RPGs with the best Barbarian experience?

[Beastro]

I'm speaking of more the one that's a variation of what Odysseus was in Greek mythology, a warrior but a crafty one known for not just brute forcing everything.

I wouldn't say Odysseus is a poster child for the barbarian archetype but whatevs

Variation, I didn't say poster child.

 

[Ryzer]

Also, not a proper RPG, but Asghan: the Dragon Slayer is a classic I'll always recommend:

This is the first time i hear about this game and it looks like good shit. Thanks for the tip. I hope it's possible to run on it modern systems.

French game huh? Interesting

Ryzer La vie sexuelle any thoughts?

It's Asghan the Dragon Slayer, never played it, I'm not well versed into French games except Dofus and Rayman.

 

[Fargus]

I'm not well versed into French games except Dofus and Rayman.

Not even Arx Fatalis?

 

[sser]

A recent game. It's okay-ish, I guess.




Also agree with others that BG3 offered a good Barbarian playthrough.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

In terms of Conan specifically, not RPGs neccecarily, here a few of the more modern 3D ones, staring with the PS2:

- Conan: The Dark Axe (2004) [PS2]

- Conan (2007) [Xbox 360, PS3]

- Age of Conan (2008) [PC]

- Conan Exiles (2018) [PC, Xbox One, PS4]

- Conan Unconquered (2019) [PC]

 

[Fargus]

Nobody mentioned that Arcanum can be played as barbarian. And everyone will hate you.


I want someone to make a game about this barbarian. Basically ERYFKRAD's character.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

 

[Modron]

Savage the Shard of Gosen is pretty cool even if it's unlikely to be completely finished.

 

[Beastro]

I want someone to make a game about this barbarian.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Conan Exiles has been mentioned twice already and is probably the best CRPG barbarian experience.

Conan Exiles was intended to be a quasi-MMORPG, where on each server groups of players would form tribes/factions each with their own base(s), with extensive crafting and base-building mechanics. The game is more fun as a single-player exploration-focused Open World RPG, but there are various difficulties stemming from the MMO design. For single-player, you'll want to spend a great deal of time upgrading your base, gaining levels, and learning new feats, so that when you do finally set out to explore you will be over-levelled and better-equipped relative to a multi-player group. You can also implement a mod that permits having more than one follower at a time, although the followers aren't as capable as other players. Keep in mind there are vast differences in difficulty between regions, and even some specific dungeons that are intended to be much more difficult than the surrounding region.

Conan Exiles has a lengthy series of "journey steps" to give a new player some direction, though many of these steps are focused on the base-building portion of the game. Also, the steps are divided into tiers, and the game hides the steps in all tiers higher than the lowest unfinished tier (though if you accomplish a step in a higher tier, it will appear as completed and give you XP). And the order of some of the steps is rather perplexing, though of course you can always look up the hidden steps in higher tiers if you want a bit more direction.

However, there really isn't anything in the way of formal quests except for the ultimate goal of escaping, which you will eventually learn necessitates acquiring certain items, which in turn requires exploring certain locations. There are only a handful of NPCs that can be interacted with, as opposed to fought, aside from the thralls you capture and put to work. Exploration is largely free-form and left to the player.

A few possible server setting alterations, after the player has experienced the default settings:

• Progression - No XP rate changes should be needed
• Day/Night Cycle - due to Conan Exiles being an MMORPG, there isn't a means of waiting / skipping time
  • Nighttime speed increase
  • Dusk/Dawn speed increase moderately
• Survival
  • Consider unchecking the option for dropping all equipment & inventory with your corpse on death, which then requires a 'corpse run' to retrieve everything
• Combat
  • Player damage multiplier - increase as a last resort, if you're encountering HP sponges (but consider first whether the area is too high level)
  • Player damage taken multiplier - decrease
  • NPC respawn multiplier - increase (longer duration to respawn)
  • Durability multiplier - decrease (affects non-combat tools as well)
• Harvesting
  • Item spoil scale rate - decrease
  • Harvest amount multiplier - increase greatly
• Crafting
  • Crafting time multiplier - decrease drastically
  • Thrall crafting time multiplier - decrease drastically
  • Fuel burn time multiplier - increase drastically
• Abandonment
  • Disable building abandonment should be checked
  • Disable thrall decay should be checked
• Chat - Irrelevant in single-player
• Purge
  • Purge preparation time - Set to whatever is comfortable for you

 

[udm]

The best barbarian experience I had was on tabletop with 13th Age. Here, barbarians are really a force to be reckoned with and easy to play, cleaving and critting every few rounds like a bad motherfucker.

I like Age of Conan too, at least up to a point. The Hyborian lands are beautiful, exactly how Howard described them.

Anyway someone really ought to make a Conan/Hyborian mod for Mount & Blade. Way overdue. But most people are illiterate and probably have never read the original Conan stories, so it's unlikely it would fly

 

[Falksi]

A recent game. It's okay-ish, I guess.




Also agree with others that BG3 offered a good Barbarian playthrough.

Yeah, this really disappointed me to the point I opted for a refund.

Modern devs really need to stop building retro inspired games based on modern gaming principles. Here you have a game that looks great, plays well enough, and has a ton of potential, but I played it for just over an hour, and there was hardly ANY challenge at all to it, to the point where the only life I lost was when I let my missus have a quick go lol.

To make matters worse, the hardest difficulty is locked until you beat the main game, and there's no way I'm playing through a snoozefest of a challengeless game just to get to the real beef.

Abathor has some real potential, but it's a tribute to Arcade style games built for modern casual players, rather than being a genuine arcade style experience.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Nobody mentioned that Arcanum can be played as barbarian. And everyone will hate you

Didn't happen bro, enough rep and they treat you like any other dude of the Victorian era.

