I’ve been trying to find new games to play, and I’m getting into Baldurs Gate. I like turn based games, and I wanted to find one like it that I could customize my full team and not just stats. I also wanted to know if there were any good games that were turn based that were free since I don’t have too much to spend rn. Any suggestions?
Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a 5e game based on the SRD. You can create your entire four person party and it is turn based. It is definitely jankier than BG3 so don’t expect stunning visuals or voice acting but it plays well and is closer to “real” 5e than the liberties Larian took with the rules. It also has a bit of homebrew classes due to the limitations of what’s allowed under the SRD (basically the rules of what non WotC people can use in their media).
There is also a lot of player generated dungeons, classes and content although those naturally lack voice acting.
It runs $30 for the base game but goes on sale fairly often. It has a sequel in the making.
Oo, alright! I don’t care much ab VA or visuals so that’s alright. My laptop runs pretty shitty anyway. Thanks!
Just so you know, your party in BG3 is actually entirely customizable. You can choose which companion(s) you want with you. Every companion can be respecced to whatever class you want (it doesn’t affect their storylines). Or if you don’t want to use any of them, you can also just make your own party of generic “hirelings” that you can fully customize, but they have no story.
The main story would be complete-able either way, you’d just miss out on the dialogue and side quests of the “official” companions.
BG3 is a really, really good game, probably the apex of this whole genre. Its predecessors Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 by Larian are also really good.
The old Infinity Engine & D20 games are still available and cheap now, from gog.com and often on Steam. I mean games like:
- Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2
- Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 (if you like sci-fi)
- Icewind Dale
- Planescape Torment
Many of these have also been remastered for iPad and Android tablets, if that’s better for you.
There are also similar games from other companies, like Temple of Elemental Evil, Solasta, Gloomhaven, Pathfinder… it’s actually a huge, huge genre that spans back to the 90s and 2000s and there are dozens if not hundreds of good titles.
Do you have any more specific criteria, like things you like or don’t like? The older games are more likely to run on an old laptop, but if you want to try the newer ones, many of them are also available on GeForce Now (it’s a game streaming service that lets you play the latest games on max graphics on any old laptop).
You can also run an emulator and find old turn-based JRPGs (Zeldas, Final Fantasy, Chrono Triggers, etc.), if that’s more your jam.
Most laptops can run those without much issue.
I definitely want one that’ll run on a lower quality laptop, bc while mines ‘newer’ I think, it’s pretty bad at running games and Baldurs Gate 3 lags the hell out of it lol. I’ve tried updating my party and it would just make me play the character and I couldn’t change it, but I could’ve been doing it wrong because I only try at the start of a new save. Do you do it through the mirrors or whatever they are? I haven’t played in a few months lol
Very minor spoiler:
In the first area of the game, not long after the spaceship crash-lands onto a beach, you’ll come across the ruins of an old temple. Inside the temple you’ll eventually find an undead character. After your conversation with him, he leaves. Next time you take a long rest, he’ll show up at your camp.
This character will allow you to respec yourself and your companions any time you want (for a small gold cost). He will also let you add hirelings in lieu of story companions.
There is also a mod that might make it easier: Custom Companions Lite for Baldur's Gate 3 - mod.io (haven’t tried it)
BG3 runs great on GeForce Now, or if you have an Nvidia card, turn on DLSS.
But yeah, those older games are great too. Solasta was fun and lets you customize the whole party right from the start. It’s just nowhere near as epic in scope as Baldur’s Gate 3. It has a story, somewhat, but is really more like a D&D combat simulator. Temple of Elemental Evil is similar, but for 3.5e instead of 5e. BG 1&2 use AD&D or 2nd edition rules, one of those… mechanically they are pretty simple and boring compared to 3.5e and 4e/5e, but they’ve still got good storytelling.
Take a look at these lists:
- From GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/games?genres=rpg&tags=turn-based&order=desc:bestselling (you can further filter by the “2D” tag and/or release date to find older or simpler games your laptop can run)
- Or the top-rated turn-based RPGs on Steam: Turn-Based Role-Playing
There are just so, so many good games in this genre, old and new, 2D and 3D, that you can really just pick one or two that look interesting and spend a few hundred hours with them easily.
There are many that are $10 or under (you can filter by price on both marketplaces) and still excellent.
