IndiraLightfoot

I tried my hand at Vampire like 12 years too late. The game was barely playable for technical reasons, but I have a feeling it would be a game that I'd really love. I hope Obsidian's secret project is something along that game in atmosphere and design. All in all, a very cool list!

Although it would mess up some spell variety, I believe you're right gGeorg. I recall how I tried to argue for no decimal numbers and such during the PoE1 beta. I'd love to see integers throughout the combat system. That's why I don't want to see any casting durations of 0.5 or 1.5 s.

7 Grand Steps: What Ancients Begat: A review: https://indiegamereviewer.com/review-7-grand-steps-what-ancients-begat-a-virtual-coin-operated-game-from-mousechief/

I'm tempted to say Arkane Studios' Prey. You actually get to complete almost the entire game transforming into coffee cups, cigarette butts, toilet rolls, and wet floor signs.

Portal.

Absolutely true. This is right now the biggest flaw with Deadfire: it's all or nothing. In PoE1, there I could build a thousand varied and surprisingly nuanced builds. It had like a greater number of sliding scales that I could adjust and jog.

What I love about this thread, is the overall perspective on the combat system and its ambition to compare it with the mature iterations of PoE1. We know this: -The PoE1 system worked well, it had its own CRPG signature, including some of its flaws -With Deadfire, Josh & Co seem to wish to make the game sleeker and more in line with other similar CRPGs. Thus, 50% of the combat system is currently altered. -The system is not at all balanced right now. It's like that saying: "If we only could be strangers again." Obsidian is trying to make a new and fresh system, but we have trouble forgetting our long relationship with the old and tried one. I applaud their bravery, but it may turn out to be a mistake, especially as I fear there are lots of nerfs incoming, when I'd rather want to see a stern focus on Deadfire offering as fun and engaging and varied combat experiences as possible.

Sadly, I must admit to having not played any Jagged Alliance game, but may I still say that Jagged Alliance 2 has the coolest cover art of all time?

But... How...? How did you know?

Hmm, it says Jagged Alliance 70, so it should be the highest or something else is wrong? Adding in NWN2 + MotB (63), you can really tell this is the Obsidian forums, a lot of their games super high, plus CRPGs in general. Well, thanks to NWN2 + MotB not equal to one game, Baldur's Gate made it to top 10, which is my favourite of the BG games.

Heh, who needs the word "pinnacle"? CRPGs are the (pine)apple of the avid video gamer's eye!

Yay, if I add NWN2 and MotB, my beloved NWN2 will be top 10!

I can totally see how people really like DA:O. However, the things I listed just killed it for me in the long run. I played it through once, and then when I had all the expansions, I tried to do it again, but Awakening got the better of me, and I just let it go. But storywise, I did like DA:I's better, and combat, well it's close, like you say, both are repetitive alright, but some enemies and settings were so very well done in DA:I. I loved that spooky swamp area, where skellies rose up from the bogs. Problem for me was that DA:I was so extremely big that I never got to finish it. I have 140h invested, no expansions, and I'm still caught in a red desert somewhere. What I really hated in DA:I was that war room - a very annoying hub that you had to endure over and over again. Absolutely disgusting. The few companions I had aboard in DA:I was very elaborate and well done. I didn't take that guy with the horns, though. I got the freezing queen, the gay wizard and the arrow-slinging elf (that sounds like a queer group, and it was! ).

Regardless, I must say that I'm extremely grateful for algroth's fantastic list. What a tremendous effort! He's put a lot of work into it. I didn't expect game cover images and all. Thank you, algroth! And he's already said that this OC vs expansion thingie would be controversial. It seems there will be very few games suffering at that. NWN2 is one, and I suspect BG2 will do too.

Yep! I have this as well, and it's been like this since the beta started.

Oh noes, Melkathi! I'll miss you terribly!!

Yup, that's why I suggested earlier that Empower gets ditched in favour of dunehunter's modal suggestions for casters. That would make Deadfire so much more fun to play, and also, the combat tactics gets slightly deeper and much more varied (and thus, we get to build casters that are varied too). All the systems, including UI, are already there, all that's needed is some cool ideas for modals, implementation, and then balancing those caster modals.

