Why have turn based RPGs become so easy nowadays? Are there any that have old school levels of difficulty and challenge?

Most games require some amount of skill or decision making. Wizardry starts out good but by the time situations like OP arise it becomes repetitive garbage. Other games have done DRPG combat much better.

Because its not fun.
I dunno, Romancing Saga 2 is a jarpig and yet its far more fun and innlvative than Fallout.

Dungeon rpgs and crpgs do it.

Japan has always tucked at making tactics and barely even like them. Consider that jrpgs come from crpg which come from war gaming. Dnd comes from war gaming. The japs barely touch war gaming.

Lol, RPGfags legitimately think this. RPGs are the one genre where this not only works but is the core foundation of the gameplay. RPGfags have no clue what actual difficulty is, which is why every "look at how HARD this RPG is, lol" post involves some enemy just wiping a party that can't or doesn't fight back. Because that's the only kind of 'challenge' the idiots who like these games understand.

Yes but they're mobile games. Wizardry Daphne and Buriedbornes 2.

there are exceptions but generally the genre as a whole has regressed

Too easy and being stupidly hard for the sake of being hard are different things anon.

Sounds like wuzardry did the same goof so many other games do. You eventually get so many spells and resources you can use that trivialize encounters and if you ever run out just teleport back to heaven and try again.

Idk anon that new Wizardy Variant game is PISSING ME OFF WHY THE FUCK IS EVERY 'YOU HEARD A SOUND BEHIND THIS DOAH' A HIGH LVL DICKFUCKER THAT ONESHOTS ANYONE ON MY TEAM.

Do you have an interesting opinion? 'cause "X regressed" is always thrown around each decades, only for the "good old games" to be hot trash. Its legit the most normie opinion ever.

I’ve read the Wizardry IV copypasta and none of it sounds fun at all, a random encounter where ninjas instant-gib you isn’t difficult, it’s bullshit

I have heard a legend about people complaining about Wizardry 3 being easy and the devs taking offense on that, but I am not sure.

Guarantee 99% of the people posting it never played it. You know how dumb fucks find TikTok to gawk at and share it around. That's what this this is. You gawk at it and share it around with other Anons

No, any game can be dismissed as easy. Reflex-based games are all about repetition and memorization. I've beaten Ninja Gaiden on the NES with 1 life, and it was all about memorizing enemy placements and how to counter them. After just 1 week of practice the game was a piece of cake.

I hate when people who have never played Wizardry 1 talk about Wizardry like they have any clue what the game is about.

Wiz1 can be the easiest game you've ever played, if you know what you are doing. One of the best grinding spots for EXP is on the first floor, and offers zero risk. There's a fucking elevator from floor 1 down to floor 9, with floor 10 being the last floor. And you don't even need that, since your mage can just teleport directly to the pit dropping you into floor 10. The fun part of the game wasn't getting to the end, it was exploring all of the dungeon, figuring out the tricks of each floor, and slowly making progress. The reason that RPGs now are so "easy" is because they can't be completed just by beating up the same enemy for 5 hours and then casting a teleport spell to the final area. Wiz1 can absolutely nuke your entire party and you're just a few hours behind. Rogue, similarly, just loses you the time you spend on the current play session if you die. Nobody wants to play Dragon Quest 7 for 70 hours and then be forced to replay the entire game because they lost to the final boss.

Also, literally the only danger in that screenshot is the ambush. Two spells will make your entire party basically immune to the entire group. An encounter of six dragons is generally a lot more concerning, because you can't just cast a spell to stop breath weapons and there's no easy way to mitigate the damage or kill them immediately.

It's hard to do surgery too but that doesn't mean you want your doctor to slag off. Why is only entertainment that gets away with this "It's too hard" bullshit. Do your fucking jobs.

Play ones with actual good battle systems

SMT V gives you way too many advantage imo.
Emerald Beyond's demo was boring, and the battle system is overcomplicated.
Didn't play the last one.

Emerald Beyond's demo was boring,

Each platform had a different protag in the demo, I could easily see how the start of

and the battle system is overcomplicated

Filtered

Just play better games.

