Why do people like the Baldur's Gate series and NWN? And why do they like Torment?

[Lord Raziere]

A top down view in an RPG allows you to better simulate having a bunch of people all looking around... tons of people looking in different directions at any given moment, as opposed to a 1st person or OTS that gives you a single forward view.

I can see that, but its weird to me. because I'm just used to look at my protagonists more closely and actually feeling as if I'm in that world playing and fighting as them rather than being some god looking down upon them and ordering them to do stuff, because once it goes into the 3-d isometric thing, thats what it feels like, while 16 bit and 2d and such doesn't for some reason.

[Aotrs Commander]

I can see that, but its weird to me. because I'm just used to look at my protagonists more closely and actually feeling as if I'm in that world playing and fighting as them rather than being some god looking down upon them and ordering them to do stuff, because once it goes into the 3-d isometric thing, thats what it feels like, while 16 bit and 2d and such doesn't for some reason.

I take it you have never used figures on the tabletop while roleplaying?



Speaking for myself, I never haven't (I started in HeroQuest (and I'm corrupting my four-year old nephew the same way already)), so it's more natural for me than third person (let alone first, which I actually kind of dislike).

[Lord Raziere]

I take it you have never used figures on the tabletop while roleplaying?

Speaking for myself, I never haven't (I started in HeroQuest (and I'm corrupting my four-year old nephew the same way already)), so it's more natural for me than third person (let alone first, which I actually kind of dislike).

Only time I've actually done tabletop roleplaying was for one year with like things drawn on paper at most in high school originally for a project, the rest of my roleplaying has been online and freeform for the most part. its only recently I've got physical dice to play with and I've never used them because I've never bothered to find a physical group for anything, mostly because I don't want to play DnD anymore, and if I did want to play something all my rpg books are my computer, so I'have to figure out how to work with that for something physical.

[Mutant Donkey]

I never played Torment but I loved Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter nights.
I grew up playing the old gold box AD&D games and Baldur's gate was a big step up from that. Then when 3.0 D&D came out, Neverwinter nights implemented these rules.
I guess the short answer is that story goes a long way, regardless of the medium.
The long answer is that I'm a nostalgic gamer. Oh wait, that was a short answer too. :)

[Bohandas]

I never played Torment but I loved Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter nights.
I grew up playing the old gold box AD&D games and Baldur's gate was a big step up from that. Then when 3.0 D&D came out, Neverwinter nights implemented these rules.
I guess the short answer is that story goes a long way, regardless of the medium.
The long answer is that I'm a nostalgic gamer. Oh wait, that was a short answer too. :)

But Temple of Elemental Evil did 3e so much better. Why is it so much less popular and less touted

[LibraryOgre]

But Temple of Elemental Evil did 3e so much better. Why is it so much less popular and less touted

1) Broken. ToEE as Atari shipped it does not work in many ways. The Co8 modpack fixes that, but it's still a strike against it.

2) Slow. The gameplay is very slow... while faithful to 3.5, it's very much playing everything out on a tabletop, compared to NWN's more dynamic gameplay.

3) NWN did not succeed on the strength of its mechanics... the enduring popularity of it, except for a few oddballs like me, were the persistent worlds that you could create and share with people. Communities built up around it, and moved to other games. I was in a LOTRO Kinship at one point that started out as a NWN world... they just migrated together to different games. LOTRO came out in 2007, and built up steam when it went F2P in 2010... eight years after NWN was released.

[Aotrs Commander]

1) Broken. ToEE as Atari shipped it does not work in many ways. The Co8 modpack fixes that, but it's still a strike against it.

2) Slow. The gameplay is very slow... while faithful to 3.5, it's very much playing everything out on a tabletop, compared to NWN's more dynamic gameplay.

3) NWN did not succeed on the strength of its mechanics... the enduring popularity of it, except for a few oddballs like me, were the persistent worlds that you could create and share with people. Communities built up around it, and moved to other games. I was in a LOTRO Kinship at one point that started out as a NWN world... they just migrated together to different games. LOTRO came out in 2007, and built up steam when it went F2P in 2010... eight years after NWN was released.

