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Decline Worst travesties in the genre?

Darth Canoli

Arcane
Joined
Jun 8, 2018
Messages
5,689
Location
Perched on a tree
Nigga you could just cheat it out and ignore it! Why the fuck you care about that side thing??? I just cheatengined 10000000 building points and fucked off killing monsters and shit.

Dude, that's exactly what i did, however, the game will load that useless throne room (2x loading screens at least each time), this is a fucking waste of time and absolutely unforgivable for something supposed to be an entertainment.
Besides, nothing about Pahtfinder is remarkable anyway so let's move on.
 

Zep Zepo

Titties and Beer
Dumbfuck Repressed Homosexual
Joined
Mar 23, 2013
Messages
5,233
One of our autistic poll makers (planetar, long, kruno) need to fix this, as everytime I see this post it reads as:

Worst Transvestites in the Genre.

Be the first, men.

Ready...GO!

Zep--
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,180
Location
Bulgaria
Nigga you could just cheat it out and ignore it! Why the fuck you care about that side thing??? I just cheatengined 10000000 building points and fucked off killing monsters and shit.

Side thing? It's not a side thing, that's the point my Bulgarian nigger. I signed up for an RPG, not this shit. If I want 4X I'll just go and play Alpha Centauri.

Furthermore, the kingdom quests are bland and poorly written. Take "Ancient Curse" for example. Oh my Lord! I feel an evil curse will strike our kingdom! I don't know when, I don't know how, I don't know why, but it will strike! Quickly my lord, do everything you can to prepare!!! (hint: you can't do anything but wait). And this same shit repeats itself 12 times (!) and that's just the beginning.

It's a very lazy way to automate quests. The next quest is the troll army which is also devoid of any context, depth or explanation, making you feel like playing a Sid Meier game.
Meh,for me was a side thing. I planed my exploration in a way that i will always end up in my territory in the end of month,so i could do the quests. You could just cheat it away mate. Still,i do agree that some of the events are pretty badly made,also those craftsmen quests were painful. Still the whole game is pretty good. The dungeon craw was fun,the encounter was challenging from time to time and the level design was good.
 

aeroaeko

Learned
Joined
Oct 19, 2018
Messages
159
Pong
we should not be playing games
we should be outside picking berries and making love
barefoot on grass and no clothes
technology is gay
you are GAY
 

HeatEXTEND

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Feb 12, 2017
Messages
3,995
Location
Nedderlent
We all know the answer, deep within our hearts: it's when gaming became mainstream, and thus, the victim of "focus groups", "marketing campaigns", "microtransactions", "loot boxes", "asset flips" et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Almost all of the most egregious gaming sins can be traced back to video games themselves becoming "mainstream".
fuck off faget
 

Biscotti

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Nov 24, 2015
Messages
562
Location
Belgium
Fallout 4.
Boring answer I know, but it's the product of decades of decline. A true perversion of a once legendary franchise.
We went from Fallout 1 all the way to a looter shooter with gutted dialogue and character building that barely surpasses the depth of your average Ubisoft themepark. I'm having difficulty thinking of a single worse travesty.
 

HeatEXTEND

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Feb 12, 2017
Messages
3,995
Location
Nedderlent
We all know the answer, deep within our hearts: it's when gaming became mainstream, and thus, the victim of "focus groups", "marketing campaigns", "microtransactions", "loot boxes", "asset flips" et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Almost all of the most egregious gaming sins can be traced back to video games themselves becoming "mainstream".
fuck off faget

Only after you learn how to spell properly. And that may take a while. So go on, grab an Oxford Dictionary and join the civilised world.
NEVER :outrage:
 

Biscotti

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Nov 24, 2015
Messages
562
Location
Belgium
This will be heresy in the eyes of many here, but I find Fallout 1 to be highly overrated/overrhyped. It's still a good game, but it has a ton of flaws.

Rather irrelevant to the point I was making. Regardless of your opinion on the first (two) game(s), if you're fond of CRPGs to some degree, the degeneration and ruination of the franchise should be plain as day.
 

Nifft Batuff

Prophet
Joined
Nov 14, 2018
Messages
3,207
Ultima VI.

