/v/ - Video Games

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Looks fun, I will give it a shot :)

>>274340
Enjoy!

Also, in case you're wondering what cross-class skills to pick up on your character, I thought I'd give a quick rundown what it means to pick these skills if you don't already have them.

Acrobatics: Very limited utility, but does let you reach an otherwise inaccessible place and helps you recover faster from getting knocked down in combat.
Animal Ken: Helps with getting food & lets you grind wargs for animal pelts, which helps you stay warm longer and can also be sold for money in the general store in the 2nd town. Also raises your max hp and grinding it also raises willpower & endurance. Only really helps with one quest, but for that quest it can be useful for the Sorceress to use the Warrior's quest solution.
Climbing: Only the Sorceress lacks this skill and it's pretty unnecessary for her, but does let you access some content a bit early and hop town walls so you aren't locked out at night.
Fast Talk: This is both persuasion and your haggle skill. Has a good bunch of quest solutions and makes everything cheaper. Grinding it also gives you willpower and you count as grinding it just by talking to NPCs. Both Warriors and Sorceresses benefit from this skill since you will have money problems. But there are ways to grind money, so that's mainly a nice convenience.
Herbalism: Kinda garbage, but helps you grind willpower & endurance and the skill also raises your mana pool. You can make & sell potions with this skill, but you could also just use fast talk to save money, grind willpower, and buy potions for cheaper. Has basically no quest utility, aside from the very first quest in the game. No, you don't get extra power potions with herbalism. And you don't need it to gather herbs or plants either.
Magic: Does a ton of shit and a lot of quest solutions, but if you want to use it in combat you will need to buy a staff and be prepared to accept that you won't get the best combat spells. It's probably the best skill and without it you get no mana pool. Just be prepared to hunt for spells and grind their proficiency levels.
Parrying: Helps with combat and nothing else, enough said. It's a good skill though, especially once you upgrade it, but not very necessary if you are good with dodging. Also, the Flame Aura spell is basically a damaging parry (but one that costs precious mana).
Stealth: Helps you avoid enemies. But aside from that it's largely useless unless you also have Thievery.
Thievery: Lets you join the Thieves' Guild (where non-Rogues can get lockpicks), break into places, cheat at dice, and steal some shit, but if you want to rob people blind you will need Stealth also. Stealing can make you filthy rich, sidestep quests by stealing the rewards (or doing them anyway for an extra reward), and get shit that's not for sale. I'm pretty sure some theft requires skills other than stealth too.
Throwing: It's an option for Warriors mainly, as Magic also gives you a ranged attack which you can equally use for nearly all quest solutions (so you could've picked that skill instead). But hey, it lets you throw snowballs at people. Has some combat utility too, I suppose?

Oh, and I'm pretty sure some of the skills unlock the opportunity to learn certain combat maneuvers. And the Rogue has a bunch of quests that require skill combinations if you want to do them as another class.

This looks pretty cool, but I took a quick gander on the steam forums and I instantly saw several people complaining about not being able to complete a quest or something (?) by doing things out of order or messing up somehow. Is this one of those games where you can perma-fuck yourself without even knowing it, having to restart the whole game? Or is that only for optional side-quest stuff?

>>274405
No, fuck no. The devs made sure you couldn't fuck yourself into an unwinnable gamestate. You can always progress.

There's a bunch of optional sidequest shit you can miss or fuck up though, yeah.

>>274409
Sounds good, I'll have to play it then.
I remember back in the day a lot of these types of games would screw you over, and seeing some of those steam forum posts instantly made weary.

>>274409
To be clear, you can still fuck yourself into an unwinnable state if you are a Sorceress caught outside at night without Climbing (because you will probably die before it's morning and the gates open) or got reckless with handling the cold, but that's just being a dumbass. For quest solutions it's impossible to end up in an unwinnable state.

>>274413
Yeah this game is actually well-designed on the whole.

>>274414
I'm pretty sure the autosave alone should let you reload to a point before that happens in this case.

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Back in the 80's, when Ubi Soft was good...

