I prefer science fiction to fantasy of any flavour. But in the almost complete absence of a proper SF RPG I will settle for SF flavoured fantasy.
See, I'm mostly totally the opposite, I find it tougher to get into sci-fi. That said, to me, the Fallout series qualifies as sci-fi RPGs. KOTOR was a great series, obviously Planescape straddles that line a bit. System Shock 2 is excellent. I have both Shadowrun games but haven't dove in yet.
I don't really like post-apocayptic stuff either. It's a bit short on the stuff that makes SF fun: space ships, ray guns, laser swords, robots and cyborgs.
I love KOTOR but as a roleplaying system it's a bit limited.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall is very good, but I would rather trade in the magic for psionics and a few plasma guns.
The problem is, there is very little else for SF fans, wheras 90% of crpgs are generic fantasy.
Mass Effect? I haven't played it but pretty sure it's a sci-fi RPG (whether it's any good or not is another matter).
I do like Mass Effect, but it's really a shooting game with RPG elements, especially the sequels. It doesn't have anything like the level of character customisation of a game like Baldur's Gate.
Id like Hammerfell, and a contuation of the fight against the Thalmor. I loooved Skyrim, though I really hated how there were no consequences to choices. This seems to have been the main critique of the game in general too, and it will be interesting if the new installment will accomodate this.
If they also stopped levelling monsters I would be a happy camper, but that seems unlikely... At least Skyrim was better than Oblivion's birgands with daedric weapons.
I appreciate all the Elder Scrolls games to an extent. Arena and Daggerfall (like most DOS games) are next to unplayable nowadays, but the did establish the idea of a basically endless world. The Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim trilogy really set new standards for just how BIG a world could be. There is something to be said for that. Again, Skyrim was my least favorite, but alot of it has to with the port and, honestly, the fact that there are mountains f'n EVERYWHERE. It's not a bad game. It's just that it is essentially a single player MMO. The expansion packs for each are actually far superior to anything in the vanilla games.
I don't really like post-apocayptic stuff either. It's a bit short on the stuff that makes SF fun: space ships, ray guns, laser swords, robots and cyborgs.
Um, have you played Fallout 3? It's got all of that stuff.
I don't really like post-apocayptic stuff either. It's a bit short on the stuff that makes SF fun: space ships, ray guns, laser swords, robots and cyborgs.
Um, have you played Fallout 3? It's got all of that stuff.
Maybe it has, but I didn't see it before I got bored trudging aimlessly around a dreary wasteland armed with a spud gun.
I think the problem with sci-fi RPGs is: it's hard to do one that's believable enough, simply because of the weapons they'd have.
With fantasy, one can easily abstract taking several blows from a sword, or a few arrows, and still fighting on. It's slightly less believable to be shot with an M16 the amount of times you can be shot with arrows in a D&D game, and that's with today's technology, so when you go far into the future, weapons should be more lethal, surely. They're also a lot more accurate than bows, crossbows, and early firearms.
This means that the combat dynamic would change drastically to that in D&D. There'd be less emphasis on open area skirmishes, and more people ducking behind cover trading shots. It's difficult to do that in a real-time game; how do you decide when someone is and isn't in cover, and at what point does the shot happen? A few games have made it work: turn based ones like XCom, and first person style ones like Fallout: New Vegas and Mass Effect, but that's not very Baldur's Gate like.
It also means that shots would be far more lethal than they are in D&D, and even at high levels, characters could die in a few hits. Surviving 20 laser blasts is considerably less believable than surviving 20 arrows (although that's still pushing it a bit!), so I think, to keep such a game believable enough to be interesting, it'd just be too difficult. See how quickly characters can die in XCom, and then imagine that that character isn't so easily replaceable.
Finally, there aren't many known brands that would instantly grab a huge audience. Other than Star Trek and Star Wars (the latter being more fantasy-in-space than sci-fi), the genre doesn't really have a D&D equivalent. Sure, there are plenty of well known settings and games, but not one that everyone, geek or otherwise, knows of...did you know that the average person has never heard of Firefly??
That said, an RPG set in the Star Trek, or the Firefly, universe, or even the Elite universe, would be cool!
I don't really like post-apocayptic stuff either. It's a bit short on the stuff that makes SF fun: space ships, ray guns, laser swords, robots and cyborgs.
Um, have you played Fallout 3? It's got all of that stuff.
Maybe it has, but I didn't see it before I got bored trudging aimlessly around a dreary wasteland armed with a spud gun.
Skyrim at least had nice scenery.
