Has Beth lost its edge on RPG gaming?

[vram1974]

When I think of classic RPGing I think of Daggerfall and Oblivion and the Fallout series, along with of course Baldur's Gate, Zelda and the Dragonwarrior series, then later Final Fantasy.

 

Skyrim seemed to uphold many of the RPG elements of previous games but it also focused heavily on modern graphics which certainly must have cut into the RPG budget. That problem seems intensified in FO4, which is extremely weak in RPG and relies heavily on the implementation of FPS and Minecraft-like settlement building.

 

I've been looking over Metacritic and although I know that users took a giant dump on Fallout 4, it definitely shows Beth dropped a turd in the RPG community. As a game it's highly playable (114 hours since Nov. 10) but the RPG community haven't enjoyed the narrowed choices (4 per NPC max) and the linear storylines. As pointed out in many FO4 reviews, it often doesn't matter what the fuck you even do, the results are the exact same.

 

 

 

For instance, when you're asked to side with the mayor of Diamond City or Piper, either choice gets you into the city and both act the exact same way toward you.

 

 

 

On Metacritic Fallout 4 gets an 84/100 which is decent but not only is it not Game of the Year it's not even RPG of the Year:

 

Witcher 3: 93/100

Pillars of Eternity: 89/100

 

Amazingly, the RPG community has even turned their backs on major titles with great graphics for better storylines such as Undertale (93/100).

 

I wonder if Elder Scrolls 6 will be a return to classic RPGing or whether Beth will continue to develop these graphics intensive FPS games where your choices don't matter and they've already decided who you are (mother or father looking for your son) and what you must do.

[Guest MonsterFish]

Not to sound like a dick but this is about the 7 billionth thread on this matter.

[vram1974]

I know there was one other I was following but it got deleted after the site rollback.

 

At any rate, my main reason for bringing this up was I was looking through Metacritic and was really surprised at how many highly rated RPG there are for shit graphics because gamers will pick storyline over Godrays any day of the week.

 

I mean, I knew RPGers were upset about FO4 but to the extent other titles created with Kickstarter are beating Bethesda's monster budget is frankly shocking.

[GimmeBACON]

If you think about it, doesn't most RPG's suffer from that exact same effect? I don't have to play Witcher or Mass Effect to know that your character is who they are indefinitely, the only thing important and relevant that they do is the main quest, and the one or two ways it happens. I agree that they should have focused on making their story better instead of better graphics and gameplay, but; F3, FNV, Skyrim... none of them had a stellar story with multiple choices and impactful decisions either. Witcher, Mass Effect, etc... their story isn't that great either.

 

Maybe the problem is that every company feels rushed to put out the game as quickly as possible to make their money back from what they put into it, and people need to stop holding Bethesda to a higher standard when it's obvious that as far as their performance proves, they're not gods gift to gaming.

[vram1974]

If you think about it, doesn't most RPG's suffer from that exact same effect? I don't have to play Witcher or Mass Effect to know that your character is who they are indefinitely, the only thing important and relevant that they do is the main quest, and the one or two ways it happens. I agree that they should have focused on making their story better instead of better graphics and gameplay, but; F3, FNV, Skyrim... none of them had a stellar story with multiple choices and impactful decisions either. Witcher, Mass Effect, etc... their story isn't that great either.

 

Maybe the problem is that every company feels rushed to put out the game as quickly as possible to make their money back from what they put into it, and people need to stop holding Bethesda to a higher standard when it's obvious that as far as their performance proves, they're not gods gift to gaming.

 

I know that Skyrim is quite limited in certain respects and the storyline made me get Alternate Start and Skyrim Unbound but I rather enjoyed some of the quests and many were quite memorable. I can't say there have been any great quests in Fallout 4.

 

The coolest thing in FO4 was when the huge airship arrives. I got chills. But other than the Dr. Curie quest it feels a little sparse and the game is getting repetitive.

 

What's amazing is that the storylines in Dragonwarrior are still a lot more fun than many of the modern games. And I loved Final Fantasy 4. That might just be my childhood talking. I remember in Dragonwarrior 3 you think you've killed the final boss and suddenly you fall into the underworld and realize you basically just started the game. Mindblowing shit.

