RPG's with great MARKSMANSHIP. Like Dragon's Dogma and Fallout New Vegas.
SorcererV1ct0r
Member Posts: 2,176
Longbows are incredible effective medieval weapons. You can see the effectiveness of this type of weapon on Battle of Agincourt, where in lesser number, without cavalry and supply problems, English lost about 100 soldiers compared to 8000 soldiers from the French side, with cavalry and far the better equipment. In most RPG's, this magnificent weapon is just a boring weapon which has no range, no damage output and nothing interesting.
Dragon's Dogma in other hands, did a amazing job with rangers. I loved so much play DD as a ranger. My unique critique is that IMO a Dragon's Glaze bow should fire arrows at faster speed than a Rusted Longbow and all projectiles has the same speed. Other amazing thing about DD is that you can use special arrows. Including blast arrows and a OHK arrow which OHK most bosses(not all)
Makers finger VS a dragon. On spoiler the ranger vocation trailer
Fallout New Vegas is another game with amazing marksmanship. My unique critique is that the range of shotguns is too short compared to IRL shotguns. And slugs only reduce the spread a little when it should fire a single "pallet". But you can use Dragon's Breath ammo, slugs, flechette, contrary to FL3/4 which restricts you from using only "shotgun shells"(i assume buckshot). Anti Materiel Rifle can use even incendiary and explosive rounds. And using .308 AP to snipe heavily armored robots at long range or the AMR is so satisfying. Mainly with the correct perks. Enemies also can use this nasty guns against the player. .45-70 Brush guns are very common among the Legion. On FL3/4 since armor works absorbing the damage by percentage, there are no reason to use large caliber armor piercing rounds. A 9mm SMG will outDPS any damage against any target.
Here is a Super Mutant dying to Dragon's Breath rounds on New Vegas. On spoiler, a montage of AMR + explosive .50 BMG rounds
And of course, you don't start new vegas with such weaponry. You start with a 9mm pistol in poor condition and a unscopped bolt action 556 rifle in poor condition. Takes time to get a semi auto rifle.
Dragon's Dogma in other hands, did a amazing job with rangers. I loved so much play DD as a ranger. My unique critique is that IMO a Dragon's Glaze bow should fire arrows at faster speed than a Rusted Longbow and all projectiles has the same speed. Other amazing thing about DD is that you can use special arrows. Including blast arrows and a OHK arrow which OHK most bosses(not all)
Makers finger VS a dragon. On spoiler the ranger vocation trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWjD0vOgOWEFallout New Vegas is another game with amazing marksmanship. My unique critique is that the range of shotguns is too short compared to IRL shotguns. And slugs only reduce the spread a little when it should fire a single "pallet". But you can use Dragon's Breath ammo, slugs, flechette, contrary to FL3/4 which restricts you from using only "shotgun shells"(i assume buckshot). Anti Materiel Rifle can use even incendiary and explosive rounds. And using .308 AP to snipe heavily armored robots at long range or the AMR is so satisfying. Mainly with the correct perks. Enemies also can use this nasty guns against the player. .45-70 Brush guns are very common among the Legion. On FL3/4 since armor works absorbing the damage by percentage, there are no reason to use large caliber armor piercing rounds. A 9mm SMG will outDPS any damage against any target.
Here is a Super Mutant dying to Dragon's Breath rounds on New Vegas. On spoiler, a montage of AMR + explosive .50 BMG rounds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSc62PLpnq4And of course, you don't start new vegas with such weaponry. You start with a 9mm pistol in poor condition and a unscopped bolt action 556 rifle in poor condition. Takes time to get a semi auto rifle.
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The ranged archetype in Kingdoms of Amalur-reckoning was fun to play with too, but that was more of the sneaky-trappy type.
Fallout 3/4 are all about spray and pray. Due the fact that armor just absorb the damage by percentage, there are no reason to for eg, using .308 armor piercing vs a enemy in power armor instead of a 9mm SMG. On New Vegas, the 9mm SMG would deal almost no damage on heavily armored enemies, only DPS matters on FL 4.
Dragon's Dogma also has flat damage reduction.
A great gamble shot can deal ZERO damage if you hit in the heavy armored part of a armored cyclops and OHK the same cyclops if you hit in the unarmored weakspot. It makes the game more immersive, skill based and rewarding. Armor and weapons also looks gorgeous
Two Worlds 1/2 had bows with different projectile speeds which is great but the speed of then is too slow IMO. My 185 lbf crossbow fire bolts about 95 m/s. On the game, most arrows are 20 m/s and hard to hit moving targets.
Kingdoms of Amalur is the high mobile shortbow style with a lot of cooldowns which i hate...
You've clearly never specced for sniper rifles.