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>>274608
Holy fuck. TYVM for the recommendation. Also, Ubisoft just published it. The developer was Computer's Dream. UI is a bit cumbersome but it's clearly an ambitious and interestingly designed game.

If you've played it, can you tell us what your own experience was? And if there's anything you recommend when it comes to playing the game?

>>274340
lol what game is this?

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>>274770
'Tis Fable. I'd post more screenshots but we already got a vid in thread.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1893/fable/
https://adventuregamers.com/games/view/16422
https://www.old-games.com/download/1312/fable

Don't know much about the game itself though.

>>274782
Also, I don't think Fable has any RPG mechanics. It's just an adventure game.

This game is super fun and engaging! Thanks for posting it.

>>274399
Climbing isn't needed but it's interesting to note that the Sorceress is probably best at exploiting the outdoors night even though she can't hop town walls. There are other ways to survive the night outdoors later on as a Sorceress though.

Also if you want pickpocketing, you need to have Stealth active for Thievery to do its thing.

>>274304 (OP) 
Neat game. Shame how cold and food go from existential threats to not worth considering on your second run. 
Screw the paladin subquest.

>>274304 (OP) 
Kind of forgot to mention this stuff, but Heroine's Quest has some interesting systems going on. There are some survival mechanics where you have to manage food, warmth (freezing outdoors will kill you if you aren't careful), and sleep. The game also has a day/night cycle and breaks it up into hours. NPCs even have daily schedules where they walk around depending on the time of day. It makes the game world feel much more immersive normally, but if you are playing as a Rogue, NPC movement patterns become much more important. A number of quests have multiple solutions too (especially if you have cross-class skills).

>>275292
You're welcome! It's a shame more people don't know this gem.

>>277260
Raise the game difficulty (esp. to highest) and your ass will freeze much faster, making it a threat again. Food does become too easy to solve once you know what you're doing though.

And that subquest rewards you with the best sword in the game, but it's all about how much honor you've accumulated, and dishonorable behavior (like stealing a pair of boots) subtracts from it.

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>>277346
You misunderstood me. I'm not whining about difficulty, I'm lamenting about not stealing everything that isn't nailed down and then coming back with a crowbar and stealing that as well.
And I reiterate, screw the paladin subquests. Only neat one was in qfg4 when you "save" Rusalka. Otherwise it's you better curtsy and say hi and bye to everyone or you may cuck yourself and your blue sword won't rise to the occasion. And don't get me started on 5 and its ending.
>be king millionaire with a harem and unlimited cash
>be a wandering bum
<pick one
Yeah, how about you go yiff in hell Rakesh?

>best sword
The dagger scales just fine thank you very much.

Anyway pretty sure these guys did qfg2 remake and elmos dutchman's mine as well. You should check those out as well if you liked this.

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My favorite is Quest for Glory 4 1/2: So you thought you were a hero. The game has some outdated pop culture references but the humor is very high brow, as shown in picsrel.

>>274768
>night bar
>beautiful women
>its a nigger
never change ubisoft

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>>277370

>>277361
Honor-maxing as a rogue is kind of a challenge run.

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>>277370
Brauggi really lucked out with his wife.

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I wonder if these games count.
first pic: time quest is an old text based rpg with pictures. you go on an adventure through time traveling and you can choose which timeline to go in which order. the game is bloated with paths.
second pic: spellcasting 1+2+3 is a similar game,  but you are a freshman magician trying to lose his v card.
third pic: eric the unready is an adventure about a retarded grug going on a self-given quest to rescue a kidnapped princess. he really is retarded.
anyway try them out and tell me what you think. all are available on gog and are made by same dev team.

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>>277381
That is fake right?

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>>277461
Nope.

>>277800
So, do you marry the centaur?

>>277838
Only if QFG5/2 comes out

>>277361
Hey man, it's a choice, especially as a rogue. Stealing is also very, very rewarding. There needs to be some reward for being good.