ToEE also had a pretty dull story (almost non-existant - just like the module itself¹) and your companions were more quirks than characters. And the NPC looting system was a massive pain in the arse and a mechanic that just didn't work. (I think the later Co8 patches made it so your idiot NPC companions would stop picking up loot forever and making themselves permenantly encumbered...)

As a mechanical adaption of 3.5, it was excellent, but that WAS the only thing it had going for it, really. (And only once you patched the hell out of it with community patches - made by some of the dev team, even, on their off time, since Atari refused flat-out to patch it.)

(I mean, it was better by far than the flat, dull, lifeless and not even well-adpated Pools of Radiance 3. version, where I recall consisted mostly of smashing furnature so you knew where you'd been because everything looked the same, your characters not being able to walk away from each other, the way maximum dex bonus for armour actually capped your Dex instead of just affecting your AC, you couldn't, I recall, even choose your feats and at the point I gave up out of boredom, picking up treasure was pointless, since there was absolutely nothing to spend it on apart from healing potions because the venders never got new stock. Oh, and your characters had no dialogue other than several shades of grunt, which gave them less life than a generic GDI Infantry Soldier in C&C 1 Pools of Pants was baaaaaaaad. It, along with Star Trek New Worlds and Perimeter, fall into the top three worst games I have personally played.)





¹Which, half of the time, didn't even bother to give names to the NPCs. It was not, actually, a particulalry good module (at least from the reading of it) compared to, say, Deserts of Desolation.

[LibraryOgre]

(I mean, it was better by far than the flat, dull, lifeless and not even well-adpated Pools of Radiance 3. version, where I recall consisted mostly of smashing furnature so you knew where you'd been because everything looked the same, your characters not being able to walk away from each other, the way maximum dex bonus for armour actually capped your Dex instead of just affecting your AC, you couldn't, I recall, even choose your feats and at the point I gave up out of boredom, picking up treasure was pointless, since there was absolutely nothing to spend it on apart from healing potions because the venders never got new stock. Oh, and your characters had no dialogue other than several shades of grunt, which gave them less life than a generic GDI Infantry Soldier in C&C 1 Pools of Pants was baaaaaaaad. It, along with Star Trek New Worlds and Perimeter, fall into the top three worst games I have personally played.)

Don't forget that several of the pregens had better stats than any player-generated character COULD have, because everything was point buy except those specific pregens, which seem to have used a different point buy.

[Aotrs Commander]

Don't forget that several of the pregens had better stats than any player-generated character COULD have, because everything was point buy except those specific pregens, which seem to have used a different point buy.

I vaguely remember trading out characters, because there was not even the most basic attachment beyond a pile of stats and some grunts, so that sounds about right.

[veti]

But Temple of Elemental Evil did 3e so much better. Why is it so much less popular and less touted

Because it missed everything that mattered.

Implementation of rules - seriously, why would that even be a consideration? D&D rules are made for tabletop play. Playing on a computer is a completely different experience. Particularly if there's no online element, hence no other living players. And there was no story, and no "creation kit" or whatever NWN called it.

NWN was, at its root, a storytelling medium. Lots of human DMs see D&D that way too, so there's a premade constituency for that. The ease of making new modules attracted a huge base of fan-made adventures, even before online play was a thing.

And, unlike ToEE, it gave you a single character to play, not a whole party. This alone made it feel much, much closer to an actual RPG than ToEE ever dreamed of being.

[Triaxx]

ToEE is a bad successor to BG. It's much better considered as a successor to IWD. It's a minimalist plot, which largely (almost entirely) consists of go here, kill that thing, then come back. And for what it is, it's fine. There's no grand story telling here, no massively complicated and convoluted plot. But instead it's gone and focused very much on the mechanics of the combat system. And I like that about it. It doesn't try hard to have you get bogged down in some deep mysterious plot, while still having some nice little surprises and twists.

[LibraryOgre]

ToEE is a bad successor to BG. It's much better considered as a successor to IWD. It's a minimalist plot, which largely (almost entirely) consists of go here, kill that thing, then come back. And for what it is, it's fine. There's no grand story telling here, no massively complicated and convoluted plot. But instead it's gone and focused very much on the mechanics of the combat system. And I like that about it. It doesn't try hard to have you get bogged down in some deep mysterious plot, while still having some nice little surprises and twists.