I was hesitating to give this recommendation, because while it’s an excellent turn based game with a LOT of good story, the party is very much lacking in customization (the Main Character is very customizable) but it is very cheap right now on GOG (similar, actually slightly less on Steam right now as well)
The Deluxe/Extended version of Both Shadowrun Turn Based games are for sale at total of $10 for all.
But again, while there is SOME customization of the Player party, it’s normally only the equipment and an either/or choice of talents/skills.
Still, lots of fun, interesting companions, each with their own story-based sub quests if you work to talk to them between missions.
This is true, but it’s also not.
Technically, yes, you can respec any of your companions and change them around quite a bit. However, their stories are hard-coded, so if you change them too much, your game can kinda come out weird. You can change things like their appearance and it won’t affect much, but changing their class can cause parts of their story to become a bit nonsensical.
I’ve used it. I used two of the origin characters as companions, but I didn’t like any of the others, so I ended up using the mod to create the 4th member of my party. I was satisfied with the results, but, as noted, the mod character did not have any sort of integrated story in the game (which I didn’t care about). Keeping the origin characters in your camp without them being part of your actual 4-character party is enough to trigger at least parts of their in-game stories.
The older Baldur’s Gate games (1 and 2) are customizable and turn-based, though they are a bit clunky by modern standards. The first two games in the Neverwinter Nights series are similar, but after those two they switched to online-only games.
The Elder Scrolls series is highly customizable, but the combat is NOT turn based. Instead, they have a real-time combat system. But they are at least RPG games and have a lot of customization. As the series progresses, it gets much better from a graphical point of view, but the RPG quality keeps going down as Bethesda dumbs down the games. It makes the games better for casual gamers, but for people who like depth and mental challenges it makes the game feel shallow and idiotic. Skyrim, for example, looks pretty, but it’s “puzzles” are basically kindergarten levels and its main quest is extremely formulaic. Side quests are also a bit shallow and short, for the most part.
Many turn-based RPG fans also do not like Bethesda’s real time combat system, and much prefer something turn-based instead.
I am a huge fan of this game and want to support this suggestion.
It may look like a crappier version of BG3 and in many ways it is, because let’s face it, BG3 is probably the best video game to be released in quite a while and few games can match it. And any game that is substantially similar to BG3 is naturally going to compared to it and it will look much worse for that comparison.
Maybe a slight tangent...
(For the record, it came out two years before BG3, so it’s not a copy or anything; there are a number of very similar games that could be considered their own genre maybe. The Divinity: Original Sin games would count, though they were made by the same people as BG3 and are more like spiritual predecessors, and I’d argue the Pathfinder video games “Kingmaker” and “Wrath of the Righteous” would be in the same genre.)
What sets Solasta apart for me, though, and what I really love is that you build a fully-customized party. You make four characters, design how they look, their backgrounds, personalities, and so on. And then they come to life, in a way. They will have little discussions and bicker among each other in cut scenes, all based on how you built them. I find this absolutely remarkable. This little feature is what hooked me on the game and what keeps me coming back to it despite the existence of similar games with more polish.
I’ve never played a game where I really felt like “this is my party”. In a typical game like this, your characters either have a predetermined, scripted storyline and dialog, or they don’t have any at all. But in Solasta, it happens somewhat organically in play based on your character creation choices.
I’m not trying to oversell it. This aren’t really stories that are dynamically generated. They are just a series of incidental pieces of dialog, or reactions within scripted stories. So in a hypothetical situation (as random example not actually from the game), let’s say you are asked by an NPC to invade a bandit camp. You make a character with a righteous background who talks about bringing the enemies to justice, a bloodthirsty one wants to hear them scream, and the greedy one hopes they have a lot of loot.
It’s flavor text, but to me it’s what really made the game feel like my own. If this is the sort of thing that sounds appealing, check it out. I initially played this game for free on my Xbox when it was on Game Pass, then when that expired I waited for a later sale before buying it.
Ditto for games like Pillars of Eternity or Pathfinder: Kingmaker.
Ditto for Icewind Dale, but for 2e instead.
They’re real time with pause. There’s sort of an internal system of turns so that it’s mechanically d&d but it all happens simultaneously.
The general term of the genre were talking about is CRPG. It’s one of the most prolific genres of niche games.
Pathfinder: wrath of the righteous is the only one i can think of that even comes close to the BG3 exprience.