Devs make them that way, because the people they tend to draw in are there for the story. The only time you will see a difficult, or unfair turn based game is if it's an indie title and usually then it's more of a gimmick. Darkest Dungeon and Fear and Hunger, or that Skald game come to mind, for hard turn based games.

Based wizard autist

Wiz1 can be the easiest game you've ever played, if you know what you are doing

That applies to almost any game. Difficulty becomes trivialized with immense knowledge.

OP is talking about hard games vs. easy games, so pointing out that the example of a "hard game" actually being rather easy is making a point.

Turn based RPGs have always been fucking braindead anon. You aren't haunted by some nonexistent Chrono Trigger PTSD. Get the fuck out of here poser.

Metaphor's combat is unironically better than SMT V's. Vengeance gives you way too many powerful limit breaks and bosses have no means to counter any of it. Metaphor's bosses on the other hand have actual mechanics where if you screw them up, they'll just soul scream and insta wipe your party.

an anon claimed that this eventually reams you good
haven't played my copy yet

Regardless older RPGs were much harder compared to the current era where tutorials and handholding has become common place.

only professor layton math/logic puzzle games are hard.

Well yeah. Bro, I just wanna play the damn game, not play Yu gi Oh with "Showstopper", whathevertopper etc...

Yes, and the rest of my comment is about why that is the case. You can 100% wipe on Wizardry 1 (and that game saves character status, not game status, so your characters are just gone) and you are, perhaps, 5 hours away from fully completing the game. If some 20-hour or 40-hour or much longer game were to do the same thing, then it would just push people to quit rather than play thru the whole thing again. Asking people to get better or get luckier and just spend another weekend afternoon is quite different from asking people to spend an entire month replaying the same thing they've already done.

Also, tutorials and handholding? In a RPG? RPGs are just sets of menus and any tutorial would just be explaining those menus. Outside something stupid like the tutorials in Xenoblade, any sort of handholding in a RPG would be pretty irrelevant. Do you really think that "press X to select the highlighted menu option" is something that provides handholding assistance to completing the game? You're bitching about action or exploration games which make those mechanics easier. They don't apply to RPGs.

Although you are welcome to post counterexamples.

It took me around ~175hr to beat that game blind on hard. Everything 1 or 2 shots you. I think I played around 100 hours before i just got tired and shelved the game for 2 years. It bugged me all that time that i didnt finish it. Came back and after 2 years after release no one had uploaded a full playthrough to youtube, there was simply no footage past the first 5 hours, so i finished the entire playthrough with that motivation and uploaded it and remains the only one on youtube. It was an ordeal i dont think i can go through again. Even did the post dungeon with the 2 true last bosses

You played the wrong ones.

absolutely none of that sounds fun, might aswell get into cock and ball torture

replaying the same thing they've already done.

Asking players to replay a longer game is less about difficulty and more about time commitment and if the RPG in question is highly enjoyable to begin with, then they might be very willing to replay it again regardless of length. Difficulty/challenge is separate from how long it may take you to finish the game. No, what I'm talking about are RPGs becoming mechanically simpler, dumbed down and made more appealing for modern audiences who have little interest in engaging with the game and its systems.

RPGs are just sets of menus

Depends on the game itself. Roguelikes or DRPGS aren't going to have much in way of tutorials or handholding but other RPGs will see lots of guiding. Especially pervasive in modern JRPGs and CRPGs.

Vengeance gives you way too many powerful limit breaks

And the funniest part is that if you ask average vtard which one's the best they'll answer with critical. People claiming vengeance had good combat must be joking.

mfw my mages cast tiltowait

Could you beat that consistently by properly minmaxing the characters and making good plays in combat or is it a case of "you rolled badly now die"?
Because only one of those is good difficulty.

Final Fantasy 8 has a ton of tutorials, but none of it makes the game any easier. That's because the tutorials just involve explaining how the game works. (Explaining it poorly, but still.) How easy or how hard it is to complete FF8 depends entirely on how you approach the game. Claiming that tutorials and handholding are what make FF8 easy is completely silly.

I use FF8 as an example because I honestly can't remember many RPGs, even many JRPGs, which involve tutorials. Most just leave it to you to fuck around and figure things out. A valid claim might be NPCs just repeatedly telling you to go to the north exit to progress the game, although I'm not sure that's making the game easier. It's handholding, but it's in a way to tell you were to go to not get lost. It's making the game idiotproof and it's annoying, but "I didn't waste 10 minutes wandering around before using the north exit" isn't really a difficulty issue.

