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Game Finding Time!
Vahraan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So Christmas is coming around the corner, this means some nice disposable income and given that my time with WoW is coming to an end, I need to find a new time sink. Especially for my time at school waiting for classes.
So I thought I'd give oblivion a try, however I'm not sure its shaping up to be what I need. I'm not a huge fan of the amount of exploration there seems to be, but the skill systems and whatnot seems like good times so far.
So does anyone have any suggestions for fun single player games with lots of playtime?
Preferably some sort of action RPG, but I'm open to different genres too.
Thanks in advance!
So I thought I'd give oblivion a try, however I'm not sure its shaping up to be what I need. I'm not a huge fan of the amount of exploration there seems to be, but the skill systems and whatnot seems like good times so far.
So does anyone have any suggestions for fun single player games with lots of playtime?
Preferably some sort of action RPG, but I'm open to different genres too.
Thanks in advance!
PSN: Gumbotron88 3DS FC: 0018-3695-0013 (Devon)
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Fallout 3 may be too much for my puny system to handle, but we'll see what i can do.
Also, Deus Ex if you haven't already.
You could of course spend an eternity playing Civ4.
Titan Quest is a good Diabloish Action RPG.
Fallout 3 is like Oblivion, lots of emphasis on exploring, which sounds like its not your thing.
See, I played Civ 4 for about two games, then got bored and played minesweeper. What am I missing?
I'd also recommend Planescape:Torment like everyone else is.
Right now im playing the Witcher which is pretty fun so far, the combat is pretty awsome, and the story isint too bad. There isint much exploring like Oblivion/Fallout 3, so you wont be going across the map to find that one item, but you will find that item in the next house along the road much of the time.
For DnD games, the older ones are great fun (Icewind dale, Planescape, Baldur's gate). They use 2.0 rules if I rember right (I think icewindale 2 uses 3.0). Never Winter Nights, its expansions, along with Never Winter Nights 2 and its expansions are great fun. The first one uses the 3.0 or 3.5 ruleset for Dnd , and the NWN 2 uses either 3.5 or 4.0 ruleset, its been a while so I cant rember now, someone clarify this if they can. The single player for the second game is much better for the first I can tell you that much, and both games are fairly forgiving if you dont make the perfect build. One time I went then NWN 1 with a horrible build and I still made out okay. The online for the NWN is still huge. The second game has some bugs now regarding online, but can be done. Granted the whole ruleset for DND games isnt a big deal unless your really into that stuff, however Never Winter Nights and Baldur's gate play much diffent I can tell you that.
A word of warning though, both games (NWN and NWN 2) will crash your computer, no matter how good it is. NWN 1 is about, 6, or so years old now and it still will crash peoples computers with all the effects going on. NWN 2 is a lot more demanding in terms of hardware, and still crashes a decent amount(kind obvious that one is). However, its not so bad. "Oh, I just tunred my game on, and it crashed!" That happens very rarely, and ingame you will , at least with both my brother's and my own experence, crash more often than most games.
Granted, Never Winter nights 2 is a pretty demanding game, so I dont know if you can run it on your computer, they did release a patch a while back which would make the game run better if my memory is right.
Price wise, the older DND games you should be able to get a fancy box set for I duno, 20-30 dollars. (Bauldr's gate, its expansion, Baldur's gate 2 and its expansion, or something along those lines.) Granted, your probally going to have to order those through amazon. Never winter nights you can get the Diamond edition (The newest I belive) for under 30 dollars fairly easily(this includes the orginal game, and the 3 expansions). Never winter nights 2, you can get for mabye 30-40, each of its expansions cost about the same (each 30-40, with two out now and a third coming soon), well, the newest expansion just came out not too long ago, so it may be a bit more.
Both NWN and NWN 2 are great and will last you a while on their own, the expansions will make the experence so very better though, and will give you the amount of time you spent on the core games, all over again in a new enviroment with new options.
The Witcher uses the 2007 aurora Engine (the one used in NWN 2) and I can say now, if feels juts like im playing NWN 2 again. I mean the gameplay is completly diffrent, no DND in it all at, but the textures and such look the same, and I like how they looked.
Sorry for going on so long.
TLDR: Never winter nights (with its expansions) and neverwinter nights 2 (with its expanions) are great and will last a long time, NWN 2 is hard to run though, so it may not run on a laptop very well.
