Gladius Legis
Legend
Not a new game per se, but ...
Upcoming AAA/AA CRPGs or story-based RPGs (updated 15/04/2025)
- Thread starter Ruin Explorer
- Start date
Ulorian - Agent of Chaos
Legend
All three were great, but I would say that Wrath of the Righteous was the standout among them.
Pale Violet Light
Explorer
Mass Effect is a shooter-RPG hybrid. In mass effect 1 the hybrid is a misshapen monstrosity; in 2 and 3 they went more for a straight shooter (with rpg elements) and the gameplay benefitted immensely. Trying to jam anything into a single box these days is a fool’s errand.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
The changes look fairly minimal, and focused on making it work on Steam Deck. Which means the main campaign still sucks.
Gladius Legis
Legend
It's still way better than the first game's main quest. It's worth one good-aligned playthrough, if nothing else just to set the context for Mask of the Betrayer.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I suppose it's worth getting if you have never played it before, but it's not worth buying again.
But it could have been made so much better with some narrative tweaks. Even in MotB, now that WotC seem to have dropped the Wall of the Faithless, it would be nice to be able to actually destroy it.
Obviously, it would take a lot more to fix the hard railroading in the original campaign.
Gladius Legis
Legend
The plot of the NWN2 OC is rather linear, but there is pretty clear and detailed choice and consequence throughout that game, particularly dealing with the main cast of characters.
As for MotB, could not disagree more. The consequences of hubris was a major theme in that story, and being allowed to tear the wall down would have undermined it thoroughly.
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Ruin Explorer
Legend
I am honestly mystified by how they released a campaign as profoundly bad in virtually every possible way as the first NWN's main one.
They made basically every mistake it is possible to make when designing a CRPG's story/writing. Mistakes that the same people, working on other games, earlier in their careers, didn't make!
I mean, look at the writers - James Ohlen, Drew Karpyshyn, Lukas Kristjanson etc. - these people basically all worked on BG2, some on BG1, and the writing errors they made were were worse than the ones in BG1. They all have good writing careers afterwards too.
I can only think that maybe because they all dual roles as designer and writer, they ran out of time, and had to slap together a campaign in 0.9 seconds before releasing it or something? The quality immediately jumped up massively with the expansions. If I was a conspiracist I'd wonder if they did it on purpose to set the bar low and encourage people to do better, but I doubt it.
Gladius Legis
Legend
That or they just decided to be lazy and bank on the toolset being the selling point for NWN1 and the OC being effectively a tech demo for said toolset. (If that's the gamble they made, it actually paid off for them.)
Paul Farquhar
Legend
There is no choice for your character to figure out that the guy you are pursuing isn't the real baddie and act accordingly, even though as a player you figured it out ages ago, or to prevent a certain companion being obviously stupid and getting themselves killed.