LOL. Fair enough. And to be honest, the Space Ship was a DLC anyway, and I don't think it went anywhere. But yeah, by the end there were robots and cyborgs and lazer/ray guns galore. And that's not the first time I've heard the complaint about the dreary background. I grew up on Wasteland and Fallout so I expected it. But it is NOT everyone's cup of tea.
@Squire - I think you may be right. However I suspect an equally large problem is making convincing character classes in a futuristic society. You can convincingly say that it takes months or years to properly learn how to use a sword or cast a spell, but with technology, laser scopes and guidance systems, power armor and repair robots and all of the other insane gear that we have all come to expect, is there really a reason to specialize? Just put on whatever suit you want and become bad--s at anything.
I think that Kotor, and Mass Effect got passes because of their specific worlds in this design. Kotor in particular had Jedi (basically a wizard or warrior wizard) and that helped.
And of course the third factor is that it is so very easy to slip from individual explorers to spaceships and whole crews. Then you have a whole different kind of game. Traveler tried to do it, and had some degree of success. But that is a really hard middle ground to strike at as far as I can see.
SF isn't as hard for weapons as people think. Just give people space armour and personal force fields. The thing with Space Opera is it is no more bound by "realism" than a fantasy game, go watch Guardians of the Galaxy. You can still have your big swords along with your ray guns, but you ditch the pseudo-medieval backdrop for something more colourful.
Well I'll end up playing it, but really I won't even consider buying it until it's like at least 75% off, because well it's Bethesda and that means the melee combat is going to be floaty nonsense, the story is going to be subpar at best, the people of the world are all going to incredibly ugly and it's going to be glitchy as hell.
It doesn't matter where it's set, all the races of the world with be there, major factions with be there and your silent protagonist will join everything and end up the leader of every little guild, college or fight club she/he/it can find.
With all this happening it's still going to be bland as watching a Bones marathon. Until about a year and half to three years after release, once the modding scene has had time to turn it into something worth playing.
One thing I do like about the Elder Scrolls games as a whole is how the level advance works. Only those skills that you practice actually improve. If you are a lock picker, you get good at that. If you don't work at it, the skill sits there.
I'm not saying that they level up system is perfect, far from it. However the fact that, in BG and D&D in general you can be a 'Thief' with maxed out lock picking skill without ever having once opened a lock just seems a bit anti-intuitive.
The whole "Skill picking" just seems flawed in my view. "Oh, I leveled up. Now I have X skill points to distribute." What???
One thing I do like about the Elder Scrolls games as a whole is how the level advance works. Only those skills that you practice actually improve. If you are a lock picker, you get good at that. If you don't work at it, the skill sits there.
I'm not saying that they level up system is perfect, far from it. However the fact that, in BG and D&D in general you can be a 'Thief' with maxed out lock picking skill without ever having once opened a lock just seems a bit anti-intuitive.
The whole "Skill picking" just seems flawed in my view. "Oh, I leveled up. Now I have X skill points to distribute." What???
Only problem is that in the Elder Scrolls (at least in Oblivion and Skyrim) the monsters level with you, yet the chests in any given location don't. There is hardly any way to plan out a path on the first couple plays that will take you progressively to areas that have chests to open at your basic level of lockpicking. It's common place to be traveling down the road to High Hrothgar, see a cave off to side, and go in to clear the map only to find that every chest in the dungeon is a master level lock, while you yourself are barely halfway through Adept. Again, these are good games, but they are so massive that I can't recommend playing them without a coupe of Wiki pages bookmarked in your browser.
One thing I do like about the Elder Scrolls games as a whole is how the level advance works. Only those skills that you practice actually improve. If you are a lock picker, you get good at that. If you don't work at it, the skill sits there.
I'm not saying that they level up system is perfect, far from it. However the fact that, in BG and D&D in general you can be a 'Thief' with maxed out lock picking skill without ever having once opened a lock just seems a bit anti-intuitive.
The whole "Skill picking" just seems flawed in my view. "Oh, I leveled up. Now I have X skill points to distribute." What???
Yep, and worse is the multiclassing system... "Oh, I levelled up! Suddenly I know how to do magic, which I never so much as attempted before in my life, and my wizard friend took 20 years to learn what I've just learned in a few months!".
Runequest is the only tabletop game I've seen do something similar: you can only level up skills you've "used successfully" and put a tick next to previously.
