CRPGs - Worst features game list

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The Mad Hatter
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CRPGs - Worst features game list

Post by The Mad Hatter »

I was thinking about this as I played through Baldur's Gate 2. Most of the games with tedious and/or annoying features were from long ago. We put up with a lot back in the day.

Worst "random encounter" system - Bard's Tale 2. Not only were they not scaled to the area and party, not only could they come at any time, but even standing still for a moment could bring on another random attack. Hack and slash at its worst.

Worst mapping - Wizardry 6. The last of the pre-automap games, I found this one impossible to keep track of. The layouts were haphazard and could not be kept on a single sheet of graph paper, and I was constantly getting lost. I ended up never finishing the game (which is too bad because I liked the rest of it).

Dishonorable mention - Bard's Tale 2. The above random encounters combined with teleport squares and blind zones - ugh.

Worst "no save" sequence - Ultima 4, Abyss end game. You go through a multi level dungeon that takes hours to complete, only to be hit with a final question. Get the question wrong and repeat the Abyss. This was long before the days of the hint site - you wanted an answer, you called pay by the minute Origin hint lines. I'd already done this once and couldn't do it again (not as a 14 year old using my parent's line). I got that question wrong again and again, finally giving up in disgust. To this day I've never finished the game.

Dishonorable mention - Diablo 2. I left the game on for days at a time to avoid going through the same encounters again and again. Long, mindless hack and slash rescued only by the experience/goodies acquired along the way. I understand that was Blizzard's intent due to the multiplayer gameplay, but still.

Worst real life mechanics - Realms of Arkania. Shoes wearing out, characters constantly getting sick...I got tired of that one very quickly. I'm told there's a great game underneath it all but I'll never know.

Dishonorable mention - Ultima 7. I'm sure we all remember the endless whining about food. Enough said.

Most tedious single encounter - original Pool of Radiance, kobold encounter. Turn based combat with low level characters versus hordes of kobolds. No fireballs to wipe them all out, and might have to be repeated again and again if the main character is killed. Took forever to finish, and there were more than one to go through.

Most buggy release - Darklands. Broken quests, broken areas, broken encounters. Great game but crippled by bugs. It was worth waiting for Microprose to mail out patches, but the delays in between gradually killed my interest in the game.

Worst end game - Divine Divinity. The game should really have ended before reaching that desert area. The creatures were very hard, there were hordes of them, and they were absolutely pointless. I ended up running through them just to get to the final encounter zone. The payoff for all that slogging was minimal at best.

Worst pathfinding - Baldur's Gate 2, probably because I'm playing it now. Love the game but damn...my main struggle in any encounter is trying to free up trapped characters, and any long movement gets some of them stuck or going back in the wrong direction. Argh!
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tgb
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Post by tgb »

Back in the prehistoric times (i.e. saving games to 5 1/4" floppies), didn't the early Ultimas erase your save files if the main character died?
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Peacedog
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Post by Peacedog »

Dishonorable mention - Bard's Tale 2. The above random encounters combined with teleport squares and blind zones - ugh.
You clearly never played Wizardry 4.

Also, it's a little weird to put games in a category ("wost mappping"), when the thing didn't really exist. Different era.
Back in the prehistoric times (i.e. saving games to 5 1/4" floppies), didn't the early Ultimas erase your save files if the main character died?
No. Ultima V, in a certain circumstance, would erase a character from your save game, though. To make ressurection impossible.
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The Mad Hatter
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Post by The Mad Hatter »

Peacedog wrote:
Dishonorable mention - Bard's Tale 2. The above random encounters combined with teleport squares and blind zones - ugh.
You clearly never played Wizardry 4.
Nope, didn't start with Wizardry until Wizardry 6. I certainly saw the earlier versions but I was a Commodore gamer until 1986, and I don't think Wizardry ever came out for the 64.
Also, it's a little weird to put games in a category ("wost mappping"), when the thing didn't really exist. Different era.
Different era yes, but any of us who did CRPGs back in those days had to put up with the mapping. They were a big part of those games.
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Post by bluefugue »

My brother had the same Ultima IV problem -- spent hours fighting through the Abyss and then got the question wrong. We tried it a couple times and failed every time (must have been dense I guess). Finally he used an Isepik/Snapshot type cartridge program to save at the bottom of the Abyss until he figured out the right answer.

