RPGDot - Returned from Slumber

Wow....blast from the past!! That is amazing! Great job man

Great - now I'm feeling old

Thank you Myrthos - there is a lot of knowledge about RPGs hidden in the RPGDot pages.

That is super cool! I joined way back when to discuss Arx Fatalis and remember being sad that it went away shortly afterwards.

Now that is a blast from the past!

Thank you @Myrthos; for bringing it up again. I, for an example, never knew how RPGDot was like, and now I can finally take a look at it!

Wow! That brings back memories.

Interesting to see the site's top 100 games as of 2006 preserved. ES:Oblivion held the #1 spot in the community's hearts in 2006, it seems! Not a viewpoint you'll hear very often on the Watch today.

Very cool, and it brings back a lot of memories. I remember stumbling across RPGDot while searching for info about Gothic.

It's interesting what games had their own forums back then. Dungeon Lords? Seriously?

Hexprone said:

Interesting to see the site's top 100 games as of 2006 preserved. ES:Oblivion held the #1 spot in the community's hearts in 2006, it seems! Not a viewpoint you'll hear very often on the Watch today.

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My take on Oblivion back then (one of my RPGDot-review-snippets):

Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion: 8/10 points

Oblivion is a good adventure game, but it's not a great rpg game. why ?

1. rule for a rpg -> I start as an unperfect nobody -> through training and questing I can raise my skills -> in the end I am the hero … the Oblivion level scaling ruins this.

2. rule for a rpg -> you have to make choices and have to live with restrictions … with the exception - live as a vampire - there are absolutly no restrictions in Oblivion - I am grandmaster in all guilds - I can wear all clothes - I can go everywhere, evertytime -> no challenge at all.

3. rule for a rpg -> a good dialog system is essential -> look at Planescape Torment … Oblivion dialoges are stripped down, combined with a silly mini game.

4. rule for a rpg -> make challenges: you want to go into the woods as a level 1 caracter, try it, but you will be beaten up (look at Gothic) in a good rpg you have to train and equip yourself to be ready for the next great quest. … In Oblivion you can be grandmaster of the arena with level 1, close the Oblivion gate at level 1, beat Daedras up at Level 1 …

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Those were much simpler days back then. Or maybe I'm just getting old thinking this way.

In any case browsing old forums like those is making me awfully nostalgic. I'm reminiscing what being online meant back then. Internet was for sure much slower, but didn't it feel more special? It had fewer rules back then. And no silly social media with all kinds of drama queens. I recall people being less uptight back then. Flaming and trolling were certainly a thing even back then, but it was mostly just silly online stuff. Real life was out there. Nowdays one can't separate those two so neatly as we're always online and we keep sharing our personal life is on social media… Ah but I'm rambling.

Being more ontopic, I must say that those forums contain so much cool content on rpgs. Secrets, tips, ideas, discussions, jokes… I want to sip that pool of knowledge!

Edit: Sorry edit my post like a madman, but I just wanted to comment HiddenX Oblivion review and not double post. Quite spot on! I don't think Oblivion can ever be truly fixed, but Obscuro's overhaul mod for sure did pretty darn good job on that!

Hexprone said:

Interesting to see the site's top 100 games as of 2006 preserved. ES:Oblivion held the #1 spot in the community's hearts in 2006, it seems! Not a viewpoint you'll hear very often on the Watch today.

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A more interesting figure for me is the number of people who've played/rated each game.

You'll notice how few people had played things like KOTOR:2, VTMB & HotU compared to their current popularity while, as you suggest, some of the more then played games are barely mentioned nowadays, of which the previously mentioned in this thread, Arx Fatalis would be a great example.

HotU is a particularly fascinating one as it has just 22 votes and languishes at no.73, even though the site's review of it gave it 94% & practically everyone who played it gave it either a 9 or 10 out of 10. It has five people who chose to troll-bomb it with 1/10 & gave no reason why, hence it's lower ranking. Meanwhile, the original game, the one barely anyone cares about today, had nearly 300 players/raters.

I remember seeing this top100 before somewhere a couple of years ago while researching something else. I've no idea how as I don't ever use any wayback machines or the like, just from a google search.

HotU?? Oh, I see: Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. Clearly it isn't terribly popular with me. Bloodlines didn't get popular until the modders fixed it up.

Wow. Oblivion > Morrowind. I agree but I'm a heretic.

Why do you consider yourself a heretic?

Looking a bit deeper into the situation regarding HotU it soon becomes clear where those five people came from:

Several sources stating that I gave it a high mark because it was Bioware and expected (no less than five sources so far, and rising) are the ones that I take offense to. I gave it a high mark because it was a quality game… not because of who was on the box. I paid money for it just like everyone else did and if I didn't get my money's worth I'd be the first to raise hell.

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Ah, so those five people are definitely mentioned and noted. So where did they come from? Let's read further:

A fight broke up over RPGCodex because of that review .

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and:

rpgcodex? from what i've heard, "they" think that BioWare is the anti-christ. so i'm not particularly surprised if they tore Xen a new one for daring to say that Hordes was actually *good*…

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So it appears that HotU provided us with one of our first examples of extreme codex politically motivated game-butthurt 'trolling' (that could be argued to be light terrorism) from a bunch of people that didn't even play the game and just wanted to prevent a Bioware product from featuring in a top-poll (the game would have been no.1 interestingly enough by Dot's method of numbering).

I've no doubt those same five people are still on the codex to this day, repeating the same rhetoric with the same aggression while still never actually having played the game…

Zloth said:

HotU?? Oh, I see: Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. Clearly it isn't terribly popular with me.

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It's not for everyone, no game is, I notice D&D games don't do very well on that top 100 list all-round aside from the ubiquitous BG2 & PS:T. I'd be interested in hearing your detailed thoughts on what you didn't like about HotU though, as I've only ever read one vaguely detailed post by one person ever on why they thought it was less than a near perfect cRPG, and even then it still felt like an agenda was trying desperately to squeeze through the punctuation marks.

The top 100 at RPGDot is flawed. We started this off by allowing unregistered users to vote as well. Many were serious about it, but some others were not and gave a game a score of 1 or 10. For a time we tried to keep up and remove anything we considered to be spam, but I don't think we were very good at it. At some point we restricted scoring to registered users only, so we could at least see who scored what.
If I would introduce a rating system for games at RPGWatch, I would allow voting only for registered members, with a minimum amount of posts and require the need for entering a minimum amount of words as explanation of that vote.

Just browsed through RPGDot.. is anyone still in contact with Dhruin? I hope he is well.

purpleblob said:

Just browsed through RPGDot.. is anyone still in contact with Dhruin? I hope he is well.

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Last thing I remember reading was he left for personal reasons that's it.

This was his last interaction:
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1061265944#post1061265944

lackblogger said:

Why do you consider yourself a heretic?

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Just making a joke.

I'd be interested in hearing your detailed thoughts on what you didn't like about HotU though...

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I never played it. In fact, I had to look it up on the top 100 list just to figure out what HotU was supposed to stand for. Even then, I don't remember any expansions for Neverwinter Nights 1. So clearly it didn't make any sort of impression on me.

I really enjoyed NWN2, though, and Mask of the Betrayer.

Oh wow! What's hilarious is one of the first things I see in the CRPG forum is "Grimoire Update"

OMG!!! You brought back the layout we created!!!! feeling a nostalgia attack atm and I should have to look if I still have the .psd files for all that stuff. And yes, I'm Arkray, been in the shadows all this time since I left you guys