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 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
I mean, the original BG 1 & 2, yeah it was a bit clunky. But anyone playing BG nowadays are playing the enhanced edition which basically eliminates all the clunkyness.

The EE doesn't change the interface much (it didn't need to, as its completely functional). Except protruding the dialog box too far into the center of the screen, which is worse than the original..

The enhanced edition fixes most of the annoying things that popped up in the original. Larger stacks of arrows/sling bullets. Access to potion bags to help manage inventory. Got rid of the issue in BG 1 where the game would unpause if you went into the inventory etc.

There are a lot of little things that were slowly updated in fixed in BG 2 and Throne of Bhaal. But the Enhanced Edition went further and enhanced the experience significantly. It is still very much the same game, but many of the little annoyances are now gone.

Voss wrote:

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
I mean, the original BG 1 & 2, yeah it was a bit clunky. But anyone playing BG nowadays are playing the enhanced edition which basically eliminates all the clunkyness.

The EE doesn't change the interface much (it didn't need to, as its completely functional). Except protruding the dialog box too far into the center of the screen, which is worse than the original..

You can just drag that to resize it, can't you?

The king of Old Gold games for me is Darklands by Microprose.

Nothing since has scratched that particular itch, and we're going on... 28 years now?! Jesus I'm getting old.

The mix of choose your own adventure, setting, style and open world-ness was and is mind blowing. I wish I still had the spiral notebooks I would keep next to my computer while playing, because you'd get quests like 'The Burgomeister of Essen would like you to track down Harald Kleinswaltz, he was last seen near Stadt.' and that was it - no real guide or journal or help. Add into that the fact that your 'magic' came from finding the proper Saints to call upon in specific scenarios and you having to travel to the right monastery or church across much of the medieval Germanies, or Alchemy which required specific recipes and it really rewarded an organized reference.

I liked how you gradually fell down the rabbit hole through emergent storytelling - you started off being jumped by thugs in alleys, progressed to fighting robber knights on the roads and in their castles. Then eventually you started running into witches, demons, The Wild Hunt, and journeyed into hell to fight the devil!

If someone would just remake the exact game with updated graphics and UI it would be amazing.

Nothing since has scratched that particular itch

Yea it is weird how there's so many indie developers jostling for the same small patch of genre when some absolute gems have no imitators at all.

It took forever to get another King of Dragon Pass game, although it's cool we got one eventually, and you always hear from eastern Europeans how brilliant and inventive Vangers was but I'm not seeing many car RPGs on the market :-p

Crispy78 wrote:

Voss wrote:

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
I mean, the original BG 1 & 2, yeah it was a bit clunky. But anyone playing BG nowadays are playing the enhanced edition which basically eliminates all the clunkyness.

The EE doesn't change the interface much (it didn't need to, as its completely functional). Except protruding the dialog box too far into the center of the screen, which is worse than the original..

You can just drag that to resize it, can't you?

It can be resized to be bigger, and take up more of the central screen space (up to 2/3s, which is out and out crazy), yes.
But what it really needs is to be moved so it is flush with the bottom of the screen, alongside the hotbar, instead of positioned above the hotbar.

The best that can be done without modding is turning off 'Scale User Interface' which opens the game area up quite a bit, but makes plain how much wasted space exists in their UI setup (and shrinks all icons and text significantly). It does limit the dialog box to half the height of the screen, though.
The same is true for Icewind Dale.

The annoying thing is, when they did the Planescape Torment EE, everything is along the bottom of the screen with no issue. You can optionally open a combat log in the upper right, but they don't toss things into the center of 'game area,' because that's obviously terrible. Though they made the dialog box a separate window as part of this, but there's a significant chunk of dead space in both lower corners that could have been used.