I wouldn't even call it a successor to IWD... IWD was structured (I jokingly call it a rail shooter), while I found ToEE to be terribly unstructured after the Moathouse.

"Ok, we've beaten Lareth, and we go to Nulb and... now what?" There are a few hooks (a few different ways to explore the temple, plus the Emridy Meadows sidequest, if you haven't done it already), but you've also got the problem where the temple, at least, will radically ramp up in difficulty without any warning. It doesn't really have anything to bridge that difficulty gap, either... you just find yourself fighting a ton of bugbears with 100 HP when you're like, fifth level.

[Aotrs Commander]

So, today's new 4.1 patch version of Deadfire does indeed have a new (optional at game start) turn-based mode (albeit in beta).

Can't accuse Obs of not making an attempt to please everyone, I guess.

(Probably a good chunk easier, mind, to go from RTwP to TBS tha vise-versa, not that it's particularly easy either way...)



(Of course, all this always means is some people are deeply annoyed that someone else's, often only slightly different, interests are being catered to instead of theirs...)

[Bohandas]

Because it missed everything that mattered.

Implementation of rules - seriously, why would that even be a consideration? D&D rules are made for tabletop play. Playing on a computer is a completely different experience. Particularly if there's no online element, hence no other living players. And there was no story, and no "creation kit" or whatever NWN called it.

Lack of an online element makes realtime less excusible. With NWN the realtime element can be explained away as a means of preventing a single player from slowing the game down for everyone else, but that excuse doesn't fly with Torment or BG

[Winthur]

Lack of an online element makes realtime less excusible

But BG is superfun in MP.

[Bohandas]

Everyone keeps talking about the story in BG and Torment as if that excuses the actual RPG game portion being sub-par. Why even have the game parts at all then if the story is all it has. They should have been released as a visual novel.

[Winthur]

Everyone keeps talking about the story in BG and Torment as if that excuses the actual RPG game portion being sub-par. Why even have the game parts at all then if the story is all it has. They should have been released as a visual novel.

Considering that Baldur's Gate has a thriving modding community that took its already robust and compelling mechanics (spells and items that introduce multiple interesting approaches) and elevated them into one of the best tactical experiences on the market with stuff like Sword Coast Stratagems, Ascension and so on, I'd say you're now being adversarial for no reason.

[Kish]

Now? That's where he was from the first post.

[LibraryOgre]

Lack of an online element makes realtime less excusible. With NWN the realtime element can be explained away as a means of preventing a single player from slowing the game down for everyone else, but that excuse doesn't fly with Torment or BG

But, as pointed out, BG and Torment are only real-time in theory... nothing prevents you from pausing every round (there's even an option to have the game do this for you), then having the action play out in the round, before you pause again. All of the underlying mechanics are round-based... it only looks realtime, because that's more dynamic than Temple of Elemental Evil or Gold Box's explicitly turn-based mechanics.

And, of course, BG WAS designed to allow multi-player, from the get-go. One to six players can do a multiplayer run-through, each with their own PC. Icewind Dale continued this; Planescape: Torment, based on the same engine, simply continued it.

Everyone keeps talking about the story in BG and Torment as if that excuses the actual RPG game portion being sub-par. Why even have the game parts at all then if the story is all it has. They should have been released as a visual novel.

And, well, this part is simply opinion. You think it's subpar; I think it's a pretty awesome implementation of the 2e ruleset. Even when BG2 turns into rocket-tag (or BG1 starts as Brick Tag in the Land of the Glass Ornaments), the game remains fun to play. The battles are challenging, and you have to think about your strategy... but there are few perfect builds or strategies to overcome all challenges. The mechanics mostly conform to the AD&D 2e standard, with BG1 and IWD being pretty much as laid out in the PH, and BG2 bringing in some Complete Handbooks material.

[Bohandas]

Considering that Baldur's Gate has a thriving modding community that took its already robust and compelling mechanics (spells and items that introduce multiple interesting approaches) and elevated them into one of the best tactical experiences on the market with stuff like Sword Coast Stratagems, Ascension and so on, I'd say you're now being adversarial for no reason.