For the SNES
ultima-vi-the-false-prophet-02.png
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,332
Location
Massachusettes
It's always the same lame, predictable choices for these topics. I won't be specific but any game developer that releases an RPG where the enemies visibly spawn on top of you or magically drop down from the ceiling should be sealed in a kayak of his own filth and left to spawn countless generations of flies and maggots to slowly feed off his flesh. Did Dragon Age 2 really do that? Wow.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,332
Location
Massachusettes
Gargfolk from the SNES version of Ultima VI instead of gargoyles?! Hahahaha! I had to look twice to make sure that wasn't photoshopped.
 

infidel

StarInfidel
Developer
Joined
May 6, 2019
Messages
494
Strap Yourselves In
That depends on the person, i like having different levels even if they aren't designed by hand, i can honestly say i have spent more hours playing Spelunky, Streets Of Rogue, Enter The Gungeon and others than many RPG's or even classic games, precisely because they offer a different experience and challenges all the time.

Then again, a lot of my favorite games aren't procedurally generated so i would be a hypocrite if i said i typically prefer roguelikes and roguelites, heck, i think in the past few months i haven't played one, not even Enter The Gungeon despite getting a big update.

I do enjoy Enter the Gungeon a lot since it's a good game, but I played it often enough now that I can recognize the patterns of the levels. You don't really get "infinite levels". You get a bunch of different layouts that repeat on subsequent playthroughs. Since you play the game a lot, you also must have noticed that most patterns of rooms appear again and again. Procedural generation is often like that: it repeats certain layouts and patterns, but it pretends that it's actually got "infinite levels", which isn't true. You will notice the repeating layouts and patterns at some point, and realize that you're playing through the same levels again and again, just with minor changes to them.
Shame on you for being a broken record, and shame on you, too, for making me sound like a broken record as well, when I come in to bring some perspective against your irrational procgen hate...

Anyway, your statement above is true, usually.
But that's still like 100 times more variation than any game with handmade content, so...
Besides, I consider something like Gungeon to be only midly procedurally generated - all the single blocks of a level are handmade (maybe the stuff lying around on the floor is random, too). STRAFE also falls in this category, btw. So if you think the level design there is bad, blame whoever designed the single blocks, not procgen.
True procedural generation is something like ADOM, Caves Of Qud, Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld. Where (almost) everything really is procedurally generated (in the case of DF even history, those crazed madmen!).

It really depends on what you consider "100 times more variation". Yes, levels are always different but you will still recognize patterns, types, etc, and there will be some inevitable things created by random generation, like dead ends that don't have anything interesting in them, that you can avoid in clever level design. There will at some point be something that reminds you that this level wasn't designed by a human with a creative vision behind it. That's why proc gen levels always start to feel samey to me at some point.

I'd rather play a game with a dozen truly well-made levels built by actual designers, than a game with millions of proc gen levels that all feel like proc gen. In truth, proc gen doesn't really give you more variation than hand made levels. Usually it gives you less variation, actually. If you take something like Thief or Dishonored, you have 10 to 12 hand-made levels of which each one is unique. (And in the case of Thief you have 1000+ fan-made missions, of which at least 20% or so are actually good and also have their unique style and touch.) If you look at dungeon crawlers like KotC, Grimrock, Might and Magic, etc, you have meticulously hand-crafted levels and encounters, and each encounter is designed to be a decent challenge at the level you are expected to meet it at, and there are puzzles to solve in the dungeons. BG2 is beloved for its wizard duels and generally tough and interesting encounters. Morrowind for its unique items you can find tucked away in deep dungeons.

The more procedural things are, the less impact they tend to have. Morrowind's hand-placed loot and BG2's hand-crafted unique items are often cited as some of the best itemization in RPGs ever. Meanwhile, people can't stop complaining about how lame and boring the randomly generated loot in Divinity: Original Sin is. Getting a "unique" item (which isn't truly unique because some of its stats are randomized) feels less impactful than in BG2 or Morrowind because it could drop when you kill a boss... or it could not. Because random chance plays a role in which items are found where, finding a unique item feels more like luck than actual player achievement. In games like MW and BG2 it feels like your own achievement since the unique items are always locked behind specific barriers: a tough encounter, a bunch of traps, a certain quest, creative exploration etc. When items are procedural you think "looks like I had a lucky run" rather than "I managed to track down this unique, yeah!"