I found the pathfinding worse in Icewind Dale mainly because of those narrow tree trunks in Kuldahar that you have to walk across. IOW the map design exacerbated it worse. There was however a town in Throne of Bhaal with some pretty horrible pathfinding situations, all these little multi-layer balconies and staircases and such you have to deal with. Yuck.
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tgb
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Post by tgb »

No. Ultima V, in a certain circumstance, would erase a character from your save game, though. To make ressurection impossible.
You, sure, Peacedog? I could swear Ultima II or III (or maybe both) deleted your character when he died.
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The Mad Hatter
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Post by The Mad Hatter »

tgb wrote:
No. Ultima V, in a certain circumstance, would erase a character from your save game, though. To make ressurection impossible.
You, sure, Peacedog? I could swear Ultima II or III (or maybe both) deleted your character when he died.
Not Ultima III for the C64 anyway - how else could I periodically wipe out entire towns and then reload? Maybe it was different on other systems though.
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Post by bluefugue »

I'm trying to remember how all this worked.

Mad Hatter, in Ultima III the towns would reset if you simply exited and re-entered. (Slaughtering the clerics in Yew, then re-entering and slaughtering them all over again, was a good way for low level parties to make cash because Yew had no guards.) Same with Ultima IV, actually. (The instant town reset rather diminishes the impact of using Mondain's Skull, by the way.) I am pretty sure U5 was the first one in which there was perma-death for NPC's. So I don't think reloading really comes into it, unless I am misunderstanding you.

But I think what might have happened in Ultima III is that if all your guys died, the game would save them as dead. You would then have to go back into the roster and disperse the party, form a new party with the dead guys accompanied by some living ones, and resurrect them.

This is just a guess based on vague memory. I do know this much: at one point my brother got his ship into the whirlpool in Ultima III (I'll say no more, minor spoiler) and he was so afraid of his party dying that he almost yanked the disk out of the drive right then and there. He'd already been playing the game for some time so I wonder if he would have done that if he hadn't known that in some way there are permanent consequences to your party dying.

Again, I'm not sure about the details on this & may be misremembering. I do think that Ultima III auto-saved when you entered or exited a town, though.
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tgb
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Post by tgb »

But I think what might have happened in Ultima III is that if all your guys died, the game would save them as dead. You would then have to go back into the roster and disperse the party, form a new party with the dead guys accompanied by some living ones, and resurrect them.

This is just a guess based on vague memory. I do know this much: at one point my brother got his ship into the whirlpool in Ultima III (I'll say no more, minor spoiler) and he was so afraid of his party dying that he almost yanked the disk out of the drive right then and there. He'd already been playing the game for some time so I wonder if he would have done that if he hadn't known that in some way there are permanent consequences to your party dying.
That's probably what I am thinking of, and I'm sure I was like your brother-party death meant restarting frm the beginning.
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Post by D.A.Lewis »

Good post Mad.

More Bad game design

Wizardry 1 had this feature that if your party died they stayed dead. You could not restart from the last saved position. You had to etiher create a party to go down in the dungeon and rescue them. This same feature was brought to life in Devil's Whisky (the once upon a time Bards tale remake).

Gothic had the most awkward play interface. Sure you eventually get used to it but if they would have stuck with the standard FPS interface, there would be no question Gothic is one of the all time great RPGs

Ultima (early ones) Many people raved but I hated the reagent system of magic. It was just too tedius. And while it may have added some level of realism to magic system, the very fact that you usually ended up carrying 99 items of each reagent surely detracted in my book.

Last Kings Quest. Most of the games were nice little adventure games but in the last one they felt they had to increase the audience by increasing the twix factor. And to have a jumping puzzle was just too much for this gamer. (actually I liked the game it just wasn't really a Kings Quest game)
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