>>277377
Not sure what your problem is but back in those days games had limited color palettes and would have to choose which range of colors they can display at a time. Also, Bureau of Astral Troubleshooters was not made by Ubisoft. It was made by Computer's Dream. Ubisoft just published it. And this game was released in 1989. The zeitgeist was very different back then. Please don't become one of those single-minded idiots who keep mentally circling back to their pet issues even when the context doesn't call for it.

>>279955
>defending niggers
Filthy fucking nigger lover
Where are you from, anon?

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>>274768
I don't have any advice for playing this game, since I never did. I'm planning to use the Amstrad version, since it was my first computer and they made a release for it. Nobody else here will care about this, but it means a lot to me.

>>279955
It's obviously a palette issue, but back then it wouldn't have been a problem because all games were built around these limitations. Pic is the Amstrad version, in very colorful mode 0. But since I only had the monochrome green monitor, I'd only have seen shades of green, which you can kinda get an idea of what it looks like on the cpc-power page that's linked from here:
https://www.cpcgamereviews.com/b/4/

Also Ubi-soft published some other nice games back then. Look into Zombi and Hurlements, for starters.

>>279964
I'm saying that's not a nigger but a result of a limited color palette you single-minded fucking retard. Were you dropped on the head as a baby, anon?

Also, if all you're going to do is shit up threads with "I sure do hate niggers" cancer just do us all favor and shoot yourself already.

>>279972
Zombi and Hurlements are interesting but they're really just adventure games on the whole. Probably we could have a whole other thread about classic adventure gems or even old games in general. There are some gems that are seriously slept on.

>>274304 (OP) 
Game has weak art, but competent voice acting (and writing) for some reason. Wasn't really expecting that.

>>277361
IIRC only the Warrior can draw the sword with high honor. For everyone else high honor is basically useless afaict. Your only concern is low honor causing all the guards to be on the lookout for you.

>>281654
Low honor basically doubles as a criminal heat system.

>>277445
When it comes to RPG + text adventures hybrids, it's usually just MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, the original MMORPGs) that do that, except MUDs tend to underdeliver on the adventure game aspects, ironically.

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>>283378
Eamon is a single player text (and only text!) adventure/rpg and there's a shitload of scenarios for it. Most of them are for Apple II though, so you have to run the disk images in an emulator, even though it's just a BASIC program. In theory someone could write a very simple, portable Apple BASIC (integer or applesoft) that's sufficient to run this game. Because it doesn't do anything fancy at all, so there's no need to emulate the entire Apple II hardware.
And there's plenty of other old games like this, but without a well-documented engine in BASIC. So those are more like one-shots, unless the original author himself used the engine to make several games.
I guess there's also various BBS door games, and notably this Tunnels & Trolls game for Amiga:
http://amigan.1emu.net/releases/
In theory the source could be modified to run on any OS, but I dunno how much of that code is Amiga-specific...

>>283384
Apparently there are a ton of Eamon variations? https://eamon.wiki/Eamon

>>274399
>Herbalism: Kinda garbage, but helps you grind willpower & endurance and the skill also raises your mana pool. You can make & sell potions with this skill, but you could also just use fast talk to save money, grind willpower, and buy potions for cheaper. Has basically no quest utility, aside from the very first quest in the game. No, you don't get extra power potions with herbalism. And you don't need it to gather herbs or plants either.
Yeah, no joke, it's actually easier to grind money and buy potions (especially with Fast Talk), especially early on when you are at your weakest and don't have the tools yet to make most potions (but can still buy them), than it is to use Herbalism to make your own. At least Herbalism gives you extra max mana, I guess. And I think trying to lowball people too hard can hurt your honor score? But Fast Talk is still way better for warriors than Herbalism. You get extra quest solutions and getting discounts when you're buying gear and potions (and spells, if you took Magic) helps a lot.

>>283384
>Eamon is a single player text (and only text!) adventure/rpg and there's a shitload of scenarios for it.
Where you can find this?