>mfw my mages cast tits-of-wait

Minmaxing characters would make the game considerably easier, but the only way to minmax a character is rerolling stat points at character creation to get a high number of points. A dwarf samurai with 20 points is a lot better than a dwarf fighter with 8 points, especially when you can dump those points into STR/VIT and have a very powerful character. There's no decisions when leveling up since levels just give random stat buffs.

Making good plays is 100% the key to success. Really, knowing what is dangerous and what can be beaten, and how to deal with them, is the key to clearing fights or getting a party wipe. Ninjas are very dangerous but you can cast Bamatu twice and basically none of them can touch you. Mages are very scary but Montino can make a whole group irrelevant. When to go full nuke and when to just hold off and let your frontline grind the enemy to dust is an important skill which will determine if you can keep fighting in the dungeon or need to retreat.

is it a case of "you rolled badly now die"

In some cases like ambushes, yes. You can get ten dragons who all decide to breathe on your party, where even 10 damage each basically means a party wipe. You can have ninjas which just get exceptionally lucky, hitting with crits even on max armor and instakilling two of three characters in a turn. Altho in a lot of cases, it's about knowing what you can do and when to pull out what options. Running from a group of dragons on the first turn can save you a lot of damage. Knowing when to pop one of the teleport spells and get your party out in an emergency is important. Luck can absolutely shit on you but outside an ambush instantly killing your whole party, it's about making judgements with the spells and options you have, and the luck is just how bad of a situation you get put into.

It does.

thread about a Anon Babble post

Hang yourself

Steam release when

Since this is somewhat a Wizardry thread, can anons here suggest which entry is best to start out with for someone who never played it before?

2 weeks before EOS

do you played other bloobers? do you even like bloobers?

2 weeks before EOS

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BUT WHYYYYYY!?!?!?!?!

because you didn't spend 7000$ bucks on bones

Blobbers you mean? I've played Eritrean Odyssey and SMT if those count

you can get two that are on steam, the remake and the other one
or just emulate some old ones
there is also wizardry daphne which have great visualization and solid story and characters but it was created through monkey paw wish
its gacha and not yet on steam but you can play on emu its great as SP tho even if inventory management is pain

Wizardry 1 is fine, but realize that it's a lot more basic of a game than you might expect. Plan on needing to figure things out as you move down floors and don't assume it's just Etrian Odyssey but with older graphics. Figuring out what's a good idea to fight, and where, is a bit part of playing the game. It's not like EO where you just grind enemies and then walk back to town.

Wizardry 1-3 are connected, even with you trading characters between Wiz1-Wiz2 and doing something similar between Wiz2-Wiz3. So if you like Wiz1 then keep playing the rest, but you're not missing much if you skip them after Wizardry 1.

Don't play Wizardry 4. It is this game. If you really enjoy the series or are just curious then go ahead; it's not AS hard as people claim once you're used to Wizardry 1. But it is quite unfair and the worst bullshit you've dealt with in Wiz1 is not even going to come close to what Wizardry 4 will throw at you.

I have not played Wizardry 5, so no comment.

Wizardry 6-8 is pretty great. They lock you in the dungeon (so no going back to town) and you rest in the dungeon itself to recover HP and spells. Systems have been overhauled quite a bit, with skill points on levelup and a new way of doing spells. You'll also run across NPCs who act as stores and can be talked to, or stolen from/attacked, if you like. The biggest drawback, outside the negative-AC system the whole main series uses, is that the game looks garish on modern HD monitors. But if you don't like Wiz1 and want something more modern, then I enjoyed these. You also transfer characters between Wiz6-Wiz7 and Wiz7-Wiz8 like the first games. Wiz6 sticks you in a dungeon and locks the door, while Wiz7 and Wiz8 have big worlds for you to wander around in.

Other than that, the PS2 game (Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land) was fun and is a good entry into the series. "Busin 0" is the sequel, but I don't think it's translated.

