Rajaah's CRPG Blog

Playing anything on a small screened Switch, when you have a big screened PC sounds like someone used to terrible life choices. PC Master race, and all that.

Being that the KOTOR2 resto mod is fan made, the chance that any console has it included are slim to none. There is also a restoration mod for KOTOR1, but not nearly as much was cut from it. The publisher made Obsidian push KOTOR2 out the door, so a large portion of the final chapter was rushed and at least one whole planet was cut.

Doing Pillars 1 right now. Love how simple, fun, RPG this is. Truly feels like a spiritual successor to BG, with a tad less interesting story. However I am getting pulled into the lore and find myself enjoying it quite a bit.

Pillars 2 is next

Followed by the pathfinder games

For BG2 classes if you haven't chosen yet:

If you're keeping your paladin and get offered a kit, I would recommend undead slayer to make you immune to energy drain from undead. Makes all the vampires and shadows much easier to deal with.

Ranger/cleric: you can only use blunt weapons, but there's a bug where R/C gets Druid spells instead of Cleric spells in this multiclass. What does this mean? You are a dual wielding beatstick with spells like Iron Skin, Insect Plague, and some other good utility spells. (Insect plague / creeping doom isn't stopped by most protection spells: it will literally do damage to many wizards and constantly interrupt their spellcasting).

Fighter/Mage (multi or dual class kensai): Best melee class in the game. Also one of the most fun. Multi class is a better beatstick, dual class is a better caster but they're both good. Just fill up your 4th level slots with stoneskin and 2nd level slots with mirror image and you're unkillable in melee.

Bounty Hunter: if you like rest abuse this is a great class for the lulz. You can lay down traps on certain points before enemies spawn on scripted events. As soon as they spawn they get hit by 5 traps, take a bunch of damage and die instantly. I think they fixed it in EE where you can only do 5 traps at a time though, not sure.

Wild Mage: yeah you have Neera, but before her this really spiced up a game.

Any thief combo is hilarious once you get boots of speed against enemies that can't see stealth. Backstab, run away, stealth. Rinse and repeat.

Oddball but fun combos are Cleric/thief, mage/thief, fighter/mage/thief (Swiss army knife). Mage/Cleric if you don't like Aerie. Archers were Gods in BG1 but not as much in BG2.

I would recommend the first 3 because the gap between a main character melee class and the recruitable melee NPC's is a lot wider than a caster protagonist and recruitment casters. R/C and F/M offer great versatility too.

Rajaah said:

That trap class sounds like a ton of fun. One of the reasons the original Bioshock is my favorite FPS of all time (narrowly edging out Metroid Prime) is because of all of the traps you can make use of. Bioshock 2 carries that over and gives you even more reason to tool around with them, since it has those otherwise-annoying horde mode rooms where you have to defend a point. I had a ball going around and booby-trapping rooms, then watching the enemies get obliterated as they walked right into all of the traps.

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You'll want to play a rogue in NWN1. You could recover traps. Every boss fight was me putting down a dozen traps in a hallway and having them chase me to their death.

Rajaah said:

That's cool, I have no Rogue plans so I'll do that in NWN. Like how I have no Cleric plans so I'll do that in TOEE. Planning classes for all of these games in advance would be kind of silly, but it's alright if I do it for a couple of them. Likely to default to a tank or caster for most of the rest anyway. Also planning to go Monk in PoE, subject to change of course. Just liked Monk in that one.

A few dumb questions:

-NWN2 and ID2 never got an enhanced edition did they?

-Where should Fallout Tactics fall in relation to FO1 and 2: Before them? After them? Between them? I'll likely get to it much later since it's one of the more optional things on the list, unless there's a chronological reason to play it between them or something.

-Is Wasteland 1 a thing? I added Wasteland 2 and 3 to the "optional" last third of the list and I'm updating the first post. If Wasteland 1 is olde and archaic I'm fine with leaving it off cause I already have too much.

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yeah. wasteland was 1988. haha there is a wasteland remastered though.
dont know anything about it though.

Wasteland was the precurser to Fallout.
"The ideas of the Fallout series began with Interplay Productions' Wasteland, released in 1988. At that time, Interplay was not a publisher and used Electronic Arts for distribution of the game. According to Interplay's founder, Brian Fargo, they wanted to explore a post-apocalyptic setting and created Wasteland for that. Sometime after release, Interplay decided to shift focus and become a publisher while still developing games. Fargo wanted to continue to use the Wasteland intellectual property but could not negotiate the rights back from Electronic Arts."

but then..
"In 2003, inXile Entertainment, founded by Wasteland's producer and co-designer, Brian Fargo, acquired the rights to Wasteland from Electronic Arts, which had let the rights lapse and handed them to Fargo after a discussion with him.[10][11][12] In June 2007, Fargo stated: "I am indeed looking into bringing back the game that spawned the Fallout series. Stay tuned..."[13][14] In November 2007, Fallout fan website Duck and Cover reported on possible concept art images from Wasteland 2 displayed in the main header of the inXile Entertainment website.[15]"

Rajaah said:

That's cool, I have no Rogue plans so I'll do that in NWN. Like how I have no Cleric plans so I'll do that in TOEE. Planning classes for all of these games in advance would be kind of silly, but it's alright if I do it for a couple of them. Likely to default to a tank or caster for most of the rest anyway. Also planning to go Monk in PoE, subject to change of course. Just liked Monk in that one.

A few dumb questions:

-NWN2 and ID2 never got an enhanced edition did they?

-Where should Fallout Tactics fall in relation to FO1 and 2: Before them? After them? Between them? I'll likely get to it much later since it's one of the more optional things on the list, unless there's a chronological reason to play it between them or something.

