Dungeon crawler RPG like EQ
 

I started playing a game called Exanima about 1.5 years ago. It's a top down RPG dungeon crawler that I wish there was more of. It's still in development, but even as unfinished as it is, it beats games like d3 and poe to high heaven.

Some great points about Exanima are:

Realistic combat and physics
No map, so you'll focus on combat and exploring and not on an overlayn map.
Combat and movement are much slower paced than most games
Each enemy is dangerous by itself and can take a minute or more to defeat.
There is no HP regeneration, so if you get badly hurt, you won't recover.
Fighting against multiple enemies is extremely challenging. 2 opponents is difficult, 3 is near impossible, 4 is certain death.
The visual effects aren't over the top. It's a low fantasy game, so while there is some magic potions and monsters, it's not a constant barge of spell particles.
It can easily take several hours to clear one floor/level.


Contrast that with D3 or POE;

Map overlay is constantly up, of course you can always turn it off but for reasons below, it doesn't really matter.
Combat and movement is so fast that you hardly have a chance to see what your fighting.
You can kill 40 mobs in 3 seconds with combat/spell effects that cover the whole screen.
Enemies, even bosses are easy to kill
There really is no penalty to taking damage. Just drink more endless potions or easily TP to town.
The visual effects are blindingly obnoxious to a point where you can't even see the world around you.
Clearing levels can be done in a matter of minutes.


Exanima and EQ have a lot in common, and I hope one day a developer will make an RPG that combines the two. A game where it's impossible to clear a dungeon by ones self. Like EQ I'd like to see classes have more defined roles, healers can only heal etc etc. It doesn't appear that that's what consumers want though. It seems like a game like exanima or EQ is too plain or slow paced for what people are looking for these days which is a real shame.

Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome, Trannies....... just stay on topic.

Interesting. It sounds similar to Baldur's Gate, at least from the top down aspect. I enjoy Diablo style games, but I also like these types of games from time to time. The slower and more deliberate actions really reward planning.

We're pretty much out of trannies.

Have you ever played some of the warband mount and blade? It uses a decent bit of physics in the damage calculations as well as firing projecitles like arrows/bolts while still being an RPG + a war strategy sort of game. Never seen a game quite likt it. it's almost its own kind of genre.

Ton of content mods for it too,like pendor.

path of exile sucks

Looks really cool! Going to buy it on steam

I ha e 1000+ hours logged on warband. It's another game that I'd like to see combined with classic EQ.

Yes, classic EQ was really good at slowing players down. I'm not sure if this was intentional by the devs or not, but what it allowed for was more communication and thoughtfulness.

How about gothic 2?

You are probably in for a treat then. If you try it you should first consider if you want to use the Night of the Raven add on or not. It makes the game much more challenging and adds a bunch of cool content. Be cautioned though, the learning curve for combat is very steep and NotR will exacerbate that. You'll eventually be able to kill things by virtue of skill alone that you had no chance of beating earlier, giving a great sense of accomplishment.


Wouldn't even consider trying it until you played gothic 2, gothic 2 NoTR and gothic 1 and completely bored of all of them.

Money well spent. The controls will seem wonky at first until you get used to them, just stick with it and it weel eventually become second nature. G2 will give the option of using a new control style or reverting to the control style used in G1. I prefer G2 controls personally.