As for your claim of levels having more variation, that is only partially true. In a game with hand-crafted level design, where you have 5 level designers each contributing 3 levels, you'd end up with 15 distinct levels, each with its own personality and style. And these levels can be vastly different, both in content and in quality, which leads to such discussions as "which Thief level is your favorite?". In a proc gen game there are no favorite levels because nobody is ever going to see the same level as any other player (unless you can specify the random seed manually, but it's still not the same). In proc gen games, you usually get 3 to 6 different layouts or styles of level. Say, you get the "dryad forest", the "undead crypt", the "demon underworld", the "warlock tower". These are the four types of dungeons you will encounter in the game. Almost all roguelikes do this. Even Dwarf Fortress does this. And while the actual layout of these places will vary, the overall style will stay the same. Dwarf Fortress has these pyramids, which will always have a similar (but not same) layout. Villages in DF also have similar layouts every time. Etc.

Since there will always be styles and patterns that, after some time of playing the game, will become familiar and recognizeable, there is no endless variety of levels. There's only be slightly different versions of the same levels you've gone through a dozen times already. Meanwhile, in a hand-made game every level can be unique and pull a twist on the formula. It can combine assets in unorthodox ways that still manage to work well together. It can put in surprising and challenging encounters, specifically designed to surprise the player. Locations can be filled with lore, writing, and a purpose. There is a lot more variety in hand-designed levels than there is in proc gen.

In my personal experience, no proc gen game I played up to now has given me as much sheer variety of levels as Thief and Dishonored 2 did, or Baldur's Gate 2. Proc gen games mostly deliver fake variety by juggling similar patterns and styles in different ways each time, but the end result feels way more samey than the dungeons in BG2, a Might and Magic game, Wizards and Warriors, Ultima Underworld, etc.

C'mon, you're being unfair, compairing the genius of Thief/Dishonored 2 level designs to an area that is in its relative infancy. It's not like even 10% of handmade games are on par with these. One of the problems with current procgen is that people don't even have a goal of generating beautiful levels. The goal is to make something playable and challenging for a set of combat/survival rules they implemented (notice emphasis on combat and survival, in the neighbouring thread dude was looking for at least something that has more proper non-combat-focused dungeon exploration and didn't find much). Community around a level builder is also not a given as an infinite content producer. For example, Duke 3D/Shadow Warrior/Blood has nowhere near the same amount of community levels as Quake and Quake has a pittance compared to original Doom. System Shock 2 has the same editor as Thief and I don't see much being done. Deus Ex is probably somewhere on top of every list of the best games ever done (including Codexian) and how many new campaigns per year we get for it? Somehow Doom and Thief got lucky all these years ago and all the rest got zilch.

Check this out, for example:
https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

It looks pretty good to me. If procgen will actually hit mainstream in the sense that smart people will start seriously working on it, I'm sure we'll have wonderful stuff in 5-10 years. Until then you get perlin noise and template constructors.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,663
Fallout 2.

The Codex loves shitting on Bethesda, but the truth is that Fallout 4 and Fallout 3 didn't come out of nowhere. If Fallout 2 didn't exist, we wouldn't have Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 as we know them: we would have had Fallout 2 and Fallout 3.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,663
This will be heresy in the eyes of many here, but I find Fallout 1 to be highly overrated/overrhyped. It's still a good game, but it has a ton of flaws.

Fallout is the good kind of overrated games, though. And that is because people mention its strengths, and its strengths live up to the hype. But it has flaws people simply ignore. The bad kind of overrated games is when people praise the game's strengths, but upon playing said game you realize those strengths are simply not there. This happens a lot with Bethesda games, i.e. "the exploration is amazing!" and then you go and play them, and realize the exploration is garbage.

This is why I can't trust user reviews anymore, and why I pay much more attention to negative reviews. A well written negative review is much more important to me than 10 positive reviews.
 
Joined
May 31, 2018
Messages
2,554
Location
The Present
Pillars of Eternity. For a game that was a kickstarter darling and all that, i really don't get why it's considered to be so good. Everything about the game is just so... bland. Don't get me wrong, it's competent, but far from stellar like some people say it is. For a game about souls, it sure lacks a lot of just that. Combat is uninspiring, the writing tries so hard to tell so little in so many words (and then most of what it says is just bland and uninteresting), companions are boring, it has very little room for RP... yeesh. Don't know what all the fuss was about. I put ~10 hours into it and i'm done.

What a monumental disappointment that game was. They correctly identified nearly every short-coming to not only the IE games, but adaptation of turn based RPG games to real-time CRPG, yet came up with the totally wrong remedy in all instances. PoE is the greatest gaming heartbreak in history.
 