 

[Fargus]

Nobody mentioned that Arcanum can be played as barbarian. And everyone will hate you

Didn't happen bro, enough rep and they treat you like any other dude of the Victorian era.

You mean getting past reaction threshold after which they stop calling you a filthy barbarian? Never happened to me. They usually reacted negatively to barbarian armor and i reacted negatively with my axe so it was rather short run. But an eventful one

 

[Louis_Cypher]

I wouldn't say Odysseus is a poster child for the barbarian archetype but whatevs

The Greeks had a different concept of virtue to a modern Christian society. The ability to see crafty or cunning solutions to problems from almost any starting point, was the virtue called "metis", considered one of the highest moral goods. Oddyseus was the hero who most closely displayed metis; his creation of the Trojan Horse on behalf of the Achean armies being one such display. A modern character known for this is Captain James T Kirk, who famously "creates a fighting chance to live" out of any dire situation, and doesn't accept "no-win scenarios". Conan has this kind of virtue; metis. He doesn't care about the taboos of civilization, only what works.

Exercise is linked to intelligence, bodybuilders are often intelligent, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made his riches before becoming an actor, in real estate.

The original Greek meaning of barbarian also doesn't mean what people have come to associate with it. Something like a caveman. The Persians were just as literate as the Greeks, but were termed 'barbarians' along with say Celts. It just meant a non-Greek. In some ways Celtic and Germanic barbarian societies were more advanced or healthier than more settled societies, and in other ways less advanced. Their 'braves' were probably individually formiddable, even if Roman discipline won out in war. So intelligent barbarians is something entirely keeping with the origin of pulp literature, inspired as it is by the bronze age; perhaps Achilles is a 'barbarian' to us.

Conan Exiles has been mentioned twice already and is probably the best CRPG barbarian experience.

Conan Exiles is an excellent survival game, with perfect Conan atmosphere, I dunno why it is never mentioned along things like Valheim.

 

[NecroLord]

Arcanum has both a Barbarian character background and barbarian armor.
Npcs will react to you wearing barbarian armor with numerous funny lines of dialogue.

Temple of Elemental Evil allows you to create an entire party of raging Barbarian meatheads. Also has Barbarian armor and even a helmet.
Npcs will also react to Barbarian armor.

 

[NecroLord]

Smart has more to do with wisdom than intelligence.

Exactly, there are all sorts of types of wisdom and intelligence, some of which may even conflict:

• - Formal education
• - Spacial intelligence
• - Spiritual insight
• - Quick wits
• - Street smarts
• - Wily cunning
• - Charisma

Conan is wily, cunning, street smart, quick witted, survivalist, and charismatic; he can master a room of people with his force of personality, and knows exactly what he wants in terms of exercising his faculty of "will", where civilized folks have been often been over-civilized into sheep, but has virtually zero education (although he does make an effort to learn certain things, and in the cinematic version get taught formal fighting in the East). As we have increasingly seen of late, an education system is sometimes just indoctrination for a regime. Conan is a Nietzschean hero with an integrated personality, without the illusions of civilization.

It was Robert E. Howard's way of telling us that life itself truly is the best teacher.
Conan is a survivor par excellence, who has learned more than one skill and possesses real ingenuity.
To Hell with those city dwelling pansies...
They should get out into the wild and dirty themselves a little.

 

[deuxhero]

The main character of Kingdom Come Deliverance starts as an illiterate barbarian. By doing a sidequest he can cease to be an illiterate and with enough grinding you can learn Latin.

I think Crusader Kings 3 lets your character learn Latin and Greek. Debatable if it's an RPG or not.

 

[Kabas]

Tried to recall some more examples.
Not sure about the best but in Drakensang: The River of Time you can play as Gjalskerlander and you get some unique dialogue.

Berserker from Chronicon is pretty cool and has some fun abilities like throwing giant globes of ice, blinking around or summoning biting dragons from the earth.

In Path of Achra there are plenty of classes i would classify as barbarians.

And in Gedonia Barbarians are one of the joinable factions with their own quests and like.
Their gear rewards oriented towards characters who speicalise in nature magic/werewolf transformation.

 

[NecroLord]

I'm just going to say that we need more Berserkers in rpgs/games.
Not plain Barbarians, but Berserkers.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

I know it's probably heresy here on the Codex, but i never liked barbarian characters, or at least the rage implementation in games.
The concept of "I get super strong when angry" is like the ultimate basement dweller fantasy, because they tend to be uselessly weak and get angry a lot.

 

[0sacred]

There is historical precedent for rage though (berserkers). Even though it was likely drug induced.

 

[NecroLord]

There is historical precedent for rage though (berserkers). Even though it was likely drug induced.

Also could've been a spiritual/religious side to it.
Namely, those few elite warriors who demonstrate pure rage and skill in battle while shrugging off pain and the effects of wounds inflicted on them.

That's Valhalla wet dream material.

 

[Serus]

There is historical precedent for rage though (berserkers). Even though it was likely drug induced.

Not just nordic berserkers, similar stuff have been noted to have existed in some other cultures - like Celtic to not look very far. Warriors attacking in some kind of... well... rage or whatever, not caring about own survival. How and why, beats me.

 

[0sacred]

There is historical precedent for rage though (berserkers). Even though it was likely drug induced.

Also could've been a spiritual/religious angle to it.

There is historical precedent for rage though (berserkers). Even though it was likely drug induced.

Not just nordic berserkers, similar stuff have been noted to have existed in some other cultures - like Celtic to not look very far. Warriors attacking in some kind of... well... rage or whatever, not caring about own survival. How and why, beats me.

Caesar wrote that the druids taught immortality of the soul to inspire fearlessness in Celtic warriors.