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Mummelmann on 17 February 2020
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HoloDust said:
Mummelmann said:

It didn't garner much attention where I lived, still riding on the wave of the massive and epic BG2, it was sidelined by most. The console space was also accelerating at the time, gamer habits changed a lot in the early 2000's. Two of my favorite titles in the genre since the golden days are actually indie productions, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Divinity: Original Sin.

I miss Troika studios, they also made the only decent Vampire the Masquerade game back in the day. They also made the brilliant Temple of Elemental Evil, which was the first title I remember making proper use of the tactical aspects of the 3rd edition D&D rules.

Yeah, VtM: Bloodlines was remarkable game, one of my all time favourites, hopefully sequel will do it justice.

I haven't tried Kingmaker yet, I have to be honest, I got back in pen&paper RPGs after so long, and appeal of party based VG RPGs somewhat fizzled out (the very reason I got more into VG RPGs in the first place back in late 80s was due to our D&D group starting to meet less and less), but given that I'm pondering moving from D&D 5e to Pathfinder 2e (5e is very accessible, but fairly shallow and WotC support is quite shoddy compared to Paizo), I might give it a go.

On the other hand, I don't have this problem with action-RPGs, they ultimately provide challenge of requiring your skill as a player, so I'm guessing I gravitate more toward them these days, since they are not in direct conflict with P&P counterparts...though I do think action-RPGs are furthest away from reaching its peak - there was glimmer of hope back in days of Gothic and VotM, afterwards I was hoping for more direct skill to character dependencies (I tend to say that every NBA2K has done this better than any action-RPG ever made), but unfortunately, there wasn't much done in that field.

I'm still hoping for a proper revival of the Gothic brand! I fear they harmed the IP too much though. Risen had the right idea, but they forgot what it was by the time the sequel rolled around. Somehow, even with its obviously much lower production values, Gothic 3 made me care a lot more about its characters and world than any TES game ever did, I genuinely felt bad when siding with the orcs and actually changed my mind.

You should try Kingmaker! It's really entertaining and the combat is amazing. It's not immensely well written, but the gameplay is the star. The style of narration is more inspired by pen & paper too, with small "book" segments where you make skill checks and have a narrator. Fair warning though, it's properly hard, I had to adjust the difficulty more than once. The realm managing bit is also difficult, I'd recommend lowering that by default for any player since mistakes can literally cost you the entire game farther down the line.

I recently took up D&D myself as well, with some of the kids at work (I work with autistic kids and youth). Been so long, but I still love it, I like being the dungeon master and setting them up all the time. We use the 3rd edition, as it's the one I'm familiar with, and it has somewhat deeper mechanics that I enjoy. Needless to say; the kids are having a blast!