enough to convey the idea of what the desert looks like. Same in Morrowind: you don't need to walk all over Molag Amur to understand what the region is like.

 

[Atrachasis]

But I've personally would have done without the seamless open world aspect, introducing hubs much like how Fallout and particularly Final Fantasy XII (since we are talking about a non-isometric RPG here) did. That is, you can travel to towns, cities, and wilderness without having the player walk through lots and lots of it; just having a good few maps of desert is enough to convey the idea of what the desert looks like. Same in Morrowind: you don't need to walk all over Molag Amur to understand what the region is like.

See, that is where I have to disagree with you, but probably only because I am very exploration-focused: I relish the joy of discovering something unexpected in the midst of the wilderness or just stroll about looking for clues if I get stuck on a questline (or even just to grind a little if I screwed up my character build). This only works if a few points of interest stand out in contrast from the surrounding areas, and the hub structure doesn't give me that satisfaction because I know that, whereever I go, I will be in a high-quest-density Region of Interest where the developers have left a certain number of quests, items, and NPCs for me to find. Stumbling across a lich in the basement of a townhouse, though certainly also unexpected, just doesn't give that same feeling of satisfaction to me.

I fully agree, though, that the joy of discovery may turn into frustration if almost every point of interest in the wilderness anticlimactically turns out to consist of a two-room ancestral tomb.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Meanwhile in roguelikes the only variation I get is... fighting random enemies with random equipment. Meh. It becomes repetitive to me very quickly, and roguelike gameplay is pretty limited anyway due to its single character nature as compared to strategy games where you command multiple units, or a party-based RPG (are there any party-based roguelikes?). I've played many roguelikes but none of them managed to even remotely compete with the hand-crafted dungeons and encounters of BG2, ToEE, KotC, Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, etc.

Depends on your definition of party based. There are plenty of roguelikes where you can get a party together but not under your direct control, and the members can obviously die permanently just like you. As for ones where it's the focus and you have full control, I think theres a few out there but I've never been interested in them because the reason roguelikes interest me is how varied the gameplay is.

When you have a party, you do the same thing every encounter, and the only choices are where the fighters stand to bop things and whether your mage is going to throw darts or fireballs. I liked KotC for the power gaming aspect and decent combat pace, but realistically I fought 90% of my battles the same way as my previous battle and I can't see any reason to do a second playthrough. And the last crpg I tried was Kingmaker, and aside from enjoying the character tweaking, the gameplay itself bored me to tears. There were never any options, just run everyone forward to bop shit. I ended up making a party with buffed animal companions since it at least got things over with quickly without taking casualties but even that lost my interest around when the trolls showed up. I can remember dozens of situations in roguelikes where I had to do some crazy thing to get out alive (or failed and died) but crpgs pretty much boil down to a numbers game. Some roguelikes do too (mostly newer 'noob friendly' ones, the new ToME, Crawl, and to a lesser extent ADOM as well) but the really great ones just have so many crazy mechanics because they don't worry about animations for everything. Incursion is the closest I've ever seen a video game come to actual DnD, and Brogue and Nethack both let you do all sorts of crazy simulationist things. In any other game, things like hand mirrors, towels, whistles, pickaxes and so on would be useless fluff. In Nethack they can be game breakingly powerful tools when used in the right situation. I'm not sure what your favourite examples of encounters are, but mine include things like escaping enemies by drinking a potion of levitation and floating across a pool of lava only to get dispelled by a pixie and fall to my death, polymorphing myself into a Xorn and then equipping an amulet of unchanging so I can phase through walls (but can't wear armour) for the rest of the game, defeating a demon lord by allowing it to swallow me whole then firing a wand of digging into it to escape and cripple it, and turning enemies to stone by clubbing them with the corpse of a cockatrice until it rots away (which I delayed by dipping it in holy water.)

By comparison, Kingmaker had the bandit fort, which I've played through like 3 times now, and every time it's been the same; do all the skillcheck things that can be done then have a big brawl at the end where I mob everyone except the boss who teleports up a ledge so he has to die last. Not that killing him first would make anyone surrender, I'm sure. I think I tried sneaking past him to free his dad or something but that didn't do anything either. I literally don't even play these fights, I just pre buff then let the AI resolve them for me. I can't be bothered to move 6 guys around to specific positions so I can avoid a single enemy getting a flanking bonus that won't matter. There's no emergent gameplay to be found here. Fuck, you can't even position your party for the important fights, everyone just lines up so the boss can get a cheap fireball off after a -conversation- before you move. You can't flee because it would break the railroading narrative. It was just a bunch of tedious sub events that were all complete non-decisions. Gee, should I make a totally free roll to break in from the side or knock on the front gate? I WONDER.

