What RPG are you playing right now?

[Markies]

I started The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Game of the Year Edition) on the Microsoft XBOX this evening!

Western RPG's....The Final Frontier.

This will be the first Elder Scrolls game I have ever played. And the only Western RPG I played before this would was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Ever since I got the original XBOX, Morrowind has been one of those games that people keep bringing up. As a retro console gamer, Elder Scrolls has always escaped me. I know very much of them and what they are about, but I just haven't been too compelled to play them. I much prefer Japanese RPG's.

But, after watching reviews and wanting to try it out for myself, I decided to try Morrowind. I figured this would be a good place to try it and the XBOX version would be perfect for it.

So, after spending most of the evening choosing my Race, Class and Sign because of all the text and knowledge I needed to know before hand, I was finally able to play the game. I am obviously rather lost and very little idea of what I am doing. These open ended games with no direction are not in my wheelhouse, so I'm trying to get out of my comfort zone.

We shall see how sucked in I will be with the game. I don't hate it just yet, but I also didn't fall instantly in love with it. I'm going to give it some time and let it grown on me. Who knows? Maybe in a few days or weeks, I will absolutely love it.

[Ack]

So what did you pick for your race? And class isn't as important as your skill selection in general, since you can build them all up, but your main skills do impact when you get to level up.

If you would like a suggestion, use spears. They give you a slight range advantage over other melee, which you can sometimes abuse to avoid taking hits or kill frustrating enemies quicker. Keep in mind that your attacks are influenced by hidden dice rolls, so you may "hit" an enemy and yet not hit them. This was changed in the next game in the series, Oblivion, but then a lot was changed for Oblivion.

As for the open world, now that you're fresh off the boat, head to Balmora for that first main quest. It shows you a little of the world, but most importantly it gets you to the first real town you're meant to visit, thus providing a base of operations as well as starting points to join guilds. Even if you don't feel the guilds fit your character, you can get some benefits from them, so check them out.

And levitate is a bad ass spell. I wish it wasn't taken out of the series, but you can do some ridiculous stuff with it.

[MrPopo]

To add more, Morrowind does not use level scaling, so you generally are going to want to follow the quest breadcrumbs for a while. Aside from a bunch of one-of quests there are a series of quest chains in the game. There's the main quest chain (which is currently sending you to Balmora), a chain for each guild, a chain for each Great House (but you can only join one House), and a chain for each of the two temples. All of these will have skill gates before you can proceed further on them, so you usually can't get in over your head as you bounce between them. The quests will push you all over the island to explore things, and just doing those will give you a ton of content while still giving you direction.

[Markies]

I chose Nord.

This usually happens in Board Games (Gloomhaven for example), but whenever I get into these large Role Playing Games, I always go with the Warrior/Barbarian cause they are normally the easiest characters. Since I'm just starting off, I figured Barbarian or Physical Fighter would be a good idea.

So, my Race is Nord.
My Class is Barbarian.
And my sign is The Lady.

So, use a Spear and the game uses Skill Gates, not levels to stop you from going further.

That is one aspect that I was terrified of. Since the game is so open, I was afraid that I would get into an area far beyond my reach and I would get absolutely destroyed. So, I'm glad that it's my skills that would prevent me from going forward, not my levels after I get utterly trounced.

[MrPopo]

Well, if you go into full "I'm just going to go in a direction and see what I see" then you will certainly run into places you will be in over your head. But if you focus on doing quest breadcrumbs you should be mostly fine.

[Ack]

Also, fighter not easy! Fighter BEST! Magic is good, but now Minsc leads! Swords for EVERYONE!

[opa]

RE: Spears/ & main quest spoilers:

I legit remember not using spears at all. Don't they suck? There are like five spear types in the game. You need blunt weapon and short sword proficiency for the last two weapons of the game. Blunt weapon was pretty powerful from what I recall and there were a ton of paralyzation daggers that made short sword worth it. Spears weren't worth it in my book when there were so many spells and more archery options than spears.

Levitate -> stand on high spot -> shoot til they stop moving... seemed to work quite well

[MrPopo]

There's basically 1000 ways to break the game in half if you want. I always had a fondness for spears. But as long as you can do combat at a decent level you can beat the main quest.

[Markies]

I started Arc The Lad Collection on the Sony Playstation this evening!

Arc The Lad Collection was a game that I had on my PS1 RPG list many years ago and then basically forgot about. I hadn't thought about it for a long time until somebody mentioned it on these here forums. It suddenly dawned on me and everybody was talking positively about it. Well, a few years ago, I was walking around our game convention and I found a near perfect copy of the collection. The game discs were still sealed and I realized now was a good time to jump on it. Thanks to my Random Fortune Cookie, I'm going to be spending several hours, days, months and weeks playing the collection.

Holy Crap!

I immediately put the game and I instantly fell in love with it. It took me less an hour to understand everything and for me to love the game completely. The battle system is simply amazing. It is such a quick take on the Strategy RPG genre. It's a very basic game, but I know II and III build on the first one completely. I'm going to be playing the Collection all the way through and I think I'm going to love every moment of it. I've been dying to play a good JRPG and this will satiate all my desires.

[opa]

I started Ys VIII last night but boy did it take some work to get going. My PSTV was screwing up and wouldn't load the opening animation. I can't start Ys without the opening sequence! I rebuilt the database on the memory card and re downloaded the game. Finally everything booted up okay. Finished the opening tutorial so I'm good to start the adventure.