Recent RPGs

Here's a few I tried: Metro 2033, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 2, The Witcher 2.

Now playing on a i5 2500K, GTX480, 4 gigs RAM.

Metro 2033 is an FPS RPG, and much more an FPS than a RPG. In a post-nuclear apocalypse scenario, you're fighting hostile human factions and monsters in Moscow's Metro system and occasionally above the ground. Gameplay is almost completely linear. The story is a bit silly, but immersion is excellent. You have scavenged weapons and gadgets, limited ammo, and next to no information on the enemies and situations you'll face. You can switch to Russian audio if you like.
Gfx are good, lighting effects are outright awesome. (I imagine they'd be taxing too, though I played it OCd to 4.2 Ghz and full HD was absolutely viable.) They also play a big role in the game if you go for a stealthy approach, which is your best bet on the highest difficulty, which is actually challenging. The game has a checkpoint save system, and the 1st playthrough can be 50+ hours on the hardest setting, much depending on your choices and luck with checkpoints.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is effectively an expansion of Assassin's Creed 2, an easy slash & hack RPG. You continue to relive the story of Ezio Auditore, an acrobatic assassin who fights for the freedom of choice in renaissance Italy, Rome this time. Graphics and music's still beautiful, though Rome has less eye-candy to offer than AC2's Florence and Venice. The new title's innovations are ranged weapons and your brotherhood companions: assassin recruits who can be summoned to your aid. Brotherhood is an easy and fun game, but you'll burn through it very quickly if you don't pursue side quests. 25 hours will be more than enough. However, though the main story is linear, you have a fairly open world to explore and play side quests in.

Dragon Age 2 does not directly continue the story of the Warden from Dragon Age, though its setting is the same medieval-fantasy world. You play a noble fleeing the Blight in Ferelden, and re-establish your house in a major city where you are destined to tip the balance between templars and mages. Several characters from Dragon Age will re-emerge, but only Anders the apostate mage is playable. DA1 save game data can be used IIRC, though I didn't try this.
The game is the same party RPG as the 1st title: you recruit characters and play with 4 party members. You can either pause battles and give orders to each member or you can have the AI control them according to customizable battle tactics. The three classes are supposed to co-operate with cross-class combos in DA2: each class can put enemies in special states (like staggered, frozen etc.) which then enable other party members to deal huge extra damage. However, the whole battle tactics design is botched. Unless you play baby difficulty, your party members will keep killing your own party if you don't control them personally. Camera restrictions and the mouse target lock are outright terrible and make tactical play rather hard and mages way less potent than in the original DA, and you can't put customized armour on companions. Boss fights are usually tedious, though the final battle was more fun. All in all, rather poor design IMO, and a worse game than the prequel. DLC and completing side quests can make this game take ~70 hours.
DA2 is not entirely linear but lacks exploration - in fact you'll be playing encounters in repetitive scenes.

Mass Effect 2 continues the story of Mass Effect. You'll be able to import your old saves of completed games to have the game world reflect your ME1 decisions and give you a starting bonus. (There's an online collection of fan save games in case you lost yours.)
A sci-fi tactical shooter RPG, Mass Effect 1-2 comes with imaginative tech lore about space travel and alien species as well as rather immersive gameplay. You have limited control over 2 henchmen of your choice while you play Commander Shepard, a human superagent, from an over-the-shoulder shooter perspective. You can pause the game or give orders in real time. Although the AI companions are not very effective as a fire team, you can directly control their special powers which makes the game about using cover and tactics as well as shooting enemies yourself. While equipment customization got mostly slashed, an ammo concept was introduced in ME2, which much limits the all powerful sniper rifles of ME1. Weapons and powers are not equally effective against all types of protection your enemy has (armor, shield and barriers), which makes the right team composition a major factor in victory. Camera settings and user interface have also been changed/simplified from ME, not to their advantage IMO. Gfx are nice, and the game also utilizes a rather satisfying simulation of sound passing through and around objects. Also, the Illusive Man, villanous mastermind of human space dominance and your boss/mentor/antagonist, has a very familiar voice.
"Exploration" is not very rewarding or interesting, though it does provide scarce side quests. The game is mostly about building up your ship and specialist team to a task force that can bring down the enemy mainbase.
Though the game has an impressive lore background as mentioned, and touches on philosophy on several occasions, the main story features a really bad cliche final boss at the end. But at the least the victory music is good.
Completing ME2 with all companion quests and a fair bit of space exploration gave 40+ hours gameplay on the highest difficulty.