I just hope and pray that we'll get to see spell/caster modals the way you suggested, dunehunter. In that way, you effectively diversify empower in so many interesting ways. I mean, I'd love to try to make a caster that specializes in fast casting and fast recovery for spells - assuming we would get a few modals that speed things up in that manner.

Haha, MotB is on the list. It says there, right on the box, that it requires NWN2 to be played. And, as an avid modder of NWN2 I know how much sweet stuff MotB brought to the table (then we got Storm of Zehir, which added create-all-of-your-companions-yourself-functionality), I'll personally treat this list now like this: NWN2+MotB == 64 points (We'll see how far that will take NWN2, and perhaps Storm of Zehir got some stray point or two). Also, seeing Dishonored this high up just makes me happy. Comparably, it is a very new IP, and I recall that I saw that first trailer and thought: "Heck, yeah. I wanna play this game with all this cool powers." And for once, the trailer that got me carried away, well it was duller than the gameplay itself. A fantastic game! However, the same can't be said for DA:O, IMHO. The lacklustre story, the extremely repetitive combat, where I killed the same kind of enemies over and over and over, those unnatural big hands on all PCs and NPCs, showering your companions with weird pressies... It all sucked much of the fun out of the game. I actually reckon DA:I is slightly better, and that says a lot. I liked Shale, though, it was a cool companion. I'm surprised that it scores this big, and the same goes for Icewind Dale. I'm playing Heart of Winter right now, and it feels like a decent BG1 mod, nothing more. If it wasn't for the great soundtracks and that it's D&D with decent combat, it has nothing going for it. IIRC, Josh said that they made the entire game in 9 months. An incredible feat, but it also shows.

Yeah, NWN1 would never get any epic votes, were it not for its toolset and persistent world CRPG heaven galore.

Gosh, it really paid off giving my favourite games as many points as I could, seeing NWN1 at #40 and NWN2 at #33, this wouldn't have happened if I didn't carry them there! I reckon they deserve to be higher up the rungs than - the same goes for Ultima VII. Still, IIRC, people have voted separately for MotB, so we'll see.

It warms my 4x heart to see that CiV got this kind of score, #50 here is more than decent. CiV got so much flack when it was released, but time went by, and two nice expansions, and I ended up doing all the achievements for that game. It was extremely entertaining, for hundreds of hours.

Heh, when I open the game, 2002-2005 copyright is glaring at me at the bottom of the main menu. I never bothered looking at a possible different release date, in this case 2005. Well, it's surprisingly old and fabulous!

Alright guys, you convinced me. I'd love to see v1, but adjusted like this: 0, 1, 2, and 4.