 

I suppose when you think about it most RPG are similar in that you are a hero who must save the world and even Dragonwarrior could be quite linear. But something about some of those older titles between 1996-2005 seemed to really balance the best of top of the line graphics with roleplaying choices: Daggerfall, Baldurs gate, Morrowind.

[gaggedgirl123]

Bethesda is succesful, I'll give you that, but they're not the part of the BIG budget companies either. And it always makes me laugh how people are NEVER satisfied. Now we got people complaining that they focused too much on graphics, but before release everyone was bitching that the graphics weren't that good.
Honestly FO4 is the only Fallout I could bear to play for more than 10 hours, just because of the colors. And I'm not that much of a graphics whore either, I just couldn't stand the eternal yellow or green.

It's just that people tend to expect too much. If you're adding voice acting to make it feel like a real conversation, of course you need to cut the options a little, otherwise the game will NEVER be finished. Now would they have been able to do better? yes. No question about that. But at least mod tools are still around, and that's a godsend

[vram1974]

And it always makes me laugh how people are NEVER satisfied.

 

To be honest I don't go out of my way looking for things to complain about. But I found Fallout 4 boring when I started because the RPG seemed stripped out. Since then there have been other aspects of the game that have drawn me in and surpassing 100 hours is actually quite decent. If I'm being truthful I think I copped out after about 100 hours in Fallout New Vegas.

 

Unlike other people, I was so happy about Skyrim that the first 300 hours pretty much breezed by before I even thought about modding it. I didn't even really get bored of the game for a full 800 hours.

 

And despite coming from Oblivion, which has superior RPG elements and a much more "roleplaying feeling" to it, I really really loved what they did with Skyrim.

 

Games can still be really addictive with RPG stripped down. Take Diablo for instance. The first title actually had quite a bit of interactivity with the townsfolk and a deeply moody atmosphere. Diablo 2 stripped out all the atmosphere and made it more cartoonish but it was still fun as hell. I played thousands of hours of that game. Diablo 3 was even more stripped down to a really basic "kill all the shit" game with weapon and money hoarding and auction house. It was sort of the death of the series for me.

 

I just worry that Elder Scrolls could go Diablo 3 route and put too much into popular elements and strip out all the stuff that made people get into it in the first place.

[stormcrowwolf]

I rarely chime in on topics like this one, but I'm feeling "in the mood" to flick my two pennies into the well.  (Yes, I'm mixing metaphors )

 

Bethsoft is largely a victim of rose colored glasses as far as cRPGs go.  There really is little they are doing different since Morrowind from game to game to game. They create an open world, fill it with items to discover that tells you about the world, give you a few quests to do, and yes, all of them have been linear since at least Morrowind, and probably even before that (I don't know, I never played Arena, Daggerfall, etc).  What you do doesn't matter a bit as the stories progress as far as the rest of the world is concerned.  You end up with a hero complex, and everyone fawning all over you with a few cursory explanations and results after completion in the Fallout series, which is even more cursory with 4.  Or worse in the MMORPGS... everyone is the same hero you are for the exact same reasons, and the world itself is generally oblivious.  (Afterall, if everyone is a war hero, why should anyone give a damn anyway?  Whack your peons with your Wabbajack if you get frustrated enough.) 

 

I don't see Fallout 4 as anything but an evolutionary step down the same path as an "open world" game.  The quest lines are usually not the main draw with Bethesda's (or any other dev house's) open worlds.  It's what modders do after Bethesda tosses out the basic framework, a smattering of patches and/or XPs, and says "have fun with it!"  I'm not going to get into the debate about which of Bethesda's games have been "their best" RPG, because I consider them all flawed and I ignore the pull of nostalgia making them more than they actually are other than generally fun fantasy worlds to explore.

 

Every single cRPG out there that's been published and I've played, even the ones I've been addicted to, have linear story lines and limited if any impact on the created world as a whole, including the procedurally generated Rogue-like games.  This has been true with games all the way back into the 80s (and I've been around long enough to have played games that old like the original Gold Box D&D games).  If you want a "genuine" RPG experience with a fantasy world that adapts fully to your actions and not-arbitrary decision and moral judgements or black/white moral rankings you have to go old school with pen and paper, human guided game systems.  That's the only way it's going to happen unless someone comes up with a genuine general AI as a dungeon master.