If you grew up in the 90s, there is realy nothing like breaking out that N64 and fire up goldeneye, mario64, ocarina of time, waverace, starfox or perfect dark.

real nostalgia trip

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
If you grew up in the 90s, there is realy nothing like breaking out that N64 and fire up goldeneye, mario64, ocarina of time, waverace, starfox or perfect dark.

real nostalgia trip

I often try to get out my old ps2 games and the graphics (particularly movement in first person games) give me a hardcore headache now. It's a shame, because I'd love to play timesplitters more.

the_scotsman wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
If you grew up in the 90s, there is realy nothing like breaking out that N64 and fire up goldeneye, mario64, ocarina of time, waverace, starfox or perfect dark.

real nostalgia trip

I often try to get out my old ps2 games and the graphics (particularly movement in first person games) give me a hardcore headache now. It's a shame, because I'd love to play timesplitters more.

yea i know what you mean. prolly cuz the ps2 and xbox are in a time between low graphix (early to mid 90s) and todays high graphix.
N64 is so "old" that moust of it looks like a bit better stuff then minecraft.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
If you grew up in the 90s, there is realy nothing like breaking out that N64 and fire up goldeneye, mario64, ocarina of time, waverace, starfox or perfect dark.

real nostalgia trip

I often try to get out my old ps2 games and the graphics (particularly movement in first person games) give me a hardcore headache now. It's a shame, because I'd love to play timesplitters more.

yea i know what you mean. prolly cuz the ps2 and xbox are in a time between low graphix (early to mid 90s) and todays high graphix.
N64 is so "old" that moust of it looks like a bit better stuff then minecraft.

I can usually look at really low polygon count stuff just fine, it just seems like there was a time when they made everything really fuzzy and blurry to make it look "realistic" that makes my head pound.

Baldurs gate is teetering right on the edge for me, old fallout I can't play, pretty much anything first-person that is pre Half Life 2 I can't handle. And it's funny, because as a kid I never had that problem, I played the heck out of those games. but now I'll go

"Hell yeah classic star wars battlefront 2 on sale for a Dollar? Time for some nostalgia!" and then I'll load it up and feel like puking 20 minutes in.

For me the big thing is the polygon games. BG is completely fine, but Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind just don't work for me. They look so much worse than the games that came before them that I can't stand it.

Though I'm not fan of athe modern 'retro-style' games, either. Anything deliberately over-pixelated just baffles me. Its like deliberately trying to create a child's drawing. Or the deliberately blurry 'leaked' pics we get in news and rumors from time to time. You actually have to make a conscious effort to look that bad at this point.

Neverwinter looked worse even back then - at least to me. Sure it was all 3D now, but the engine always felt like it was so hollow. You had black dark nothing surrounding the adventuring area. Rather than beautiful drawn cityscapes and the like that you got with the former games.

The game felt like it had no "soul" to it. It didn't help that the first quest was "Four things have escaped - there are 5 regions to the city and one is a starting zone with shops and healers".


This felt so disappointing after BG2 where after the first basic quest you are basically thrust into a huge (feeling) city with. "Go find out what you can". That's it, no lead, no hints just go find and adventure and explore. You felt like you were finding quests rather than following a pre-designed pathway. The fact that there's several quests you can take hwich have no link to the main quest and yet each which feel like a proper adventure are great. It was also back in a time when quests weren't as "questy". I feel as if with MMO and with time we've watered down RPG questing and adventuring to its most base components.

It's ilke how people are now realising that, with the release of WOW classic, that as they've evolved the game to make it more efficient, they've sucked some of the life out of it.

You know, don't know how old it is but I was just reminded about star wars galaxies. That game stole a few summers of my childhood, and I absolutely sucked at it and made the worst smuggler in the galaxy, but it was still my character, and I think it was the best star wars RPG experience available outside of KOTOR, even a better than The old republic in terms of community.

 Overread wrote:

It's ilke how people are now realising that, with the release of WOW classic, that as they've evolved the game to make it more efficient, they've sucked some of the life out of it.