Crusader Kings 2 does sound like a cut above, I keep meaning to give it a shot. EU4 was fun for a while until I realized how important it was to do inane timing bullshit where you stop the clock every half a day to fight on favourable terrain. Which is tolerable with one army but not so much with 4.

 

[Sigourn]

See, that is where I have to disagree with you, but probably only because I am very exploration-focused: I relish the joy of discovering something unexpected in the midst of the wilderness or just stroll about looking for clues if I get stuck on a questline (or even just to grind a little if I screwed up my character build). This only works if a few points of interest stand out in contrast from the surrounding areas, and the hub structure doesn't give me that satisfaction because I know that, whereever I go, I will be in a high-quest-density Region of Interest where the developers have left a certain number of quests, items, and NPCs for me to find. Stumbling across a lich in the basement of a townhouse, though certainly also unexpected, just doesn't give that same feeling of satisfaction to me.

I fully agree, though, that the joy of discovery may turn into frustration if almost every point of interest in the wilderness anticlimactically turns out to consist of a two-room ancestral tomb.

Sadly that last line is my problem with Morrowind. At one I simply have to accept that, if I'm playing the game "wrong" as many have said before, I'll simply have to avoid every cave and ancestral tomb I come across. I've been burned quite badly and it makes no sense to enter another cave/tomb knowing it's just yet another generic place for me to "explore" (can you even call it exploration when it's just a handful of rooms with nothing to actually "discover"?).

This is why I've simply called it quits and started resuming the main quest at full speed, and once I'm done with the 4th and 5th trials I'll probably do Tribunal and Bloodmoon. That's genuine fresh content I've never done before, plus it helps there aren't ancestral tombs, eggmines, Daedric ruins or generic caves to find there.

 

[Sigourn]

After all of Sigourn´s retarded posting (which regrettably got him sent to the Ignore list) I decided to roll a new Dunmer War Mage and replay Morrowind with mostly vanilla resources and a few easy of life mods and god damn is the game still fucking fantastic....while exploring a Dunmer stronghold got a glass dagger (even forgot my usual trip to Suran´s pawnbroker for that one ) and I am enjoying the heck out of it...even the slow pace of the game I am finding it a very nice change of pace

Was it the Dunmer Stronghold full of Redoran NPCs, which have nothing unique to say even when you are a member of the Redoran faction, and which for some reason are hostile to you even if you are a Redoran as long as you are of a lower rank than them, shitting on everything the Redorans stand for and associated with no quest at all?

That same Dunmer Stronghold? Yep, I've been there.

 

[JarlFrank]

When you have a party, you do the same thing every encounter, and the only choices are where the fighters stand to bop things and whether your mage is going to throw darts or fireballs.

Completely disagree here. Games with larger parties mean more choices, and I vastly prefer the gameplay of party based games over single character. If your game is single character it better be an action game cause anything isometric is better with a party, especially when the AI is good. You can flank your enemy, buff your teammates, use enveloping tactics, etc etc. The more robust the tactical system, the better, of course. In KotC I used various different spells, not just fireball, and used my fighters not just as a shieldwall but deliberated whether to keep them back or rush the enemy wizard, etc. Peak tactical experiences are games like JA2 or Silent Storm. I also love the Total War battles but the AI isn't the best, but I tend to use difficulty mods that make the AI better at raising armies so I'm often up against a superior force, which means I have to flank a lot, use decoys, etc. None of that is possible in single character games, where tactical choices are much more limited. With only one character the only choices are whether to quaff a potion now, flee, or attack.

I have played the same mirrored battle in Rome 2 Total War against a pal in multiplayer several times and each game went differently, btw. Since it's against another dude instead of an AI, you have two people making use of all the tactical options and trying out different approaches every time. It helps that the battles in TW games are relatively complex and you have to consider things like elevation, unit exhaustion, etc.

 

[Zlaja]

This is why I've simply called it quits and started resuming the main quest at full speed, and once I'm done with the 4th and 5th trials I'll probably do Tribunal and Bloodmoon. That's genuine fresh content I've never done before, plus it helps there aren't ancestral tombs, eggmines, Daedric ruins or generic caves to find there.

Have you never finished the main quest or is it just the expansions that are new to you? Either way you're about to experience some of the best content the game has.

 

[RPK]

If you have relatively static gameplay (all you do is explore dungeons populated by monsters), proc gen can't offer engaging content for long enough to make the game gripping.