 

One of the problems with having branching story lines, and non-programmers usually don't grok this, is just how much of a problem conditionals (ingame decisions) can create with program complexity.  Let's say you have an initial choice.  You're asked a question.  There's 3 paths to choose from.  Those three each have a result that results in another pair of choices.  Then again, another set of choices each with two or three choices... you're already up to roughly 25 results that have to be coded, scripted, and tested thoroughly.  When you have multiple classes, multiple subclasses, etc, it quickly adds up in geometric (not linear) progression to thousands or tens of thousands of logical paths to follow and test.  That takes geometrical amounts of worker time, financial resources, computer resources, packaging resources, etc.  This is added on top of whatever resources added to making the game work visually.  Love it or hate it, people are still voting with their wallets, big graphics "WOW!" type games still make more money than something that looks more at home on a system from the 90s, so that's where financial resources are being spent.  The other reason is, while a logical fallacy in story may be jarring in the RPG context, it generally doesn't compare to being completely unable to even play the game due to graphical corruption issues in the rendering engine(s).  So, despite people complaining about decisions not really being influential with game outcomes - Dragon Age 2 as a rather in-your-face example - design decisions have to be made based on finite resources and the ultimate goal of the story line.  Many games are designed from the ground up to only have one over arching outcome to set up the next sequel which we all supposed to gladly go out and buy!  (Except I didn't bother with DA3, so it kinda failed there).  It's just that some game houses are better at covering up you're really playing a linear or extremely decision limited story line than others.

 

@gaggedgirl123  Bethesda is just one subsidiary of ZeniMax Media and is definitely "one of the big budget" international conglomerates in the same league as EA.  It's not an "independent" studio.

[afa]

Before all this devolve into rose tinted glasses wearer reminiscing about the good old days. I will say this. Bethesda RPGs have never been that good, not even morrowind, not oblivion, not Fallout 3/NV, and not Skyrim. Their size, scope, technical concept, and quantity is something to be appreciate, but everything else is really not their strong suit.

Choices in rpgs or even in games in general are nothing but cleverly (sometimes not so cleverly) placed tricks and illusions, at best a temporary suspension of disbelief. The actual choices are all predetermine by definition. The more interesting or "technical" part is how it is presented and how good it is at tricking the player or convincing the player even for just a little while.

 

FO4 isn't doing particularly poor, of course there are people who will bash it, this is the internet. The issue with FO4 and Bethesda rpgs in general are obvious: bugs, glitches, could use more depth, lack of good story telling (or cleverly design illusions), etc. Its strength has not change, large vast open world with independent NPCs and interactions. However they are starting to get challengers knocking on their turf. There are lots of open world games out there, quite a few number of open world rpgs while they might not be on par with Bethesda's size and scope, they do it well enough while excel in other areas, and when you step back and look at them holistically, both the good and the bad, it seems like Bethesda is starting to fall behind or at the very least the gap between them are closing fast.

When their early titles have technically issues it might feel reasonable to give them a pass, but when it repeats over and over again we are now face with a dilemma of do we accept Bethesda RPGs for what they are and accept their flaws or do we condemn them for still suffering from the same issues after all these years.

[Guest endgameaddiction]

I've condemned them because of their ongoing track record of badly broken games. The story telling isn't something that will stop me from playing the game. On the contrary. I wasn't really displeased with Skyrim's storyline of Imperials vs stormcloaks. Nor was I displeased with the main storyline of the dragonborn vs alduin. I'm usually not into war storylines. I couldn't stand New Vegas's war between NCR and Legion. That was because I didn't like either faction and I didn't like the game all that much for what it was. I didn't like Skyrim's guild quests where none of it had an impact on you with the other guilds. If you chose to be a dark brotherhood, you could also be a companion, mage of winterhold (which led you to be the archmage), and a thief of the thieves guild. Not once was there a decision in that game to stop and really think about what faction you want to join because once you pick that one guild you cannot ever join another guild. There were no paths to carefully choose follow. Everything was all at your dispense. But despite all that, I still play Skyrim.