WoW Classic mostly made me realize that the old version just wasn't fun, and was pretty empty and lifeless.
Modern WoW has a lot of problems (particularly in the writing area, and the dull as dirt 'world quests'), but they've at least realized that cities should have people in them, and the gameplay shouldn't repeatedly stop after every couple fights so colored bars can refill.

Man the opposite for me, WoW Classic is how MMO's should be played. I get that its not for everyone, which is fine. I understand how people may not like a particular way of playing. Hell I don't understand how people can even stand playing online shooters...let alone competitive online shooters.

But to each his own I guess. Most people, me included, are just happy to have the option of playing it instead of being told "No! You're wrong and no one wants to play that!!! It feels more like an adventure with my character then modern WoW does.

Now to get back on topic....I just re-installed Heroes of Might and Magic 3 because I hate myself and I want to suffer...it's the only explanation that makes sense!

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Man the opposite for me, WoW Classic is how MMO's should be played. I get that its not for everyone, which is fine. I understand how people may not like a particular way of playing. Hell I don't understand how people can even stand playing online shooters...let alone competitive online shooters.

But to each his own I guess. Most people, me included, are just happy to have the option of playing it instead of being told "No! You're wrong and no one wants to play that!!! It feels more like an adventure with my character then modern WoW does.

Now to get back on topic....I just re-installed Heroes of Might and Magic 3 because I hate myself and I want to suffer...it's the only explanation that makes sense!

See, I actually grew up in the lap of my father, a gigantic nerd who would play HOMM3 and BG, and I basically was exposed to the gameplay mechanics and sound effects of those games before I was able to form coherent thoughts and sentences.

So it's sometimes a very strange experience to play one of those games and realize oh...wait...I know this guy. I know what he's going to say. I know that a dwarf, when injured, goes "YOP!" and I don't know why I know that because it's in the misty pre-3 years old recesses of my memory.

That said, HOMM3 does and will always slap, I just wish playing it didn't feel like a drug induced past life regression.

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Man the opposite for me, WoW Classic is how MMO's should be played. I get that its not for everyone, which is fine. I understand how people may not like a particular way of playing. Hell I don't understand how people can even stand playing online shooters...let alone competitive online shooters.

But to each his own I guess. Most people, me included, are just happy to have the option of playing it instead of being told "No! You're wrong and no one wants to play that!!! It feels more like an adventure with my character then modern WoW does.

Now to get back on topic....I just re-installed Heroes of Might and Magic 3 because I hate myself and I want to suffer...it's the only explanation that makes sense!

wow classic was actualy a win/win move.
Thouse who played 10+ years ago but dont like how wow evolved now has classic to play while the rest of us are happy in the current version of wow.

personly i began during lich king, and i find classic to be a horrible experience, and a big step backwards in terms of playability.

I mean everyone prefers the expansion they started in. I was in Beta testing and played all the way up until a month before Burning Crusade dropped. So I only ever really played Classic and got to experience first hand all the stuff that made WoW, WoW.

Hell I remember logging in and running through the barrens and just seeing people yell "LEeeeeroy JENKINS!!!" and wondering what they were talking about. Then I looked it up and almost died laughing.

I tired playing modern WoW and it was...well somewhat boring. I didn't fear for my life! What's the point of playing if you can't get one-shot crit by a Defias Pillager?

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
I mean everyone prefers the expansion they started in.

That's a wildly baseless assumption. I know I certainly don't care for vanilla a month before Burning Crusade, but that's where I started.

I tend to prefer Pandaria (where they managed good, linked short stories in compact arcs throughout the zones) and Draenor compared to the beginning or the current expansions. with Wrath coming third and Cataclysm itself on the bottom (the pre-release revamp of the old world prior to Cataclysm itself I'd call significantly better than the 'real' expansion, or most expansions, actually).

Voss wrote:

That's a wildly baseless assumption.

?

