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Recommendations for old school style RPG games?
I've played and enjoyed Neverwinters Nights, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. I was wondering if you guys could recommend some games in a similar style that I've overlooked. Thanks!
Old school style or actually old games in that style?
Because if all you require is the style, but don't mind modern incarnations then there are lots of options:
Pillars of Eternity, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, Tyranny, Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera
Thank you for the list! I've actually been meaning to play Pillar of Eternity for a while now, but the others ones are new to me. Didn't know they were still making shadowrun games. Anyway, I meant old school style, in fact I prefer newer ones if only to avoid crashing and playing surgeon with various settings to get them to work. Once again, thanks, that list will hold me off for a while
No prob.
I have 121 hours in Pillars of Eternity and have played through it several times now. It's quite good and I highly recommend it. I haven't had the chance to play POE2 (or Divinity 2) yet myself though since I am waiting for it to drop in price a bit before I do.
And yep, Harebrained Schemes started making new Shadowrun games after a successful kickstarter campaign in 2012 for Shadowrun Returns. They are a bit simplistic mechanically, but quite well done story, characters and settings-wise and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Avoid Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown though... it's not the same as the others, not made by Harebrained and their MP servers were recently shut down (Nov 30) so why it's even still for sale I honestly don't know.
Thanks for the heads up about Boston Lockdown. It's funny, the only successful kickstarter stories I can think of have been video games. Undertale, Shovel Knight, Darkest Dungeons, PoE, and apparently Shadowrun. I'm sure other products have actually delivered, but you hear about so many scams that it just muddies the waters till I associate it with basically burning money.
Funny you should mention that since Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera were all also Kickstarted too. :P
And yeah I generally avoid kickstarter for physical products since so many of them seem like very obvious scams and even the ones that don't are still risky since even people genuinely trying their best to launch a product/company often underestimate how much it will cost and how hard it is to accomplish. It's all about doing your research and being careful with who you trust on kickstarter.
I guess one of the reasons videogames can thrive on kickstarter is that a) you can send out unfinished builds to contributers to prove that you're actually working on it and b) once you've finished the game you don't need to really worry about producing enough copies because a lot of the sales are purely digital.
Also, not really video game related but you might like this video, it's pretty funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dEuEkf0ezI
There's been a ton of successful board games and card games that were kickstarted.
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/165271/top-10-funded-kickstarter-boardgame-projects
I've never personally backed any but I own a few that started as Kickstarter projects.
Pretty interesting. Also, looking at that list, Kicktraq seems to have a theme...
I think Kicktraq is just where they got the data.
Have you tried Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura? Basically a D&D world brought up to the Victorian industrial revolution.
Seconding Arcanum. It's one of my all time favorites and very often overlooked. Just make sure that, at the very least, you use the Unofficial Arcanum Patch (UAP) and High Resolution Patch since the game is a bit buggy and wonky on modern systems otherwise. Although apparently the new v1.5 HRP currently has some issues on Win 10 and may require a bit of tinkering to get working.
Thanks for the advice, yeah one of the first things I do is go looking for some sort of unofficial patch, even on modern games. Though from what I've seen gog is pretty good at ironing out old games to be less glitchy.
Hey, that looks pretty awesome actually. Now that I think about it, it's kind of odd that there's not that many industrial/steampunk rpgs. Seems like a good break from generic medieval worlds anyway.
Underrail is a very unknown game on Steam. I haven't played it to the end, but it might be the kind of experience you're looking for if you want an old-school iso RPG.
It looks pretty good, for some reason it reminds me of the frost mod for Fallout 4. Thanks!
Oops, somehow missed this comment. I'm all for unforgiving difficulty, and I particularly enjoy roleplaying so the "consequences" aspect sounds perfect. Thank you!
Definitely Ultima Underworld and Arx Fatalis.
There’s a decent port of Underworld to Unity Engine, that adds mouselook and modern control scheme to the game:
https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldExporter/releases
You know, my parents still play Ultima Online. I'll be sure to show them the Underworld port, would make for a good Christmas gift. Arx Fatalis looks good too, and the best part of all these old games is that they're cheap to buy! Thanks :)
Sounds like Pathfinder kingmaker might be what you're after.
Just watched the IGN review of it, they weren't too kind on the designs of the dungeons but praised it for converting the p&p mechanics into a videogame. Does it have player made maps like Neverwinter Nights' vault? If so, looks like something I'd definitely be interested in
Not indended to be snarky, but a pen and paper game with some friends is, under the right conditions, unmatched
Oh that's definitely true, but organizing a game where we can all make it takes a bit, whereas with a videogame I can just load it up anytime I have freetime and want to play.
I haven't actually! I've played New Vegas (and I have Fallout 4, but for whatever reason it crashes on launch. No idea what's going on there) but didn't write it in my original post for some reason. I've heard good things about them, thanks for reminding me :)
True, especially with Christmas coming up. Though 10$ is pretty good on its own