Screenshot thread

[Puukko]

The last dungeon. So gorgeus.

What be this?

 

[Lyre Mors]

What be this?

Operencia: The Stolen Sun. But so kool to not post the name of the game!

 

[RK47]

Top 10 D&D Betrayal

 

[HansDampf]

Nar Shaddaa skyline.

Spoiler

Jabba's ship is the dumbest level in the game. First you have to punch these lizards, while every misstep costs 20 HP. And the remainder of the level is layered with traps. Open a door, mines. Walk around a corner, mines. Collect shield, mines. Fuck you!

The next few levels make up for it.

On my last life... Very easy boss, though, after that marathon of a level.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Jabba's ship is the dumbest level in the game. First you have to punch these lizards, while every misstep costs 20 HP. And the remainder of the level is layered with traps. Open a door, mines. Walk around a corner, mines. Collect shield, mines. Fuck you!

No kidding, the mines are easily the worst part, worse even than face-punching the dragons. Especially that one corridor with three consecutive mined doors. Still, Dark Forces loves setting mines in bullshit places all throughout the game - ESPECIALLY hiding them among bundles of shield rechargers.

On my last life... Very easy boss, though, after that marathon of a level.

It was exactly the same for me

 

[Reinhardt]

Top 10 D&D Betrayal

Elves...

 

[yellowcake]

spooky

Spoiler

excuse me but dark side cloning my very own respectable self is banned all around the galaxy

you are inferior

aw hell fucking no

the final levels of mysteries of the sith are so insanely frustrating - the game takes away all your guns, leaves you only with the stupid, shitty lightsaber, and then throws tons of rampaging critters at you that can kill you in 1-2 hits

AND I HAVEN'T EVEN YET COME ACROSS THE TURBO-TIGERS THAT COME LATER IN THE SITH TEMPLE ITSELF

Do you have force heal? I decided I can manage without it on my playthrough. Let's just say it is doable.

BTW force users have their ways of dealing with turbo tigers.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Do you have force heal?

Yep. It's one of the things I always pack in all Jedi Knight games, if only to ease some of the tedium of the more annoying levels.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Come on, shake your body, baby, do the conga

Spoiler

suddenly dark jedi vampires who shoop lightning bolts

Getting Thief vibes.

One thing I like a lot about the final levels in MotS and JK is the environmental storytelling through the leftover backpacks in secret places. In JK, it was smuggler's backpacks behind cracked walls (with mines planted on the other side) in the Valley of the Jedi, in MotS it's explorer's backpacks in the sith temple, typically next to chewed up bones. It's a small and simple thing, but it's great at conveying that there's a yuge galaxy out there, with all kinds of people that could have made it to these "lost and unknown" worlds and even used them to store their warez.

This place was p. big all things considered.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Fancy that.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

Very nice of AI to clump everyone together behind this door so I can pelt them with grenades and AOE spells.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Spoiler

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Thanks for the screenshots of that, reminded me to go check the weeb board and see what people are saying about it. Looked interesting in early access.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Old low-res games leave so much to the imagination.

 

[JarlFrank]

I feel like I read very mixed opinions about Neverwinter Nights. What do you guys think? The Enhanced edition and some DLC are 80% off at the minute on Steam, so I'm thinking of getting it

Worst RPG ever made.

 

[Comte]

 

[hpstg]

Is this No Man's Sky?

 

[Gragt]

I feel like I read very mixed opinions about Neverwinter Nights. What do you guys think? The Enhanced edition and some DLC are 80% off at the minute on Steam, so I'm thinking of getting it

Worst RPG ever made.

I’m always loath to use superlatives and this is another case where my instinct feel right. NWN (OC) isn’t a good game to be sure, but I wouldn’t qualify it as the worst. I’d make a case for mediocre: it isn’t good, as I’ve written, but it isn’t bad either since nothing in it is blatantly broken or badly designed. NWN’s cardinal sin, though, is that it is dull: most characters are underdeveloped (a shame since some had potential), quests are unimaginative, and the writing pedestrian.

I’d argue that Oblivion is a far worse game, especially because the level scaling removes pretty much all challenge and makes the game effortless to the point it feels poorly designed, and the writing is insulting. Looks pretty, though. At least NWN has a definite feel of progression and a serviceable story, and some parts are memorable—the forest and lost castle were rather eerie, although the scores of trash encounters did ruin the mood.

Expansions and (some) unofficial modules redeem it though, as many have already mentioned.

That said, I’ve promised myself never to play the NWN OC again, so you might be onto something. If I do end up playing it again, I might actually join your side. :D

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Worst RPG ever made.

Despite its shortcomings, Neverwinter Nights was a valiant attempt at making a workable multiplayer game from the Gold Box engine.

 

[JarlFrank]

I feel like I read very mixed opinions about Neverwinter Nights. What do you guys think? The Enhanced edition and some DLC are 80% off at the minute on Steam, so I'm thinking of getting it

Worst RPG ever made.

I’m always loath to use superlatives and this is another case where my instinct feel right. NWN (OC) isn’t a good game to be sure, but I wouldn’t qualify it as the worst. I’d make a case for mediocre: it isn’t good, as I’ve written, but it isn’t bad either since nothing in it is blatantly broken or badly designed. NWN’s cardinal sin, though, is that it is dull: most characters are underdeveloped (a shame since some had potential), quests are unimaginative, and the writing pedestrian.

I’d argue that Oblivion is a far worse game, especially because the level scaling removes pretty much all challenge and makes the game effortless to the point it feels poorly designed, and the writing is insulting. Looks pretty, though. At least NWN has a definite feel of progression and a serviceable story, and some parts are memorable—the forest and lost castle were rather eerie, although the scores of trash encounters did ruin the mood.