 

I've really tried to let this game sink into me, but everytime I really try, the game has its broken moments and reminds me why I despise the game. And this all goes back to when I bought TES Anthology, installed Skyrim. Tried to play Skyrim with no mods so I could appreciate the game for what it was. Nonstop CTD and freezes. I went through 12 reinstalls in the first month alone with Skyrim that it was just so devastating that I gave up and modded the game and played it like that.

 

Skyrim was enough for me to realize that they will never get their shit together. I will not go through another game with an experience like that ever again. So to me their games are worth dust. And if they went bankrupt, I wouldn't care. It would do the game industry a huge favor. Even more a favor if they sold off their rights to TES and Fallout to an actual game developing team who knows their shit.

[ratrace]

 

I've really tried to let this game sink into me, but everytime I really try, the game has its broken moments and reminds me why I despise the game. And this all goes back to when I bought TES Anthology, installed Skyrim. Tried to play Skyrim with no mods so I could appreciate the game for what it was. Nonstop CTD and freezes. I went through 12 reinstalls in the first month alone with Skyrim that it was just so devastating that I gave up and modded the game and played it like that.

Playing any unmodded Bethesda game is masochism. Bethesda don't make games, they make frameworks for modding (imho, of course). On the other hand, their lack of almost any aspect of decent game development - from technical aspects to creating good stories or interesting characters with believable dialogue lines - makes the modding community spring into action. That's where the fun begins. And that is what gives their games longevity, beauty and depth.

That goes for all their games including Morrowind - again, imho. Though I cannot speak for Arena, Daggerfall etc. Haven't played those.

 

 

I didn't like Skyrim's guild quests where none of it had an impact on you with the other guilds. If you chose to be a dark brotherhood, you could also be a companion, mage of winterhold

Especially the fact that you can wear the DB armour and noone cares. Just a little detail, but it is quite representative of how little your decisions have an impact on what happens in the game.

Why not implement a system that makes it gradually harder and eventually impossible to even enter cities without getting instantly attacked by guards if you're not disguised and your undercover ruse has been broken too often? Just as an example. With "Wanted"-flyers, an overall sense of paranoia etc.

 

Bethesdas strongest suit is the creation of worlds that are compelling to explore. That's it.

[AngerManagementWolverine]

I'd say that Bethesda lost their edge, and it is possible they never really had an edge to begin with. I've played from Morrowind to FO4, in one way or another the game fails at something. That's not counting their "ability" to tell a story.

 

The stories of their games are not all that great, which has been said already. The thing is, the stories were never were the strong points of their games. I found most of the stories to be rather boring, which is generally why I never finish the main story.

 

However, their biggest problem isn't their story writing. In the words of my brother, "Bethesda lets the modders patch the game." In other words, they are lazy. Skyrim for example, their high res texture pack has to be fixed by mod, so the wood chopping blocks aren't purple. This is true to a certain extent for the Bethesda games I've played, but more noticeable for me in their more recent titles (For me: FO3 to FO4.)

 

With their "Let the modders patch the game" mindset, they manage to fuck the game for the first few months by not having any kind of proper modding tools, which is the thing that people use to keep the game alive. So yeah, Bethesda has lost their edge. It is just they didn't have much of an edge to begin with, so it is kind of hard to notice at times.

 

As for their story-telling ability, at least from Morrowind, it hasn't been any good. Some of the stories I enjoyed the most were DLC's: Old World Blues for FO:NV and Dragonborn for Skyrim were stories I at least more invested in than the main stories.

 

My two knives in the well. (Another mixed metaphor. Doesn't make any sense, but when did that matter.)

 

@Ratrace and Endgame

Of Bethesda games, the one that had anything remotely like what you two are talking about was Morrowind. While the DB armor I do not believe had any sort of effect to that nature, wearing Ordinator (Spiffy Guards) armor did. Then again, Morrowind was the only one to have joinable factions that intersected and competed with each other, they also had more factions and factions had requirements for joining said factions. Their games since then have not really had these things.

