10 RPGS You Might Have Missed @ Elder Geek

Dhruin

Dhruin

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Not much chance you've missed these if you read this site...well, perhaps apart from the jRPGs. Elder Geek offers 10 RPGs they feel people may have overlooked, with Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale 1 & 2 and KotOR2 joining some jRPGs such as Final Fantasy IX:
Icewind Dale was wonderful.

Dungeon crawling in a party-based system never felt so good. Comparatively, Icewind Dale I, II and their expansions were action-rich in comparison to the story-driven Baldur’s Gate series. Both the music and atmosphere were perfect for fall and winter gaming. Much like Bioshock made you thankful that you were dry, the Icewind Dale series made you thankful you had a thermostat.

Playing Icewind Dale as a single player experience was fantastic, but the game truly shined in D&D style when you played it with others. That case still holds true today. Co-operative play makes everything better, especially when you’re pretending to be a level 14 half-elf thief.
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More information.
 
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They could have left the jrpgs out and added in Planescape: Torment. Might and Magic series, Arcanum, and Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines.
 
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It is a broadband article ... some stuff for consolers (note that they are ALL PSx games ... amazing how Sony has fallen) adn some nice PC stuff. Though choosing one of the most popular PC series (BG) is a bit curious.
 
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uh. yeah. I bet _MANY_ RPG fans totaly missed Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2- PC. ..and probably KOTOR and every other RPG released too :p i mean they're only the biggest and most talked about RPG's released on PC.. ofcourse everyone misses those..
 
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It's a good list definitely but seriously, anyone with even mild interest in RPGs already knows about Baldur's Gate 1/2 and/or FFIX & FFXII (depending on whether your tastes are in console or PC RPGs) since they're some of the best selling blockbuster RPGs of all time.

They should have gone with some lower profile titles. Wizardry 8 is STILL worth picking up. So is Arcanum, especially with Drog's patch that fixes a ton of bugs and allows for higher resolutions.
 
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Relayer said:
They should have gone with some lower profile titles. Wizardry 8 is STILL worth picking up. So is Arcanum, especially with Drog's patch that fixes a ton of bugs and allows for higher resolutions.
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My thoughts as well too. Throw in some indies that are fun that might not be that well known in the 'mainstream'. Like Eschalon, any of Vogol's games, Knights of the Chalice. Hell they could of thrown out BG entirely and replaced with with Albion or Betrayal at Krondor. I can't believe they left out Betrayal and put in BG. These are games people supposedly missed. Even my brother own BG and he doesn't even like RPGs.

Oh well, these lists are normally just garbage anyways. Sometimes it's fun to see how well you match up with the person giving the list. Most of the time it's good for a laugh.
 
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bemushroomed said:
uh. yeah. I bet _MANY_ RPG fans totaly missed Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2- PC. ..and probably KOTOR and every other RPG released too :p i mean they're only the biggest and most talked about RPG's released on PC.. ofcourse everyone misses those..
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Actually, they do. When my daughter went to college she introduced some of her friends to BG, BG2, and etc. and they were big cRPG fans. Of course those came out when they were little kids so it's not really surprising they've never tried them.
 
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BillSeurer said:
Actually, they do. When my daughter went to college she introduced some of her friends to BG, BG2, and etc. and they were big cRPG fans. Of course those came out when they were little kids so it's not really surprising they've never tried them.
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I don't know, I think when you're a "big" fan (more than a CASUAL) of anything you tend to to find out as much about is as possible.

If it's cRPGs then you've probably come across some journalist or fan "best of" lists which always list the "classics". Or you're asking for recommendations of what to play next which always lead to the same handful of cRPGs which always include Baldur's Gate and some of the others recommended.

So yes, I guess this list is good but I would think most RPG noobs have already come across most of those titles and if not they will no doubt do so at some point when the internet has so many fan sites and articles already written about them, especially on the more mainstream sites (IGN, Gamespot, 1Up, etc.).

But there are many titles that only get mentioned on the smaller, more hardcore cRPG sites.
 