I love EO but that is the only hard fight in the entire game. the rest of it is laughably trivialized by a medic spamming immunize

I haven't played the other Wizardry games on Steam (Five Ordeals, Labyrinth of Lost Souls) so I can't discuss those. I also haven't played Wizardry Variants Daphne, this game, but it seems pretty decent.

EO is a pretty similar format to Wiz1-3, where you have a central hub town and then dive into the dungeon. The biggest difference is that EO feels like your main options are to just grind fights or to run (or avoid the FOE on the map) while Wiz1 has a lot more options for spells to change how the fight goes.

SMT seems like it has more focus on collecting and fusing demons to make something to take on fights. That's not anything like Wizardry. It looks difficult, just a different sort of difficulty than Wizardry offers.

Is that game good? I love the first wizardry games, but I am skeptical about that one. Isn't it a gacha?

Nah, Werdna's game is legitimately bullshit in it's assholery that lives off human suffering.

I've heard that most of that pasta is bullshit or greatly exaggerated. The game is legendarily difficult but not to that extent, and probably a lot easier nowadays since people have had decades to gather and share information on it.

takes 15 seconds to do something that was done in one line of text in the real games

grim

Yeah I love when RNG just fucks me over randomly, with no way to predicting it or preparing for it.

3 enemies that have a good chance of instantly beheading a party member

Case in point, outside of the encounter itself already being completely random and a likely game over, there's also another RNG factor: maybe they behead everyone on first turn, maybe nobody ever gets beheaded for the entire duration of the battle.

GIT GUD SCRUB

Nah I'll just play a game that isn't retarded, and that's what everyone else did too, which is why this shit doesn't happen anymore as devs realized putting in random unpredictable "lol fuck you game over" just makes people not play your game.

Difficulty isn't inherently positive, you have to either be retarded or a child to think so.

This is the issue with a lot of games from the past as back then people didn't have all this easily accessible knowledge. Like the autist up above was blathering about how easy Wiz1 was but you would only know about most of the that shit if you found it out yourself which odds were you weren't going to do until you were already intimately familiar with the game through repeated plays. Same with Return of Werdna where there's a lot of annoying puzzles and traps that can permanently end your current playthrough but you weren't going to be privy to most of that back when the game was on store shelves.

wizardry 4 is less an rpg and more a puzzle game with a combat minigame
frankly, it's less "hard" and more tedious if you don't know everything there is to know about wizardry when you play it, but they did market it to "wizardry experts" so you can't really fault the devs for that
if you compare wizardry 4 to the kind of bullshit sierra put out as text adventures around the same time, then it's pretty tame though

its good even if it gacha
I actually enjoy playing it and you can play it as SP game, sure there is gacha attached but honestly you can just ignore it
well its free you can try it on emu
i gotch you but honestly i was never into bloobers much and i found them extremely boring after awhile, most units bloobers have little character and are simply stats lines

On the one hand, combat isn't THAT bad. The biggest difficulty involves finding the save point on the next floor to summon the monsters to survive that floor. You'll die if you can't do that, but given the save point after the boss on the previous floor, it doesn't set you back too much.

Some of the more bullshit parts of previous games are back and cranked up to 11. Some floors in previous Wizardry games had damage traps at specific intersections or when going into a dead end room. Wizardy 4 has one floor where the ENTIRE floor is covered with those, outside a specific clear path. The previous games had spinners at certain points to confuse your direction. Wizardry 4 has an entire floor with identical rooms and identical hallways with spinners in every intersection. It's stuff like that, which is annoying but not impossible.

Trebor is much talked about but kind of irrelevant. The ways he kills you is if you leave your game running for too long (easy enough to just reload or even turn off/reload at the start or end of a floor with no setback) and the step counter is so high that isn't not relevant unless you're trying for the true end.

On the other hand, some parts of Wizardry 4 are so much bullshit that they will involve a full game reset and just listing on your map not to do that again. And the true ending - which means not wanting and ending where you just die anyway - requires basically solving every puzzle in the game and then figuring out what you're supposed to actually do to get the best ending, which isn't very clear. It's hard, but more in the sense of a difficult puzzle rather than challenging fights.