I look forward to your thrilling roguelike that is the same every single time so you can write a TAS for it.

Roguelike gameplay is static in the way that the world doesn't act on its own and doesn't react to your actions much, unlike a strategy game where AI nations do their own thing and the world state changes dynamically. Once a dungeon level has been generated, that's what it looks like.

And since procedural dungeons are never as fun as unique hand-made ones, roguelikes don't grab my attention for long.

There's more variety in different playthroughs of a Total War or Paradox game even though those are set on pre-made maps than there is in roguelikes.

Funny, I find the exact opposite. Of course, it varies by game, but the difference between playthroughs, even the the exact same race and class, can be quite radical in a roguelike depending on what gets generated. Dealing with a dragon is quite different than a ghost phasing through walls, or being polymorphed into a dog or a level overflowing with explosively breeding monsters. And even those same threats are wildly different depending on your gear. Do you have access to invisibility? Teleportation? AoE wands? Can you alter terrain by digging tunnels or conjuring walls? Can you tame the dragon and make it your pet? Is there a temple the ghost cannot enter? Roguelikes generate a lot of interesting situations. Brogue also nailed the terrain bit; things like burnable grass, pools of lava, exploding swamp gas, collapsing bridges, various traps... certainly more memorable than most hand crafted dungeons I've seen.

Strategy games otoh, are pretty much paint by numbers. Make a doomstack, roll over cities, curse and make a garbage clearing stack for the gnats trying to retake stuff you conquered 30 turns ago. The map itself never really even matters. I think the only location in Total Wahammer I cared about was that one city that gave a huge discount for dragons, and that only matters for high elves. Anything else is just some arbitrary amount of gold and a chunk of map to paint. You can use the same 3 or so strategies anywhere on the map with any faction. Hell, you can use it in multiple GAMES and it'll still work. Something like "1/3rd melee 2/3rds ranged, wait until it's as big a stack as you can command then move out and attack cities whenever the stack is at full health" describes probably 75% of the Total War franchise. Whether the vampire counts have skeleton spearmen or skeleton swordsmen doesn't really make a difference.

Eh, I tend to play TW games with mods and improved AI and some of those give real different rosters to different factions, so it does matter which guys you're fighting. Also in Paradox games it's fun to see the world develop differently in each game. Crusader Kings 2 is the best example for that kind of emergent gameplay. It really creates some interesting and unique situations. I once played as an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, managed to unite England, had a nephew marry a Byzantine princess. He had a daughter who inherited a weak claim to the Byzantine throne. So when the Byzantines were in a civil war, I declared war on them to press the little girl's claim. Cause their armies were busy elsewhere, I managed to occupy Constantinople and get them to accept peace. So an 8 year old girl of English culture and Catholic faith became the Byzantine Empress. Of course, the Byzzie nobles weren't very happy with an underage girl of foreign faith and culture ruling over them, so only a year later a usurpation war started which the girl lost. She ended up in the dungeons and was kept there until she was 16. At some point I noticed that she had returned home to the small Irish province her father was governing, and she was missing her eyes! The Byzantines had blinded and released her. She spent the rest of her life as duchess of an Irish backwater province.

Meanwhile in roguelikes the only variation I get is... fighting random enemies with random equipment. Meh. It becomes repetitive to me very quickly, and roguelike gameplay is pretty limited anyway due to its single character nature as compared to strategy games where you command multiple units, or a party-based RPG (are there any party-based roguelikes?). I've played many roguelikes but none of them managed to even remotely compete with the hand-crafted dungeons and encounters of BG2, ToEE, KotC, Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, etc.

i believe pathfinder: kingmaker had an update that added a more-or-less rogue-like mode of random generated dungeon with a new party where you just see how far you can get before you wipe. I stopped playing it before that update though so not sure.

there's also a pretty good turn based mod for it so, so I think that might qualify as a party-based roguelike.

 

[Sigourn]

Have you never finished the main quest or is it just the expansions that are new to you? Either way you're about to experience some of the best content the game has.

I've finished the main quest in the past, I really enjoyed it. The expansions are mostly new to me: Tribunal in its entirety, and Bloodmoon for the most part, as I've only done a few sidequests here and there in a previous playthrough. But definitely nowhere near as fresh as the main quest is on my mind (that said, I've only finished it once, as I usually drop the game before even being cured of Corprus).

 

[DraQ]

Has there ever been a BIG open world RPG that was also QUALITY?

Excess fluff removed and no.