People generally prefer the original piece of entertainment that got them to be a fan to begin with. There is nothing wildly baseless about such a statement. Its the same principle that applies to someones preference for, lets say, their favourite actor who played James Bond or Doctor Who.

As an example, my favourite version of Civilization is Civ 5. Why? because its the first Civ game I played. Many civilization fans swear by Civ 3, or even Civ 2. Are they wrong? No, not at all. I totally believe them when they say its the better game/their favourite. I also make no illusions that their preference for those games are based on whether or not they were the players introduction to the genre.

So baseless? Not at all. However, like many things involving humans nothing is 100% universal. I mean some people actually enjoy Black Licorice...

I started playing in 2nd edition of 40k and liked 6th edition best, though there were things I’d have tweaked, of course.

I also enjoy black licorice, so I’m gonna say your assertion probably doesn’t hold up.

Doom 2016 kicks the snot out of Doom 1, though Doom 1 is still a good old gold game.

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:

Voss wrote:

That's a wildly baseless assumption.

?

People generally prefer the original piece of entertainment that got them to be a fan to begin with. There is nothing wildly baseless about such a statement. Its the same principle that applies to someones preference for, lets say, their favourite actor who played James Bond or Doctor Who.

As an example, my favourite version of Civilization is Civ 5. Why? because its the first Civ game I played. Many civilization fans swear by Civ 3, or even Civ 2. Are they wrong? No, not at all. I totally believe them when they say its the better game/their favourite. I also make no illusions that their preference for those games are based on whether or not they were the players introduction to the genre.

So baseless? Not at all. However, like many things involving humans nothing is 100% universal. I mean some people actually enjoy Black Licorice...

I mean, my first civ was 2 and other than nostalgically going back and playing the fantasy game mode, which was a hilarious clusterfeth, civ V is still by far my favorite version of the game.

mostly because looking at civ VI makes my eyes pop out of my skull and strangle themselves with their optical nerves. The gameplay is...fine, but graphic design wise it looks like a garbage mobile game and I'd much much rather spend time looking at the much more dated graphics of civ iv than vi.

civ iv does have the good version of rhys and fall though.

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:

Voss wrote:

That's a wildly baseless assumption.

?

People generally prefer the original piece of entertainment that got them to be a fan to begin with. There is nothing wildly baseless about such a statement. Its the same principle that applies to someones preference for, lets say, their favourite actor who played James Bond or Doctor Who.

As an example, my favourite version of Civilization is Civ 5. Why? because its the first Civ game I played. Many civilization fans swear by Civ 3, or even Civ 2. Are they wrong? No, not at all. I totally believe them when they say its the better game/their favourite. I also make no illusions that their preference for those games are based on whether or not they were the players introduction to the genre.

So baseless? Not at all. However, like many things involving humans nothing is 100% universal. I mean some people actually enjoy Black Licorice...

You're either confusing nostalgia for preference, or you genuinely think people can't form new opinions when exposed to new things. Both _are_ wildly baseless.

If you don't have any real reason for liking Civ 5 beyond 'played it first' you aren't engaging in any sort of game analysis OR self-reflection.
Compare it to the_scotsman's answer where he realizes his 'first' is mostly nostalgia, but he doesn't like the most recent version because of the graphics. He's actually put some consideration as to which Civ game he likes. Its still an opinion, but its backed by his own rationale.

I can't think of many things where I prefer the first one.
Dr Who? I definitely prefer Tennant or Smith to what'shisname.
Star Wars? Nope, Empire.
Baldurs Gate 1? Nope. 2.
Civilization- certainly not 1, 2 or 3. They're not even in the running, and I started with one
1st edition AD&D or BECMI (those was sort of simultaneous for me)? Feth no. I'd rather play 5th or even 4th rather than that mess.

