Games

[icycalm]

Don't tell me From. From makes dungeon crawlers, which are by definition worse than games that don't take place entirely in a stinking dungeon. If From's games are better than BioWare's and Bethesda's this will be DESPITE their being dungeon crawlers. I.e. if they had not been set entirely in a dungeon they'd be even better (though they would require a LOT more money and creativity to make, which is why From is sticking with their stinking dungeons).

So, what do you think? It's basically Mass Effect + Dragon Age vs. Fallout 3 + The Elder Scrolls.

I don't have much to say on the subject, which is why I am asking people. The last BioWare game I played was Baldur's Gate 2 lol, and the last Bethesda one was Oblivion (which I played for about half an hour and hated it), and before that The Terminator (1990) lol, which was pretty fucking cool! (though after a couple hours I couldn't figure out what to do and gave up. I was around 12, by the way.)

[DJ Orwell]

I'm confused by your comment about From. Dark Souls 1 & 2 (and Bloodborne, evidently) take place in a wide variety of interconnected outdoor settings. You are above ground and in broad daylight more often than not. Do you mean "entirely in a dungeon" in a design sense, the same sense that people refer to "corridor shooters" as such for having linear level design, despite "corridor" not really describing the awesome aesthetics accurately?

The first 20 minutes of both Dark Souls games are indeed in dungeonesque places, but they break free into daylit hub areas and you'll be around them for hours before going underground again. I haven't played Demon's Souls, but given the non-contiguous level structure, I don't believe it would be in entirely the same dungeon.

Now, all the King's Field games are indeed dungeon crawlers, but From doesn't quite make those anymore.

[icycalm]

I haven't played any of these games, but every screenshot of them I have seen (including Bloodborne's) makes them look like stinking dungeon crawlers to me. Just a sea of identical gray pixels. Where are the cities, towns and villages? Where are the rivers, lakes and forests? Where are the inns and taverns? Where are the NPCs? If there are none, and if the entire action is set in a labyrinthine set of corridors, regardless of the color of the textures, it's a stinking dungeon crawler, and it should have become extinct since 1994.

[icycalm]

From what I've read of Dragon's Dogma on Scathing Accuracy, it may very well be that Capcom schooled all of them. Renegade's review is bad, that's why I haven't posted it here, but certain things he says make me hopeful that DD is the real deal. I would be playing it (and Demon's Souls) right now if my PS3 hadn't gotten fried a few months ago. jeffrobot bought me a copy of the game.

[DJ Orwell]

Many areas of both Dark Souls games occur on the *rooftops* of civilized settlements, albeit mostly abandoned except for scarce scavenger NPCs you come across. There are altogether many NPCs in all of these games, though admittedly your interaction with them is typically limited to non-interactive JRPG dialogue strings and bartering (no quests, no dialogue trees). Nonetheless, they serve crucial roles, and their locations and services change as a result of your progress. Certain NPCs eventually live or die by your actions elsewhere, and you can always just kill them.

I'm in a really crap place to scour and link videos, but check out Anor Londo.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uzMlRPr-5wc

Or The Painted World. Or Heide's Tower of Flame. Or the Undead Burg. Or the Lost Bastille. These levels consist mainly of towering catwalks, flying buttresses, spiral staircases. Very, very un-dungeon.

Also, the hub level of 2, Majula, is a small inhabited village on a crest over the sea that the NPCs you come across come to occupy.

This is all, of course, nothing on the scale you'd expect from a Western RPG, which typically represent believably-sized bustling urban districts, but on the other hand it's definitely and obviously not anywhere near just dungeons.

[icycalm]

I skimmed the video. Pure dungeon crawling. As for this:

Or The Painted World. Or Heide's Tower of Flame. Or the Undead Burg. Or the Lost Bastille. These levels consist mainly of towering catwalks, flying buttresses, spiral staircases. Very, very un-dungeon.

Pure dungeon crawling too.

Every single thing you wrote is typical of dungeon crawlers. Ah, you kids. That's why I have yet to see anyone compare these games to other dungeon crawlers, just like I haven't seen anyone compare Hotline Miami to overhead action games. You just have no idea that an entire genre of these types of games exists.

[icycalm]

This is all, of course, nothing on the scale you'd expect from a Western RPG

You make it sound as if this a Japanese thing, as if From is not simply copying the dungeon crawling formula from the Western studios that created it, and then abandoned it when they figured out that dungeons are boring, sometime in the early '90s.