Even if you spec into it, the damage per second will be lackluster compared to the faster firing weapons. I can 2HK supermutants and BoS paladins with Anti Materiel Rifle + explosive ammo on new vegas...
But having pistol caliber guns better than anti materiel rifles to deal with armor is just ridiculous and a consequence of % based armor. On skyrim, a sword can outdps a warhammer vs heavy armor which is also ridiculous... Anyway, comparing the ammo types which a sniper can use in each game
FL 3/4
Fallout New Vegas
Every game which has damage reduction by percentage has the problem of one type of weapon being dominant. It applies even to Children's Online Daycare, where body armor in this games can protect you even from a PTRS-1941, which fires a 14.5x114mm round, capable of piercing 40mm of RHA armor, enough to pierce most modern armored vehicles and the body armor on the game don't care if is a 14.5x114mm round or a .22 LR, it just reduces by percentage. No body armor should protect you even from Barrett M107(.50 bmg) or Cheytac Intervention(.408 Cheyenne Tactical), in fact, if it probably can pierce a thick armored glass, then your body armor, then your body, then the back of your body armor...
If Dragon's Dogma had percentage based reduction only, nobody would ever use a longbow over a shortbow and skills like Great Gamble would become worthless. Percentage based reduction is unrealistic and homogenizes the weapons and skills.
The same applies to spells.
For eg, Isaac's greater missile storm on NWN1 can outdps a heavy hitting spell if the enemy has no magical resistance, but if the enemy has DR against magic, then it will be far less effective. And a nuking spell subjected to only one DR will be better.
It doesn't change that it's still fun exploding heads at a massive distance in F4. They also had the hold breath mechanic that used AP to make the scope stop shaking. The peak around cover system helped a lot too. I actually find F4s combat a lot more fun than New Vegas, but the story and choices was nowhere near as good.
I don't think anyone's completely accurately depicted modern armor against guns in games. Even more medieval stuff isn't done that accurately. But they do have to make it in a system mechanic that's understandable by enough people. I mean really, most body armor should be scrapped after taking one bullet. The stuff is never the same and is compromised after one impact, same thing with a bicycle helmet. I think people would get annoyed at having their armor be worthless after taking a single shot in a game. You have to weight tediousness vs accuracy.
You can do that too on new vegas, and put then into fire, and use explosive rounds(...)
But armor mechancis on new vegas are simple to understand. Is like DR on D&D 3.5e which NOBODY complains that is a hard rule to understand. Is pretty simple, if you deal 6d6 damage with a fireball and got 20 for eg and the enemy has 10 DR vs fire, you dealt 10 damage. Pretty simple. Is A - B = damage. Pokemon has way more complex rules.
And my point is not that we should have complete realistic armor mechanics, only that i wanna longbows better than low power shortbows vs heavily armored enemies in a medieval game and anti materiel rounds more effective than a 9mm vs a heavily armored enemy in a firearms game. A lot of people love bolt/lever action rifles and large caliber hunting rifles and anti materiel rifles. This types of weapons are always made useless in video games even in situations which they should be great, like large creatures, armored robots, etc.
And is not as if armor is worthless on new vegas. A full set of power armor has a DT of 31. The hunting rifle has a damage of 52, that means that if you got shot by a .308 hunting rifle, you will gonna take 21 damage. With the perks which can give more 6 DT, you can reduce the damage of it to just 15. About the same damage of a 9mm pistol in a unarmored target.
Here is a video of testing a body armor with many types of calibers. At about 5min, you can see how much it penetrated with a .50 bmg ap.
Antitribu mod for VtMB added dragon breath rounds to a shotgun but since it has a cycling problems, you can only use it on the double barrel shotgun.
I think some of the reason they have lower damage for physical weapons on bots is a lot of the bullets might just not hit something vital. Energy weapons were meant to shine in those situations and they had some great ones with the fully modded out Gauss, plasma and laser rifles. They were also fun to snipe with, so more marksmanship. I also find it fun to change around weapons on need or just using whatever I have ammo for in these sorts of games. It keeps things from getting stale.
That's weird that you couldn't use dragon's breath in a pump action shotgun, since it uses the pump to cycle. In real life, though, you'd have to wait till the round stopped spewing fire before cycling, or you'd have this hot shell flying out spitting fire in random directions near you. Apparently there are also more recent types of dragon breath rounds that have an extra charge just to cycle the round in a semi auto shotgun, too. Not sure if they existed when Bloodlines was set, though.
