How I dislike CRPGs. So much writing, and almost all of it bad. Planescape: Torment, okay, fairly unique. Disco Elysium, not my cup of tea but I can see there's something to it. But yet another generic trip down D&D memory lane, with all the same old systems, the same old setting that was never much good outside of the tabletop to begin with? The intervening CRPGs that I tried - Wasteland, Inquisitor, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker to name that ones I most readily recall - were all such bad, unrewarding trash that I finished not a single one of them. The gameplay is a stupidly contrived to make a tabletop RPG run without a GM, the dialogues go on forever but if you've read one of them you've read them all and none are worth reading, why even play those games? Many play them, so I'm sure I just don't get it, but do I ever not get it!
Which is too many words to say - I hope you're having fun, but I'm not touching another CRPG until I hear some serious praises sung about both the writing and the gameplay.
I think that depends on what you want in a game. Me, I'm not interested in combat or levelling up fast as possible or mowing down mobs. I like lore and the little sideways and off the beaten track parts. So I'm picking up all the books and notes and letters and scraps of paper and reading them and they're funny (or not). Some of it is useful advice, some of it is just worldbuilding and to add colour, and that's what I want. Oh, hey, the long-gone troupe of actors had a smash hit performance here years ago? Wish I'd been there to see it!
But certainly for other people, that's all just padding and a waste of time that adds nothing, and that's equally valid point of view.
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Notes -
How I dislike CRPGs. So much writing, and almost all of it bad. Planescape: Torment, okay, fairly unique. Disco Elysium, not my cup of tea but I can see there's something to it. But yet another generic trip down D&D memory lane, with all the same old systems, the same old setting that was never much good outside of the tabletop to begin with? The intervening CRPGs that I tried - Wasteland, Inquisitor, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker to name that ones I most readily recall - were all such bad, unrewarding trash that I finished not a single one of them. The gameplay is a stupidly contrived to make a tabletop RPG run without a GM, the dialogues go on forever but if you've read one of them you've read them all and none are worth reading, why even play those games? Many play them, so I'm sure I just don't get it, but do I ever not get it!
Which is too many words to say - I hope you're having fun, but I'm not touching another CRPG until I hear some serious praises sung about both the writing and the gameplay.
I think that depends on what you want in a game. Me, I'm not interested in combat or levelling up fast as possible or mowing down mobs. I like lore and the little sideways and off the beaten track parts. So I'm picking up all the books and notes and letters and scraps of paper and reading them and they're funny (or not). Some of it is useful advice, some of it is just worldbuilding and to add colour, and that's what I want. Oh, hey, the long-gone troupe of actors had a smash hit performance here years ago? Wish I'd been there to see it!
But certainly for other people, that's all just padding and a waste of time that adds nothing, and that's equally valid point of view.
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