RPGs you thought aged well but didn't?

Time for Beamdog to work on it?

My profile quote "Thou hast lost an eighth" is from Ultima IV -- it's the first rpg I played and how I came to love the genre.

Yeah ... it's completely unplayable now.

Fnord said:

I would argue that JRPGs actually took a step back in playability with the PS1. Now you've got longer loading times, long flashy, often unskippable animations and of course horribly low poly models.

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The shift from pre-rendered graphics to 3D polygonal graphics was a rough one for every genre. I remember being very resistant to it. And even those that at the time looked good to me (like FFVII), look beyond terrible to me now, while a game like FFVI still looks fine. So I 100% agree with you about any of the early games with low poly models aging very poorly, at least graphically.

JFarrell71 said:

The shift from pre-rendered graphics to 3D polygonal graphics was a rough one for every genre. I remember being very resistant to it. And even those that at the time looked good to me (like FFVII), look beyond terrible to me now, while a game like FFVI still looks fine. So I 100% agree with you about any of the early games with low poly models aging very poorly, at least graphically.

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I completely agree with you. I really was not a fan of early 3D graphics back in the days, and found games like StarFox, VirtuaFighter and so on to look worse than games using sprites, and when the PS1 rolled out I found many of the games released for it to be hideous. Well, the character models at least, many of the pre-rendered backgrounds could look stunning, but that just made the character models stick out even more!

Just playing through Final Fantasy 3/6. I was never a huge fan of it anyway, but on return I've found the first half of the game utterly awful. A REAL fucking painful, railroaded slog.

Philistine said:

.. along the same lines, for me it's NWN2. When it came out I thought it looked great but the idea of playing a child for the original campaign was unappealing, so I played Oblivion which came out the SAME DAY… (Imagine if TES VII and DA4 came out on the same day).

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I'm just going to point out that, at least here in the United States, this is inaccurate. I played Oblivion months before NWN2 came out. I know this because I played Oblivion in my old apartment, and by the time NWN2 came out, I was living in a house for about 5 months, and bought it on day of release.

According to the internet, here are the release dates:

ESIV: Oblivion - March 20, 2006
NWN2 - October 31, 2006

Now, if you're not a resident of the USA, you may live somewhere where the release dates were on the same day, and I'd be interested to know about that.

I have to say it's Drakensang. I remember when it came out, it looked good. Nothing fancy, just a good looking game. But I tried to play it recently and while some of its assets can still pass (models and textures are nothing I can't forgive, in fact I can forgive much worse), it's the level design that gives up its age. It just feels empty and somehow artificial. I fear I will feel same about NWN2, but I haven't played that game in a long while so I hope I'm wrong about it.

Cyberpunk 2077. Damn you CDPR and your downgraded graphics! /s

JFarrell71 said:

Cyberpunk 2077. Damn you CDPR and your downgraded graphics! /s

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Re-post from my Cyberpunk 2077 thread.

Oh my god they did again. Just like Witcher 3.

Joking aside the latest Steam stats show not many gamers use Nvidia's $1,000+ graphic cards. So don't blame them, as CDPR wants to sell as many games as possible.

Go play Star Citizen if you need a graphic obsessed game.

What's wrong with Horizon Zero Dawn? It looks like a good game. Is it because the PC port sucked?

I played the original Fallout again recently. I didn't think it was too bad. I guess movement on town/battle maps was tiresome but it wasn't that bad. And the game still looks great to me. And the UI definitely feels dated, but that's to be expected.

My nomination for this category would have to be Final Fantasy Tactics. My biggest issue with it is random encounters. When you want to grind for XP and gil, you burn up a month of in-game time waiting for something to attack you on the road. When you're on your way to do something, you get five random encounters on the way. That was the way random encounters worked for a lot of early RPGs. I'm glad that modern RPGs have moved away from it.

Nathaniel3W said:

What's wrong with Horizon Zero Dawn? It looks like a good game. Is it because the PC port sucked?

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Nothing actually. It's one of the better games released for PC this year.

