Just picked up Pasqal Haneumann; loving the game so far. I welcome any tips - anything that you wish you had known starting out.
WHY CAN’T I EDIT THE TITLE?? I SWEAR I KNOW HOW TO SPELL!!!!
Seeing what people's tastes are and the last post I saw about story was years ago. Link me to a thread if that is incorrect, but I searched and didn't find anything recent.
Bonus with included banter and growth
The game is called Joy Malignant, and is coming out on the 29th of July, less than a month from now!
Title
Recently played through Mass Effect 3 for no reason and particular.
I played as an engineer this time around. And I realized that I really enjoy the fantasy of a so-called "Tech Wizards". The engineer plays out mostly how you'd expect a wizard to, but in a SciFi setting. You've got Lighting, fire and ice spells. You can use spells that takeover the minds of synthetic beings. You have a cute robot drone you can command.
But besides something like shadowrun, which I do plan to play, what else is out there that fills this niche?
Hey everyone,
I recently started a game music breakdown series where I analyze music from games that have inspired me, exploring how musical choices reflect the themes, philosophies, characters, and locations within those games.
My latest episode is about "Fall-from-Grace" from Planescape: Torment. Alongside the harmony, melody, and orchestration, I also explore how I think Mark Morgan's music reflects both the philosophy of the Sensates and the character of Fall-from-Grace.
In particular, I argue that some of the compositional choices mirror the Sensates' belief that true understanding comes from opening oneself to the fullest range of life's experiences.
This is, of course, just my own interpretation, and I'd genuinely love to hear what fellow Planescape fans think.
I just reviewed Colony ship for my channel over on YouTube. But because I put out a video on this Reddit pretty recently I'm not going to link it here. But what I will say is honest to God you guys need to really look at Colony ship. It reminds me a lot of OG fallout. Super cool. Probably honestly other than bg3 probably right next to bg3 as my favorite non Stellaris video game I played in quite a while
2023 was a great crpg year with rogue trader, bg3 and to a lesser extent, starfield.
There hasn’t been any crpg of this caliber in three years, and nobody want to compete with gta6 release, so 2027 doesn’t look better.
Most of the games recommended on this sub are old stuff I have already played. I thought with the popularity of bg3, that we would see a big stream of high production crpg, but alas it’s not the case.
Solasta II looks nice, so far. Maybe.
Hi, it's Andrea from FLAT28, developer of Glasshouse.
It's been a while since my latest post on this sub, and everytime it's a good experience so I thought that our latest devblog was a very good moment to make a post!
In our latest devblog we talk about our approach to writing our cRPG, the challanges and learn experiences we did over the years. We also briefly talked about the Neowiz Indie Quest contest that awarded us 70.000$ and few sneak peaks of what's coming ahead.
If you're into cRPGs, if you already knew Glasshouse and wanted a bit of an update that may be a good reason to jump on our devlog and give me your thoughts ^_^
For those that didn't know anything about Glasshouse:
Glasshouse it's a Feudalpunk CRPG, with Turn-based combat, set in a lockdown apartment block at the dawn of a world war. You'll need to investigate the mysterious triple murder next door, fight the Political Conspiracy, and make terrible choices before the flatmates do it for you!
Thank you :)
These are the games I have played:
Any recommendations for any games I can play would be so helpful as I feel like i have ran out of options rip
Of course, I mean games which are available legally for free.
Hey guys, I’ve heard a lot of good things about this game. I love science fiction I love fantasy fiction, and I love a good story, but I also love combat that comes along with it and I was just curious how much of this game has combat or is it just basically one big book please let me know
I fell into a Rogue Trader hole after finishing BG3, and it has honestly been such an unexpected delight. I loved it so much that I started painting Warhammer 40k miniatures on the side.
For me, Rogue Trader shines in the world-building, lore and choices. I thought all the little choices that pop up when you are scanning planets or just moving through the world felt very impactful. There were small things I made a snap decision on that randomly popped up again later in the game; I love that. I also find the combat mechanics to be very accessible; the buffs and debuffs took a little googling to understand, but nothing too complex. I think by about hour 20, everything started to feel much more fluid. Also, RT's RPG element is very immersive. You feel like a ruthless space lord! It is definitely a game that is more rewarding to play a morally dubious character or a merciless despot; I enjoyed leaning into both.
So, what is next after this? I feel like trying to tackle Wrath of Righteous, as it feels like the natural progression on a CRPG journey. I would most appreciate some suggestions. I have tried but failed to get into Divinity 2, I just can't get into but if you can convince it is worth slogging through the first few hours it would be a strong contender. I feel like i missing out on that one.