 

[Damned Registrations]

None of that is possible in single character games, where tactical choices are much more limited. With only one character the only choices are whether to quaff a potion now, flee, or attack.

I mean, that's just not true. Luring enemies out of position is a staple of roguelikes, flanking a group to attack a caster is even more of an option when you have access to things like teleportation, tunneling, and wall phasing. I mean, when was the last time levitation was a tactical consideration in a party based game?

If anything, 'flanking' is pretty much irrelevant in party based crpg since the new definition is flanking is any two people attacking someone. So you may as well just line your fighters shoulder to shoulder in every single fight. And again, 90% of the time there's not even any options to begin with. Who flanks who is just a matter of who has more bodies most of the time. Whether to flank or have a unit stand back and not attack at all isn't a real decision. At best you can abuse the retarded AI in total war by making them chase cavalry with infantry or waste ammo shooting at a mounted commander. But 90% of the time shit doesn't matter at all and you can just blob at the enemy with the most basic of formations.

You're acting as if all else is equal except you just have more bodies to work with in one game, but that's never the case. Decent roguelikes give you far, far more options. You're basically arguing checkers is more complex than something like street fighter, ignoring the fact that there aren't hundreds of character matchups in checkers and the pieces don't each have 50 possible moves each turn.

 

[JarlFrank]

If anything, 'flanking' is pretty much irrelevant in party based crpg since the new definition is flanking is any two people attacking someone. So you may as well just line your fighters shoulder to shoulder in every single fight.

That's a problem with the systems in question then, not with full party control and the practice of flanking. If we take strategy games like Total War, you get a flanking bonus when your unit attacks the enemy from the flank or behind. Two units attacking from the front don't get any special bonus. Same with any good RPG system. Helherron for example has characters face one of eight directions and being attacked from the flanks or behind gives a to hit bonus.

And again, 90% of the time there's not even any options to begin with. Who flanks who is just a matter of who has more bodies most of the time. Whether to flank or have a unit stand back and not attack at all isn't a real decision. At best you can abuse the retarded AI in total war by making them chase cavalry with infantry or waste ammo shooting at a mounted commander. But 90% of the time shit doesn't matter at all and you can just blob at the enemy with the most basic of formations.

As I said, I've played the same exact mirrored match in Rome 2 against a friend and each time it went differently because if you want to win the battle against a thinking opponent (or against an AI opponent with a larger or better equipped force), you need to use actual tactics instead of just blobbing forward. Mindlessly throwing blobs forward is actually an extremely suboptimal way of fighting out battles as units will get congested, fight at low efficiency and make perfect targets for artillery. Maybe try a mod with higher difficulty, or play multi against another human, and you'll see that the battles require actual tactics.

You're acting as if all else is equal except you just have more bodies to work with in one game, but that's never the case. Decent roguelikes give you far, far more options. You're basically arguing checkers is more complex than something like street fighter, ignoring the fact that there aren't hundreds of character matchups in checkers and the pieces don't each have 50 possible moves each turn.

There's enough party-based RPGs and strategy games that have lots of options. You're acting as if strategy never matters in a strategy game (lol) because you can just throw blobs at the enemy, which is absolutely a losing move if you're up against an enemy outclassing you. Kinda like just going forward with your roguelike character and walking into enemies until they die.

There are games where attack direction matters, where there's several utility spells more useful than simple fireball spam, etc. Try something like Helherron, Blackguards, Warbanners. Warbanners has some nice interactions with the environments: felling trees that can fall on enemies and damage them, using freezing spells on water to create a walkable surface, setting fire to a tile to make anyone who steps on it take damage, etc. And usually the odds are stacked against you so you have to make creative use of those abilities.

Having to co-ordinate all your characters/units and having to keep track of several fronts makes party-based and army-based games fun. In a single char game you only have one piece to look out for, and can only perform one action per turn. I just prefer the more tactical gameplay of party-based games. And since the gameplay engages me more, I'm more willing to deal with randomized content than in roguelikes where it's boring and repetitive compared to hand-crafted RPGs. (And even then, hand-crafted battles are superior to random/procedural ones: Warbanners has handcrafted battles, and one of my favorite recent-ish strategy games, Ultimate General: Civil War, has hand-made historical battles)

I'd gladly play a game with Nethack's complex systems and hand-crafted dungeons. But Nethack on its own, with the randomization and the permadeath, doesn't engage me for much longer than half an hour or so.

 

[Fenix]

To be honest with you, I have so little faith on the human spirit, I dont think even an AI could produce the refuse that passes for entertainment these days. People these days are too goddamn weak, just a bunch of complaining little bitches.