The Witcher 2 is a slash & hack RPG with a magicking ranged combat option, not unlike the Gothic RPG series. It seems to continue the story of The Witcher, a game I havn't played. You're a monster hunter who gets caught up in high politics in a tale of medieval/fantasy setting. While you'll mainly play an acrobatic swordsman, your arsenal also includes magical spells, poisons, throwing weapons, grenades and traps, and you can enhance your skills with alchemy.
You'll be fighing human(oid)s and all sorts of nasty fantasy beasts while questing in beautiful or barren environments. The game has nice graphics, a mediocre inventory/crafting system and simple hit&dodge combat mechanics.
The storyline is not quite linear, as you're forced to choose your side in conflicts between warring powers while you work your way towards your personal objective. Limited exploration is avaiable and even somewhat rewarding. "Features" include excessive foul language and nudity.
Unfortunately, immersion gets absolutely destroyed on a large number of occasions as characters use modern terms in speech, drink vodka and have Hungarian names. Eventually, you can't even escape a direct reference to The Lord of The Rings and Disney's Snow White, which is way past the line.
The hardest setting won't do for a 1st playthrough, as it has permadeath, and you *will* die. Difficulty settings seem a bit off, as "normal" is in fact very easy, while "hard" can get very hard. Not sure how long exactly this game took, but as per feeling, it's similar to AC:Brotherhood stripped of its exploration options. The Witcher 2 has a much more closed world for that.

This post has been edited by Dinadan of Logris on Jun 26 2011, 08:26 PM

Changed stuff as I've finished The Witcher 2 today.

DA & Creed should both come with changes of underwear. Not got as far as playing brotherhood with ac tho, sounded a bit pointless.

Damn, what are those games with big brother or w/e it's name is? & the little girls, they're as freaky as you get, absolutely mesed up in a beautiful way. bioshocks, thass it. Damn fine geme too.

tbh tho fps nowadays often are as much rpg as rpg's, DA for instance is only rpg in the sense that you get conversation options that have nearly no bearing on the game.

But alistair and morrigan are hilarious

hmm, im surprised you don't have MONSTER HUNTER in that list however its a console/handheld game where you and 3 other friends of your choosing can go out into the wilderness and hunt monsters of various sizes and each with different behaviors. Not only that but you also can choose from 8 different weapons, and all are very destructive in its own way. However as monsters get tougher you got to craft or upgrade your weapon. Though this game is extremely fun with 3 or 4, but pose more of a challenge to 1-2 players.

The RPG elements have certainly gone up in FPSs since Wolfenstein 3D. But they still only give 1 linear story without much character customization, side missions, lore, or decisions that change the ending/your path to it. They also come with multiplayer and a shorter SP.

Not true, of course. Dragon Age (Origins) is not the old style open world RPG, but it still comes with a character leveling/building system and equipment customizaton. KotOR, DA, ME: these all utilize conversations with 2 or 3 choices that affect your character's alignment; a most obvious RPG element. Some conversations allows you to pick who you fight and when you fight them, others unlock character development lines, the rest mostly make the story progress, often in one of two ways. But at any rate, if it makes no difference to you who becomes ruler of Ferelden or whether or not your character survives victory, then you didn't mean to play RPG in the first place - even though the option was there

AC: Brotherhood on the other hand has a multiplayer mode that's rather unrelated to the story, just like FPSs do.

O yea, there are also "conversations" merely for your entertainment.

DA2, not so much. You're making most of the funnies there, if you choose to (though random bickering between party members is still there.) ME2 has more/better of that than DA2.

I wouldn't know it, I only play PC games... and console games ported to PC

Hah, Alastair da bomb.

Fynfyn, I like DA, as I said, but it certainly is more linear than not.
Pocket PC? I'd need 12" of magnifying glass to see what was going on

I prefer Morrowind-style open RPG too. Hope Skyrim will be good, it comes out in November.

This post has been edited by Dinadan of Logris on Jun 26 2011, 11:48 PM

As simplistic as it may be.. warriors of might and magic was always a pleasant time passer for me... anything past IV that is.. the first three were.... well, somewhat pac man ish...

neer knew they existed, at first i assumed you meant homm, (of which elven legacy is a gd update if you ask me.)

mount and blade: warband. i definitely got my money's worth out of that game.

Try some of the mods, blitz. They have a medi mod for warband now.

Does Warband have a single player like the original?