Nathaniel3W said:

What's wrong with Horizon Zero Dawn? It looks like a good game. Is it because the PC port sucked?
.

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It's the usual modern dull, trash filled, repetitive open world affair.

I found it boring & predictable beyond belief.

No, no and no. Unless you deliberately grind instead of running past "random encounters".
Wasn't boring to me at any point and is not a thriller movie where predictability means an undesirable trait.

Pros:
The game has some nice looks, a proper story and all sorts of "heroes" and villains, playing it with k+m is fun and not a job, grinding is optional and not required, puzzles and challenges are not too easy, every sidequest has a story behind it and usually such a nifty reward you want to do them all.

Cons:
Horrible inventory system (especially the presence of a fasttravelling item), no official option to keep the main character as a caricatural huge headed child, no romance (although almost everyone you meet is hitting on you), dinoriding controls are weird.

At the time it released, I greatly enjoyed Oblivion. On multiple occasions I've tried going back to it, and often I find myself surprised I was able to 100% the game.

The leveling system feels remarkably puzzling to me now. To make the most of your character, you have to level up minor or lesser skills, then focus on major skills which allow your character to become "eligible" to level up. When you sleep, you can then allocate 5/5/5 or 5/5/1 (assuming you focus on luck, which can only increase by 1 per level) points to any attribute. If you level too fast, it's entirely possible that your character will fall behind as creatures in the world level with you, unintentionally raising the difficulty. But since creatures in the game world scale with the player, playing efficiently means that you don't achieve that sense of progression anyway - you don't feel like you're getting stronger, rather that enemies are becoming spongier.

It's very strange. I'm surprised I was able to put up with it at all back then. I was enamored with the game world at the time, I think. And I do believe Oblivion is still very beautiful in many ways, but I struggle to actually play it again.

Generally speaking, early 3D as mentioned several times. It's no secret that well drawn 2D games aged considerably better, such as HoMM3 and BG2 compared to 3D strategy games or RPGs of the time.

Beyond that, Oblivion is a good shout. I've also tried replaying it, but I just can't. I can manage both Morrowind and Skyrim just fine, but Oblivion just doesn't work for me anymore.

Also, I tried replaying Nox some time ago. Loved it back in the days. Played through it quite a few times, even in somewhat recent years. However, I simply can't get into it at this point. I can't really explain why.

Maylander said:

Generally speaking, early 3D as mentioned several times. It's no secret that well drawn 2D games aged considerably better, such as HoMM3 and BG2 compared to 3D strategy games or RPGs of the time.

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The Simon The Sorcerer games have a similar problem. The devs were, as far as I understood it, kinda pressed into making an3D game, which looks imho quite bad, and even had a different story than the 2D game that was planned.

Apart from that, the series is a nice fantasy-themed games, full with parodies.

Maylander said:

Also, I tried replaying Nox some time ago. Loved it back in the days. Played through it quite a few times, even in somewhat recent years. However, I simply can't get into it at this point. I can't really explain why.

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Nox, great memories. Is the resolution a problem? If it is 640*480 or so I can imagine it would be difficult. I have that problem with bg1 and torment.

ilm said:

Nox, great memories. Is the resolution a problem? If it is 640*480 or so I can imagine it would be difficult. I have that problem with bg1 and torment.

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Yeah, it's painful to play on modern monitors and such. I would really like a simple, visual upgrade of the game. Essentially an enhanced edition, similar to Baldur's Gate: EE and so on, even if it's just a "cash grab". I'd pay for it. Used to love that game, but now it's just unplayable for me.

Maylander said:

Yeah, it's painful to play on modern monitors and such. I would really like a simple, visual upgrade of the game. Essentially an enhanced edition, similar to Baldur's Gate: EE and so on, even if it's just a "cash grab". I'd pay for it. Used to love that game, but now it's just unplayable for me.

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You can go up 1024x768 by editing the cfg file, from what I'm remember. I certainly played it at higher than 640x480.
Some handy people have probably patched it for better resolutions (haven't looked).

Edit: okay, looked
https://www.wsgf.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=78239#p78239
Dunno if someone has put that in a patch somewhere.