How accessible is Shadows Over Riva?

Hey everyone.

Just thinking of picking up the 3rd Realms of Arkania game, but I'm wondering how accessible it is to modern audiences.

Is there an auto-map, or any map at all? Is it easy to get lost? Are there any tooltips explaining things better? In general, is the game accessible or is it a bit difficult to get the most out of?

I'd like to buy it since it's only 80 cents on GamersGate, but I don't want to just add it to my backlog if it's a game that's not too friendly to play by gamers today.

I also played the first game remake and thought it was great, but it's probably been polished up for modern audiences. So I'm just wondering about these old games as I've heard some negative things said about them in terms of playability today.

Any thoughts on this?

I played it for the first time two or three years ago and ended up enjoying it very much. So I would say it's definitely possible to play today, unless you're very focussed on graphics (which I think you are not?).

There is an ingame map, and personally I think it works well that it pretty much takes place within a single town (plus surroundings). I didn't feel lost in the game, as far as I remember.

The learning curve is *steep* though, and you'll need to read the manual. I think I spent 2-3 hours just rolling my party, and got crushed in my first battle Once I got the hang of it the balance was fine though.

Overall I enjoyed the game very much, in particular the story which feels almost like a pnp campaign. I would recommend trying out the game…

KasperFauerby said:

I played it for the first time two or three years ago and ended up enjoying it very much. So I would say it's definitely possible to play today, unless you're very focussed on graphics (which I think you are not?).

There is an ingame map, and personally I think it works well that it pretty much takes place within a single town (plus surroundings). I didn't feel lost in the game, as far as I remember.

The learning curve is *steep* though, and you'll need to read the manual. I think I spent 2-3 hours just rolling my party, and got crushed in my first battle Once I got the hang of it the balance was fine though.

Overall I enjoyed the game very much, in particular the story which feels almost like a pnp campaign. I would recommend trying out the game…

Click to expand...

Thanks for the detailed thoughts, I appreciate it!

I will grab this game and give it a go. I'm not worried about the graphics (I think they look nice, even) I was just worried that the game design was too archaic to enjoy today. I don't really have the patience for games without a suitable map or auto-map feature, so I try to avoid those, at least until I can find some sort of program that would help me map those games. I will give it a try though and for 80 cents you really can't go wrong.

Thanks again!

KasperFauerby said:

There is an ingame map, and personally I think it works well that it pretty much takes place within a single town (plus surroundings).

Click to expand...

Actually it's a single town (with sewers) and its surroundings, which are quire small.

And as KasperFauerby said, creating and leveling up your party members will be the biggest challenge. I suppose you go with a party of premade characters and analyze the first 2-3 battles. You'll get an impression of how it works and may then start over with a self-made party.

Morrandir said:

And as KasperFauerby said, creating and leveling up your party members will be the biggest challenge. I suppose you go with a party of premade characters and analyze the first 2-3 battles. You'll get an impression of how it works and may then start over with a self-made party.

Click to expand...

I've learned a lot about the character system from playing the Blade of Destiny remake. Will those things carry over into RoA3?

I will probably use pre-made characters to start and once I get the hang of it, roll a new party myself.

Why won´t you play the whole trilogy and import your party from one chapter to the next

At least thats what I did when gog released the trilogy since I always had trouble to get the abandonware versions to work properly

mprod said:

Why won´t you play the whole trilogy and import your party from one chapter to the next

At least thats what I did when gog released the trilogy since I always had trouble to get the abandonware versions to work properly

Click to expand...

I didn't know you could do that. That's pretty awesome and I will probably do just that. Going to pick up the first game on Steam and go from there. Thanks!

take it from Gog they are nicer

or don´t wouldn´t want to be pushy

Anyway their versions functions without any problems on both my xp and win7 machines

mprod said:

take it from Gog they are nicer

or don´t wouldn´t want to be pushy

Anyway their versions functions without any problems on both my xp and win7 machines

Click to expand...

Nah you're not being pushy. I appreciate the response. The only reason I prefer to play on Steam is because the Steam client keeps track of total time played. That's important to me to keep track of how much mileage I get out of games and I like having that information all in one place. When GOG gets a client I will happily play games on it but until then I prefer Steam. I'm just weird like that .

Good to know the games function properly on Win7 machines. Old games are tricky at times and I imagine I'll have to tweak some things to get it running perfectly but I'll look into that more as I get closer to playing it.

I do think I am playing this game next, though. Starting with Blade of Destiny. We'll see, though.

I started a replay of Gothic 1 my first as a pure mage about the same time you did your first run and am now a fair bit in G2 notr also as a mage to make it harder as if it wasn´t hard enough wouldn´t recomend mage as the first playthrough (I actually had to cheat and respec my charather a bit since I remebered wrongly and realised that I wanted to go dex-mage and didn´t want to replay the first 3h also I gave myself the Mastersword because of the annoying merchant bug and threw away the proper amount of gold for it for the snappers to eat or whatever))

Anyway I don´t know how you play but I usually play older turnbased games on my laptop when I´m commuting/travelling/working/bored and newer ones on my stationary at home

Strangelly the laptop is the the win7 and the big one at home is xp would love to have w7 at home as well but for some reason all the versions I have crashes after a while and it´s something about the number of harddrives and special soundcards I´m using so sofar I´m stuck with xp for stability

at the moment
laptop workcomputer: mm4-5 world of xeen
home: g2notr and dark souls and some other stuff

luckily I only have other parents children to look after otherwise it would be all work and no play

Fluent said:

I've learned a lot about the character system from playing the Blade of Destiny remake. Will those things carry over into RoA3?

