ARPG talk deluxe

[Kurogachii]

Are you into ARPG's? Diablo? Torchlight? Path of Exile? those are just a few examples, if you played more obscured ones i'd love to know!

 

[Boaby Kenobi]

I've played a couple of hundred hours of PoE on Steam but haven't played for a while. Also have Warhammer - Inquisitor on Steam but again, not played that for a while. Not really played much of Inquisitor but it seems pretty good and it's a game I've been meaning to get back into sometime soon. Played a little of Titan Quest years ago and that was cool as I do enjoy Greek mythology.

[Doom-Child]

Sacred had some fun bits, but it was also pretty fucking janky.

 

Titan Quest and its expansion are tits.

Edited June 8, 2021 by Doom-Child

[Mr. Freeze]

I have a serious POE addiction. 

[Kurogachii]

16 hours ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

I've played a couple of hundred hours of PoE on Steam but haven't played for a while

They're releasing POE 2 so i guess that's an incentive to go back.

[Mr. Freeze]

sorry not sorry

[june gloom]

I spent close to 100 hours on Titan Quest and I never want to click a mouse again.

 

I think my issue with these games is that they're pretty much the same thing over and over. They take the basic structure of RPGs and turn them into, essentially, mindless arcade games. Most of them don't even have interesting level design; and you can forget about a coherent, meaningful story.

[RDETalus]

This was my favorite

[Final Verdict]

Diablo: The first ARPG I played... I think. Running around in the dungeons under Tristan was an adventure in and of itself. My first encounter with the Butcher as a kid scared the shit clean out of me.

 

Diablo II: The vastly improved sequel and probably the one everyone and their dog knows about. Not much else needs to be said here, a timeless classic. 'Nuff said.

 

Diablo III: Enjoyable but ultimately didn't hold for me for long. I still sunk a good 80 hours into it though. I think part of the problem was that with D2 I spent a lot of time playing it with a bunch of online friends on Battlenet. By the time D3 came out I had lost contact with them so I mostly played solo. This was during release, pre-inferno nerf when Inferno really lived up to its namesake.

 

It took me forever to beat Belial on Inferno, never made it past Act III Inferno though because that's when I stopped playing. Came back to check out the expansion, played that for a bit and then left again.

 

PoE: I backed this when it was a barely known project under development by a small team of New Zealanders. At the time the ARPG genre was dry and I hadn't played any good ones in some time. I liked what I saw and threw some money at them. It did not disappoint. Other than D2 this is the only other ARPG where I spent more than 1k hours playing it. I haven't been back to it for a couple of years though.

 

I have a funny story about the early days of PoE's development.

 

Because of my 'donation' they gave me a unique fancy border for my avatar on the forums. It was far too flashy and pompous for my tastes and people kept mistaking me for a developer, constantly asking me for updates and help. I was bombarded with questions every day. At the time you could not disable it, or at least I couldn't figure out how to disable it. I asked them to remove it, they agreed and changed it to a gold or platinum border. I forget which. 

 

But you know that saying about being careful what you wish for? The jokers decided to add my forum name in big flashing disco letters to the credit screen of the game. You can guess what happened.

 

I get they wanted to honour me or whatever, but I could not even enter a thread without people treating me like some kind of messiah. All I wanted was to help the game see the light of day as an ARPG fan. This was in the early days though so things were different on their forums, the community was very small and the developers were more laid back. 

 

It didn't stop me playing PoE, it just exiled me from their forums. I'm weird that way.

 

Grim Dawn: Another good entry in the ARPG genre. Like PoE it was nice to see some innovation with the old ARPG formula. Highly recommended.

 

A few others I have played: Inquisitor, Van Helsing, Titan Quest + expansions, Victor Vran, Kult: Heretic Kingdoms, Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, Divinity: Original Sin I & II, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, Depths of Peril, Dungeon Siege I, II and III, Sacred I & II, Silverfall, Spell Force, Torchlight I & II and finally Zombasite. 

 

Some of the above are quite obscure or just really old, but that's what I can remember off the top of my head. I'm sure I'm missing a few and not all of those are strictly ARPG.