[icycalm]

Reminds me of the Select Button thread on Etrian Odyssey. This dude was going nuts over the game, how it's awesome, and it beats JRPGs, and look at this and look at that, at which point someone came in and asked him, "You do realize that there exist hundreds of these games, don't you?"

The funny thing is that the person who asked the question was "desgeega", that fat transexual "indie" developer or whatever. Even HE/SHE/IT knew that Etrian Odyssey didn't invent anything (and is pretty mediocre at what it does besides the mapping thing).

[icycalm]

The funniest thing of all is that these new "From fans" have such a short memory, that they've even forgotten Demon's Souls. No one remembers this game anymore. They all talk about Dark Souls, as if it was the first. If they can't even remember what happened a couple years ago, how could anyone expect them to research what happened 30 years ago? (That's how old the genre is. 20 years ago it was already dead.)

To spoiler my Demon's Souls review a little, I'll tell you what From did. From basically resurrected a dead genre and gave it a big budget. A bigger budget than a game of this kind has ever had. And the question is: was the money well spent? The genre was dead for a reason (because it was boring), so is the rich coat of paint enough to make the experience worthwhile, despite its INTRINSIC deficiencies?

That's what I am going to explore in my review, along with dispelling the absurd hype that surrounds the game and bringing it down a few notches, to reality. Things look hopeful, but the fact remains that I've never been able to finish a game of this sort. I play it for a bit, then I go to sleep, and when I pick it up the next time I am in the middle of a dungeon and don't remember the first thing about where I was going and where I was supposed to be going, so I just dick around in circles for a few minutes and then turn the game off and play something less boring lol. If From manages to hold my attention for even HALF of this game, it will be a triumph for them.

[icycalm]

My Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom review from 2007:

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/xbox360/king ... cleofdoom/

simplistic action dungeon crawler

Anyway, yeah, so all you do in this game is pick a pre-generated character and slog your way through a series of somewhat randomly-generated "dungeons", which are divided into several themed areas (forest, ruins, palace, etc.)

The whole point of the "dungeon" design is that the developers do not have the creative cojones to create something that feels like a real world. It doesn't matter if there's some green or a skybox. If you are in corridors killing stuff and all other kinds of interactivity are minimal to nonexistent, you are playing a dungeon crawler.

[icycalm]

Sometimes I wonder what happened to all those tens of thousands of people who played all those games with me in the '80s and '90s. Did they all die or something? Am I the only one left? Because I sure as hell don't see any of them writing anything today.

[Qpo]

So, what do you think? It's basically Mass Effect + Dragon Age vs. Fallout 3 + The Elder Scrolls.

Fallout 3 is the best and The Elder Scrolls are the worst out of these. The dialogues are really good in both the first Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, so if BioWare has improved their combat systems and worlds in the sequels they might be really good. But Fallout 3 has already pretty much nailed everything, so I'll go with Bethesda.

[icycalm]

I guess we should make it BioWare vs. Bethesda vs. CD Project, with their Witcher and upcoming Cyberpunk franchises. I haven't played any of these games. The Might & Magic series and other crappy 3D WRPGs essentially turned me off the genre for decades. The first 3D WRPG that looked interesting to me was BioWare's KOTOR, and its successor Mass Effect. I just never got round to trying them, and now all these games and franchises have received so much hatred on the internet, that it's hard to get excited about playing them since even if 10% of the hatred is justified, they'll suck. Hopefully it's all bullshit.

Either way, it's amazing that no one plays, or even makes, JRPGs any more. What happened to all those who liked them and bought them? I guess the Westerners finally realized that their own efforts are better, but the Japanese? What happened to them?

Or maybe they are all on handhelds now and that's why Squeenix is making those Fairy games on them.

[icycalm]

And how come Fallout 3 is the best and The Elder Scrolls the worst, if they are made by the same company?

All I know about Fallout 3 is that it's brown. It looks even crappier, at least in screenshots, than From's games.

[icycalm]

I think what happened with Dragon's Dogma (and with Shirokishi Monogatari before it), is that the Japs acknowledged that JRPGs suck and people don't want them anymore, and they riffed off the Western games. Shirokishi apparently was terrible (there's an SA review of it I've been meaning to post), and Dragon's Dogma apparently nailed it.

[icycalm]

Qpo's opinion aside, if I had to pick, merely from previews, the best two 3D WRPGs, I'd go with Mass Effect and Dragon's Dogma, and with Demon's Souls coming on top on the dungeon crawling subgenre (since dungeon crawlers are 3D WRPGs where the action is confined to a dungeon). (And note that I am ranking franchises here; the precise superior installment is not of great importance here). I wonder how far the reality is from this prediction.