You are wrong. I have read an article about city architecture some time (10 years) ago.
There was explained, that city's archiecture that consist from symmetrical geometrical figures is very harmful for human psyche, so large building covered with that modern rectangular like sorta tiles is very bed. An old buildings from briks and with ornament like we had it in Old Russia is good.
Think for the same in literature and art in general.
What AI will autogenerate for us most likely will couse mentall illness an mass, like if today's large city's water filled to the brim with antipsychotic drugs which are flushed to toiled and don't breake apart in sewerage and doesn't filtered at water treatment plant is NOT enough.

 

[Fenix]

Meanwhile in roguelikes the only variation I get is... fighting random enemies with random equipment. Meh. It becomes repetitive to me very quickly, and roguelike gameplay is pretty limited anyway due to its single character nature as compared to strategy games where you command multiple units, or a party-based RPG (are there any party-based roguelikes?). I've played many roguelikes but none of them managed to even remotely compete with the hand-crafted dungeons and encounters of BG2, ToEE, KotC, Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, etc.

I agree, the most fun I have in RL is trying wild buildsthat works (or not). It's not abiut challange in the first place - it's to take tools and spin them differently. ToME4 is good for that.
Or ELONA with crazy amount of content.
Some are just thematic games I love - like ProspectorRL or Transcendence, cause of my soviet childhood was filled with sci-fi and dreams of humanity transferring to the stars.
The basis - the foundation why I play them, is they are simple in graffix, easy to observ and thus not tiresome.
Any 3D game today quickly suck out my neural stamina.

 

[Damned Registrations]

setting fire to a tile to make anyone who steps on it take damage, etc. And usually the odds are stacked against you so you have to make creative use of those abilities.

Creative how? How many ways are there to use flammable ground? You light it when you're not standing on it. Durr.

See, the comparable example in Brogue exists, alongside flammable bridges, explosive swamp gas, and scalding steam where the two meet. But you don't just light it with a fire spell. Constantly burning enemies like wisps and salamanders exist, lightning can ignite swamp gas but not grass, torches can be knocked loose onto dry grass, you can set an enemy on fire and lure him onto something flammable, other special gases like confusion and caustic potions are flammable, you can gain temporary fire immunity but still be on fire to spread flames, fire consumes some items on the ground so it's not a no brainer to always use it... the situation is just so much more complex than simple 'don't stand in the fire.' Lighting a zombie on fire, then turning invisible so it resumes wandering around and finds it's way back into the goblin fort to burn all their totems to the ground while they flee out the back entrance into a trap I've laid for them is creative. Spreading thin vs artillery and not focusing all your arrows on the heavily armoured shield infantry is just a no brainer. The fact that I need to micromanage my retarded army because they'd rather shoot whatever is closest instead of the enemy archers is just repetitive tedium. I've already made that choice 500 times before, it's always the same.

 

[Fenix]

Well, you are right too. I didn't played Brogue much.

 

[JarlFrank]

See, the comparable example in Brogue exists, alongside flammable bridges, explosive swamp gas, and scalding steam where the two meet. But you don't just light it with a fire spell. Constantly burning enemies like wisps and salamanders exist, lightning can ignite swamp gas but not grass, torches can be knocked loose onto dry grass, you can set an enemy on fire and lure him onto something flammable, other special gases like confusion and caustic potions are flammable, you can gain temporary fire immunity but still be on fire to spread flames, fire consumes some items on the ground so it's not a no brainer to always use it... the situation is just so much more complex than simple 'don't stand in the fire.'

Now imagine that very same system with a full party to control rather than just a single character.

 

[Damned Registrations]

See, the comparable example in Brogue exists, alongside flammable bridges, explosive swamp gas, and scalding steam where the two meet. But you don't just light it with a fire spell. Constantly burning enemies like wisps and salamanders exist, lightning can ignite swamp gas but not grass, torches can be knocked loose onto dry grass, you can set an enemy on fire and lure him onto something flammable, other special gases like confusion and caustic potions are flammable, you can gain temporary fire immunity but still be on fire to spread flames, fire consumes some items on the ground so it's not a no brainer to always use it... the situation is just so much more complex than simple 'don't stand in the fire.'

Now imagine that very same system with a full party to control rather than just a single character.

That's the thing, I have to imagine it because it doesn't exist. And back to the original point, it wouldn't be interesting the second time around if I knew the zombie and goblins etc. were all going to be there and it was the obvious thing to do. It's cool and memorable because it was unique.