Its not just me, either. I can't think of anyone I've ever met that prefers something just because its their entry point. Humans are a little more complex than that, and in my experience, the ones with a simple preference prefer the 'latest and greatest' rather than their first. That at least has some basis, since generally sequels show improvement from the experience of the creators and/or additional content. (Though in some cases, like Civ, you have to wait for expansions to bring subsystems back)

Voss wrote:

You're either confusing nostalgia for preference, or you genuinely think people can't form new opinions when exposed to new things. Both _are_ wildly baseless.

While people can form new opinions when exposed to new things, it usually takes a significant amount of time and exposure before it sinks in as we humans tends to be very stubborn monkeys. So no, I disagree entirely. Perhaps in a earlier era people would take the time to do so. In the modern era however there is just so much damn content most won't because...well...why waste my time programming myself to do that when I can just bypass it to the stuff I know I do like. Especially in this modern age where nostalgia itself is a form of preference. I'd go into it more but this is a Video game thread and its pointless and I'd rather not derail it.

Now, back on topic

I had a chance to go through a pile of old CD's I have and found a bunch of my old Lucasarts games. Unfortunately like many old CD's from the early 90's they don't work anymore. Which sucks since I wanted to give the Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis a spin again. I also wish I could find my disks for Zack McKracken and the Legend of Kyrandia.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I also enjoy black licorice, so I’m gonna say your assertion probably doesn’t hold up.

Well you're just histories greatest monster then aren't you!?!?!

Not until I correct the spelling of *history’s* greatest monster... which I’ll concede I’m now in the running for.

I know I'm gonna catch hell for this so I'm breaking out my asbestos gloves, but I'm replaying mass effect 2 now, and i'm amazed at how much better the gameplay in mass effect Andromeda was.

(Jumps into ceramite layered bunker, dogs hatch and awaits the flamestorm of outrage from andromeda haters.)

Eh. The gamplay in Andromeda wasn't ever really a problem.

Well, other than the sense that there should have been more exploration and colony building and less constant 'shoot the evil space orks for being all inherently evil and stuff.'

The Mass Effect series did improve significantly in gameplay over time. Graphics too, ignoring some too-early launch bugs.

Its the writing that was so uneven, both between games and internally within them (while I personally think ME2 and Andromeda are the best games overall, their endings were laughably bad). The first one was the only one with a pretty good ending, but it also had a lot of busy work and fetch quests that loaded it down.

 Matt Swain wrote:
I know I'm gonna catch hell for this so I'm breaking out my asbestos gloves, but I'm replaying mass effect 2 now, and i'm amazed at how much better the gameplay in mass effect Andromeda was.

(Jumps into ceramite layered bunker, dogs hatch and awaits the flamestorm of outrage from andromeda haters.)

For me it was not that Andromeda was a worse game, some of the missions was very good, but for me it was the feel that game felt somewhar devoid of any real hearthbeat if it makes any sanse. I liked the atmosphere much more in ME 1&2 due to the feeling that it was far more alive in every sense.

I've only played ME2 and I felt like it was a game stuck between two genres. It wasn't quite action filled enough for a proper FPS, but at the same time it lacked some of that heavy party team play and questing aspects that a pure RPG game has.

Very neat for its day, but I still felt like they should have gone one way or the other. I think my other gripe (which fits for either mode) is that the maps feel very linear. I think you really feel it because of the FPS aspects of the game, so you feel like you should be able to sneak around or take another path, but most of the encounters are rail-roaded to you.



The other thing - surveying - seriously its one of those in-game mini-games that basically has no challenge and feels like its just there to burn your time. You don't get that feeling of "finding" things just of using the survey probes and stuff

 Matt Swain wrote:
I know I'm gonna catch hell for this so I'm breaking out my asbestos gloves, but I'm replaying mass effect 2 now, and i'm amazed at how much better the gameplay in mass effect Andromeda was.

(Jumps into ceramite layered bunker, dogs hatch and awaits the flamestorm of outrage from andromeda haters.)

I hardly think you can call any of the Mass Effect games 'old' gold... they only just came out! If Mass Effect was a human it would barely be in secondary school