Longbows vs Shortbows in video games is not depicted well at all. Material matters way more than size. The Mongolian double recurve had greater range and stopping power than the Welsh long bow, but was still small enough to fire from horse back. Otzi the Ice Man, found over 5000 years ago, technically had a long bow on him. It wouldn't have had anywhere near the draw strength of the Welsh long bow or even compound bows used not that long after that weren't nearly as long. It would be really cool to see some of the greater variety of bows with different materials in games.
The worst thing about bows in video games, though, is you cannot fire them sideways while squatting and really do much damage. You just can't get the full draw out of the bow and there's a very limited area at the back of the pull where you really get any force from it. It's still fun to creep around with one in skyrim and oblivion, though.
I don't wanna "ultra realism", A - B from FNV is not "ultra realism"; Is in fact a very simplistic abstraction from reality.
For me, using different types of ammo to engage different high priority targets is a part of marksmanship. See the "Related military weapons" on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marksman
New Vegas also makes your skill and attributes matters way more. Someone with poor stats and attributes will have to deal with a massive sway if he is using the AMR, someone with everything fully maximized will have no scope sway. This type of progression of your character becoming better at marksmanship is also something lacking on FL4.
A .50 bmg incendiary technically can ignite the fuel tanks or destroy components. I don't like games which treats all bullets the same...
On Antitribu mod, is due the game limitation. You can't have two ammo types for the same weapon on the VtMB. But the double barrel shotgun on the mod is already one of the best weapons to use against kine and it makes sense.
As for the mongolian longbow, it doesn't exist in the society which Dragon's Dogma is based from. But rangers are pretty dope. Here is what even a low level ranger can do with special arrows, the right skills and playing smart.
The Battle of Agincourt was also a total disaster for the French because they attacked across a narrow stretch of land after a large storm had created muddy conditions, while wearing very heavy armor and riding horses. The English by comparison were uphill, firing down upon them, and were lightly armored. The French did eventually reach English lines, but were so exhausted from the trip that they were defeated by the (relatively) fresh and lightly encumbered English troops.
The longbow absolutely played a role, but there were other significant considerations.
@ThacoBell - I've heard they're releasing a port of Dwarf Fortress on Steam with graphics (not just ASCII). I've never really played it, looked so complicated I didnt know where to start.
I've always had a weird issue with consumables or rare ammo types that causes me to save them. I always think I'll use them when I REALLY need them... and then never really end up needing (or using) them. That's a me thing, though. For sure.
I an different. After i got enought money on Dragon's Dogma, the first thing that i did was to buy Maker's Finger only to use in a end game "miniboss" of BI and get a lot of XP. If i see death on BI, the first thing that i do is to switch to blast arrows and use STR buffing items. If i have no chance against a foe, i just run...
I love the Junk jet of Fallout because all the scrap you are holding actually serves for something: as a projectile.
Someone should do something like that for Medieval-ish games
I haven't tried it, but this mod might be exactly what you're looking for
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/9057
I didn't get that far into Dragon's Dogma, because the outright wrong quest marker locations pissed me off too much, but it seems like there'd at least be some amount of composite bows in the setting. Probably nothing as good as the Mongols had, but even the Byzantine cavalry had composite bows.
Well, i honestly never used much energy weapons on fallout. But IMO if it can take out a LAV IRL, it should be able to take out the sci-fi/post apocalyptic equivalent to LAV(armored robots). About the mod, the mod doesn't change how DR works on fallout to make like i believe that should be. Quicker weapons in smaller caliber better vs unarmored and large caliber weapons better vs heavily armored enemies...
As for the Dragon's Dogma, i believe that the quest in question is when you need to search a tome, right? Spoilers of the quest bellow
You also don't need to complete this quest. You only need two to see the Duke.
And shorter bows has less "time" to accelerate. Making a analogy with firearms, is like compare a short barrel .44 magnum with a long barrel .44 magnum. The poundage of a bow affects the strength of the arrow but is not the unique thing to determine the projectile strength. Crossbows are about equally deadly and requires way more poundage to archive the same kinetic energy due the short "spam". Note that most mongols was half drawing and the mongol style cavalry is completely different than the English.
The British longbow is great for what he was designed. Pierce armor at range, protect fortress, disable cavalry charge, etc. Of course he is not the best bow for every situation. I believe that for cavalry combat at medium range, the mongols has the best bow. For the long range fortress defending, the english has the best bow.
This is why i say that the longbow is the anti materiel rifle of medieval ages...
That video will encourage you to try it again.
The arrows the Mongols fired were actually pretty big and fat, so they had enough mass to accelerate and travel far. So you could fire large arrows out of a composite bow. Not sure what the Byzantines used, but I'd expect they'd have been a lot larger and heavier than the arrows people use for sport archery and most hunting. I mean if you wanted to, you could compare the armor piercing power of a balista or gastrophetes, since those fired larger bolts than the little hand held ones that were used in Europe around the Battle of Agincourt.
