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[Blademasterbobo]

you're boring

[shinygerbil]

This thread is boring.

I was expecting a thread full of hilarious screenshots and LOL REMEMBER THAT GAME AMIRITE HI FIVE but instead we got people arguing :''(

[GhostBomb]

This might be the worst thread I've seen on Tigsource.  It just makes me feel bad.

[Eigen]

First half of the first page was promising ...

[zalzane]

Durr hurr, I bought an isometric RPG that's older than I am on Steam and it doesn't even have any tooltips during the loading screen to tell me how to do things.  Worst yet is that the game developers didn't even make a alternative for me the person playing the game over a decade later without the manual I was intended to be referencing during play.  Did they even test this game before they released it?

Arcanum, is that you?

[Muz]

Hah, Baldur's Gate 1. I remember it boasting about having 16 million colors (!) and all the CDs were required to store all the awesome textures and high res graphics and stuff. But now the graphics are awfully gaudy with that 'photoshop look'.

[antoniodamala]

Durr hurr, I bought an isometric RPG that's older than I am on Steam and it doesn't even have any tooltips during the loading screen to tell me how to do things.  Worst yet is that the game developers didn't even make a alternative for me the person playing the game over a decade later without the manual I was intended to be referencing during play.  Did they even test this game before they released it?

Arcanum, is that you?

You know what's worst than that? All Spiderweb Software games. They're all like "why balancing the game, when the player can restart it anytime? Let's just go have a drink." 

[moi]

I bought the geneforge collection, I played geneforge 1 & 2, they're terrible,nothing but horribly unbalanced grindfests

[crowe]

Durr hurr, I bought an isometric RPG that's older than I am on Steam and it doesn't even have any tooltips during the loading screen to tell me how to do things.  Worst yet is that the game developers didn't even make a alternative for me the person playing the game over a decade later without the manual I was intended to be referencing during play.  Did they even test this game before they released it?

Arcanum, is that you?

You know what's worst than that? All Spiderweb Software games. They're all like "why balancing the game, when the player can restart it anytime? Let's just go have a drink." 

if you think that then i would wager you haven't played any of the newer ones, but i guess it is easier to make an emoticon than to discuss things!

[Netsu]

Hah, Baldur's Gate 1. I remember it boasting about having 16 million colors (!) and all the CDs were required to store all the awesome textures and high res graphics and stuff. But now the graphics are awfully gaudy with that 'photoshop look'.

I remember it boasting about having 60 thousand lines of dialogue (or something around that). I wish RPGs today would still race for the highest line count, not polygon count.

[D-TurboKiller]

So, I come back 2 days later to this thread only to see it pretty much crashed and burned, oh well.

tl;dr what you would consider an Awful Classic:
-Buggy, unfinished, sometimes unplayable.
-Too unintuitive, either through bad controls or messy interface. It doesn't need to be familiar, it just needs to work well.
-The game is actually bad, with awful sound/music, bad story, terrible level design, etc.
-Personal preference. Sometimes a game just doesn't bond enough for you. I still can't enjoy RTS and Grand Strategy, as well as 99% of MMOs out there (fuck grinding, forever nofunmode).

But yeah, despite their age, I'd probably have more positive things to say about the worst of the classics than most modern, decent games out there.

[AshfordPride]

I remember it boasting about having 60 thousand lines of dialogue (or something around that). I wish RPGs today would still race for the highest line count, not polygon count.

I'm pretty sure Fallout: New Vegas broke some kind of record relating to dialogue.  If I recall correctly they had the most recorded lines of dialogue in any game to date.

[gimymblert]

Wasn't the swotor MMO that have now the most line (+ voice acting)?

[Muz]

Ugh, lines. JRPGs today have too many lines of dialogue. Maybe even games like Dragon Age. But I don't actually want to read/listen to all that. Sometimes there's a good game underneath all that, but you have to smash the any key to grind through all the dialogue and get to the gameplay.

I actually did love Baldur's Gate as a multiplayer game. It had a good classic D&D feel, not too much non-gamey stuff. It wasn't slowed down by storyline, unlike BG2 and Lionheart. It was just a lot of fun to join up with random (non-cheating) internet strangers and go dungeon crawling.