Click to expand...

Yes, it's actually quite the same. There might be some new spells and balancing issues though.

Fluent said:

I didn't know you could do that. That's pretty awesome and I will probably do just that. Going to pick up the first game on Steam and go from there. Thanks!

Click to expand...

If you already played the Blade of Destiny remake I think you may have a hard time with the original Blade of Destiny. Technically it's really… old and you already know the story and other stuff. So you might get bored.
Another idea is to grab the second game and "import" your characters from your BoD remake playthrough. Afaik that's not possible officially, but you could grab a character/savegame editor and just recreate your characters there.

FWIW, even though I loved Shadows Over Riva I couldn't really get into the earlier games in the series. They are more open games where you travel the world, and while I know many people love exactly that aspect of rpgs, in these particular games that travelling comes with an insane amount of micro-managing your party during the travel. I felt it caused the story to be much less focused.

My point is that starting from the very beginning of the series might be a bit hard-core But I guess you know the overall structure of the first game from the remake.

In terms of creating characters, in the originals you don't get skill points when you level up. You get "chances to roll a skill point", meaning that if you are unlucky you can "ruin" your build, levelling from lvl 4 to 5 during party creation. I don't know id they kept it like that in the remake? In any case, I ended up rolling one character at a time and then saving it to the character pool. Then eventually I could piece my party together from my rolled characters. A purist might call it cheating, but given how tough SoR seemed from the start I felt I needed good starting characters. Just a hint

That's what I did too. I saved before each level up and if the character got screwed, I just reloaded.

Yes, that works for "in game" level up's.

But during party creation, because you start with a "high level" party in SoR, you have to roll everyone up to lvl 5-6 (can't remember the exact level) all at once. That makes it extra painful to miss a skill upgrade 2/3 through the party creation process

I see. Never had that problem myself as I always imported the party from the prequel.

mprod said:

I started a replay of Gothic 1 my first as a pure mage about the same time you did your first run and am now a fair bit in G2 notr also as a mage to make it harder as if it wasn´t hard enough wouldn´t recomend mage as the first playthrough (I actually had to cheat and respec my charather a bit since I remebered wrongly and realised that I wanted to go dex-mage and didn´t want to replay the first 3h also I gave myself the Mastersword because of the annoying merchant bug and threw away the proper amount of gold for it for the snappers to eat or whatever))

Anyway I don´t know how you play but I usually play older turnbased games on my laptop when I´m commuting/travelling/working/bored and newer ones on my stationary at home

Strangelly the laptop is the the win7 and the big one at home is xp would love to have w7 at home as well but for some reason all the versions I have crashes after a while and it´s something about the number of harddrives and special soundcards I´m using so sofar I´m stuck with xp for stability

Click to expand...

Cool that you're replaying Gothic. Great game. I still have to play G2 and I look forward to giving it a shot sometime in the future.

mprod said:

at the moment
laptop workcomputer: mm4-5 world of xeen
home: g2notr and dark souls and some other stuff

luckily I only have other parents children to look after otherwise it would be all work and no play

Click to expand...

Haha, true! I've heard good things about World Of Xeen and I'll have to check it out sometime. I also have Betrayal at Krondor on my short list of old games to try. So many games, so little time.

Morrandir said:

Yes, it's actually quite the same. There might be some new spells and balancing issues though.

If you already played the Blade of Destiny remake I think you may have a hard time with the original Blade of Destiny. Technically it's really… old and you already know the story and other stuff. So you might get bored.
Another idea is to grab the second game and "import" your characters from your BoD remake playthrough. Afaik that's not possible officially, but you could grab a character/savegame editor and just recreate your characters there.

Click to expand...

True, I might get bored, but at the same time there were features missing in the remake that were present in the original that I'd like to experience. I didn't play the remake with the latest patch in which they added a lot of new features, so I'm interested to see how the old game stacks up to the new one.

KasperFauerby said:

FWIW, even though I loved Shadows Over Riva I couldn't really get into the earlier games in the series. They are more open games where you travel the world, and while I know many people love exactly that aspect of rpgs, in these particular games that travelling comes with an insane amount of micro-managing your party during the travel. I felt it caused the story to be much less focused.

My point is that starting from the very beginning of the series might be a bit hard-core But I guess you know the overall structure of the first game from the remake.

In terms of creating characters, in the originals you don't get skill points when you level up. You get "chances to roll a skill point", meaning that if you are unlucky you can "ruin" your build, levelling from lvl 4 to 5 during party creation. I don't know id they kept it like that in the remake? In any case, I ended up rolling one character at a time and then saving it to the character pool. Then eventually I could piece my party together from my rolled characters. A purist might call it cheating, but given how tough SoR seemed from the start I felt I needed good starting characters. Just a hint

Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip!

The story in Blade of Destiny definitely isn't as strongly emphasized, as the game is more of an open-ended adventure.

I actually found the openness in RoA1 very refreshing. Travelling between towns was the best part of that game (the remake), because yes, you did have to manage your party carefully or they would die horrible deaths. I really enjoyed the survival aspects of the remake so I'm hoping it's the same as the original.

That said, I'm not THAT excited to play the first game original since I saw mostly all of it in the remake. I'm more interested to play the original and see how it compares to the remake as well as being able to carry my party over for Star Trail, which I also want to play. Eventually I'd like to complete the whole original trilogy, so I have no choice but to start with game one.

ALL the RoA games (old and new) are now on bundle stars for penauts!

http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/the-arkania-bundle/