 

[Swordofdanu]

Sacred 2, just started a new co op game up. 

Shame about the crap follow ups. 

[Dragonfly]

Champions of Norrath on the PS2 was my shit. Sorely underrated ARPG to be sure. Also an MMO ARPG-ish game I quite liked back in the day was Continent of the 9th Seal. It's not _really_ an ARPG, per se, but it feels ARPG-ish in a way.

[continuum.mid]

do The Elder Scrolls games count? If so, I like those.

 

Also the Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigna trilogy on SNES is great. Never got around to finishing any of them though...

Edited June 9, 2021 by northivanastan

[kwc]

I really enjoyed this and it's sequel, Thongs of Virtue. Fun, fairly linear little campaign-based ARPG, relatively short compared to the whole endless-replayability of most other games in the genre, but I tend to enjoy the fact that I can see credits on a game and feel like I'm done with it rather than playing an endless loop 'til I'm sick of it.
 

I'm not sure if the humour has aged well since I played it (or if it even was truly charming to begin with) but it was a silly time and a good casual romp.

I'd recommend it to anyone who likes ARPG's yet may not want to commit to a lot of deep lore/mechanics/systems and just take a load off.
 

2 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

Champions of Norrath ...

 

Thank you.

I used to play the demo for this all the time back in the day but the name always escaped me.

 

Edited June 9, 2021 by kwc

[whybmonotacrab]

Xanadu Next. This is very much a Japanese take on Diablo, but with metroidvania elements and puzzles. It still has the loot, dungeon crawling, and all that stuff but it's a bit less mindless. If you want more mindless, you could try the Ys series by the same makers though it's closer to an ultra fast paced version of Secret of Mana than Diablo.

 

 Chronicon is like 16bit Diablo. It's a recent indie release and people say it's amazing. I personally couldn't get into it, but I'm firmly in the minority and it might be something you enjoy.

 

 If you want the straight up Diablo 2 clone, Last Epoch is in Early Access and it's shaping up pretty nicely. It lacks some polish at the moment, but everything else feels excellent.

[Devalaous]

2 hours ago, kwc said:

I really enjoyed this and it's sequel, Thongs of Virtue. Fun, fairly linear little campaign-based ARPG, relatively short compared to the whole endless-replayability of most other games in the genre, but I tend to enjoy the fact that I can see credits on a game and feel like I'm done with it rather than playing an endless loop 'til I'm sick of it.
 

I'm not sure if the humour has aged well since I played it (or if it even was truly charming to begin with) but it was a silly time and a good casual romp.

I'd recommend it to anyone who likes ARPG's yet may not want to commit to a lot of deep lore/mechanics/systems and just take a load off.
 

 

Thank you.

I used to play the demo for this all the time back in the day but the name always escaped me.

 

 

There was a third game in the Deathspank series, but it dropped the Deathspank name entirely for some reason. I recall it starting off way too difficult, never finished it.

4 hours ago, Swordofdanu said:

Sacred 2, just started a new co op game up. 

Shame about the crap follow ups. 

 

Sacred 1 and 2 were absolutely amazing and captivated me like few other games. Seems Diablo 4 is going to scratch my itch for a Sacred 3, given that the owners of the Sacred franchise decided to take the series out back and shoot it in the head multiple times. Its funny, when I finished Sacred 2, I wondered what a Diablo game that was open world like Sacred 2 would be like. And now Diablo 4 will be exactly this.

[Albertoni]

I personally loved Hellgate: London and its MMO revival, Hellgate: Global (which only changed the game to be a bit more MMO-ish, it was 90% the same game; It also added an area based on Japan but I never got to that one).

Imagine gameplay like Borderlands, with an ambience reminescent of Doom 2016 / Eternal, same destroyed and corrupted towns but in a very British architecture, made by an ex-Blizzard team that resigned after Diablo 2. The melee classes were third person, the gun classes were first person.

 

It was janky, but that kind of jank that you can absolutely love. A shame it was incredibly obscure.

 

This explains things quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F05qrSMyi9w

Edited June 9, 2021 by Albertoni

[DSC]

Ha, at first I thought it said ARG in the title!