I've played so many cRPGs over the years, and have loved so many.
One that I always think back to was Wasteland 2. The story was fine enough, but what really drew me in was how the party worked. With your party almost assuredly being made up of characters you made, there was so much freedom to make stories for them.
I believe another user was actually discussing this exact thing recently, when ranking their favorite cRPGs and I wanted to double down on that.
The fact that there are different "dialogue traits" (even if it was pretty limited) that unlocked different avenues of discussion? It really helped lean into the feeling that the party was made up of different personalities that you crafted.
My favorite thing though, which I have never seen another cRPG do quite as well, is actually dialogue choices. Yeah, in every other game a party member might speak up after a dialogue trigger or whatever - but it's still scripted. Wasteland 2 letting you change the speaking character mid-conversation made talking to NPCs feel truly alive, like it was a group of people having a conversation.
Perhaps you had a typically reserved character/Ranger who only spoke up at certain times, or maybe you had another who tried to be the moral compass of the group. Or maybe you had two that were in conflict with each other's decisions, being shown by them offering up different opinions.
For me, this added so much to the game and it's why I bounced so hard off Wasteland 3. Seeing this feature get removed really took away my main interest in the game - and it's something I've desperately craved for another game to do but have never seen happen.
I built it as a pure skill-based arcade game — no complex controls, just timing, physics, and those “one more try” moments.
I'm currently playing through rogue trader with a friend, but we can't play every day and I'm itching for more.
I've played through bg3, wasteland 2 and 3, divinity (both), jagged alliance 3. Mostly co op.
I've also played through a fair bit of Poe and Poe 2. Completed expeditions Rome.
I've tried kingmaker and decided it wasn't for me. I prefer turn based and even though it now has the option for it, I don't really want to go back.
I'd prefer a newer game, one that doesn't have a huge party, around 4 would be ideal, 6 is too many.
Any recommendations?
Now I don't want this to degenerate into a flame war since it is a very popular game and my opinion will surely be unpopular, so please try to be civil and discuss. As a long standing fan of Baldur's Gate, I will expose my opinon on why Baldur's Gate 2 was a massive step backwards. I thought of this carefully through years.
Let me start with the most obvious wound: the opening dungeon. In Baldur’s Gate 1, you step out of Candlekeep and the entire Coast Way is your oyster. I still remember the moment I first stepped out of Candlekeep, the sense of freedom and vulnerability, the realization that I have to work out with my own hands a path. You can go north to the Friendly Arm Inn, south to Nashkel, east to the basilisks, or just wander into the coast and get charmed by sirines before you stumble on a cave full of flesh golems long before you are ready. The game trusts you. It says, here is a world, go make your own trouble.
That feeling stayed with me through every hour of Baldur's Gate, and it is a feeling Baldur's Gate 2 never once bothered to replicate. You spend the first hours walking hte same corridors, fighting the same enemies, pulling the same levers, and listening to the same morbid babblings of Imoen because the game tries to shovel in your throat at all costs some kind of emotional attachment and make you "care" about her (unless you dismiss her, at least I can do that). It also forces you to ackwwoledge a specific party ignoring your agency (I can again dismiss them but then I have to walk alone through two areas, it's a Hobson's choice). It is essentially a forced tutorial masked as a dungeon and it strips away the fundamental joy of exploration and party customization, replacing with a key hunt. It is a chore. Thank gods when I discovered the mod Dungeon BeGone.
Now, even after leaving that dungeon, it is the underlying concept where the problems start. As I said, Baldur's Gate trusted you and its world enough to let you wander off the road and discover a bear that would one-shot you when you are level 1, or a vampiric wolf that requires enchanted weapons when you leveled up. It understood that danger and scale are built through emptiness, accurate encounters and surprises. It was brutal and realistic. That wilderness gave the Sword Coast a sense of place. You had to explore at 360 degrees and earn every inch of the map. Exploration meant picking a direction on the world map, walking into the fog of war, discovering small, self-contained stories or dangerous wildlife that had nothing to do with some grand, sweeping narrative.
Baldur's Gate 2 jettisons this almost entirely. After the initial slog, the Map opens... and almost none of it is reachable. You are deposited into a city district and given a laundry list of massive quests, with characters pointing you where you have to go. You no longer have to explore, the game tells you where to go. After you meet the necessary npc, a new area opens on the map. Each is a theatrical set piece that is waiting for the player, and this design carried on in modern games unfortunately (don't try to hide in a corner, Dragon Age!).
The map is no longer a world. Every area exists to just serve a power progression through a particular flavor: you have the forest of shadows, the besieged keep, the dragon's lair... This is destroying the sense of scale and reducing the environment to a mere background for continuous combat. What I see are overdesigned dioramas that abandon any pretense of a living world.
