Ganrich

I think they replaced sanity with shotgun, TBH.

Destruction has always been mediocre. In MW the best damage spell was in Mysticism iirc. So, if you are using magic for damage then prepare to be underwhelmed. However, all the other schools were powerful. They supplement other builds. Destruction did have it's attribute damaging spells that were useful. An Archer with destruction could harm a melee enemies strength and basically paralyze them via encumbrance. Conjuration, Mysticism, illusion, and restoration can down right break MW. Enchant can too, but it's a pain to level up by comparison and you can still fail at enchanting items. If you knew what you were doing Magick in MW was incredibly powerful. Where in Skyrim all the other schools suffered because of Shouts because they lost spells. They didn't make destruction useful though. You have to spam forever to do anything. They should have killed Destruction Vs Mysticism and spread damage spells out to the other schools.

And Bethesda ruined a bunch of companies so that they could purchase them, and Hollywood ruined Orson Welles and Walt Disney. Business is ****ing over a bunch of people to make profit, at this point you think that developers would have figured out a way to **** back. And whatever you do, don't glance over at EA with Origin Systems and (arguably) Bioware. What happened to Pandemic? The big fish eat the little fish so they can poop.

Almost anyone that played it knows its combat is a busted mess. However, the world is incredibly crafted, its char gen is among the best (I think it is the best), its reactivity is stellar, and it has some great side quests/companions/content. It's definitely a very flawed gem. It gets a whole lot wrong, but the things it gets right are incredible. If the combat was better implemented... I daresay people would remember it more fondly than many of the classics (Fallout, Baldur's Gate, etc). However, we got what we got, and the world (plus its other positives) is/are well made enough that the IP deserves another shot despite its broken combat. The character creation system was bad. Sure, lots of weird options for flavor, and it had a certain elegance in that a point was a point was a point. But allowing a lot of options doesn't help you much in my book when a substantial percentage of them get the "ha-ha, non-viable choice!" kick to the balls a third of the way through the game. (And a few others get the opposite treatment: "Oh, you put a single point in the 'Harm' spell, so the rest of the game is EZ Mode!") To me, Arcanum is exhibit A to support the proposition that, yes, balance matters in single-player games. As for the setting, the world had an interesting core concept, but they failed to populate it with any interesting characters. Yeah, the Char Gen is directly effected by the broken combat. Fix the combat, retain the Char Gen, and you have a winner. I said that already. It still doesn't mean the IP isn't worth a revisit. Just fix the combat, and then you don't have to worry about that level of imbalance in the skills. As for characters, to each there own. I found a few to my liking. Just like any other RPG of the mid-90s to early-2000s you have a mixed bag. Some characters appeal to some people, and so on. It could use improvement, but there are worse out there.

I don't disagree. However, one of the perks of Arcanum's tile system is that you don't load into buildings, and a byproduct of that is that buildings are to scale. One of my pet peeves of isometric RPGs is that the scale on the outside is small, and then when you load in you find yourself in a mansion. Having the buildings more like Arcanum would allow sneaking in through windows and the like without a load screen. It would give stealthy/thieving gameplay some added umph. Peek in the window to see if anyone is home, climb through, steal the good china, and make a buck. I'm sure it can be done with the WL2/DOS systems, but I think it would be easier with tiles. Maybe a mix. Something like WL2/DOS for natural environments, and tiled buildings. It could make modding easy. Not unlike Shadowrun's tools, but with better terrain. I dunno how feasible it is. Just thought I would toss it out there.

Almost anyone that played it knows its combat is a busted mess. However, the world is incredibly crafted, its char gen is among the best (I think it is the best), its reactivity is stellar, and it has some great side quests/companions/content. It's definitely a very flawed gem. It gets a whole lot wrong, but the things it gets right are incredible. If the combat was better implemented... I daresay people would remember it more fondly than many of the classics (Fallout, Baldur's Gate, etc). However, we got what we got, and the world (plus its other positives) is/are well made enough that the IP deserves another shot despite its broken combat.