Daemongar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 21, 2010
Messages
4,722
Location
Wisconsin
Codex Year of the Donut
You are correct sir. I, like you, really looked forward to Diablo and Diablo 2. They ended up shitting up the genre so to speak. As fun as the game was, it caused problems with the volume of sales and every RPG game a failure for not hitting 1M sales or such. This guaranteed another Demons Winter or whatever would never be made.

Also Oblivion had problems, but it maintained the skills and abilities of the entire series. Everyone fucking hates Oblivion but at least it had the character stats and kept the unique abilities. Skyrim is a travesty. Health, Stamina, and Magic - fuck! The oversimplification of everything to simplistic shit. Travesty!

But travesties? I suppose the move from low magic 1st Edition type RPGs to magic pouring out your ass, hp bloat, +10, pathfinder kind of crap.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
You are correct sir. I, like you, really looked forward to Diablo and Diablo 2. They ended up shitting up the genre so to speak. As fun as the game was, it caused problems with the volume of sales and every RPG game a failure for not hitting 1M sales or such. This guaranteed another Demons Winter or whatever would never be made.

Also Oblivion had problems, but it maintained the skills and abilities of the entire series. Everyone fucking hates Oblivion but at least it had the character stats and kept the unique abilities. Skyrim is a travesty. Health, Stamina, and Magic - fuck! The oversimplification of everything to simplistic shit. Travesty!

But travesties? I suppose the move from low magic 1st Edition type RPGs to magic pouring out your ass, hp bloat, +10, pathfinder kind of crap.
fun fact: the original design of Diablo was essentially a DLC-fest. When you bought the game you got the barebones then had to buy 'packs' to expand the game with actual content.
http://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf
image.png
 

Daemongar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 21, 2010
Messages
4,722
Location
Wisconsin
Codex Year of the Donut
You are correct sir. I, like you, really looked forward to Diablo and Diablo 2. They ended up shitting up the genre so to speak. As fun as the game was, it caused problems with the volume of sales and every RPG game a failure for not hitting 1M sales or such. This guaranteed another Demons Winter or whatever would never be made.

Also Oblivion had problems, but it maintained the skills and abilities of the entire series. Everyone fucking hates Oblivion but at least it had the character stats and kept the unique abilities. Skyrim is a travesty. Health, Stamina, and Magic - fuck! The oversimplification of everything to simplistic shit. Travesty!

But travesties? I suppose the move from low magic 1st Edition type RPGs to magic pouring out your ass, hp bloat, +10, pathfinder kind of crap.
fun fact: the original design of Diablo was essentially a DLC-fest. When you bought the game you got the barebones then had to buy 'packs' to expand the game with actual content.
http://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf
image.png
And you know what? it would have succeeded on me, even though the effect on RPGs was terrible. Why? Because when Diablo 1 came out, they released a beta with 1 level that could be hacked for up to 4 dungeon levels and players couldn't get enough of. Shit, I was playing on dial up on a hacked version to get to the 4th level of the dungeon. Was it amazing? yes. Was it detrimental to gaming? Absolutely.

However, I still stand that Fallout 1 was the savior of RPGs. It was released after Diablo 1 and had NO similarities and was successful. Had it been a flop, we would be stuck with NOTHING BUT Diable clones for the rest of the 90's/2000's. This may sound corny, but whatever. Thank God for Fallout 1.
 

PsychoFox

Educated
Joined
Mar 27, 2019
Messages
293
Location
(P___q)
Pillars of Eternity. For a game that was a kickstarter darling and all that, i really don't get why it's considered to be so good. Everything about the game is just so... bland. Don't get me wrong, it's competent, but far from stellar like some people say it is. For a game about souls, it sure lacks a lot of just that. Combat is uninspiring, the writing tries so hard to tell so little in so many words (and then most of what it says is just bland and uninteresting), companions are boring, it has very little room for RP... yeesh. Don't know what all the fuss was about. I put ~10 hours into it and i'm done.

What a monumental disappointment that game was. They correctly identified nearly every short-coming to not only the IE games, but adaptation of turn based RPG games to real-time CRPG, yet came up with the totally wrong remedy in all instances. PoE is the greatest gaming heartbreak in history.
Admittedly i am enjoying PoEII much more than its prequel. It's improved across the board (Specially in combat department) and i'd say well worth a try. Still, it does suffer from some of the same issues PoE I has namely the obnoxious writing, and I believe it doesn't manage to fully realize its potential with the system design and world-reactivity. Still, not as atrocious as the first game and i find myself keep going back to it for the combat (while waiting for PFKM to get patched to get rid of the stutter bug).
 

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