>>274399
>Magic: Does a ton of shit and a lot of quest solutions, but if you want to use it in combat you will need to buy a staff and be prepared to accept that you won't get the best combat spells. It's probably the best skill and without it you get no mana pool. Just be prepared to hunt for spells and grind their proficiency levels.
Worth noting that the Flame Aura spell will reset how cold you are outside, so it helps a lot with surviving the cold at higher difficulty levels.

>I'm pretty sure some of the skills unlock the opportunity to learn certain combat maneuvers
Really, you can only learn the Thief's combat maneuvers for daggers. They're not bad for a Sorceress, especially if you want to save mana, but there's no real point if you're a Warrior and have better weapons. You can't learn Warrior maneuvers anymore and even if you could you don't have a good weapon for it. In an earlier patch you could get a golden sword as a Rogue and Animal Ken could get you Warrior maneuvers to use with it, but you'll end up breaking the gold sword in short order but if you repair it afterwards you'll have a regular sword. But both the gold sword and the warrior maneuvers got removed in a patch. Damn shame.

You either get all the Sorceress spells from the Magic skill (except you only get the magic dart spell and not the more powerful damaging spells) and use spells instead of maneuvers or you can get all the Thief maneuvers which you can only use with daggers, I think.

There's a maneuver you can learn with the Parry skill that unlocks damaging parries though and you can parry with any weapon. If you want to make Thief combat stronger, Parry will help. Animal Ken also helps by raising your max hp while letting you stay out in the cold longer and obtain easy food. You're still no Warrior but you do have better combat performance. Parry has no non-combat use though and Animal Ken is also pretty useless for questing as a Thief, since the only quest it helps you with is one where the Thief can obtain the same result just as early and with even less effort.

>>285773
Yeah but the original game is the most interesting one, because it has hundreds of adventure modules. The other variants didn't get nearly as much attention. Plus I guess some were commercial closed source. But when the author wrote the original game, he wanted it to be free and open source (BASIC naturally is, unless you compile it).

>>290829
www.eamonag.org has all the files, and various infos. But some retro-gaming sites like this one have interesting historical background information too:
https://www.filfre.net/tag/eamon/

>>298520
No YOU are an point & click adventure.

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>>274304 (OP) 
The Fifth Disciple is a point & click adventure + RPG hybrid iirc.

>>298554
Fixed. Happy?

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>>298601
Seems to have turn-based, grid-based combat. Kind of looks like HoMM 3's combat.

I've gotten a little bit of a ways in The Fifth Disciple. So far I'm not very impressed by the adventure game elements.

>>274304 (OP) 
Whoever came up with the 320x200 oldschool retro screen resolution did not realize that 320x200 is not a square pixel resolution. In 320x200, the pixels are actually vertically stretched. So if you try playing the game at a real 320x200 resolution on a CRT for the glorious nostalgia, it will look ugly and stretched unless your CRT lets you change how vertically stretched the picture is (it should), but then you get black bars of course.

>>274304 (OP)  (OP) 
I decided to rank classes by how long it takes to freeze their asses off:

Mage: Best ability to endure cold thanks to her Flame Aura spell warming her up, but ironically most likely to freeze her ass off by getting locked outside at night and being unable to climb the wall. Mana potions also help you cast more Flame Aura. But higher difficulties raise Flame Aura's mana cost a lot.
Warrior: The pelt you can make with Animal Ken freeze your ass off more slowly and your max health means you can tank the damage longer. Also you can climb walls to not freeze to death at night.
Rogue: All you can do is steal those boots early on, which everyone can do. And you can climb walls at night.

By the way late in the game it's possible to get an item that causes you to never get cold.

>>274399
>Climbing: Only the Sorceress lacks this skill and it's pretty unnecessary for her, but does let you access some content a bit early and hop town walls so you aren't locked out at night.
I gotta say, Climbing actually makes a legit difference early in the game by opening up night time activities and early access to content and areas. But later on you have other ways to reach those places and survive and shelter through the night.

>Parrying: Helps with combat and nothing else, enough said. It's a good skill though, especially once you upgrade it, but not very necessary if you are good with dodging. Also, the Flame Aura spell is basically a damaging parry (but one that costs precious mana).
I just wanna point out that higher difficulties make Flame Aura a lot more expensive to cast, and that shit messes with relying on Flame Aura to parry too.