^ Pretty much how I looked at it in the 45 mins or so I walked around. I will just load the original and mod it. The only thing improved is lighting, and anything else they did have better mods out there. Titanfall 2's campaign is really short, but pretty sweet. It isn't the best or anything, but I enjoyed it. It took me about 4 and a half hours to complete it. Now on to MP.

Getting ready to load Skyrim remastered (hey it was free) while I wait for Titanfall 2 to be playable in about 45 mins. Im just seeing if this Skyrim update is worth anything vs modded regular Skyrim.

This, but I would replace Citidel with Vivec of Morrowind or Trinsic of Ultima Online. Tarant is my number one. It's one of the strong points of Arcanum. Edit: I mean Tarant also had street names to assist navigating it, and that made it a hair more "real" to me.

What I meant is Skyrim felt like you were mostly safe because of the lack of level scaling. Don't get me wrong. I know there were areas where trolls, liches, etc were and would wreck you at level one, but it felt that the game's difficulty was always too far behind you. I cranked it to a harder difficulty (it's been too long to remember what difficulty, but I usually play with it pretty high), and I still burned through enemies fairly easily. Oblivion's scaling was silly. No matter what level you were the enemies were around the same. Nothing worse than a bandit in Daedric armor demanding 50 gold. It also was problematic if you built a less combat focused character, or spammed jump too much with acrobatics as a skill. You ended up with enemies too tough to tackle. No, I actually am more hard on Oblivion than Skyrim. It is a completely different can of worms, though. Skyrim isn't bad, but it could be much better. Oblivion did some things better, but not many. I feel like Skyrim is like a skeleton that needs some flesh. If the perks were made more interesting, the standing stones made more interesting, the enemies were less copy/pasted (like MW), the quest lines not so mediocre(something Oblivion got right with its faction quests. They were probably the best part of the game), the world more reactive, more factions that don't get along so you can't join all of them, etc... I'd love it. I also miss the MW dialogue system. Bring that level of depth, and I'm sold. However, it felt like an open world dungeon crawler, with mediocre quests, and easy and simple combat. Yeah, I also don't care about balance being great, but all combat styles need to be fun and capable. Skyrim fails that for me because of how crappy the magic is. Dragon shouts really did become iconic, but man did it harm magicka as a whole. I will definitely wait for news of TES VI, but I won't be jumping in this time without heavy scrutiny.

The problem with Skyrim's disposition everyone inevitably likes you 2 hours into the game. It may as well be binary. Yeah, they removed attributes. That's what I meant. I think a lot of value was lost with attributes, but we will likely run circles here. I like building the character. The "organic" leveling is marketing jargon to me. Skyrim went too far with the lack of scaling levels from Oblivion. Those two things combined to make it feel like you were a god at level 1 through 50. Well, if you avoid Giants, early on. In Morrowind you had to think to succeed at times. I have no problem with any player maxing everything after 300 hours logged in the game. Who cares? It's not like the games make you pick factions at the cost of other factions becoming hostile anymore. So every play through is identical in terms of content. May as well let players max everything and not start over to try different things. If your game isn't being designed with replaying in mind then let the player max everything. I won't do it, but it doesn't hurt the game to allow it. It's a bandaid fix to a nonexistent problem. They could have kept attributes, not allowed players to increase three of them by +5 every level, and limited the number of skill increases like Ultima did in UO. Same outcome. No character with all attributes and skills maxed. Magicka almost instantly refills, and potions are in such abundance that they might as well move to a cool down system with the next installment. Limited potions and limited magicka regen in MW made you debate casting spells, but the byproduct was spells were actually useful and fun. Now they are boring, and almost useless. Destruction was never great, but man is it tedious in Skyrim. No, standing stones "would" be mostly cosmetic, but they put 4 in that replace the major/minor system from previous games. Thief, Mage, Warrior, and Lover (IIRC) increased leveling speed. So, you have to choose between something interesting(which there weren't many even still) or increasing skills not being a chore. It's like they simplify things without wondering what the ramifications might be. I just don't know how you can say more was removed in the transition between MW to Oblivion than Oblivion to Skyrim. I like Skyrim, in many ways more than Oblivion, but that doesn't change that Oblivion still had a lot of MW still in there. It's nearly all gone in Skyrim. One could argue that the differences are so vast that it's like comparing the first two games to anything after. You can compare Arena and DF, or Oblivion and MW, or Skyrim and maybe TES VI. However, the changes are so vast you can't compare Skyrim and MW, or even Skyrim and Oblivion. We might have an easier time discussing the similarities of Skyrim to the previous 2 TES games vs the differences. I'll start. How are they similar? They aren't.

