Fenixp

You mean playing a game is boring? It's no different from games with XP mechanics really - you want to increase a skill, you grind. You want more XP, you grind. A well designed game won't ever require you to grind, regardless of skill mechanics used. Which is the first massive advantage of "learn by doing" systems, incidentally. When you learn skills by using them and you can't level a skill up, it probably means the skill is useless and should be ignored. It has this mechanical courtesy of telling you "Oh yes, the skill is there, but we didn't have enough time to polish it up, just ignore it." Those are the same kinds of skills you invest in XP-based games and the find out they're utterly useless and you have lost a bunch of skill points needlessly. How exactly is that different from running away in the middle of a quest to grind up XP? In fact I'd say learn by doing systems have massive advantage here since you quite simply won't get inexplicably better at swinging your sword by finishing a bunch of fetch quests. The writing is less consistent since the expansion is more open and ... well, longer, but the writing is brilliant nonetheless.

I got really worried for a bit. Bloody Americans.

I -think- Tyranny is supposed to use some mix of trainers and learning by doing system? I generally really enjoy learning by doing system because it solves most issues I've got with XP systems.

Yes, actually, that's entirely correct. Well, they can feel free to call their arbitrary points XP for all I care, but I want to see more systems like one present in Vampire: The Masquerade or, hopefully, Tyranny (because that one'll be awesome, right?)

No. Just... No. XP for combat is an archaism that needs to die for so many reasons. That's boring tho. As I said, I really enjoyed the combat - there was just too much of it against very similar opponents. Repetition can kill even the most entertaining gameplay.

Eh, I still think it was well worth the 40 EUR I paid for it, and after all I spent like 190 hours or so with it which kinda attests to how much I enjoyed it. I'd probably play it for even more and finish it like 4, 5 times if the game was shorter - I still absolutely adore character creation, progression mechanics and combat, for me it's pretty much the top RTWP combat system in an RPG.

Sticking to Pillars of Eternity is ... Difficult. I was so enthralled by the game first time around that I managed to finish it, but when I was replaying it with WM, I started noticing just how much pointless filler there is. Just a trash encounter after trash encounter. That game really needed proverbial editor to ask "What is this encounter for? And this one? How is this location relevant to the plot or lore? So, are you absolutely, positively certain you need to undermine quality of your megadungeon by having 15 floors just because backers?" and cut and chop to make the game half its length.

I always had such mixed feelings about dungeons in Skyrim. They're beautiful, they all their their little stories and those which actually contain unique features are very memorable. But they're just so damn linear, with a convenient shortcut to exit at the end. Not only is it immersion-breaking and makes no sense, it all feels like it undermines the effort spent on making all of these dungeons relevant in some respect. Oh well.

Yeah, Kirkwall was great, what really prevents it from getting onto the "Best RPG cities" list for me is quite simply because it felt like a modder created it. The city wasn't alive, it was empty, some NPCs just wandering about aimlessly. Real shame too, the city looked fantastic.

So, after figuring out that I find it really difficult to not play Skyrim Remaster, I installed basic needs, I installed Frostfall and a bunch of other mods to make the game more interesting and now I'm having fun. Might look for a mod to rebalance perk tree as well, we'll see. I don't think I'll go for any hardcore difficulty mod because, as it turns out, 3 months straight of working weekeneds really just makes me want to play something relaxing. And I finally found a way to make field of view stick to chosen value, which is a plus. Anyway, while exploring a random bandit-infested ruin, I overheard the bandits talk about a mage researching something in the dungeon. So I went down, found room with the mage, and heard him mumbling about finding something. After dealing with him and exploring his bookshelf, I found a book describing location of some sort of ancient, powerful forge hidden in the heart of Skyrim - naturally, this forge is in-game and that was the first clue to find it. And people wonder why do I keep praising the world design and exploration in that game, this ruin wasn't even connected to a quest or anything. The game's chock-full of stuff like that.