>Thievery: Lets you join the Thieves' Guild (where non-Rogues can get lockpicks), break into places, cheat at dice, and steal some shit, but if you want to rob people blind you will need Stealth also. Stealing can make you filthy rich, sidestep quests by stealing the rewards (or doing them anyway for an extra reward), and get shit that's not for sale. I'm pretty sure some theft requires skills other than stealth too.
Honestly, cheating at dice is overrated. If you're good you can dominate at dice without any cheating. Also Thievery as a Warrior is a good way to cuck yourself out of the Paladin reward by tanking your honor score... but you can get a lot of other stuff.

>Throwing: It's an option for Warriors mainly, as Magic also gives you a ranged attack which you can equally use for nearly all quest solutions (so you could've picked that skill instead). But hey, it lets you throw snowballs at people. Has some combat utility too, I suppose?
Guys, I feel like a dumbass here, but uh... I recently figured out that you can throw knives at enemies before combat starts, and then combat will start with them being at lower health. So uh, apparently you can do that. It's handy. And the damage stacks for throwing multiple weapons before combat. And you can cast projectile spells at enemies pre-combat with Magic too.

>>307289
Basically everything worked that way back then. For instance, the Macintosh was probably the first major platform to go all-in on square pixels, but when core engineers in the Macintosh team originally pushed for square pixels, even the rest of Apple thought it was a weird idea:
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/interviews/raskin/gui.html
https://folklore.org/Square_Dots.html
Other platforms stuck with rectangular pixels especially for low-rez (sub-megapixel) modes well into the mid-90s. Note this is somewhat distinct from platforms like set-top consoles using SDTVs as displays, or SDTV digital frame capture/dump hardware, which used nonsquare pixels for the simple reason that maximum linecount was fixed in the analog domain, but columns were a digital imposition that could be arbitrarily fine given increased bandwidth.

Aside from that, another bugaboo I've noticed several people in this thread already stumbling over is various flavors of artifact color (Apple ][, IBM CGA, etc.) that make everything look like the entire palette is limited to hideous green & purple THANKS DOC hues or black & white.

Correctly configured modern emulators and source ports will fix both of these, but a lot of people are so accustomed to the fugged up versions they're unaware of what retro vidya were actually supposed to look like.

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>>311962
With the IBM CGA, I think you could at least use composite video and get more colors that way. Otherwise the 4 color graphics palettes weren't that great for games.
Or maybe you could even use text mode and get nicer colors. For example: http://deathshadow.com/pakuPaku
But then again... a color screen, who had money for that luxury? I sure didn't. My  first computer had only shades of green, and it was the same story with the first Apple II and IBM PC that I encountered at school or at another kid's house.

>>311991
Yes, most implementations could quadruple a palette's colorfulness, or (especially as in Apple's case) whip up colors out of pure B&W. And it typically wasn't so much composite as NTSC that was relied on for most artifact color, it didn't really work on PAL/SECAM TVs.

Of course, the advantage to using a monitor instead of a TV, especially a monochrome one like that, was greater sharpness and sometimes less flicker/more smearing due to longer phosphor decay.

>>311962
>Correctly configured modern emulators and source ports will fix both of these, but a lot of people are so accustomed to the fugged up versions they're unaware of what retro vidya were actually supposed to look like.
I've yet to find an emulator that does a good approximation of oldschool CRTs, and I've fucked with a lot of shaders. It's better to just actually buy an old CRT.

By the way, you can actually run Heroine's Quest inside ScummVM and use retro shaders and it won't look good, but then again, it really wasn't designed for actual oldschool screens despite the retro style.

>>312544
I've probably said it before but it bears repeating: pretty much all of these "retro" "CRT" shaders are written by people born after 2001 who probably never played video games on a CRT TV of the appropriate vintage. Maybe a monitor. It's about social signaling, not simulating the original experience, and you're never going to match the visual experience of a physical object using a flat framebuffer anyway. IMO the best you can really manage is one of those software NTSC/PAL decoder shaders.