By the gods, I don't think that the dungeons per se are bad, they are well crafted and the artwork is wonderful, but they are designed as semi-scripted narrative sequences with very little room for the organic exploration that defined so many of the original's best moments. You can feel the developers nudging you along from attraction to attraction, terrified that you might experience five minutes of unscripted quiet. So exploration turned into itinerary.
You do not stumble upon the unseeing eye because you were tracing a river and found a hidden cave, instaed, you get handed a quest card by a priest standing in front of a temple, after a scripted cutscene, pointing at your party and only that. Everything is handed to you because the game is terrified you might get bored. Baldur's Gate was never afraid of you being bored. It respected your patience and rewarded your curiosity with a world that felt real. The sequel treats you like a tourist on a luxury coach, pointing out the big sights while the guide makes sure you never have to walk too far between amusements.
The storytelling suffers from the exact same inflation. Baldur's Gate told a quiet, paranoid story about an iron shortage and bandits on the road, a mystery that unraveled slowly across dozens of hours. You were nobody, and the world treated you like nobody. The political machinations and the revelation of your heritage crept up on you so gradually that when Sarevok finally entered the frame in full force, he felt like a true menace, a man with a terrifying plan rooted in the mundane. The plot was woven into the geography and politics.
Baldur's Gate 2 opens with your abduction by a melodramatic wizard who tortures you, then immediately buries you in the personal trauma of a character who is clearly the writer's favorite. Then Irenicus and his sister and their stolen soul angst, a revenge drama that could be interesting but monologues at you constantly. Damn I got it, there is so much power within me, now let me continue my path. You do not even have the freedom of going away, you are railroaded into witnessing Imoen's abduction and accepting to raise money to find her or Irenicus.
I never wanted that. I wanted to be free to choose what to do. The game WANTS me to care about Imoen, or Jaheira dreams. I can only answer in a rude manner that I don't want to hear their issues and feel like I went with the "bad choice". The game design was clearly centered on the idea that the protagonist does care and the story makes more sense, appears more coherent with that in mind.
Bioware clearly tried to write a linear adventure with a specific plot and specific twists in mind, ignoring how we players build a plot by ourselves. The sense of regional stakes evaporates. You are no longer a denizen of the Sword Coast caught up in history, you are the Bhaalspawn on a path to reclaim your divine essence, or get revenge, or free your "half-sister" (what a poor retcon).
I could try to immerse myself in that, but the pacing is broken. The game tells you that Imoen has been dragged off to a horrible fate, then after chapter 4 that your soul has been stolen and you are dying, and always that time is of the absolute essence. Then it throws out that urgency completely while you run errands for every faction in Amn, with the most aggressive content dump I have ever seen in a roleplaying game until the late 2000s. The story and the structure are at war from the moment you reach chapter 2.
Granted, you can ignore most quests and go straight for Spellhold, but then as I said, you miss quests, you miss content. I like being free to do what I want on my own pace, I don't like if that creates dissonance with the story.
The companions follow suit. In the original, companions who were previously interesting precisely because they were simple adventurers. The game allowed you to assemble a diverse crew of adventurers and oddballs who mostly stayed out of your way, letting you roleplay your own path. I was free to use them the way I preferred and make up my own stories and tales about them, without attempts to turn me into a therapist for a widow or a traumatized elf, nor a marriage counselor for a grizzled paladin.
The sequel instead fills your party with overbearing, talkative companions, every single one of them a quirky trauma case, who constantly bicker, demand your attention, interrupt your playthrough with their thoughts or their inter-party banter even when it's not appropriate (Aerie do you really need to talk with Anomen about sunrise while we are going to face a dragon???), and thrust you into awkward romance subplots. Evidently, Bioware really liked romances, since they later made them a staple.
And here I am, that's all. I expected to be shorter but this dragged me to insist.
I'm not saying Baldur's Gate 2 is mediocre, but it is a massive let down compared to the first Baldur's Gate, and I for one will forever look up with nostalgy at how that game became a classic in its own, while the sequel had an intrusive desire to force emotional depth in your playthrough, instead of making you decide whether you care or not. In no way I can find it a true progression on Baldur's Gate 1, it negates most of it strong points and builds the tropes that developed into the next era of modern rpgsL particularly those from Bioware but not also that (if you ever had the feeling of being in an hollywood blockbuster, in a dating simulator, or in a theme park with shiny things all around to stimulate people with attention deficits, you know what I mean). So I find this to be where everything started, like the original sin of modern crpgs.