We're on opposite ends of the coin on that one. I found elven legacy to be not as good at HOMM... I think the hexagon type of terrain movement thing didnt' compare to the cool graphics of HOMM movement and such.. both above ground and below...

If you haven't you should definitely check out the remade versions of King Bounty:

The Legend; Armored Princess and March of the Orcs.

Really really fun.

Yup and it has a arabic faction.But like i said they're tons of mods and a medi one which is better. Plus there are like formation mods too.

I played through Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A frighfully linear RPG shooter, it's somewhere in the triangle of Fear 3, Mass Effect and Splinter Cell Conviction. You're playing a cyborg in a world of emerging mechanical "augmentations" to the human body. Unlocking your augmentations is the limited RPG character system implemented in this game, which is mainly about sneaking and real-time shooting, not RPing. Your choices are about whether or not you will be using lethal force or if you wish to rescue/spare the characters you come across. There's about a dozen of rather superfluous weapons in the game that you can upgrade and will be trying to squeeze into your inventory along with ammo, but you're perfectly well off without anything but your fists ("takedown") and pistol against normal enemies and a heavy rifle against the few ridiculously stupid bosses. Though the AI isn't very smart (yet still a bit smarter than in Splinter Cell Conviction), combat can be deadly because of high weapon damages. So you'll be keeping your cover, heal/recharge/cloak and pewpew out taking out enemies easily 1 by 1 at well-chosen times -- if you can't manage to avoid a firefight. If you hide/move around, bosses are not much of a challenge either. The final "battle" is just laughably easy.
I found DX Human Revolution less enjoyable than the games mentioned above, and it had rather a short story, too.

---
Forgot to say, but it's worth mentioning about non-Steam versions that they patched the game to reduce loading speeds.

This post has been edited by Dinadan of Logris on Oct 25 2011, 10:59 PM

This games kicks ass so much you remember it for ages.
You need to have a PSP though...

Id suggest that its worth a play, but they could have made the game MUCH better with just a few tweaks to gameplay here and there. It feels like mgs 1997 and although that is an all time awesome game, we are in 2011 now.

I agree. Definitely reminded me of MGS.

what is it called? I might give it a try.

what is it called? I might give it a try.

Sorry didn't notice.
100 years war mod
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/board,57.0.html

1257
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/board,167.0.html

1200
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/board,132.0.html

Don't ask me the diff between them. All I know is one of them has a HUGE ######ing map(1200 I think) and I got bored with it because brigands are fairly rare in Germany and the Scands. They're all in Italy and Spain.

100 years mod is pretty good but its been years sicne I've played it, that is to Warband and I've yet to play it.



There's also a Rome era mod as well and I must say back in regular MB it was pretty solid with a descent map. I believe they're attempting to bring it over to Warband but I'm not sure if they have done so already I've been out of the loop for some time.

Also a Shogun mod but its a piece of ###### right now unless he's released an update i nthese last few months ive been away.

This post has been edited by Drowningpool on Nov 13 2011, 10:27 AM

Ottomans 1453
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,173313.0.html
Looks great.

There are plenty of Viking Era mods. There's one of just the island of Briton, and there's also submods for it(one of briton vs rome) Not sure if they have chariots or not.

Hegemony:268 B.C. mod for regular M&B
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,34293.0.html

And there are several submods to this which cover B.I. and other various timeframes.
As it says there will be a Warband version but word is it will be some time... Several mods have come across a big problem with porting over to the new versions.

This post has been edited by Drowningpool on Nov 13 2011, 10:50 AM

I've finished Mass Effect 3 the other day. It's essentially the same game as ME2, and you do conclude the apocalypse story in this one, presumably ending the series.

The final part was not very satisfying for me. Difficulty was moderate, and the "challenge" came too often from glitchy game mechanics. Most enemies were too weak/stupid and usually there just wasn't enough of them to "swarm" the team like in previous titles. Just as well, as squadmate AI has reiceved no apparent improvement, and SPACE being the key for both entering cover and sprinting, you can't move around freely at all. Side quests are too often tedious, redundant and pointless, progression is linear, NPC environments are hilariously static, the exploration is unrewarding, and RPG parts are simplified to the point where you have no inventory and can't even see the stats of a weapon that you are offered for purchase. Ofc you wouldn't need it anyway, as you can pick up a better one lying in the dirt and then give it to all three members of your squad.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't help either, as although it has certainly much better an ending than ME2's "giant titanium skeleton of doom" final boss, it's still made much too silly by the included dreams of Shepard. I can't help feeling that the potential of the original was squandered, as neither ME2 nor ME3 lived up to Mass Effect's sci-fi brilliance. What's worse, on more than one occasion, the game makes the story progress in a flashy movie-like way that's not feasible at all, a final stand-off "ooh the TENSION chat" between a supposed villain and the protagonist being just one of these.