>>312548
I'm pretty sure a bunch of them were written by people who tried to autistically replicate the effects of CRT screens and must have had them for close comparison and analysis, but in the end it really doesn't do the original justice. It's hard to get the subpixel antialiasing effects, dithering, and so on right and you would need a stupidly high resolution too.

>>312548
>IMO the best you can really manage is one of those software NTSC/PAL decoder shaders.
Yeah, that's what I meant, just fixing various things that are independent of screen technology, like NTSC/composite artifact color, gamma, aspect ratio, and judder-free even multiple framerate. Whether you're using an LCD, OLED, or even PC CRT, that's something you can do perfectly.

I always did wonder why there weren't more RPG/Adventure Game hybrids. You would think a genre like this would mesh together really well. Here is to hoping there is a renaissance of these at some point, like we've seen with "boomer shooters" recently.

>>312571
Probably because the adventure genre as a whole was crushed to death under its own hubris at the tail end of the point'n'click era, leaving only a tiny residuum of snooty IF & mechanically shallow VNs.

>>312571
The big studios making RPGs fell in love with Diablo and Final Fantasy in the west and east respectively, and shat out derivative clones.

There's a reason we shat on Diablo back in the day and it was precisely because it was reducing the RPG genre to hack & slash with cutscenes.

>>312606
I think the damage done to WRPGs was more the fault of MMORPGs, and non-massive ARPGs like Diablo were if anything merely a reflection of MMORPGs in terms of both mechanics and presentation. Aside from MMORPGs, I think Bethesda's hiking sims probably shoulder the most blame for the pre-Kickstarter "decline" era of WRPGs.

>>312608
MMORPGs had also largely become Diabo clones. The most influential MMOs became Everquest and WoW and they were both Diablo derivatives in hack & slash grind design.

If RPGs had taken after Ultima Online it'd be a very different world of RPGs.

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>>312609
Say what you will about UO's PvP-rich "playground" world vs. the instanced massively singleplayer "themepark" of EQ/WoW, but the core control and combat mechanics are the same. They share less with a proper RPG UI capable of complex multi-character party combat, and more with an ARPG like Diablo, or more relevantly one of the original sins against RPGs as a genre, Super Avatar Bros.

>>312612
No one was talking about Ultima 8 here, but for what it's worth, adding platformer challenges to an action-adventure RPG isn't that bad of an idea, within reason anyway. Ultima 8 was just a weird fucking game that honestly shouldn't have tried to be an Ultima game.

>>312612
What do you mean by calling WoW "instanced singleplayer"? Maybe current retail is, but vanilla wasn't (and I assume you are referring to any version by including EQ). There are plenty of quests most classes can't do alone at the intended level and PVP servers had endless mosh pits in areas like Stranglethorn Vale. It's certainly not as sandbox-y as Ultima, but it's far from the way you described it. There were inventive ways to grief other players, such as using the rogue's distract spell in high places to causes idiots to pivot and walk off ledges to their deaths or consuming as many size-increasing buffs as possible then standing on vendors with your largest mount active so nobody could click on them.

>>312612
Nah, original EQ was all about open world content and had zero instances. But WoW went crazy with the instances.

>>312648
Dude, WoW instanced dungeons, raids, even PvP lmao. And then they added teleports so you could just chill in a city or something while teleporting to instances instead of actually doing open world stuff.

>>312651
I never said it didn't have instances, but it's definitely not (wasn't) an instanced singleplayer experience. Games like SWTOR, GW2, FFXIV, etc. fit that bill more. The best aspect of WoW was open world PVP.

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>>311995
That's what made 80 columns text so great on the green monitor (it was a little blurry on the color monitor). I guess Amstrad probably used the same tube for their PCW business computers, which all had green monochrome screens.
Maybe one day I can buy another one of those old computers, but the problem is floppy disks are out of production, you have to use floppy emulator. And maybe the CRTs will have problems too, after so  long, so you have to use different display and convert the signal. And also some capacitors might have leaked, and possibly other things need replacing due to wear (keyboard?) So that's why I haven't bothered. But I finally fixed my emulator to allow changing floppy disk images, so I'll be able to play BAT and other adventure and RPG games that came on multiple disks.