Yeah, I still haven't played FO4 because of the voiced PC. I just knew how much that would limit the options, and knew it wasn't for me. I probably never will play it, tbh. I give Bethesda **** because I grew up on TES, and want more from them (I know they are capable). It just looked like (with FO4) they were taking Bioware's dialogue wheel, making it more shooter focused by lowering the influence of skills, and retaining the open world. I don't want FO meets Borderlands (without the jokes, because if FO3's humor was off) with Bioware's dialogue boot strapped to it. So, now Bethesda is a wait and see deal with me. This recent issue of review embargos until the day before just compounds that sentiment.

Oblivion still had birthsigns, major/minor skills, and NPCs still had the 0-100 disposition system. Skyrim didn't. They watered down char gen to race and looks, traded signs for those standing stones (where many people felt obligated to activate the ones to hasten leveling skills), and NPCs simply love or hate you. Skyrim did indeed remove a fair bit from Oblivion. My biggest pet peeve is that I have to equip spells to my hand(s). It makes archery/2 handed skills a chore to mix with magic. They removed half the spells to make room for dragon shouts. Magic is nearly useless without mods. Sure, they spent more time building the province. The dungeons didn't feel so copy/paste. I didn't mind perks, but lord are the majority of perks banal. +10% damage here, increased armor there, etc. Those were all things that you got by leveling the skills in previous titles. Now you spend perks to do what use to be done under the hood. Perks "could" be amazing if they did something fun with them, but incremental increases to the skill in question is just lazy. So, they added perks, but the majority don't do anything new really. I agree that comparing Arena/Daggerfall to anything after Morrowind is fruitless, though. Still, in terms of the world, reactivity, depth of NPCs, etc, etc, etc the games get more shallow with every new release. Jank, or no, Morrowind was far deeper than the puddles that leak out of Bethesda these days.

They have been doing it for 2 decades. Every iteration of TES has had systems removed or simplified. It seems their stock and trade. They just went too far with FO4, apparently, and brought the middling wrath of the console crowd. You know, the kind of "wrath" where you still shell out 60 bucks without hesitation but whine on the internet afterwards.

Well yeah. Captain Obvious told me that this way there is no time for negative reviews. Not that I would buy a Bethesda game on release or at full price anyway, though. Fo4, Fo3, Skyrim, Oblivion... that tells a story when it comes to their RPG games. Besides, the general information policy around Fo4 was already *really* bad (or hey, pretty good from a marketing point of view). Remember, they always only presented material that was showing the player either walking randomly through the game world or shooting up stuff. There was not a bit of dialogue seen... or quests. And what happened then? Game got released and people found out that at least dialogue- and quest-wise, it's nothing but a big turd. :D Let's not forget that anything built on that engine launches with more bugs than a roach motel. The engine has its strengths, but day one playability isn't among them. I used the command prompt about 5 times on my first playthrough Of Skyrim to fix bugs. I'd hate to have been on console with it at launch.

I agree, but I remember Chronotrigger fondly. Consistency is key to making time travel work, IMHO. Almost any medium that dabbles with it does it from the "rule of cool" standpoint instead of focusing on an interesting, coherent story.