[zalzane]

Wasn't the swotor MMO that have now the most line (+ voice acting)?

I'm not sure having the most lines of dialogue counts when it's written like a fanfic.

[Netsu]

I'm pretty sure Fallout: New Vegas broke some kind of record relating to dialogue.  If I recall correctly they had the most recorded lines of dialogue in any game to date.

I can't for the life of me find any information about the line count in the original Baldur's Gate games or the first two Fallouts, but I'm almost certain that those games counted the lines of dialogue WRITTEN while the record you speak of is for voice acted dialogue.

I was only able to find out that Fallout: NV indeed has the 'most lines' for a single player RPG with 65k and that the previous record owner was Fallout 3 with 40k, but I'm pretty sure that the RPGs of old had more written lines than that.

Ugh, lines. JRPGs today have too many lines of dialogue. Maybe even games like Dragon Age. But I don't actually want to read/listen to all that. Sometimes there's a good game underneath all that, but you have to smash the any key to grind through all the dialogue and get to the gameplay.

In a good RPG the dialogue should be the gameplay just as much as combat in my opinion. I can't imagine playing Fallout 1&2 by skipping through all the dialogue.

[VDZ]

Only 65,000 lines? If we're going with just written lines, countless Japanese games, especially visual novels, break that record (with AFAIK the record holder for written lines being 'W. L. O. Sekai Ren'ai Kikou' with a line count of 147,534). I'm not sure how this would translate to voiced lines (as narration/thoughts is unvoiced and the protagonist usually doesn't have a voice), but with numbers like that (and nearly all modern VNs being 'full voice', meaning everyone gets a voice except for possibly the protagonist) I'm sure there is some VN out there that breaks 65,000 voiced lines.

[SundownKid]

Ugh, lines. JRPGs today have too many lines of dialogue. Maybe even games like Dragon Age. But I don't actually want to read/listen to all that. Sometimes there's a good game underneath all that, but you have to smash the any key to grind through all the dialogue and get to the gameplay.

Sorry, but I would argue that the main purpose of RPGs (especially jRPGs) is the story, rather than the gameplay. It often tends to stay the same over large numbers of RPGs because it's not the real focus, no one buys RPGs for the innovative gameplay (though there are often some good incremental improvements). jRPGs did stem from visual novels, after all.

Basically, if you want gameplay to take a front seat, that's the domain of action games.

[Cobralad]

Japanese-Engrish conversion makes all the line-counting in VNs questionable. Also, I think that most lines are just "..." or "Uh......................I...........".
Also, anyone remembers "Fall: The last days of Gaia", which actual selling point was "5 bagillion lines more than all Fallouts together"? I guess someone should praise that game, it features protagonst watching two wolfs making out, with like thousand voiced lines describing it.

[VDZ]

jRPGs did stem from visual novels, after all.

Uh, no they didn't. VNs didn't start to branch off from adventure games until the very late 80s/very early 90s with genre-definers being early to mid-90s (Doukyuusei (1992), Leaf's visual novels (1996 onwards) and especially To Heart (1997)), while JRPGs were made as early as 1984, with the genre-defining Dragon Quest being released in 1986 (inspired by Western RPGs, JRPGs at the time and Japanese adventure games).

Japanese-Engrish conversion makes all the line-counting in VNs questionable.

Except I was talking about Japanese line counts. In English a bunch of them would have a higher line count.

Also, I think that most lines are just "..." or "Uh......................I...........".

Though it's a common cliche, "..." lines aren't all that common in VNs. (I get the feeling it's more common in JRPGs, where narrating the protagonist's thoughts is less common so situations where the protagonist would make a sarcastic internal remark or have some internal monologue are instead expressed with "...". That's what I think, anyways.)
It's true that there are a lot of short sentences, though; lines consisting of only a character name ("Protagonist-kun...!"), affirmations ("Sure!" "Got it!" "Okay.") and the like are pretty common as it's conversational dialogue. However, these are probably also very common in Western works, and it's likely that since they're counting voiced lines, they're also counting very basic lines in tons of different voices. For example, Skyrim had like 10 different voice samples for 'Take a look!' for the different shopkeepers, and the same goes for loads of other simple dialogue said by tons of characters.