I also hear constantly about how great Dragon's Dogma is, and I own it on two platforms, but everytime I play it I think during the prologue "I don't really like this combat" and then after it's over I never end up leaving town before setting it aside. Give me Kingdoms of Amalur any day over this.
My one temptation is that I did have one really awesome fight against a cyclops I was underlevelled for. I jumped on his face and kept stabbing away while he killed my whole party. Eventually the cyclops ran off the edge of a staircase that was crazy high up. He died and I survived. Of course I was way underlevelled to deal with fighting my way back out, but it was hilarious. My issue is the game seemed to require grinding, any time that comes up in a game, I checkout. Plus asides from the occasional situation like I mentioned, the combat wasn't that fun for me. The combat just was too tedious and repetitive, I must've stabbed that cyclops in the eye more than 100 times in that fight. It had potential, I just refuse to do grinding and other things that are disrespecftul to your time.
I also read this super interesting article on ars technica today about 38,000 year old bows and arrows in Sri Lanka.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/south-asia-now-has-the-oldest-evidence-of-bows-and-arrows-outside-africa/
The prologue is the WORST part by far. Why? You are forced to play as a fighter, the most boring class ever. IMO >
Ranger > Magick Archer > Assassin > Mystic Knight > Sorcerer > Strider > Mage > Warrior > Fighter
The ranged combat on the game is near perfect. And the melee with mystic knight is good. My unique critique towards DD is that you can't decide how to spend attributes, so if you wanna high magick, you can't play as MA, you need to play as SORCERER, the fact that all arrows has the same speed and the high level of gear dependency.
Combat is ALREADY a simplistic abstraction from reality. The next step is actual realism.
@BallpointMan " I've heard they're releasing a port of Dwarf Fortress on Steam with graphics (not just ASCII). I've never really played it, looked so complicated I didnt know where to start."
Oh it is. I've only watched (or read) other people play it. Its minutiae is insane. I don't actually know if its tenable with graphics. Dwarf Fortress has been known to take up all of a computer's resources with all the simultaneous calculations that it runs.
@DrHappyAngry @jjstraka34 Did you guys play the original or the re-release? The re-release fixed a lot of issues. On another note, the combat is only button mash in the early stages of the game, you will get horribly mangled trying to button mash even mid-tier enemies.
Totally agree about the quests though. Its so many boring fetch quests with vague or non-existant directions. The game's alot more fun non-completionist.
Well, if you see the video that i've posted, you will see that you don't need to "2 stab weak point 500 times", in fact, i posted a screenshot OHKilling a drake on literally the first image. If you try to kill a gore chimera as a lv 6 aedventure with starting gear, of course it will take a lot of time. Just like if you try to face a securitron with the 9mm starting pistol on new vegas.
As for mercs, the difference of a lv 19 and 21 pawn is too small. You don't need to change every level. And they don't scale to your level because they are other player's creation. Each pawn has unique knowledge about areas and monsters, unique skills, unique stats, uinique behavior, etc. The gear, behavior, skills, etc are far more important than a pawn's level.
Dragon's Dogma also has amazing dragon fights. On most games, dragons are just fire breathing lizards but on Dragon's Dogma, a red dragon is a might close quarters warriors, yellow, edadly at range and very mobile and blue a might spell caster capable of casting deadly spells pretty fast. Is not like on D&D 5e, where a high level sorcerer with a tiny portion of draconic blood is arguably stronger than a dragon...
Well, i posted a video of a lv 30 ranger fighting on the end game DLC dungeon. I know, ranger, not fighter. I agree that fighter is extremely boring. But a ranger with special arrows and items to boost his attack damage can be insanely deadly. You are arguing that fighter is boring and i believe that everyone agrees. One or two vocations on 9 which sucks doesn't means that the game is bad.
Grinding is one of the bad "JRPG's" influences on DD. Go kill X monsters to find X components and upgrade your bow or escort quests aren't where the game shines.
Why combat is great :
The game could have been better. Could have manual aiming for magick archers, different projectile speed based on bow strength and arrow weight, less gear dependency and better quest design in some areas, but only by not feeling like a consequenceless unimmersive work about managing artificial timers like 99% of post wow games, i gave a chance.
As for 90s RPG's, the best 90s RPG's din't had grinding. Dark Sun : Shattered Lands for eg.
I'd love to play the Dark Sun games, loved the hell out of that setting in the '90s and only got to play a bit of the PC games at friends houses as a kid. Problem is every time I've tried to fire them up, saving the game doesn't work in the dosbox. Tried it on Linux and Windows on multiple boxes over the many years, but never been able to save the game. Even the GOG version didn't work for me.