 

[Kaz Aanh]

In short.

 

Fallout 4 is shit game but quite addictive,repetitive with no replayabillity and lots of useless/unfinished features. Fallout 4 has only succeed because of pre-builded Skyrim hype and brilliant marketing done by Bethesda.

 

but "muhh mods will fix it"

 

If a game needs a mods in order to be enjoyable then the game design is flawed.

 

Game was fun for first 100 hours but it felt like empty, I don't feel like I will ever go back to this game again. But yeah 98 hours was just mindless walking > finding a dungeon > killing raiders > looting > going back to the city to sell items.

 

This game is so shallow that it does not deserve more than 7/10. Bethesda went way too far with the "freedom , go anywhere do what you want"

 

I wanted this game to be more refreshing and new, instead we get simplified Fallout 3 on the Skyrim engine 1.01. Fallout 4 feels like a huge framework for mods ,where Bethesda will use it to milk it to the end.

[Symon]

I'd say Beth's biggest problem is that it never seems to know what it is trying to achieve in a game. (Except make money of course).

 

1. They have always seemed addicted to unsatisfying RPG/Action hybrids.

2. They often try to roll there own tools with poor results.

3. They seem to have minimal skills with art assets.

4. They have abandoned the PC as prime platform.

5. They have abandoned writing satisfying scenarios.

 

Let's expand on these points some.

 

1. From Daggerfall to their present offerings, they've always produced a role-playing game with some ludicrous mouse-action combat element. Daggerfall with the awful mouse-swiping, Morrowind with the ridiculous attack-choices, Oblivion with it's power-attacks, I could go on. None of these are actual role-playing where the character has the combat skills nor are they an action/slasher where the player has the mouse skills. Neither fish nor fowl, these mechanics are bound to disappoint almost everyone, but they keep producing them.

 

2. Best exemplified by their lackluster scripting languages. Other game companies use an existing language and write a 'game library'. One example would be Civ4 or FF and the use of Python. Can you imagine how much more expandable a Beth game would be with an open-source scripting language? Whilst Python isn't as fast as C, it's faster than many others (Papyrus anyone?). I've done some heavy duty and fast log-crunching with Python and other games find it fast enough.

 

3. From the dreadful potato heads of Morrowind to the muddy textures they seem fond of. Beth just can't seem to produce attractive art assets. Initial good ideas are let down by poor execution. Now beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some adore anime schoolgirls and others hate them. But no one likes Beth's vanilla work. While they could never cater to all tastes, there is no excuse for their ugly art assets.

 

4. This manifests itself everywhere from 8 hotkeys (Morrowind has 10, but a console can only really handle 8, so 8 it is), ridiculous sized interfaces, to later and later releases of the modding tools. After all, the tools are an afterthought now as they can't be used on an X-Box.

 

5. Daggerfall and Morrowind both had some decent story lines. You can really forget that now with a voiced PC!!!

 

There is however, no reason for them to abandon this formula until people stop buying the games.

[vram1974]

So... going a bit off topic, are there any RPGs people would recommend I could get into during Christmas?

 

I bookmarked a few in Steam I would to try at some point:

 

Divinity Original Sin

Witcher 3 (no I haven't played it yet but I'm waiting for a Steam sale)

Pillars of Eternity

Dishonored

 

Oh and I was tooling about in Steam and saw that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have been redone in an "enhanced edition". Anybody tried this? Should I break out the old RPG king?

[Lexi SubZero]

So... going a bit off topic, are there any RPGs people would recommend I could get into during Christmas?

 

I bookmarked a few in Steam I would to try at some point:

 

Divinity Original Sin

Witcher 3 (no I haven't played it yet but I'm waiting for a Steam sale)

Pillars of Eternity

Dishonored

 

Oh and I was tooling about in Steam and saw that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have been redone in an "enhanced edition". Anybody tried this? Should I break out the old RPG king?

Maybe some older titles as well? Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic, Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, Planescape Torment...etc. Also...wait for Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen on PC..

