Bay 12 Games Forum

Strawman attacks are fun, aren't they, Trebz?

Anime fortress is best fortress. I'm with boss.

HOOOOOO BOOOY
Here comes the #1 cliché argument. Next you'll be stating that Andromeda is a good game, just not a good Mass Effect game and praising Witcher 3 as the objectively best game of all time.
Andromeda is an RPG.
Hell, it's more of an RPG than Mass Effect 1. Let's compare!
In Mass Effect 1, you can find and equip armor and weapons with incremental stat upgrades. There was the rare slightly-unique element to a gun but for the most part it was "Shotgun MK2 vs Shotgun MK3" or "Do I want high damage low firerate or high firerate low damage?".
In Mass Effect Andromeda, you can... do the same! Except now weapons and armor sets are actually unique and promote different playstyles! And this is without sacrificing quantity!

Spoiler: ME1 Level Up Screen (click to show/hide)

Pictured: All the possible levels/skills/whatever for a soldier. (More ability-heavy classes get ~2 extra bars for their abilities)

In Mass Effect 1, you can upgrade your character like so:
1.) You can spent points on extremely small incremental boosts for things such as accuracy and damage. This hurt the shooter, but that's not my point.
2.) The occasional ability. (Also in very small increments!)
3.) The out-of-combat ability; namely Charm/Intimidate. This is the only thing Andromeda doesn't have and to argue that Andromeda is somehow not an RPG because of this is pretty stupid.

Spoiler: MEA Level Up Screen (click to show/hide)

Pictured: One of the three categories you can spend points in.

Now, in Andromeda:
1.) The skill investments matter a lot much. You get upgrades like 30% increased damaged instead of +2% damage.
2.) You can spend points on passive talents and active abilities, just like Mass Effect 1.
3.) Andromeda (as well as ME3) also has an evolutions system meaning that in each power/talent, you get an additional three options - the last 3 points in every skill have 2 choices per level instead of only one, and you choose one. This allows you to further specialize your character and make it unique and yours.
4.) Again, Andromeda doesn't have the one actual noncombat skill possessed by ME1. But not having a persuade skill is in no way proof that a game isn't an RPG. Hell, it's a pretty clear design choice that I'm fairly inclined to agree with.

So.
Andromeda has an extremely higher quantity of things to put skill points in, more choices for every skill, bigger effects from leveling up in skills, and more. Mass Effect 1 has skills for persuasion.

Okay, so what else makes a game an RPG?
Is it decisions? Like Andromeda?
Is it quests? Like Andromeda?
Is it being able to choose your characters behavior? Like Andromeda?
Maybe being able to forge your own path? Oh, like the way the planetary systems and quest structure is set up in Andromeda?
And you can say that ME1 was not a shooter all you want, but in the end the majority of ME1's gameplay was a shooter. A poor one. ME1 was saved by its other elements but you can't just dismiss the fact that it was a shooter because it did it poorly. Hey, Andromeda's not a facial animation game, so you shouldn't criticize that!
I do think that Mass Effect 1 focuses more on the RPG components than Andromeda, but Andromeda is still easily a full-fledged RPG, compared to Mass Effect 1 or otherwise.

Dude, ME3 was like 5 years ago. And it looked better than Andromeda. This is actually outrageous. Not that it has an interesting and unique plot to make up for it either. Combat is kinda fun, but is a pretty much average shooter worth 50 bucks? ME is supposed to be an experience, that's why it's so big and expensive. And this installation does not deliver on most fronts.

Quote from: Trebz on March 18, 2017, 10:40:39 am

I think it might have more to do with modern gamers. Budgets were not better back in the day.

At the risk of sounding like an old timer, games used to be way more complex.

Stories were good or bad but there was a lot more open world/choices in games.

How many modern games do you build something then interact with that world?

And random encounters are a great filler. In Fallout 1&2 you had to be ready to fight anything. In the later ones you know if you will be fighting humans, monsters, ghouls etc.

Random encounters can still be "hand-placed" since some games define the kinds of enemies that appear in a given area, but I see what you mean. Both can be done sloppily. To me, not being able to anticipate what you're going up against in a fight without being killed by it first

Do I need to remind you you're on the Dwarf Fortress forum? When you google "most complex game ever" the first thing that comes up is DF. You're surely blind if you think that there isn't a bevy of options out there.

We're drowning in open world games today that are bursting with choice. If choice is all you want, there's never been more.

Dwarf Fortress (again), Space Engineers, Starsector, Cortex Command, Survivalist, Subnautica, and Factorio, are just a few, excellent, modern games in my library that easily meet that criteria.

Games have always been beautiful and people never stopped having good ideas. The games that came before have inspired the designers of today. With the indie wave, games have become more complex, varied, and free than ever before. We are living in a golden age, and you're squandering it by not making an effort to take in what's around you.

Quote from: Trebz on March 15, 2017, 05:23:45 am

Are there any decent modern rpg's with random encounters anymore? Not including any jrpg's or the Fallout series.

Elder Scrolls?

I would like an RPG with a little twist.

You know in RPGs nowadays, when you go into a town and you see, say a weapon vendor, and you know that even if his stuff is better than yours its still not worth buying because you will eventually find something better inside a wild animal, and until then you can make do with the crap you have in hand?
Or those games in which you get points every level, which you can spend to buy new spells, but you end up keeping them to buy the high-tier spells quickly, and again you can make do with your current limited list of cantrips?

I wanted a game in which those strategies are not practical. One that every equipment found can be a boon. Something that makes you adapt your playstyle with every level-up. To sum it up, I wanted a game in which you feel every upgrade as unique and useful.

Anyone knows one of these? It will probably be one of those old rpgs. That format seems to not be very popular these days.

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And the dev stopped updates 2000 years ago...

this is wrong, they're been publishing updates regularly (at least once a month) since at least 2 year ago, you can check https://www.clockworkempires.com/development.html for details of each releases