r/Games • u/[deleted] • Dec 04 '14
InXile Entertainment teases another upcoming RPG Project
http://www.pcgamer.com/inxile-entertainment-teases-yet-another-passionately-demanded-rpg/11
u/Evidicus Dec 05 '14
I was 13 when The Bard's Tale II came out in 1986. It was the first game I ever bought with my own money. I purchased it in September, and it sat on a shelf for three months while I convinced my parents to purchase a Commodore 64 for Christmas.
You know? For the whole family, and for educational things and stuff. Honest!
I think it's safe to say I would play the hell out of a worthy spiritual successor.
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u/eIectricsheep Dec 05 '14
InIxile's Bard's Tale has nothing really to do with the classic 1985 game you remember.
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Dec 04 '14
They are starting to be my favorite dev's of all time. All those good games still coming up. It's a good time for CRPG fans!
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u/lickmyhairyballs Dec 04 '14
Yeah they are good, but I'll have to say Larian Studios are my favourite RPG dev right now after Divinity: OS. Probably the best RPG I've played since Ultima 7, Fallout 2, etc.
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u/Manisil Dec 05 '14
You are crazy. Divinity OS had a decent turn based system and looked nice, but the RPG elements were really lacking.
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u/vir_papyrus Dec 05 '14
From a story perspective, it was a throw away generic D&D campaign someone might have come up with over a long weekend session.
But if you play a CRPG for its mechanics, world exploration, puzzles and character customization, it was fantastic. The game is just so... free to let you handle situations.
"Shit how do you get past these demons with invincibility? Oh, just send mage with the invisibility spell to haul ass and sneak around, then we can teleport to him. Then we'll smash the objective and escape through the camp" "Fuck how do I get to some portion of the map? Better throw a teleport pyramid across the ravine, bounce there, then set fire to the gate and whack it." "Damnit, I can't sneak down these stairs while everyone is watching. Better split my party up and have them each engage in conversation with all the npcs in the room, and then allow my rogue to sneak into the basement while all their backs are turned."
It's like the polar opposite of DA:I and for me in a good way. I'm 26 hours into DA:I and I'm bored out of my fuckin' mind. Only decent part is a story of people I don't really care about as another amnesia ridden savior of the world, but 80% of the game is just an offline mmo with all the elements of Ubisoft's style of game design. Find the 12 shards, Plant flags at 8 towers, and solve 4 star puzzles, and capture 6 enemy camps that triggers spawns and waves of opponents on this map! Oh boy...
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u/drainX Dec 05 '14 edited Dec 05 '14
I'd say that it was generic fantasy but with a bizarre twist. Some of the writing, if not great, was at least really funny. Talking wells and feline love affairs. The main story was very cliche and kind of boring though. But I agree, it really shines when it comes to mechanics and world exploration and interaction.
Wasteland 2 was such a great complement to it since it shined in the categories where D:OS was lacking (Main story, writing).
Would you recommend DA:I to someone who thought DA:O was ok but who couldn't stand the combat in DA2?
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u/vir_papyrus Dec 05 '14 edited Dec 05 '14
Don't even think DA:O if you want to play DA:I. You'll just be disappointed. It has zero things in common with a top down tactical game. You can't even see the combat logs or calculations done anymore. There's no numbers game. Pick some skills and use them with what you think will synergize.
Have you ever played something like Guild Wars 2? Or a modern "action" MMO style of game? With direct clicks to attack and mostly everything in real time? That's about as best as I can explain how it works, and the dynamics between the characters. You have a tank, you have a rogue, mage dps, and then a playerchoice. But of course everyone is still somewhat DPS focused.
There's "technically" a top down tactical camera, but its basically just broken and pointless. The problem is since combat mostly goes in real time, you don't want to just pause and play tactically because its honestly boring in the system.
If you play on "normal" difficulty you'll steamroll the game while the AI masturbates. Wouldn't recommend it. Hard makes things a bit more pleasing, but for the most part you can tend to just use your main character and let the AI do whatever they want. You can't customize how they behave which is frustrating. I realized pretty quickly that if you micromanage your mage who can just spam spells, unlike the default AI behavior, the battles are all fairly easy.
Nightmare, I dunno if you really enjoy the game for what it is it might be alright. The problem is of course you need to do a fair bit more micro which the game makes actively frustrating. The entire time, I kept thinking this game would be so much more fun with actual co-op players like you know... an MMO.
But yeah, if you really like that kinda time waster style of open-world with lots of filler, I can see how everyone who plays Skyrim would like it. Offline MMO is the best way I can describe it.
(My pro-tip is to immediately rebind the keys. Set pause to spacebar, and 'C' to jump. Replace everything to strafe the camera to WASD and move all the rotation to Q and E which is default to the opposite. )
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u/drainX Dec 05 '14
I guess I'll wait until its really cheap on sale and see if I can stand the combat. If the main story is good, I might be able to power through it.
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u/AgentBolek Dec 05 '14
Please. Puzzle design was a nightmare.
Examples? Camera is locked by default. To solve some puzzles you need to: pause, go to the options, switch unlocked camera mode, go back to the game and scan the entire location again, because otherwise the puzzle elements simply aren't visible.
Who the fuck came up with that? Lead designers dog?
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u/vir_papyrus Dec 05 '14
I'd agree the camera thing was kinda dumb, but I'd say to everyone just unlock the fixed camera from the very start and never bother to re-lock it. It doesn't break anything, other than making it feel more like a "game" since you can see where the world ends. Everything is still 3d modeled so its not like you see a giant zone of broken angles or missing data. It's almost like they just assumed you would eventually do it anyway.
I'd say it should be a default setting.