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my point was that its just that there's a much, much bigger chance that someone has missed anachronox or arcanum or maybe even bloodlines and the gothic series, than BG or KOTOR that is mentioned almost all the time. I'd even mention Deus Ex and System Shock2 even though we "hardcore" fans mention and talk about those games all of the time, most other sites doesnt.. the problem is the writer is probably not that into RPG's (and its impossible to take him seriously when he mentions jRPG's ;) )
 
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Perhaps the article isn't aimed at us.

If you look at it like they're talking to people who's only experience with rpgs are Fable 2, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, etc then they are actually doing a service if they get any of that crowd to try those older (and in most ways, better) games.

Broadening the experiences (and maybe tastes) of current-gen rpg players seems like a good thing to me.

Of course to us it's a fairly useless list. But being 40 years old and having played rpg's since my commodore 64 (atari 2600 if you count Adventure, which I don't :) I kinda doubt there are ANY rpg's that I've missed except obscure indies. Not counting jRPGs which I don't care for.
 
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If you are a really big rpg fan then you would have started when you were a kid. (just kidding)

What I meant by my list is that they should separate the jrpgs from the wrpgs since they are totally different types of games.

PS. I also agree that they shouldn't have put well known rpgs like BG. This article is for letting people discover games that are new to them and if you put more obscure games then you will get far more people that don't know the games and will check them out. As GoG gets more of the less well known games these kind of list with links to GoG could be useful to let people know of games they have never played.
 
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Hey, Xenosaga 1 and 3 right there in front - I like! And nice of him to warn folks off of Xeno 2. It had a great story but the game itself, particularly the combat system, was horrific.

FF12, not so much. What a dull story. A bunch of bad guys wearing so much armor that you couldn't tell one from another, characters I didn't care about... meh. The battle system was interesting in that you got to essentially program the AI yourself but that wasn't enough to carry the game, IMHO.
 
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Nice to hear him put Kotor 2 in there. I enjoyed the first, and of course I knew about the second, but I had always avoided it, primarily because of all the negative press it got. There were other reasons too (I dislike Star Wars and didn't like that Bioware wasn't developing it). But the article persuaded me to give it a try some time.
 
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Zloth said:
Hey, Xenosaga 1 and 3 right there in front - I like! And nice of him to warn folks off of Xeno 2. It had a great story but the game itself, particularly the combat system, was horrific.
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I bought the entire series off eBay last year, still haven't played them yet.

I didn't care for FF IX at all, in fact, I thought it was incredibly cliche and boring. I still haven't played FF XII yet.

Cool to see Wild Arms get mentioned. That was the first RPG I played on the PS1, I can still remember the title theme in my head.
 
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As far as I concern, FF IX is the best in the series storywise. It made me sob like a baby in the ending. FF XII have the best gameplay even if the story isn't as good as the previous titles. It's very "western".
 
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I have a box with all Baldur's gates games plus Icewind (came free with a PC magazine) but never really played them because the camera & UI were horrible.
I remember investing more time to install Baldur than playing it .

Sith Lords was super tho
 
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Majnun said:
If you look at it like they're talking to people who's only experience with rpgs are Fable 2, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect,
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Those are RPGs????????

:D
 
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JDR13 said:
I bought the entire series off eBay last year, still haven't played them yet.

I didn't care for FF IX at all, in fact, I thought it was incredibly cliche and boring. I still haven't played FF XII yet.

Cool to see Wild Arms get mentioned. That was the first RPG I played on the PS1, I can still remember the title theme in my head.
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I bought Xenosaga I & III myself last year and I did start the first game but after like 1 hour I still hadn't come across much actual game (l o n g cutscences) and haven't played since.

FF IX was charming for the first 10 hours or so, very reminiscent of the earlier games in the series but then the flaws in FFVII and VIII surfaced (dull gameplay, tedious combat, cliche story). But it did have the only characters I actually liked of that whole PSONE trilogy.

You should try FFXII - it was underrated and misunderstood I think. If you're not afraid of change, you will probably appreciate it. That was the problem, most were probably expecting more of the same and honestly, the series was getting stale (although FFX was great, it was too linear and added stupid puzzle elements). Plus, it had the most mature writing in an FF and some excellent voice acting. The story was also well written, just grounded in the more mundane than spectacular.
 
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