I'm enjoying my X-mas break a lot, and I'm wedging in some hours of game time here and there. I'm doing a mix of playing new games and rummaging through my backlog. As I showed you earlier, I did play the D&D board game port Tomb of Annihilation. And for an iPad game, I coudl perhaps recommend as a time killer. I did finish it, but darn was it repetitive. And the story were nearly non-existent. How can WotC sit on such a fantastic brand and dragging through the mud like this. I would've made a huge effort making money off of it, given that most of us D&D fans are past the baby caring years, with better incomes and more time on our hands. I just don't get it why they just keep on failing: Daggerdale, Swordcoast Legends (decent, but so many miscommunications, and the CRPG system was pretty idiotic)) and now Tomb of Annihilation. *End of my WotC rant* I've also played a bit of Unexplored today, a rather new Roguelike that was very entertaining and promising. I'll get back to it and probably switch to a Xbox-controller, which the game supports. And now, to that moment I always keep hoping for when I check out games in my backlog. You know the drill: "Oh, I about this game bundle years ago, perhaps I should try this very old game..." When I bought DS3, I did it because it was an Obsidian game with George Ziets as a writer and all. I played it once, and thought that Dungeon Siege 2 was apretty decent game. Well, along with it, I got a package with DS1 and DS2. And like 6 years ago, I tried DS1, and I thought it was pretty meh. I only played with that first party of mine for like 5 lvls, tops. That meant that I presumed DS2 was pretty much the same. But, wowzers, I was wrong, sooooo wrong! I'm pretty much stunned. Dungeon Siege 2 is a fantastic game, right up my alley, and almost everything about it is great. I can't believe I haven't played this game until now, like 16 years later. It came out 2002! How could I even miss it? For those of you who don't know anything about the game, it's pretty much a mix of ARPG and CRPG. I'm pretty sure, I'd get away with describing as a CRPG. And I can almost not write any cons about it. Everything is just pros, pros, pros: Pros: -Pretty great graphics (must have been stellar back then) - they match rather modern games like Path of Exile, it run circles around NWN1, and it's on par, I think, with NWN2. -Very atmospheric music, and fitting to all the various themes and encounters. Brilliant sound effects. -The dialogue: A lovely mix of seriousness and humour - more or less BG1-standards (I just don't know much of the lore, except for DS3) -The story really works, and the characters and the plot and the early hub, everything's so very well done. Even their small tutorials, which are built into the game pretty seamlessly. -The UI, the controls, the CRPG systems, all of these things are intuitive and easy to use. -The development of your party and your characters, crafting, I mean, it's surprisingly addictive and deceptively simple. There is this wonderful sense of progress, and combat is fun, semi-bosses and bosses are just the right kind of difficult, and dying and respawning comes at a prize. -Almost endless loot (It reminds me of Titan Quest, which I love) All the great ARPGs and CRPGs 2003 and onwards have borrowed heavily from this gem of a game (settings, gameplay solutions, encounter design, the lot! It's a true forerunner in many ways.) Had I got my hands on this back in 2002, I'd played it until my fingers bled and then some. Actually, I'm pretty sure it would be among my most played games by now, and a real candidate for my 25-best-games-of-all-time-list I sent Algroth. Yeah, it's that frigging good. How can there not be a Dungeon Siege 4? Here are some images of my early progress in the game. I haven't used any build guides or anything. I just pick what I feel like, and try to survive. I rolled a Dryad for my main, and she is a clunky combat mage, with bits of melee and nature. Hehe, I did multiclass here when they explicitly told me early on that spezialisation's the best. I don't care, I have fun here, folks! That's all that matters, right? Every game that start off early with my main character getting imprisoned is great in my book! The same goes for platforms in canopies and zipline cabin lifts. DS2 has made brilliant use of parallax effects, creating a sense of depth to almost every scene and area. Super-duper-nice! Sure, you can tell the max setting is 1280x680 or whatever it is, but still, even the effects are decent. Every little NPC you click on is worth it, and plot twists are pretty cool. A little cave behind a waterfall, haunted and all. Dis I mention it has seemless entrances to underground areas, just like Titan Quest? Looks like a smith who knows what she's doing, no? Hmm, looks can be deceiving. You get to find chants all over the world, and then chant them at special ancient sites. Now I know where Skyrim got their stone system from!! And teleporters, Goldilock style, just the right amount of them. Special doors only openable by certain skills at certain levels? Like in Dragon Age: Inquisition or LEGO: Star Wars/*Insert Major Brand*. Well, here's the original. Those often loathed question marks above quest giver's heads? Yup, you guessed it. I'm pretty sure this is the best CRPG jungle setting I've enjoyed so far. The outfits, leopard skin tents, you name it. Would NWN2 or D3 ever have been made, had it not been for DS2 area design? I doubt it. Nothing to see her folks! Just a ghost on a rope bridge, pondering a waterfall, and who speaks in a dialect nobody in my party can understand. Once again, notice the neat depth/3D effects going on here. All the while, jungle noises are blaring in my ears playing it, and jungle drums are patting feverishly... I just love it when you find the game of your dreams 16 years to late! EDIT: Oh, the game's so old that you need to add a line to the .ini file under Documents just to get the mouse to work under updated Win 7/8/10. Just add: "full screen = false", IIRC.