Expansions and (some) unofficial modules redeem it though, as many have already mentioned.

That said, I’ve promised myself never to play the NWN OC again, so you might be onto something. If I do end up playing it again, I might actually join your side. :D

Some of the user-made modules are great, yes, I particularly enjoyed A Dance With Rogues and Swordflight. But the game is still terribly designed in its fundamentals and the basic gameplay of it drags down the modules. Some NWN modules would be all-time classics everyone must play if only NWN's engine were better and playing in it were actually fun.

Sadly, everything in NWN is designed to waste the player's time.

It's got some of the slowest RTWP combat I've ever experienced. A single "tick" takes extremely long, so you spend a lot of time just sitting and watching as characters stand in front of each other and swing their weapons once every three seconds. Yawn.
Thief skills are even worse. Rather than unlocking or giving you the message that your attempt failed instantly, you have to wait for a 10 second progress bar to count down before the game tells you whether you succeeded or failed. Dealing with traps and locks is extremey tedious thanks to that. Resting is the same: in every other game, like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Arcanum, resting either goes by at an instant, or you see the actual time of day advancing. But in NWN, you just watch a progress bar tick down slowly, without actually advancing time of day. It's just slow and wasting your time.

And then there's the issue of no party control, making most combat focused modules pretty shit. D&D 3E isn't really made for soloing, unless you design the module specifically around one character class. Playing a fighter is just about having a decent build, then watching your dude exchange blows with enemies in excruciatingly slow RTWP combat. The only tactical element there is when to gulp down a potion. It's about as engaging as Diablo's combat in terms of complexity, except it's much worse because of how slow everything is. Playing a wizard makes you so squishy at early levels, you better avoid combat altogether until you're level 3 or so. And henchmen are frustrating as fuck because they're AI controlled and get themselves killed all the time by being retarded.

The basic systems of NWN are just pure shit. It could be a good game with only a handful of improvements, but the way it is now it's not good at all. And the "Enhanced Edition" has done nothing to fix these issues AFAIK.

Oblivion with mods is actually more fun than NWN, because mods can fix the level scaling, or cool total conversions like Nehrim. The basic gameplay is more engaging and more suited to single-character play than NWN is, which should have full party controls but doesn't, so it essentially plays like slooooooooow Diablo.

I've played Russian shovelware RPGs that felt less tedious than NWN. There's no other RPG out there that revels as much in wasting the player's time as NWN does.

 

[Endemic]

 

[Gragt]

[…] A Dance With Rogues […]

Well, that escalated quickly.

Oblivion with mods is actually more fun than NWN, […]

That’s the thing: if we go with mods then things aren’t equal anymore. Both games have serious flaws and both have been improved by their respective communities—even though they are both fundamentally flawed. I was evaluating both games on their own merits (the few there were, anyway).

You do make many good points, but I still wouldn’t call it the worst RPG ever. It is flawed but being based on D&D 3rd Edition eventually yielded some good things, and the tools seemed to have helped with that. After all, wouldn’t you agree that you derived some enjoyment out of it, even if it was from user-created content? I should say that “worst ever” would preclude that.

 

[octavius]

 

[Darth Roxor]

Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction HD

 

[JarlFrank]

[…] A Dance With Rogues […]

Well, that escalated quickly.

Oblivion with mods is actually more fun than NWN, […]

That’s the thing: if we go with mods then things aren’t equal anymore. Both games have serious flaws and both have been improved by their respective communities—even though they are both fundamentally flawed. I was evaluating both games on their own merits (the few there were, anyway).

You do make many good points, but I still wouldn’t call it the worst RPG ever. It is flawed but being based on D&D 3rd Edition eventually yielded some good things, and the tools seemed to have helped with that. After all, wouldn’t you agree that you derived some enjoyment out of it, even if it was from user-created content? I should say that “worst ever” would preclude that.

Well, if we count mods and the good user-made content, it actually contributes to NWN's badness: the way its implementation of mechanics makes everything slow, tedious and boring detracts from the goodness of the user modules. I like A Dance With Rogues so much because it focuses a lot on non-combat content, as combat in NWN is just shit and there isn't a single mod out there that manages to fix that. It's still extremely slow, you have minimal control over companions and they usually act like retards, and it's essentially Diablo with D&D rules except 10 times slower. There are plugins that speed up resting speed (thank god), but none that speed up the progress bar when unlocking doors or disarming traps, so thief activities are still tedious (because apparently this is hardcoded). You are pretty much forced to use Cheat Engine's speedhack to make the game waste less of your time with idiotic design decisions.

NWN mods are good despite the game they run on, not because of it. Apart from ADWR, I also enjoyed Swordflight, but had many situations where I almost ragequit during the more difficult dungeon crawl sections. Playing a fighter-rogue I'm pretty good at most things, including combat, but in some places encounters are quite tough and you get a crossbow-wielding thief girl as a companion, and a spellcaster. The thief girl would always stay within enemy threat ranges and fire her crossbow, constantly provoking AoOs and killing herself in the process. The caster would always blow his best spells out against mobs that I could've dealt with on my own, so he ends up not having enough left for the tough boss encounter. It's frustrating and the exact opposite of fun. And it could be extremely fun if only you had direct control of your party members.

NWN's gameplay is fundamentally flawed and a lot of these flaws are hardcoded so modders haven't been able to fix them. So even the greatest NWN mods are dragged down by how utterly fucking shit the game is. I could've enjoyed my favorite NWN modules even more if only the game's gameplay systems were better. Dragging down top notch user content by having utterly shit systems does qualify it for being one of the worst RPGs ever made, even more so than some Russian shovelware games that are plain bad but never had mods made for them (no good user content for them to drag down).