Not an RPG, true, but have you tried Gunslinger? It's significantly different from the other Call of Juarez games (I'd say better in just about every respect, but that might be just me), and it has this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BZYk6Mz0GQ Gunslinger, in all its simplicity, is probably my favorite CoJ game. That said, I'm with Lexx, someone needs to make a wild west RPG (No, not WIld Wild West). It can be Steampunk or Weird West to give it a bit more versatility in its story telling, but an RPG in the West needs to happen.

My main concern as well. GTA Online was awful. I -along with many others- don't.A good game does not require to be modifiable but if it is than it's a plus. This is why I hate Skyrim. I don't buy a roleplaying game so I can replace dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine, I buy it to roleplay. Yeah, ok. That's fine. Don't download those mods. Simple. Those that want them installed can download them. Their existence does you no harm. I only want more content, improved graphics (something GTA V does wonderfully), and so on. It's almost like asking for a 4K option in the resolution menu, and someone saying "Well, me and a lot of other people don't want that." It won't harm your experience by letting it exist. Modders are the only reason I can play many old 4x3 games on my current monitor at 1080p without huge black bars, they have patched out bugs that the devs didn't get to before moving on, and in some cases they have done incredible things like replace the game engine (OpenMW). Their engine allows mods already. No sense in not letting it happen. The benefit of the serious mods far outweigh the obnoxiousness of some of the silly ones. Although, I did enjoy Skyrim more when the Dragons all talked like Macho Man Randy Savage.

Fair enough, but my point is that shouldn't it be time now for some details about this game? Has there been any chatter elsewhere outside of this forum? I'm not on that many gamer forums myself. They just started working on it months ago, to the best of our knowledge. That is assuming it began when Leonard joined Obsidian. If they are using Unreal then it's likely they are working with a publisher, and Obsidian has had a few projects fall through the cracks before getting past the early phases into actual development. It would be a really poor decision to discuss a game that may not be released because the publisher backed out. They also haven't began to get close to nailing down systems if they are that early in development. All they could say is what the game is (genre-wise or IP-wise), and usually publishers won't allow the developers to announce anything so everything coincides with their advertising/marketing decisions.

They made excuses about how much of a mess the engine/code was for the first game, and said it would be a nightmare to port. True, or not, I won't give them a dime for the game on console even if I own a PS4. I want a western game with mods. If I wait a year and a half for the port (like many did for GTA V) then I will wait for a year or two more for it to be dirt cheap on sale or find another way to get a copy. I really hate their business model when it comes to PC, and it's sad they are really the only AAA company that want to make Western games. I am a fan of the setting/genre. The only other one I can think of in the past 15years was Gun (Red Dead Revolver doesn't count).

R* might sell me a game again. It just needs a PC release. Which, if anyone is wondering, hasn't been mentioned thus far.

That sucks. I liked Sleeping Dogs much more than GTA. I always jokingly referred to it as "John Woo made a GTA game." It had style.

https://youtu.be/qZS-B1Afc1c

Well that's whooping 921600 pixels, each and every one of them refreshing 30 times per second. Why do you need more? Because some people have adverse reactions to different settings. I get some motion sickness with low frames and low FoV (in some games). Low frames have also given me headaches. So, I need more frames, or I don't buy it. I'll spend the money on hardware to ensure I have the best experience possible, and if the developer can't put the time in to give me that feature (higher fps) in the option menu then they don't get my money. Period. My FoV issues seem to change between games and engines. So I can be more forgiving there because what would bother me in one game may not in another. To me this is kind of like a color blind feature. Allowing 60 fps as a minimum keeps me from having to lie down, feeling nauseous, after 10 minutes of playing. That jerky 30fps or lower feeling is like riding in the back of a van where the driver doesn't understand the concept of "small corrections" and jerks the wheel back and forth.

I thought it was laggy because of the emphasis on catering to the peasant/controller crowd, rather than using the one true control system of the PC Ubermensch. One scheme to rule them all One scheme to find them One scheme to bring them all And then the master race binds them.