>>312685
I preferred 132 column text.

And you can still buy floppy drives and disks. Sure, the disks are not really being manufactured anymore, but there are still perfectly good floppies for sale on the internet.

>>312685
Shit, i need to replay shadowgate. It's stupidly linear but damn, that game over theme hit you hard.
Wonder how the demake fares.
Also caring about >column text is a little bit gay.

>>312655
>I never said it didn't have instances, but it's definitely not (wasn't) an instanced singleplayer experience.
No, it's more an instanced 5player experience.

>Games like SWTOR, GW2, FFXIV, etc. fit that bill more.
True

>The best aspect of WoW was open world PVP.
The honor system existed to wreck most open world PvP and stop people from doing shit like killing NPCs like flight path masters and WoW mostly moved to instanced PvP instead of open world. Of course, if you reached Rank 14 in vanilla WoW, you could go ignore the entire honor system since you'd already maxed out your access to the rewards of the honor system and wouldn't lose them no matter how low your honor sank, but reaching Rank 14 was a colossal pain in the ass.

WoW was honestly pretty lousy at open world PvP and kept chipping away at it. Attacking faction leaders was more of a thing before honor was implemented, for instance.

What I personally dislike about WoW is its constant instancing of fucking everything, the garbage grinds, the skinnerbox random loot drops system, the lack of real player choices, the theme park MMO nature, the lack of ability for players to have make consequential changes in the open world state, the lack of noncombat gameplay systems, the weak crafting system where you can't actually customize anything you make and somehow still get fucking random loot when it comes to stuff like affixes, the garbage mob AI, the poor class balancing, the way hybrid classes frequently got pigeonholed into a single specific role instead of actually being able to operate as hybrids, the poor profession balancing, the lack of mounted combat, flying mounts basically wrecking open world PvP, bad open world PvP in general, the garbage stealth nerfs, insufferable devs and CMs who were big on one-way communication, gold farming issues, trash class design like the way Paladins got raped into becoming the melee class without melee abilities that was mostly a healer in plate shortly before vanilla WoW exited beta, the underwhelming approach to exploration, the linear dungeons, and more.

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>>312685

>>312646 
Fair point, given the subject of this thread is itself a hybridized RPG genre.

>>312648
>>312651
It was perhaps a bit reductive to lump in original EQ with WoW on instancing, even if EQ did later shift in that direction. Though instancing aside, EQ & WoW do share their extremely static world, in stark contrast to UO's features like player constructed castles, expanded on in other less themepark-y MMORPGs like Shadowbane.

Regardless, my main point was the immediate control interface and combat mechanics to the extent they could overlap with singleplayer games, which were for reasons of multiplayer accommodation, dumbed down ARPGs, barring weird exceptions like Grenado Espada. And that's before getting into dumb mechanics like aggro and cooldowns that MMORPGs originated.

Given the much larger playerbases and mindshare of MMORPGs compared to Diablo clones in the era, MMORPGs are clearly responsible for most of the downfall of WRPGs as a coherent genre at least without taking 7th-gen console "everything must be a TPS" fads into account, and even for the devolution of Diablo itself from graphical roguelike into weird twinkfest bossrush dropfarm grind by D2.

>>312878
>the downfall of WRPGs as a coherent genre
Your delusions reinforced by excessive time on ironic shitposting forums are the only thing that ever established it as a coherent "genre" in the first place.

>>312882
I mean, from the mainframe days through Wizardry or Ultima into the twilight of turnbased AAA in the 90s, "basically equivalent in form and complexity to combat in D&D, maybe with other stuff like hexcrawl thrown in" was pretty coherent. One could argue about realtime stuff like Baldur's Gate or TES, but by the time you end up at something like Witcher it's clearly attenuated into minor elements at most.