It is a known bug, wait for 3.04 patch which should be released... Any year now. In the meantime, you can respec at inns, get rid of the offending ability and continue playing. But that's not much of a solution really, just a workaround. ... That's weird, I feel like I've had this conversation today. Hm.

As it turns out, quitting playing Skyrim until more essential mods get released is easier said than done. Well the dragons are supposed to be pretty much the most powerful creatures in that world. I'd say the succeeded portraying that, to frustration of many.

Yes, that's why I enjoyed Dying Light so damn much. Driving in Mad Max didn't really take a huge amount of skill sadly and car combat became trivial with some upgrades, which kinda killed the game for me. And repetition.

It not only can be done with a Divinity: Original Sin system, it was done with it. Divinity: Original Sin has no loading screens for majority of interiors, and there are many more 3D, non-tile based RPGs which do that. Now that I think about it I'd actually love to see that effect in an isometric RPG with pre-rendered background, altho it would likely mean generating several layers for each building and creating some sort of fake 3D effect. Hmm...

I'd like to point out that one thing Special Edition really improved is how rain and snow is handled. In other words, that they don't pass through terrain. So if wind blows in a certain direction and you step under a cliff, it'll block the snow. If you stand beneath a roof, it'll block the rain. It's really old tech of course and should have been in the game in the first place, but it finally bloody is and it feels great.

I think that, somewhere in the EULA, you agree that Bethesda has ownership of all user modifications. But let's say that EULAs are not really legal documents and won't necessarily stand up in court. What I would expect Bethesda to do is to take a look at the bugs unofficial patch fixes, all described in the wiki and I'm pretty sure bug tracker of the patch itself, and fix the bloody things for themselves. I'm not even asking them to fix everything, just the progress-stopping stuff (and there's not even that much of it left in the game, incidentally.) You know, so that people who don't want to play with mods don't bump into these well-known and documented problems. Not your choice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcIjFeWE4fE

Arcanum with -any- different combat system, really. I'd easily settle to original Fallout's level of polish and complexity, which is what Arcanum tried to go for in the first place and failed. Oh well, I'm sure Arcanum 2 will do a lot better when it comes out. It will come out, right?

Oh, I just remembered Krondor from Betrayal at Krondor, but it's just an example of cities presented in older RPGs. You only got pictures and text-descriptions with your imagination doing all your work. This bundled with great writing in Betrayal has made mere act of reaching Krondor for the first time very memorable for me.

It still feels like an incredibly stupid decision on part of Bethesda. "Hey, look, we brought modding support to consoles! And here's how we're going to disincentivize modding!" It's a small thing, but some people actually enjoy hunting for achievements, and for many, half the fun of TES games is modding. So what's the worst thing that can happen with modded Skyrim with achievements enabled? Some people's achievements will all get automatically unlocked or made easier via mods. ... ... So ****ing what? Edit: Apparently, they added Rain Occlusion! For the first time in Elder Scrolls history, water particles are unable to pass through roofs!

And with this, I am done with the remaster for now. I still need a whole bunch of mods to come out for it. Frostfall is out which is great, so now I need basic needs and some sort of overhaul for the skill system to make perks more fun and to make the game more difficult. They'll come, eventually.

So, here's what the modding UI looks like: Yeah, it handles as horribly as it looks. And here's how you download a mod: You can't leave the modding interface until all mods are finished loading, so ... I hope you like sitting and staring at menus. I guess that's where the decision to add borderless window came in. However, when you log into their service, Bethesda graces you with the power of loading mods directly from data files! ... *sigh* Edit: And yes, Bethesda made sure that unofficial patch is available since day 1! As opposed to... Y'know... Incorporating the fixes. Nobody's got time to do that.