The Elder Scrolls games did sort of do that right, but the problem was the level scaling, and the lack of a party dynamic meant that most characters would end up the same: a jack-of-all-trades fighter/wizard/sneaky type. At least in Skyrim, you have that woman who follows you around and fights with you, so you can make a wizard/sneaky type if you want and have her do your fighting for you, and even Oblivion had parts where soldiers could follow you around. However, the poor AI and lack of control meant that any AI companions would either die very quickly (like the guards in Oblivion), or be immune to dying (like the woman in Skyrim).
@jjstraka34 - Oh, definitely. That part I totally hated. And the fact that, in Oblivion it was possible to finish the game at level 2 because the monsters DIDN'T level up if you chose not to do so was absurd in the extreme. I am not saying the system was perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Just saying that only used skills advanced made so much sense in my brain that it nearly exploded.
I remember playing a Spell caster in Oblivion. I started casting 'practice' spells to get my abilities up. After an hour or two of just casting summoning spells I went out in the world. I got totally OWNED because I was totally unprepared. My summoning SKILL was very high, but I still only had the baseline spells. And my gear was base level as well. So EVERYTHING that I encountered was like 6-7th level and I was pretty much 1st level, but with a lot of skill. So I got 1-hit killed EVERY TIME. That play through ended shortly thereafter.
I hate to harp on it, but I think that the folks that made Dark Souls got that bit VERY right. Monsters and locations were set/assigned a certain power. If you wandered in somewhere that you shouldn't be? You died. But if you came back after getting powerful enough? You defeated it. So it CAN be done. Just they didn't do it right with Oblivion.
@Squire - and yeah. being a Wizard player almost exclusively, I hated that in 3E, every Tom, Dick and Harry all of the sudden could become casters. Wanabees... No years and years of training and suffering for your craft. Just Hey-presto. I'm a Mage. What rot. LOL.
What about an Elsweyr and Valenwood combo? Make the world big
I think exactly the same, with some rewind I think Valenwood could be the perfect place hosting the great war between the Khajiits and the Bosmer. A context of crisis is always good to set up a Morro... an Elder Scrolls game.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall is very good, but I would rather trade in the magic for psionics and a few plasma guns.
Don't ever say this around me.again. please, I'll go into a berserker rage!!!!
Seriously I prefer magic to psionics any day, I don't care what the setting is, sci-fi or not. Only game I ever played where psionics actually interested me was Phantom Dust... I loved that game religiously.
Anyways, I want hammerfell, let me go home.dammit!
One thing I do like about the Elder Scrolls games as a whole is how the level advance works. Only those skills that you practice actually improve. If you are a lock picker, you get good at that. If you don't work at it, the skill sits there.
I'm not saying that they level up system is perfect, far from it. However the fact that, in BG and D&D in general you can be a 'Thief' with maxed out lock picking skill without ever having once opened a lock just seems a bit anti-intuitive.
The whole "Skill picking" just seems flawed in my view. "Oh, I leveled up. Now I have X skill points to distribute." What???
This is literally what I love the TES series! What, you want to be a thief, get your ass out there and practices!
@jjstraka34 - Oh, definitely. That part I totally hated. And the fact that, in Oblivion it was possible to finish the game at level 2 because the monsters DIDN'T level up if you chose not to do so was absurd in the extreme. I am not saying the system was perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Just saying that only used skills advanced made so much sense in my brain that it nearly exploded.
I remember playing a Spell caster in Oblivion. I started casting 'practice' spells to get my abilities up. After an hour or two of just casting summoning spells I went out in the world. I got totally OWNED because I was totally unprepared. My summoning SKILL was very high, but I still only had the baseline spells. And my gear was base level as well. So EVERYTHING that I encountered was like 6-7th level and I was pretty much 1st level, but with a lot of skill. So I got 1-hit killed EVERY TIME. That play through ended shortly thereafter.
I hate to harp on it, but I think that the folks that made Dark Souls got that bit VERY right. Monsters and locations were set/assigned a certain power. If you wandered in somewhere that you shouldn't be? You died. But if you came back after getting powerful enough? You defeated it. So it CAN be done. Just they didn't do it right with Oblivion.
@Squire - and yeah. being a Wizard player almost exclusively, I hated that in 3E, every Tom, Dick and Harry all of the sudden could become casters. Wanabees... No years and years of training and suffering for your craft. Just Hey-presto. I'm a Mage. What rot. LOL.