[Guest MonsterFish]

So... going a bit off topic, are there any RPGs people would recommend I could get into during Christmas?

 

I bookmarked a few in Steam I would to try at some point:

 

Divinity Original Sin

Witcher 3 (no I haven't played it yet but I'm waiting for a Steam sale)

Pillars of Eternity

Dishonored

 

Oh and I was tooling about in Steam and saw that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have been redone in an "enhanced edition". Anybody tried this? Should I break out the old RPG king?

 

Shadowrun is a great one if you're into sci-fi as well as fantasy.

[Vacaliga]

So... going a bit off topic, are there any RPGs people would recommend I could get into during Christmas?

 

I bookmarked a few in Steam I would to try at some point:

 

Divinity Original Sin

Witcher 3 (no I haven't played it yet but I'm waiting for a Steam sale)

Pillars of Eternity

Dishonored

 

Oh and I was tooling about in Steam and saw that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have been redone in an "enhanced edition". Anybody tried this? Should I break out the old RPG king?

 

If you haven't already give Dark Souls 1 a crack assuming you own a controller. (The RPG elements of that game depends on your definition of the term ofc)

 

-------

 

As for the main topic:

 

To me Bethesda games* seems like they are trying to do everything but end up focusing on nothing.

The vast sea of mods available for Skyrim is great and all but it also goes to show just how lackluster the official standalone game actually is in terms of pretty much everything.

The only arguable edge I would give to Bethesda in terms of RPG would be a lack of competition, but even that would be mostly untrue at least nowadays.

 

Other than the availability of mods I find it really hard to give Bethesda games* an edge in anything really as it seems to be a stable that they are about 5years behind everyone else, and that is not just FA4, Skyrim sometimes gets a lot of praise of it's graphics but when comparing to other games coming that year (2011) I find it really hard to see why:

 

Batman: Arkham city, COD 3, Battlefield 3, Deus Ex, LA. Noire, Rage, Witcher 2, Dragon Age 2, all came out that year.

 

Hell even Half-Life 2 can give Skyrim a run of its money and that came out seven years earlier (2004) and with the update it received in 2009, it's even harder to praise Skyrim's graphical fidelity.

Not that a games graphics needs to be cutting edge to be a good RPG but since it is/was brought up so often I felt it worth mentioning.

 

*Games developed by Bethesda Game Studios. excluding games only publiced by Bethesda Softworks, such as Rage and Dishonored.

 

[vram1974]

Wow, thanks for the recommends guys. Amazingly, Steam sale just popped up with like 75% off on a bunch of these titles. Which means jade Empire is like, $3! Can't go wrong with that!

 

I ended up buying Witcher 1-3, Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines, Jade Empire and Pillars of Eternity. I might get Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition but I have a feeling these 6 titles will take a while to get through.

[PsychoMachina]

Does anyone know if Wasteland 2 is worth getting.  The director's cut is 50% off at Steam.  

[vram1974]

Does anyone know if Wasteland 2 is worth getting.  The director's cut is 50% off at Steam.  

 

Not sure but you're right, $19.99 is attractive price. It's got fantastic reviews and scores (8.5 on IGN, 86/100 on Metacritic). When you consider Fallout 4 got 84/100 on Metacritic it sounds like a pretty decent game.

 

But I haven't played so I'll wait to see if anybody else likes it.

 

With all the Steam sales until January 4 it's going to be a real hard time to not buy games

[Guest MonsterFish]

I have Wasteland 2 and its a game that requires a lot of patience.

 

Had to fight a giant toad, lost half of my men and nearly all of my ammo. Looked on the corpse and all I found was some crappy frogs tongue. Wasn't expecting a treasure trove but still... I lost half my men

[windpl]

Does anyone know if Wasteland 2 is worth getting.  The director's cut is 50% off at Steam.  

 

Original fallout had better controls than W2 . They did horrible job with unity engine, playing that game was pure pain and I had to abandon it after some time. Maybe they fixed it, but god I don't want to go through that again to check it.

[Kendo 2]

So... going a bit off topic, are there any RPGs people would recommend I could get into during Christmas?

