mstdn.games is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
We are a gaming-focused space on Mastodon. We welcome everyone who enjoys any type of gaming - it doesn't just need to be video games. Let's build a diverse and inclusive community together!

Administered by:

Server stats:

455
active users

#crpgs

1 post1 participant0 posts today

Still enjoying the #Wizardry remake! I think the secret to having fun with it is to go in with the right attitude.

People think #CRPGs are these games with rich stories (which usually aren't all that rich IMO), where you're trying to Save The World or some such rot.

Wizardry is a lot more like old-school #DandD. You have a bunch of hard-luck types who are quested by a ruler of dubious sanity to get an amulet back that might well have been rightfully taken. Of those characters of yours, often, bad things happen to them. Sometimes the die. Sometimes they DIE die. Sometimes you have to choose who goes on to adventure and who's left in a wooden box (or an urn) forever in the Inn.

Your characters aren't world-shakers. They're objects of sympathy. You're with them as they try, and sometimes fail, in the dungeon. I really like that aspect.

Show me your Top 5 #CRPGs, Fedi. These are mine right now.

  • Baldur's Gate III
  • Citizen Sleeper
  • Disco Elysium
  • Ultima VI: The False Prophet (with Nuvie to turn the viewport into a full map)
  • Divinity: Original Sin

This list is in the order of which I played most recently and - with the caveat that I'm only 64 hours into BG3 - these are honestly all perfect, no-notes gaming experiences for me.

New Site Post: 3 Reasons for 3rd-Person
kaendor.com/3-reasons-for-3rd-

After very seriously considering to make the #KaendorRPG a first-person open-world game for about two weeks, I am now again leaning much stronger towards a zoomed-out, top-down third-person perspective and UI scheme.
It does create a more detached play experience for players than first-person or over the shoulder third-person, but I think this is actually desirable for the game in my mind.

Kaendor RPG3 Reasons for 3rd-PersonThe concept phase for a videogame is turning out to be a much larger and interesting adventure than I expected it to be, even while still completely in the pencil notes phase and have done zero digital work on the game yet. Just pondering at work or while lying on the couch what kinds of features I would like to see in an RPG and how I could implement them into specific game mechanics has been quite revealing. Many things that sound great as general statements in a vacuum can look much less appealing when envisioning them in direct interactions with other systems. In the process, I've been cooling significantly on the idea to make the game a first person open world game. All the reasons I had to abandon the earlier plans for an isometric game with either 2D sprites or a 3D engine still remain in place. But switching to a first person perspective and controls is introducing a lot of issues of its own. So right now, I am pursuing ideas for a third person 3D game with iso-RPG-style controls again. But with a camera that allows for zooming in and out on the character across a…

I am trying to write a post of why I want to make my game an open-world RPG and how I think these games would be done right.

And it turns out that trying to explain the amazing joy and wonder of emergent stories that result from the interactions of procedurally generated content and complex survival mechanics that goes back to the first decade of D&D is not something you can really do justice in a paragraph. There's a whole book to be written on that subject.

Does anyone know of any good presentations or analyses on the level design for open world outdoor environments?
Anything to recommend?

I imagine there being major differences to indoor level design, and it's been such a major part of big titles for so long now that surely there must be some established wisdom now, rather than everyone just winging it.

Arx Fatalis seems to have often be treated as a poor man's Morrowind.

And after four hours of play, I can totally see where that's coming from.

It certainly is an interesting game, but in a world where Gothic and Morrowind already existed, this game surely must have felt obsolete by the time it was released. In 1997, it could have been very impressive. By 2002, it really wasn't.

New Site Post: A different Approach to Health and Injury
kaendor.com/a-different-approa

This morning I mentioned that I feel hit points as a mechanic for #videogames are feeling archaic and I'd love to see more innovation in that regard.

And people asked if I have anything better I would suppose instead.

For one certain type of games, in which you would probably want to avoid combat in the first place, and regular returns to a town are already a thing, I think I might.

Kaendor RPGA different Approach to Health and InjuryYesterday I was thinking how the hit point mechanic in basically all CRPGs and really the vast majority of all videogames with a combat component feels really archaic, and how we should consider it hopelessly outdated. If there were any other ideas that had been introduced in games in the last 40 years. Hit points as a mechanic to track how much a character can endure in a fight before being felled by a mortal injury were fine when Dungeons & Dragons came out in 1977. It's easy to calculate in your head and keep track of with pencil notes while you play. And it made real sense to use the same approach for videogames, back when games were typed by hand and looked like this. But you'd think with nearly half a century of videogame innovation and the unbelievable increase in processing power, this simplistic and crude mechanic would have become obsolete decades ago. Instead, it's still basically the universal default that nobody even seems to question. That isn't to say that it's a bad mechanic and that all the games that use it should have been using something else instead. But its continuing ubiquity is really quite puzzling…

Hit points in #crpgs seem incredibly archaic to me.

I can see why the earliest games tried to translate the dice roll and hit point mechanics of #ttrpg systems into #videogames, because the technology was very limited and they were still experimenting with what an RPG on a computer could be like.

But it's now 40 years later and the possibilities for injury mechanics in videogames are infinite. But still everyone just keeps using hit points as if there is no other imaginable way.

Features I do not want to have in open-world fantasy RPGs.

- Quest markers.
- (Map--based) fast travel.
- Weapon and armor crafting.
- Food.
- Experience Points.
- Instant, noiseless, 100% reliable stealth kills.
- "Tavern Music".
- Puzzle-Locks.
- Dialog options with randomized success chance.
- Enemies that level with the PC.
- Dice roll mechanics.
- "Romancing"

A stunning print ad published in The One #Amiga January 1994 for PERIHELION.

Perihelion is one of my favourite #CRPGs. Had it made it onto DOS, I think it would be a lot better known. As it is, it's exclusive to the Commodore Amiga.

It's a dark cyberpunk and post apocalyptic RPG with fantasy elements that has both Psygnosis style (though only published by them) and plenty of substance. A LOT of substance. The character creation system is one of the deepest I've seen with layer upon layer of customization - not all of it explained particularly well in the manual.

I'll do a deep dive thread on it soon, but would absolutely recommend checking it out.

#CRPGs by the basketful! By 1991, the SSI publishing engines were running at full speed with AD&D and TSR-licensed games flowing out.

Eye of the Beholder is the new poster child for a more casual dungeon-crawling audience with a lot less looking in paper journals for what characters had to say.

Admittedly, the wheels on the SSI Gold Box wagon were beginning to creak and wobble by the turn of 1991, I feel. I played the final instalment of those games, Treasures of the Savage Frontier, a while back and oy, did it feel dated for 1992. And everything was priced in electrum pieces which made the D&D'er in me go o.O; as I handed over dozens of them for basic provisions.

You still had to look in a separate journal too for conversations and encounter descriptions, which in a time where point-and-click adventures and rival RPGs had reams of text dialogue on disk, felt archaic, even taking into account it was for copy protection too.