-Is Wasteland 1 a thing? I added Wasteland 2 and 3 to the "optional" last third of the list and I'm updating the first post. If Wasteland 1 is olde and archaic I'm fine with leaving it off cause I already have too much.

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FO: Tactics isn't an RPG, and has no relation to the Fallout 2 story. It doesn't really matter when you play it. If you are already familiar with the FO universe, there wont be much in terms of spoilers. Again, for a turn based tactics game, it is inferior to Jagged Alliance 2 (if you had to choose just 1 to play). JA2 is the best game of it's kind, and only $4 (w/ recommended MOD for modern systems).

No EE for NWN2 or ID2, but there should be mods that do the same things.
I would assume that Beamdog is trying to get the rights to do a EE of NWN2, but it's probably complicated by the fact that the xpacs were made by Obsidian and the base game was made by Bioware. The Obsidian parts were far better than the Bioware campaign, so it would be silly for them to just do the Bioware portion.

As for Wasteland 1, I never played it, and it didn't feel necessary to the story of Wasteland 2. That Wasteland 1 remaster might be ok to play, but the original has some very antiquated graphics that go with a group of much older style games than what you are playing now. If you wanted to jump even further back in time, there is a whole different group of games to go with it, like Ultima 6/7, a bunch of the Gold Box games, some blobbers like Wizardry 6-8, etc.

reavor said:

Technically wasteland 2 was shock full of references and throwbacks to wasteland 1, the whole story was built on the original main campaign. it's like playing baldur's gate 2 without playing baldur's gate 1. but wasteland 1 is really dated and an absolute pain to play through, so in this case I would just take the loss on backstory and skip it.

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Funny. I also played BG2 when it came out, w/o playing BG1 (saving up money from summer jobs only goes so far), and absolutely loved it. As a result, I still find BG2 a far superior game to BG1. FO2 is in the exact same boat.

Humm...now that I think about it, Two Towers is also my favorite LOTR movie....maybe there is something about twos...

You can get KOTOR2 on steam now and just install the restoration mod etc through workshop. I don't personally think it needs any sort of HD graphics update, it's obviously dated but I never found it a bad looking game even on recent playthroughs, it's got a clean look to it that holds up well. It's a game you'll probably want to play through a second time at some point since (much like BG2) the class you pick, which companions you take along and which choices you make in various quests will change the experience and you can't see it all in one run. Even picking a male or female main character locks out certain companions and storylines.

Lambourne said:

You can get KOTOR2 on steam now and just install the restoration mod etc through workshop. I don't personally think it needs any sort of HD graphics update, it's obviously dated but I never found it a bad looking game even on recent playthroughs, it's got a clean look to it that holds up well. It's a game you'll probably want to play through a second time at some point since (much like BG2) the class you pick, which companions you take along and which choices you make in various quests will change the experience and you can't see it all in one run. Even picking a male or female main character locks out certain companions and storylines.

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On one hand, I hate spending hours on figuring out mod lists to get the experience I want, but on the other...look at all the pretties! Better lightsaber colors? YES PLEASE! HD Visas? YES PLEASE! Higher poly Ebon Hawk? YES PLEASE! HQ space skybox? YES PLEASE!

Rajaah said:

Jebus. With all these mods, maybe I should just play KOTOR1 on the PC rather than Switch. Like I said though, Switch = bigger screen at home, and portability. Does that offset mods that I may or may not use? I don't know, but I also don't need to worry about this for a while.

I never did a Renegade playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy, or tried the other classes I wanted to try like Biotic. My run at those games was all Paragon, all Vanguard. There's probably a greater-than-zero chance I'll drop them in this Crusade after I finish the KOTORs and finally do that replay. They're not CRPGs though, not really, and I gotta be careful not to let the CRPG Crusade get too loaded with non-CRPGs.

Finally made some more Siege of Dragonspear progress tonight while staying up late and posting on here. It's super linear compared to the main game, if anyone's wondering what it's like. Very different from the old Baldurs. I actually had it glitch out at one point when that officer chick you walk around with just walked into a wall and stayed there, and it wouldn't let me leave the area without her. Luckily loading a save fixed it. Still surprised to see a glitch in 4 hours of SoD when I didn't see one in 20-25 hours of BG1.

I think I'm about a third of the way through the story. The villain's name is Argent...and she leads a Crusade? Somebody was playing WOTLK before they made this. Unless she pre-dates SoD, in which case somebody at WoW was playing Baldur before they made WOTLK.

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KOTOR1 doesn't have a steam workshop, I also don't think it needs any mods aside from tweaking to run on modern PCs. I think the GoG version is playable as is. If it runs well on the Switch I'd just keep going, you're probably better off just playing rather than messing with mods and inadvertently bumping into story spoilers.

For KOTOR2 just get TSLRCM and the Widescreen UI fix and you're really good to go, those are the only things I'd consider mandatory. The base game has a bunch of holes in it because it was pushed out the door early, the mod fixes that as well as a ton of minor stuff. It's akin to the unofficial patches for Elder Scrolls titles, basically essential fixes that should have been in the game at release.

Lambourne said:

KOTOR1 doesn't have a steam workshop, I also don't think it needs any mods aside from tweaking to run on modern PCs. I think the GoG version is playable as is. If it runs well on the Switch I'd just keep going, you're probably better off just playing rather than messing with mods and inadvertently bumping into story spoilers.

For KOTOR2 just get TSLRCM and the Widescreen UI fix and you're really good to go, those are the only things I'd consider mandatory. The base game has a bunch of holes in it because it was pushed out the door early, the mod fixes that as well as a ton of minor stuff. It's akin to the unofficial patches for Elder Scrolls titles, basically essential fixes that should have been in the game at release.

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The reddit peoples made a non-spoiler mod list. I haven't looked it all over, but you would think people so passionate about the game would get it right.