 

I bookmarked a few in Steam I would to try at some point:

 

Divinity Original Sin

Witcher 3 (no I haven't played it yet but I'm waiting for a Steam sale)

Pillars of Eternity

Dishonored

 

Oh and I was tooling about in Steam and saw that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have been redone in an "enhanced edition". Anybody tried this? Should I break out the old RPG king?

 

Witcher 3 all the way but be warned; there is a learning curve for players to handle combat and it can be frustrating at first.  Charging into battles and spamming keys won't work.  You have to pick your skill advances carefully for your play style, prepare potions before hand, constantly upgrade your armor and weapons, use your signs and READ THE BESTIARIES.  Game play and combat is cerebral and that may be why some people don't like the game; you just can't run around like a spaz and expect results.

 

Something else too is the game's atmosphere is dark and gritty; it's a reflection of a medieval setting and some of it is disturbing; superstitious ignorance, religious zealots torturing and burning people at the stake, soldiers slaughtering whole villages just because they can, etc.  Every fucked up aspect of being human and what that entails is in the game.  It is an SJW's worst nightmare.

 

My real only gripe about the game is some of the ambient flock NPCs have quirky AIs, but if you can deal with a Bethesda game it won't matter.

 

Despite what some here would have you think, Witcher3 is closer to an RPG than anything Bethesda can do.  The interface looks retro but has modern functions, the quests are rewarding and once completed there is a real sense of satisfaction.  There is just SO MUCH to do in that game (52 square miles of map to explore) and so much going on with the different quest arcs it's hard to keep track at times.  There are three core endings and depending on what you said to who, and what you did and when, there are about 300 different possibilities for your specific play through ending.

 

For me the game experience was more fulfilling than anything I've played in a long time.  It is like playing the first 50 hours of Skyrim and realizing you've just scratched the surface.  I'm on my second play through now and I've yet to see anything in the game that needs a mod to make it better or 'fix' it.

[EdinMG]

 

So... going a bit off topic, are there any RPGs people would recommend I could get into during Christmas?

 

I bookmarked a few in Steam I would to try at some point:

 

Divinity Original Sin

Witcher 3 (no I haven't played it yet but I'm waiting for a Steam sale)

Pillars of Eternity

Dishonored

 

Oh and I was tooling about in Steam and saw that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have been redone in an "enhanced edition". Anybody tried this? Should I break out the old RPG king?

 

Witcher 3 all the way but be warned; there is a learning curve for players to handle combat and it can be frustrating at first.  Charging into battles and spamming keys won't work.  You have to pick your skill advances carefully for your play style, prepare potions before hand, constantly upgrade your armor and weapons, use your signs and READ THE BESTIARIES.  Game play and combat is cerebral and that may be why some people don't like the game; you just can't run around like a spaz and expect results.

 

Something else too is the game's atmosphere is dark and gritty; it's a reflection of a medieval setting and some of it is disturbing; superstitious ignorance, religious zealots torturing and burning people at the stake, soldiers slaughtering whole villages just because they can, etc.  Every fucked up aspect of being human and what that entails is in the game.  It is an SJW's worst nightmare.

 

My real only gripe about the game is some of the ambient flock NPCs have quirky AIs, but if you can deal with a Bethesda game it won't matter.

 

Despite what some here would have you think, Witcher3 is closer to an RPG than anything Bethesda can do.  The interface looks retro but has modern functions, the quests are rewarding and once completed there is a real sense of satisfaction.  There is just SO MUCH to do in that game (52 square miles of map to explore) and so much going on with the different quest arcs it's hard to keep track at times.  There are three core endings and depending on what you said to who, and what you did and when, there are about 300 different possibilities for your specific play through ending.

 

For me the game experience was more fulfilling than anything I've played in a long time.  It is like playing the first 50 hours of Skyrim and realizing you've just scratched the surface.  I'm on my second play through now and I've yet to see anything in the game that needs a mod to make it better or 'fix' it.

 

 

This ^^^... TW3 is basically a masterpiece from CDPR, I already have 500+ hours pf playtime, I'm on my 4th playthrough, and I simply can't get enough of this game, and besides that, there's Triss, Ciri and Gwent... =D