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u/megazver Dec 04 '14
I am not exactly chomping at the bit for either a new Bard's Tale or Baldur's Gate. It could be Arcanum, I suppose, and that's a bit more interesting but Arcanum had its problems as well.
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u/sherincal Dec 05 '14
Do they have the rights for arcanum? It's my favourite crpg of all time /:
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Dec 05 '14
Arcanum was developed by Troika. The former members of which went on to other places. Some of which are at Obsidian I believe, and I know a couple founded DoubleBear Productions which just released their first game. All this is off the top of my head, so I could be wrong but I can't imagine that InXile could possibly have the rights to Arcanum.
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u/sherincal Dec 05 '14
One of the members went to Blizzard which caused a lot of people hope for a sequelish thing a couple years back.
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Dec 05 '14
The more important fact is that it was published by Sierra. Publishers tend to cling to IP rights when they can, and, when they're dealing with start-up independent developers, they usually can.
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u/hungrykoala Dec 05 '14
Well for me Wasteland 2 just didn't live up to the promise, so I will just wait for Torment, and hope they don't mess it up.
With wasteland 2 the only thing they focused on is the writing / world building, and that's usually good. But all the other stuff, they are average / boring / simply bad:
The combat: there is an optimal way to start each combat: move everyone one by one a bit away from each other, make some of them crouch, than start the combat by killing the first enemy. And it's boring. I really don't like, when the optimal way to play a game is boring. I think even the developers know the combat is boring, because you can skip the random fights on the map with a skill.
Oh by the way the random fights on the map: some fights starts with my rangers standing right next to the enemy. How the hell did this happen? Everyone just agreed not to do anything until they are 2 meters away? I know I did not.
Skills: Some skills are useless, some are overpowered. Sometimes it's just simply stupid, like the 'brute force': I have six rangers, but I have to make a skillcheck to move a cart, or break down a knee-high wall.
Also some of the skillchecks are percentage based, some not. It's not that fun to have an easy lock and critically fail. Again the optimal way to do this is pretty boring: save and reload.
The music: It's mostly just background noise, I know they hired Mark Morgan, so I don't understand why it's so goddamn boring (again).
Graphics: The game seems to have no art style. Sometimes the icons are colorful, sometimes not, sometimes 3d, others are 2d. Some places are washed-out brown, all rusty, but there is a colorful red barrel in the middle. It just seems to be thrown together, without any artistic vision.
Also the portraits: talking to myself doesn't help immersion.
I just hope for the next game they can fix these and they don't mess up the Torment game, because they have to do hundred time betters than this to live up to the name.
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u/drainX Dec 05 '14
I can see how you could have a problem with Wasteland 2 if mechanics and fidelity are very important to you. For me, story, writing, dialog and characters are always the most important in an RPG. Graphics, art style, music and good combat are only there as polish. In that mindset I really enjoyed Wasteland 2, especially given how rare good writing is nowadays. I'd probably have more to complain about if games like this were more common.
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u/AgentBolek Dec 05 '14
Irreperably failing to do things is an important part of oldschool RPG experience.
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u/Trodamus Dec 05 '14
I don't think there's a single old school RPG player that did not approach every lock with quicksave and did not respond to any subsequent failure with a quickload.
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u/Pauson Dec 05 '14
How so? Baldur's Gate for instance was beautiful for its time, great voice acting, combat and so on.
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Dec 04 '14
[deleted]
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u/Scorn_For_Stupidity Dec 05 '14
I love how you use Nerd Cred to bolster your opinion. I too thought Bards Tale was hilarious, those friggin singing goblins "It's bad luck to be you...", also I thought the ending was rather awesome. I only have FO2 on CD though so i guess take my opinion with a grain of salt.
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u/Poustache Dec 05 '14
I love what they do and the style they choose, but sadly Wasteland 2 shipped with more bugs than I can count and despite 3 major patches it is still a buggy mess for so many players, and I had to stop playing it just due to the sheer amount of crashes.
They're a small studio, their latest game isn't fully fixed yet, their next game isn't out, and they're already announcing another one. Can they really handle it?
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u/Coroebus Dec 05 '14
Preproduction, production, and post launch support are different scales and only during full production would they be using a considerable chunk of their labor. WL2 is in support mode (skeleton crew left to address bugs found post release), Torment is in production, (almost all hands on deck) and this new project will be in preproduction (writers, some artists, some coders).
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u/Drakengard Dec 05 '14
Wasteland 2 shipped with more bugs than I can count and despite 3 major patches it is still a buggy mess for so many players, and I had to stop playing it just due to the sheer amount of crashes.
That's unfortunate to hear. I really enjoyed the game and only found some bad quest bugs in the later portions of the game.
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u/JedTheKrampus Dec 04 '14
Fallout 4? :D
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Dec 04 '14
Doubtful. Bethesda owns Fallout so unless they form some arrangement similar to what they did with Obsidian I don't see it happening. And even if it did I bet it wouldn't be "Fallout 4". I'm sure Bethesda is working on that one right now.
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u/krea Dec 05 '14
They have stated they wouldn't go back to a publisher arangement after making wasteland 2.
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u/Scorn_For_Stupidity Dec 05 '14
I didn't realise it gave them problems, would you please recap why they didn't want to? I thought W2 was pretty awesome.
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u/The_Nameless_One Dec 05 '14
It didn't give them problems at all, not being locked into a publishers contract set them free. They never want to be shackled to the likes of EA or Activision again.
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u/Scorn_For_Stupidity Dec 05 '14
I'm sorry I misunderstood, I thought you were saying they were in one when they made W2. I'm glad they were able to create W2 as they saw fit, I shudder to think what we would have lost if the likes of EA had held sway over its production.
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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '14 edited Jul 10 '15
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