No, reusing Rapture for a different story is fine. And telling the story of SuperCommunist using Rapture tech/ADAM to create her dream evangelical socialist cult, abducting girls to build her utopia and so on is fine. But not both at the same time, because *that *makes no sense :).
I just want to say that after getting the idea of “easy mode” in DA:O from this thread I put it on and played all day yesterday and, man, just breeeeezed through the game. It’s wonderful now and I’m actually enjoying myself.
I beat the impossible dwarf chick golem level without losing a guy!
DA2 and DA3 suffered the same “nothing you did really mattered in the end” problem. But we hate DA2 for it because the journey to get to the end was sloppy. The journey in DA3 was fresh and satisfying, so we forgive it for the turd it dropped on us in the end.
I’m completely the other way around on this. DA2, despite its faults, felt much more cohesive to me. The story felt tighter, maybe because the game was shorter. DA3 on the other hand I played for ages. The idea of the war table was great, as was being able to customize the keep. But none of that mattered, and it felt that it should. Whereas in DA2 I felt that the few choices I made actually helped the story along.
When I finished DA2 I thought: “that was cool”. When I finished DA3 I thought: “was that it?”
I haven’t seen any widespread dislike or hate for Bioshock 2. I loved it, better gameplay, more interesting options, visit different locations, find out some background on the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies, what’s not to like?
I’ll go with The Saboteur. Running around Nazi-occupied France as a surly Irish mechanic turned resistance fighter, blowing up radar installations, tanks, armored cars, bridges, and derailing trains? Yes please. Climbing buildings and traversing rooftops a la Assassin’s creed and sniping Nazi’s from rooftops? Absolutely. Running over Nazi patrols in my Silver Dart racecar? Yup. Oh the memories. So fun.
Ok, I can see some of the games I would have mentioned have already been mentioned here is one of my overlooked favorites. I’m talking about Midwinter by MicroProse.
Lots of players you get to play. Lots of vehicles to tool around it and fight in and load of enemies to wipe out. It had a 3d world. All of this in 80’s gaming. It was highly reviewed, spawned a sequal but it is largely forgotten about today but it was groundbreaking in so many fun ways.
Ooh, ooh, which reminds me (by way of the sequel) : hardly anybody knows about Freedom Force. Tactical RPG spoofing the Golden Age of comic books with fantastic, over the top voice acting and a generally camp atmosphere. It will never not be awesome to clobber wiseguys FOR FREEEEEEDOM! with the Staff of Liberty, while they go “cheese it, the law !”
Freedom Force is utterly delightful, and it’s sequel is also fantastic. The only problem with them is how linear they are, as it reduces replayability. If someone were to take the gameplay, and bolt it onto an XCOM style base management, procedurally generated mission metagame, it would be pretty much the best thing ever.
I loved Freedom Force! Only reason I didn’t mention it is it didn’t seem to be ignored at the time.
Bumping this thread for a heads up : it’s that time of the year. Gabe Newell is doing a smash-and-grab on your beer money again, using many of the games that’ve been mentioned in this thread. With the Summer Sale/Flash sales, Ghost Master is currently on Steam for less than one euro. Both Freedom Force games can be had for 4 bucks. Recettear is 4 bucks also. All three Thief games are under 4 bucks each, and the latest one is 12 or so. Remember Me, 10 bucks.
Sunny summers are way overrated, anyway.
I have this on my Steam, but I can’t actually get it to run in Windows 8. I admit, I didn’t try very hard, as I think I got them during a past Steam sale
Yeah, on easy you don’t need to worry about friendly fire, so your mages can nuke with impunity. 
The 2 specs mentioned earlier have to be unlocked, so its unlikely you will get to use them, if you haven’t found them yet. They are typically useful for subsequent playthroughs.
DAO was my favourite game, so am a bit surprised at all the dislike of it. Parts of it do drag on, like the Deep Roads section you just completed, but I still really enjoyed the story and banter between companions.
DA2 I was disappointed in the story, and found some of the characters one dimensional. Anders, for instance talked about the mages/templars and ONLY the mages/templars for most of the game, same with Fenris. Isabela, well, non stop sexual innuendo. She was plainly written to appeal to teenage boys.
DAI was ok. Long and MMO like, which is fine with me. The story was ok, but I found the ‘inclusive’ content came across as a bit preachy if you chose the ‘wrong’ option. my real issue with the game was the horrible combat and UI, especially on PC.
ME3 some liked it, some didn’t. I also played it much after the hullabaloo of the endings passed. I thought the ending insulted my intelligence, quite honestly. “In Synthesis, machine and organic DNA will merge into a single happy being”. What?:smack:
I loved Command and Conquer Renegade, which I understand is not the common opinion.
I also enjoyed C&C4, which changed the mechanics of the game quite a bit. No more base building or resource gathering, just pump your units out and go find people to smash. C&C3 was a huge grind at the later levels (especially time-limited missions where you start with nothing) and I only played the first few levels of Red Alert 3 because it was even worse with the grinding.
One of my favorites ever. It was also very mod-able at the time, there was a huge database of skins and builds for hero’s, powers, etc. I remember having an overpowered GI Joe team based all around martial-arts and guns that was fun as hell to play.
Yes, it seems kind of janky on modern setups, but thankfully the jank is relatively easy to work around (by the standards of abandonware anyway :)) : find the game’s .exe, set it up to run in Win98/ME compatibility mode and checking the “deactivate desktop composition” and “deactivate visual themes” tickboxes. Then close Steam, find the Steam .exe and run *that *in WinXP SP3 mode. Relaunch Steam, then launch FF from Steam as normal.
At least that worked for me. Just don’t forget to set Steam back to regular mode and reboot it when you’re done playing/want to play other games and you should be golden.
Nobody remembers Arx Fatalis - it was hugely overshadowed by the similar-looking Morrowind - but it was a terrific, tight, atmospheric RPG that was unfairly neglected. Less open-ended than the latter, but it had this great claustrophobic feel to it. The “tracing runes” magic system made sense, even if it was often frustrating in the heat of battle - basically you had to walk in with the hand movements for your best spells memorised, or you were going down - but best of all was that you had to prepare for missions: you weren’t going to just find food, potions, weapons or magic , so you had to put in time making or organising what you needed, including learning the spells before you set out, or you’d get your arse kicked by some toerag sorcerer who’d done his homework. It was hugely immersive, and it would have made a killer online game against other players…
Huh? I have all sort of troubles playing CRPG because I’m absurdly clumsy with a keyboard .
But I never had the slighest problem with DA : O…beause it’s pausable. You pause, give orders, unpause, etc… So I fail to see what your problem was. 
This looked interesting, but looking it up, I see that’s it an RTS, a genre that I hate in that it consists in clicking quickly on buildings, corraling troops, clicking on some other part of the map to get themm to fight there, etc…
Basically I only like games where I can stop and think about my next move. If I’m in any way rushed to act, I’m going to dislike the game.
So, how works “Majesty” from this point of view?
Pretty well, actually. Majesty’s schick is that you don’t actually control your adventurers. You’re the king, so you build structures, recruit characters, and then they basically roam around doing what they want. You can encourage them to do what you want by setting rewards and bounties on things. So, if there’s a minotaur rampaging, you might put a 500 gold bounty on it, and then the adventurers who want money will go try to kill it, and then go back and spend the money you gave them on items and so on at your shops. So you’re not so much rounding up troops and sending them at things as you’re setting flags on places and things and then putting money on it and hoping the characters will pay attention to you.