ME3 provides up to about 35 hours of gameplay on the highest difficulty, if you don't SPACE away too many conversations. To anyone who isn't looking for closure after ME2, I'd recommend to skip this game.

Playing GTA4, its amazing

War of Roses looks like it may be good


http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/war-of-the-roses

I agree with most of this...especially the ending. I found it did not fit whatsoever.

However, i played and finished it on insanity level as an adept. I found it was easier than Mass effect 2 tho. I was baffled that there was no final boss..the swarm at the end was hard, sure, but it was definately not what I was expecting. It wasn't even the hardest part of the game. I actually had more difficulty with the grissom academy.

I also did not appreciate having to play multiplayer to attain the "best" ending. The multiplayer is very much so like Gears of War co-op..waves of enemies that need to be defeated. It's only a matter of who can steal the most kills the fasteset..waste of time.

I agree with most of this...especially the ending. I found it did not fit whatsoever.

However, i played and finished it on insanity level as an adept. I found it was easier than Mass effect 2 tho. I was baffled that there was no final boss..the swarm at the end was hard, sure, but it was definately not what I was expecting. It wasn't even the hardest part of the game. I actually had more difficulty with the grissom academy.

I also did not appreciate having to play multiplayer to attain the "best" ending. The multiplayer is very much so like Gears of War co-op..waves of enemies that need to be defeated. It's only a matter of who can steal the most kills the fasteset..waste of time.

I had the same experience, i too played as an Adept on Insanity. The Grissom Academy was a bitch, especially that part where you exit the building into some small little area full of Engineers and centurions, as well as an Atlas. The ending wasn't terrible but it definitely didn't live up to my expectations.

Also, not enough Harbinger, he was awesome.

This post has been edited by Marshmallow on Mar 17 2012, 04:04 AM

Amazing, i played on normal and had a very good time with ME3. Difficulty was good although i am not such a shooter fan. The ending was epic to say the least, it was mind blowing, philosophical heaven, was it a dream after all, choices who are all dramatic in some sense?

[SPOILER]The only end option i missed was: just try to defeat the reapers without any help of the catalyst, which would fail if you didnt had all support from over the galaxy, but could work when you gathered everyone in the galaxy (when the bar is full) (llike i had, my whole bar was filled[/SPOILER]

The only major thing of ME3 which annoyed me is that the exploring of planets was a bit piontless now. In mass effect 2 you had the exploring planets for minerals, i liked that so much, hours and hours of relax gaming, reading good stuff about planets and then searching planets, but well, im \a carl segan fan, i even watch cosmos series now and then which is also relax tv. Also, in previous ME you had result from exploring, like when you searched long and upgraded the ship to the fulles everyone would survive, i dont think there were any negativs if you didndt searched except you would get less support for the end fight (did it matter if you only had the minimum support or the maximum support for the end fight at all?)

But anyway, the story was satisfactory, i was really sucked into it, meeting everyone from the past, and building up to a conclusion. I find the end level hard on normal, dont think i can even do it a level harder as i just arent able to kill those asari creatures fast enough, but the story, damn, one of the best storys in games in a long time (although the la noire was also pretty good)

This post has been edited by Abu of Agrabah on Mar 17 2012, 10:15 AM

If you havent played it already i suggest playing heavy rain, its awesome

There were parts of it I was blown away with. I was quite enamored with the missions involving Grunt and the Rachni for example. I thought that was well done.

I also thought Mordin and the Krogan female was also well done.

The conclusion with the illusive man and Anderson I think would have been a better fitting ending than the one they used. I would have been perfectly content if they had used something within that setting rather than continuing the story the way they did to that final platform.

But i reiterate..The necessity to have multiplayer to influence the single player game was not appreciated.

[spoiler] having your galactic readiness at 100% is the only way to keep shepard alive through the catalyst choices. War assets arent enough. You can beat the game having a full bar of war assets, but without that galactic readiness..you sacrifice some things (ie the tower of london will fall in the cutscene...etc) [/spoiler]

Is it worth playing ME1 & ME2 through for character continuity? I heard people have been having problems importing old save games.