I honestly have to say I'm mixes emotions about that concept, it wasn't the worst thing they did, hell I heard people bitch at the fact that the world DID level with you. Many people want the old rpg feeling where the world was still and you had to grind before you could go into the next area, or find the next town. Personally I loved that the world grew along side me, but I did feel that there should have been some areas that should have always been above me. Mostly boss areas. I remember one time I was playing oblivion with my mage, and was exploring the mountain tops, and walking into some runic ever where there was this big firey demon just waiting. I ran like hell because I was playing a summoner, and he was knocking all my summons left and right like ping pong ball! I don't believe going into certain areas should instantly kill, but give you a chance to retreat. Why I actually quite love skyrim because I hated the that paste elderscroll games didn't really reward you a lot for choosing specialize like skyrim does, I do hate that the world feels... Dead... I mean I explored the world crazily hoping to run into some craziness like I did in oblivion and morrowind, but I never found anything over the top even with dawnguard or Dragonborn installed.
(about the next Elder Scrolls game): "It's not what you would call a big, active project right now. There are some other ones that we have going. We know it's important to our fans, and we need to be careful about setting expectations. It's certainly a game that we'll be making one day. I could sit here and explain to you exactly what we want it to be."
(about a conflict between openness and narrative): "Yes. We haven't quite cracked it yet."
(about hoarding potions, funny): "And we make sure we give them some powerful potions or whatever. But they end up hoarding them. It's kind of a joke in role-playing games. Everyone finishes the game with like, "The Potion of Ultimate Might" that they never drank, because they're always waiting for something worse to turn around the corner."
Edit: I forgot to answer the actual question, I'd really like to visit Black Marsh. Especially considering the theory that the Hist is really the remains of former kalpa eaten by Alduin.
Yeah, the likelihood that Bosmer get the limelight is quite high at this point. Even more so when we deduct the previous covered game main races: Bretons (Daggerfell), Redguards (Redguard), Dunmer (Morrowind), Imperials (Oblivion) and Nords (Skyrim). Arena is a bit of a wild card because it was the only game which allowed the player to travel throughout the whole of Tamriel. But anyhow, I believe this is quite telling that the next TES game will not have Men as main faction.
My initial answer about hoping for Akavir still stands though. It has simply the most potential of becoming something groundbreaking new due to neither housing Men nor Mer on its landmass. Black Marsh also still holds my second place wish location. That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing Pyandonea or the coral kingdoms of Thras being featured as well. There's a distinctive lack of sea/underwater-based RPG's out there after all.
Comments
I love KOTOR but as a roleplaying system it's a bit limited.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall is very good, but I would rather trade in the magic for psionics and a few plasma guns.
The problem is, there is very little else for SF fans, wheras 90% of crpgs are generic fantasy.
If they also stopped levelling monsters I would be a happy camper, but that seems unlikely... At least Skyrim was better than Oblivion's birgands with daedric weapons.
Skyrim at least had nice scenery.
With fantasy, one can easily abstract taking several blows from a sword, or a few arrows, and still fighting on. It's slightly less believable to be shot with an M16 the amount of times you can be shot with arrows in a D&D game, and that's with today's technology, so when you go far into the future, weapons should be more lethal, surely. They're also a lot more accurate than bows, crossbows, and early firearms.
This means that the combat dynamic would change drastically to that in D&D. There'd be less emphasis on open area skirmishes, and more people ducking behind cover trading shots. It's difficult to do that in a real-time game; how do you decide when someone is and isn't in cover, and at what point does the shot happen? A few games have made it work: turn based ones like XCom, and first person style ones like Fallout: New Vegas and Mass Effect, but that's not very Baldur's Gate like.
It also means that shots would be far more lethal than they are in D&D, and even at high levels, characters could die in a few hits. Surviving 20 laser blasts is considerably less believable than surviving 20 arrows (although that's still pushing it a bit!), so I think, to keep such a game believable enough to be interesting, it'd just be too difficult. See how quickly characters can die in XCom, and then imagine that that character isn't so easily replaceable.
Finally, there aren't many known brands that would instantly grab a huge audience. Other than Star Trek and Star Wars (the latter being more fantasy-in-space than sci-fi), the genre doesn't really have a D&D equivalent. Sure, there are plenty of well known settings and games, but not one that everyone, geek or otherwise, knows of...did you know that the average person has never heard of Firefly??
That said, an RPG set in the Star Trek, or the Firefly, universe, or even the Elite universe, would be cool!
@Squire - I think you may be right. However I suspect an equally large problem is making convincing character classes in a futuristic society. You can convincingly say that it takes months or years to properly learn how to use a sword or cast a spell, but with technology, laser scopes and guidance systems, power armor and repair robots and all of the other insane gear that we have all come to expect, is there really a reason to specialize? Just put on whatever suit you want and become bad--s at anything.