I was so looking forward for Bethesda to finally fix their bloody distant land textures. Naturally, they didn't. Edit: All right, tried it for a bit. The game actually does look pretty damn pretty, aside from some LOD issues pointed out by WDeranged. As far a I can tell, Pros: - It looks a lot nicer in many areas - Natively supports borderless window - Colors seem a lot more vibrant, the world doesn't look so ... Bleached out. Cons: - It doesn't perform all that well. I mainly wanted Bethesda to do the remaster because Skyrim modded to look pretty didn't perform all that great. So now Bethesda improved it officially and it still doesn't run all that great. - No FOV slider. Still. I mean, what the ****, when a single console command can change it, it's clearly not that difficult to implement. - Mod manager. Or lack thereof. There's no "Data files" button in the launcher which has been a bit of a staple of Elder Scrolls series since Morrowind. To manage mods, you need to log-in to Bethesda network. I can imagine this'll be swiftly fixed by unofficial mod managers, but it still sucks arse. - Many textures still look rather gnarly up close All in all, I'm fairly disappointed, but it's still Skyrim. And since it's Skyrim, I can't stand it for more than 30 minutes without mods, so waiting for it to get proper mods released is the next course of action. Bye bye, Skyrim Remastered.

I don't think what they have in Tyranny really constitutes stronghold - instead it seems to be all about choosing in which order you wish to have accessible which services, which could be an interesting decision, even tho I'd like some to be mutually exclusive. Oh well.

Not a huge fan of cities focusing on quantity over quality (which certainly encapsulates procedurally generated towns in Daggerfall or, sadly, even Tarant - even tho in case of Tarant I think it's more of a case of Troika not having enough time to properly fill it with content more than anything.) Novigrad is a good one, altho when we're talking Witcher 3, I'd say Toussaint instead - it's certainly smaller, but also a lot more interesting to explore - bonus points for the city having a lot of verticality. Then there's Vivec from Morrowind, one of the most visually striking locations in RPG games with a huge boulder looming over it. Dunwall from Dishonored if Dishonored can be considered an RPG, for how eerily familiar it feels. Anor Londo from Dark Souls is a city you'll never forget, that's pretty much guaranteed. Actually, Yharnam from Bloodborne is quite worth mentioning as well. Does Citadel from Mass Effect count? Fallen London from Fallen London and Sunless Sea for how utterly fascinating it is, with background that could fill several lore books. Hell's Kitchen from Deus Ex for presenting strangely believable future (with a little detail born from lack of memory, but made frighteningly real later on) Sigil from Planescape Torment goes without saying.

Huh? Oblivion scaled 100%. You could finish the main quest line on like lvl 2 and that's only because lvl 2 was a hard-scripted requirement for a daedric quest you've had to complete in order to progress in main storyline. As opposed to Skyrim, which... Let's just say I dare you to finish a dwemer ruin on lvl 1 :-P Level scaling in Skyrim was still a bit too much to my liking, but there actually were dangerous areas and enemies which outpowered you, something not at all present in Oblivion. It's true that Oblivion had a lot more of Morrowind in it than Skyrim does, definitely. And I also really enjoy character creation and progression, which happens to precisely be why do I enjoy Skyrim a lot more than I did Oblivion. Thing is, I feel like transition from Morrowind to Oblivion dropped everything of substance about Morrowind's mechanics - Bethesda was cutting systems from Morrowind left and right without much thought as to how it'll affect the bigger picture until we were left with skeleton of RPG mechanics that were Oblivion. For Skyrim, somebody actually seems to have sat down and put serious amount of thought into how to make these changes work, which naturally leads to a massively different game, but IMO also massively superior. Of course, this doesn't necessarily have to mean that you'll like the changes - I still however stand by my initial statement that Skyrim quite simply contains a lot more meaningful mechanical complexity which hardly existed in Oblivion (and Morrowind beats both, hands down). It's poorly balanced of course - but balance is not exactly what TES games ever did right, so meh. Anyway, you definitely hit the nail on the head by saying that they're quite simply very different in their mechanics. If you quite simply prefer more traditionally structured RPGs, you'll obviously like Oblivion more than Skyrim.