Gonna give the witcher demo a spin and we'll see where that leads!
except that NWN 1 was awesome and had at least one good expansion
NWN1 sucked, had 1 OK expansion and 1 crap expansion.
Yea, I know that these aren't the newest games out there, but you made mention that your laptop wasn't 100% up to par with today's graphic intensive PC games.
http://www.nethack.org/
It's a squad level turn based strategy game where you're basically controlling a group of Mercs hired by the previous ruler of an island nation to overthrow the current dictator (his wife, tried to kill him etc. etc. ). Anyway, plot aside it's a very good game, pretty tough too.
The problem with WoW is that it leaves time for little else in gaming.
Or life in general.
I'll second that Jagged Alliance 2 vote. Just don't buy it on steam because its broken as shit.
Also, what are the specs for your laptop? Just out of curiosity's sake.
I give another vote for Mass Effect, and Cave Story.
Titan Quest + Xpac (single character hack & slash)
NwN 2 + MotB xpac (vanilla is bad, xpac is the closest thing to modern PS:T you can get. HEAVY rp)
The Witcher (super mcwhatthefuck awesome that came out of nowhere, get the updated one. Action rp)
Kotor 2 (bad last 10% of the game but the rest is pure awesome. Action rp)
Fallout 2 (Aged very well. Action rp)
Mass Effect (Pretty short, but a damn good ride. Action with mild rp elements)
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (fps action with mild rp and fantastic fantasy combat)
If your system can't handle Fallout 3, then you should maybe do NwN rather than NwN 2 but let me state that NwN 2 is better in every possible way than the original. If you can get over the exploration phobia then get Fallout 3.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Just came out on GOG though. I would assume it works okay.
What a time sink!
It's SO fucking fantastic once you get over (and get used to) the ASCII graphics. You can even get a graphical tileset (like I did) that makes the game leagues better, if that were possible.
Best of all, it's free!
If you do get into it, and want a tileset, look up May Green.
I second this post, particularly NWN2 and expansions. Just to clarify a few things: NWN2 uses the 3.5 ruleset and BG2 uses 2.5. Not much difference, but if you're a stickler for these things, there you go. Also, they are much cheaper than 30-40 each. You can get NWN2 for 10 bucks on Amazon and the MotB expansion for about 6. Hard to pass that shit up.
Might try some free games to burn up some time, too. We have an indie games thread chock full of freeware goodness, like Cave Story (which is a must-play for everyone).
And the old stand-by, Civilization IV, which is about the best thing to waste time with.
And all the mods that come with it.
I managed to get Fallout 3 to work, but I'm thinking I'll go and nab NWN2+xpac when i get the chance so i have a few things to dink around with.
I'd beg to differ.
To this day I still prefer NwN 1 over 2.
People bitch & moan about...well, anything and everything, really. But specifically in regards to NwN 1 they bitch about the official campaign and the first expansion, Shadows of Undrentide.
The strength of NwN has always been the user created content, though. If not for the fact that it shipped with a toolkit allowing people to create their own adventures, the game would've died long ago and probably never would've produced a sequel.
The final "official" patch for NwN 1 dropped earlier this year (1.69) adding all sorts of awesome content in the form of tilesets, NPC's, a prestige class (Purple Dragon Knight) that was previously only available in the premium modules...oh, and horses. Yes, you can now officially ride horses in NwN (Paladins even get a summoned mount as a feat now, effing Paladins). Mounted combat is in there with that, too.
So if you have NwN 1 and you're willing to spend some time downloading content for it, you'll not be disappointed.
Recommendations from me:
The Aielund Saga, a very entertaining story that'll take you from level 1 to level 30+ with plenty of action along the way. This is one of the rare adventures I've played that was not only fun, but actually had me caring about NPC's along the way. The pace starts out a little slow in the first module, but an event near the end kicks the action into high gear and it rarely slows down from that point forward.
Darkness Over Daggerford, originally intended as a premium module before the funding got cut off, the team decided to finish the module and release it free. Happy times for all! This was far and away my favorite NwN module ever, at least until I played through Aielund.
The Shadowlords/Dreamcatcher series, which was a favorite of mine for a while. These modules are a bit older, and lack some of the polish of more recent ones, but they're still very entertaining as a series.