I think that Kotor, and Mass Effect got passes because of their specific worlds in this design. Kotor in particular had Jedi (basically a wizard or warrior wizard) and that helped.
And of course the third factor is that it is so very easy to slip from individual explorers to spaceships and whole crews. Then you have a whole different kind of game. Traveler tried to do it, and had some degree of success. But that is a really hard middle ground to strike at as far as I can see.
It doesn't matter where it's set, all the races of the world with be there, major factions with be there and your silent protagonist will join everything and end up the leader of every little guild, college or fight club she/he/it can find.
With all this happening it's still going to be bland as watching a Bones marathon.
Until about a year and half to three years after release, once the modding scene has had time to turn it into something worth playing.
I'm not saying that they level up system is perfect, far from it. However the fact that, in BG and D&D in general you can be a 'Thief' with maxed out lock picking skill without ever having once opened a lock just seems a bit anti-intuitive.
The whole "Skill picking" just seems flawed in my view. "Oh, I leveled up. Now I have X skill points to distribute." What???
Runequest is the only tabletop game I've seen do something similar: you can only level up skills you've "used successfully" and put a tick next to previously.
The Elder Scrolls games did sort of do that right, but the problem was the level scaling, and the lack of a party dynamic meant that most characters would end up the same: a jack-of-all-trades fighter/wizard/sneaky type. At least in Skyrim, you have that woman who follows you around and fights with you, so you can make a wizard/sneaky type if you want and have her do your fighting for you, and even Oblivion had parts where soldiers could follow you around. However, the poor AI and lack of control meant that any AI companions would either die very quickly (like the guards in Oblivion), or be immune to dying (like the woman in Skyrim).
I remember playing a Spell caster in Oblivion. I started casting 'practice' spells to get my abilities up. After an hour or two of just casting summoning spells I went out in the world. I got totally OWNED because I was totally unprepared. My summoning SKILL was very high, but I still only had the baseline spells. And my gear was base level as well. So EVERYTHING that I encountered was like 6-7th level and I was pretty much 1st level, but with a lot of skill. So I got 1-hit killed EVERY TIME. That play through ended shortly thereafter.
I hate to harp on it, but I think that the folks that made Dark Souls got that bit VERY right. Monsters and locations were set/assigned a certain power. If you wandered in somewhere that you shouldn't be? You died. But if you came back after getting powerful enough? You defeated it. So it CAN be done. Just they didn't do it right with Oblivion.
@Squire - and yeah. being a Wizard player almost exclusively, I hated that in 3E, every Tom, Dick and Harry all of the sudden could become casters. Wanabees... No years and years of training and suffering for your craft. Just Hey-presto. I'm a Mage. What rot. LOL.
"It Will Be a “Very Long Time” Before we Hear About the Next Elder Scrolls Game; Team 100% Focused on Fallout 4"
http://www.dualshockers.com/2015/08/09/it-will-be-a-very-long-time-before-bethesda-talks-about-the-next-elder-scrolls-game/
Seriously I prefer magic to psionics any day, I don't care what the setting is, sci-fi or not. Only game I ever played where psionics actually interested me was Phantom Dust... I loved that game religiously.
Anyways, I want hammerfell, let me go home.dammit!
(about the next Elder Scrolls game): "It's not what you would call a big, active project right now. There are some other ones that we have going. We know it's important to our fans, and we need to be careful about setting expectations.
It's certainly a game that we'll be making one day. I could sit here and explain to you exactly what we want it to be."
(about a conflict between openness and narrative): "Yes. We haven't quite cracked it yet."
(about hoarding potions, funny): "And we make sure we give them some powerful potions or whatever. But they end up hoarding them. It's kind of a joke in role-playing games. Everyone finishes the game with like, "The Potion of Ultimate Might" that they never drank, because they're always waiting for something worse to turn around the corner."
m.static.newsvine.com/servista/imagesizer?file=fb-frednelson12387E9F91FB-1DAF-3163-AFBF-939702180F3F.jpg&width=936 The "Project Greenheart" part. Of course it doesn't prove anything that's why I said "rumors".
Edit: I forgot to answer the actual question, I'd really like to visit Black Marsh. Especially considering the theory that the Hist is really the remains of former kalpa eaten by Alduin.
My initial answer about hoping for Akavir still stands though. It has simply the most potential of becoming something groundbreaking new due to neither housing Men nor Mer on its landmass. Black Marsh also still holds my second place wish location. That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing Pyandonea or the coral kingdoms of Thras being featured as well. There's a distinctive lack of sea/underwater-based RPG's out there after all.