I'm not trolling, I truly don't understand the appeal of the story or the mechanics.

The real-time play diminishes tactical choices by making it difficult to coordinate area spells, and the fact that. other than the party leader, you're limited to pregen characters means that until you're a ways in you can't simply fill your party with mages from the start to avoid having to coordinate your spells so they don't hit the melee characters

[Bohandas]

But, as pointed out, BG and Torment are only real-time in theory... nothing prevents you from pausing every round (there's even an option to have the game do this for you), then having the action play out in the round, before you pause again. All of the underlying mechanics are round-based... it only looks realtime, because that's more dynamic than Temple of Elemental Evil or Gold Box's explicitly turn-based mechanics.

It looks realtime because every character moves simultaneously, no matter how frequently or infrequently you pause. They do not each individually move in turn. I could just as easily pause a game like Super Smash Bros every six seconds, but that wouldn't make it turn-based.

EDIT:

It's also not turn-based because you can issue orders out of turn. If it were really turn-based with simultaneous movement, all characters' actions would start and end simultaneously. You would issue orders to the entire party. The simulation would run for six seconds the party and opponents would simultaneously take their assigned actions (which they would then be locked into), and then you would issue new orders to the entire party again.

[Winthur]

I'm not trolling, I truly don't understand the appeal of the story or the mechanics.

The real-time play diminishes tactical choices by making it difficult to coordinate area spells, and the fact that. other than the party leader, you're limited to pregen characters means that until you're a ways in you can't simply fill your party with mages from the start to avoid having to coordinate your spells so they don't hit the melee characters

Have you heard of archers, clerics, party friendly nukes (Holy Smite, Fireball under fire resistance) playing with a smaller party size or simply not using these AoE spells for every single situation because they're not fit for closed areas? AoE spells are plenty strong if used properly, as evidenced by the strength of AoE CC like Web and spells like Skull Trap.

Like, in what situation do you mix melee with sending fireball into the fray anyway, outside of stacking resistances beforehand?

[LibraryOgre]

I'm not trolling, I truly don't understand the appeal of the story or the mechanics.

The real-time play diminishes tactical choices by making it difficult to coordinate area spells, and the fact that. other than the party leader, you're limited to pregen characters means that until you're a ways in you can't simply fill your party with mages from the start to avoid having to coordinate your spells so they don't hit the melee characters

This is also not true, mixed with personal preferences. The real-time play enforces different tactical choices... you can't simply shoot off a fireball and ignore consequences because you're safe in a timeless void. As for "You must use pregens, that is simply false for Baldur's Gate. Since the beginning, BG1 has had the option to make your entire party. BG2 has the same option, and IWD enforces it. Now, PS:T does limit you to pregens, and a defined main character ("The Nameless One"), but that's a fairly different beast.

[veti]

I'm not trolling, I truly don't understand the appeal of the story or the mechanics.

The real-time play diminishes tactical choices by making it difficult to coordinate area spells, and the fact that. other than the party leader, you're limited to pregen characters means that until you're a ways in you can't simply fill your party with mages from the start to avoid having to coordinate your spells so they don't hit the melee characters

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as if what you're looking for is a tactical wargame.

That's how D&D started, but it quickly outgrew that niche. By the time I first heard of it - 1978, I think - while there was still an association between it and wargaming, they were clearly quite different things.

Sure you can play D&D that way, some people do and that's fine for them. But you can't possibly be unaware that it's not the only way to play it. Others enjoy it as a storytelling experience, or role play. That's the market that ToEE missed spectacularly.

[Kish]

No one said trolling. Winthur (and I) said "being pointlessly adversarial," which you are.

From where I'm sitting, the thread-starting post amounted to: "From the perspective that my taste is supreme, justify different taste." And every response you've made since then has amounted to saying that you don't care about anything I find it comprehensible to care about, do care about a bunch of stuff I can't understand anyone caring about, and still haven't seen anyone explain how the games you don't like are something fundamentally different than they are. Well, no. You haven't and you're not going to, and that you don't find them appealing means you should not play them--and nothing more.

[Aotrs Commander]

Everyone keeps talking about the story in BG and Torment as if that excuses the actual RPG game portion being sub-par. Why even have the game parts at all then if the story is all it has. They should have been released as a visual novel.

As opposed to the thrilling and engaging story as shown in Temple of Elemental Evil or Pool of Radiance...?



Counter-point is obvious - Torment: Tides of Numenara, which is pretty close to the tone of PS:T, but it not D&D and is turn-based... And in order to not drag out the turn-based combat with chaff encounters, they basicially eliminated combat more or less as a thing in the entire game, rendering it basically more like a point-and-click adventrue game. (Which are a FAR better comparison than visual novel, and frankly your tone comes across as by a little bit derogatory to both siad games and to visual novels.) TToN more or less has the combat as entirely optional... And the game is therefore really rather short (clocking in at 35 hours in my run).



And, for the record, a PS:T where you replaced AD&D with D&D I probably would like even better, to be honest; Nameless and Dakkon as Warblades rather than fighter (just because you might as well for the coolness factor of maneuvers verses just straight numbers), with PF style rogues for Nameless and Annah... Yeah, that'd be pretty damn cool if you ask me.

(That said, my FRAG would it be more difficult to balance, as by the end of my Nameless Nutter run, I WAS level 64 and had seven hundred and forty-three hit points in AD&D...)

[Bohandas]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as if what you're looking for is a tactical wargame.

That's how D&D started, but it quickly outgrew that niche. By the time I first heard of it - 1978, I think - while there was still an association between it and wargaming, they were clearly quite different things.

Sure you can play D&D that way, some people do and that's fine for them. But you can't possibly be unaware that it's not the only way to play it. Others enjoy it as a storytelling experience, or role play. That's the market that ToEE missed spectacularly.

Tabletop D&D outgrew it. The amount of roleplaying you can do in a computer game is inherently limited; you're constrained to a handful of stock responses in dialog, and generally to combat, dialog, and occasionally puzzles as the only options for solving most problems. You can't sneak in windows or smash down doors, your cleric can't give a non-prefab sermon, and your rogue can't run a non-prefab scam. The entire game is on rails, regardless of the presence of a handful of switchtracks. Gettig the game off of that railroad would take phenomenal advances in AI and an enormous amount of drive space and memory.

[Bohandas]

Also, can somebody please explain to me how the combination of being able to pause and abilities having cooldown times allegedly makes a game "turn-based". This claim comes up in every discussion of BG and NWN and I've never seen the term "turn-based" used like this anywhere else. "Turn based" generally means that the characters move one at a time, or at the very least that the game is divided into fixed rounds. I've played Baldur's Gate enough to know that neither of these things is true; in particular if the second possibility were true then there would be no need for the game's dozen different auto-pause options because every character would complete their actions at exactly the same time.

[veti]

The entire game is on rails, regardless of the presence of a handful of switchtracks. Gettig the game off of that railroad would take phenomenal advances in AI and an enormous amount of drive space and memory.

Ummm... Yes? That's why I described NWN as a storytelling medium. It's got some of the feel of an RPG - approximately 47 times more so than ToEE - but essentially it's a way to tell, and experience, stories.

[GloatingSwine]

But, as pointed out, BG and Torment are only real-time in theory... nothing prevents you from pausing every round (there's even an option to have the game do this for you), then having the action play out in the round, before you pause again.

That's not really an adequate option, and I've always hated playing with it.

The pause-every-round option falls down because in an actual turn based game you have an accurate understanding of how much you can do in one turn. You know how far you can move, how many attacks that'll let you make, if it's a good game you also know how far the enemy can move so you know where you need to move to to make sure you fight at advantage and if it's initiative based rather than I-go-you-go then you know what order everyone's going to act. (and if the game's really good you can interact with that in some way)

In RTwP games you tend not to get any of that information because they're not intended to be played turn based so they don't give you the information turn based games give and using which forms most of the basis of having fun playing them.

Even though BG is internally rounds based it's not really intended to be played in rounds. It's intended to be realtime with a pause option to account for the fact we're not all APM gods (and it doesn't and possibly can't have coherent hotkeys because of the wide number of spell combinations.)