The fights in Wizardry 4 probably aren't much harder than any of the first three Wizardry titles. It's just that you don't control the monsters (which make it harder to complete).

reloads

Heh,nothing personel

The moment you start seeing RPG games as nothing more than a puzzle game is when you'll be able to understand why they are almost always so awfully designed. When you progress through the game and get closer to the endgame, most games become the equivalent of being able to drop nothing but I-blocks in Tetris, and the rest force you to solve fights in a single way, which makes it extremely boring (but this mostly happens in SRPGs and the like).

You haven't played Wizardry so you can start from there I suppose

Emerald Beyond's demo was boring, and the battle system is overcomplicated.

Proving OP's point

I have Lands of Lore and Eye of the Beholder in my GOG library, are they worth a playthrough?
I really like the idea of like 10-20h long RPGs, most of CRPGs, even the established classics, drag on way too long to their detriment

Yes, Lands of Lore is pretty unique so give it a play. Eye of the Beholder is by the same developers (at least the first game) and is more of a typical turn-based dungeon crawler, so depends on how much you're liking those.

Does the 2024 remake do this too or is it watered down? Have had my eye on it for a bit.

You know how usually gachatards go "oh no dude it's like a real game the gacha barely matters!"? This is the first game where that's actually true, and not some brainlet with sunk cost fallacy grinding out pointless dailies so he can buy some faggot skin in 3 years.

It'll probably close down within 6 months because there's too much game and not enough whale gouging.

I really like the idea of like 10-20h long RPGs

WAY way more RPGs should be fairly short but highly repayable games that you're encouraged to restart quickly, in the vein of Survival Horror. Super long epic experiences have their place, but compact yet deep and highly explorable should be the norm for the genre given its specific strengths. RPG fans seem to favor epic power fantasy so such a degree that this never happens and you actually need to play something like Majora's Mask to approximate this kind of thing.

this
most jrpg and srpg are just story with some stat checks mostly
you could see outrage in tactics ogre reborn when people complained that they cant grind over difficult battles

this
even if it have meta progression and unlocks
wizardry daphne have something similar in action where your first try to save situation fail and you rewind time and can fix stuff so eventually can save everyone

Anyone who says that critical is the best never played above normal mode. Metaphor also spells out the entire gimmick before you go to the boss fight not like it actually matters for some of them since camping in the backrow reduces incoming damage to ridiculous levels and you have no real difficulty setting up weakness loops.

i've been addicted to wizardry for the past month and its clicked so hard that i've already beaten several entries (but only wiz 1 - 5 style wiz, busin is cool but its its own thing)
five ordeals is probably the best entry in that series but you gotta be able to understand jp to get the most out of its community content.
Xth was my least favorite entry by a longshot.

Jrpgs became infested with more and more leftist faggotry as the graphics focus increased. They added stories.
Gaming grew while video and movies lost ad funding to the internet putting them into a death spiral.
Now people started feeling left out by all the games they heard about people having so much fun with. Being retarded, they thought this meant the stories.
Companies being run by kikes saw this and pushed story more and more and removed the game parts as much as possible or completely.

So now jrpg are relegated to small projects by a single jap who might pay a couple people for some art. Then we get a handful that are decent enough for someone to want to translate out of pure benevolence and love of their hobby. There is hope that AI allows these projects to become more common and higher quality; the only hope.

the biggest flaw in most systems is how gimped Defend is. Bravely Default pretty much solved it but there are other creative ways it could be done.

in daphne defense not only reduce damage but also expose attacker so he can be struck for higher damage

I think pokemon of all games actually has an interesting defense system. Beyond just switching for type advantage, there's the protect line of skills that completely negate (most) attacks but have a 2/3rds chance to fail if used twice in a row. Plus, you have to give up one of your valuable attack slots in order to use it.
The main games are too easy for any of it to matter but in the competitive formats (especially doubles) it gets really interesting and I think there's a lot that could be taken for a single player rpg.

in daphne knights have cover skills

You have a bunch of options, so you can play it like the original or you can play it a bit more "casually". And by that, I mean stuff like choosing which stats to increase on level-up and turning off spellcasting during ambush rounds. You can still get ambushed by 20 ninjas and have them assassinate you.
About the only thing that the 2024 remake does that you can't turn off is character creation lets you tap L-Ctrl to reroll stat points, rather than backing out and recreating the character to reroll.

You can even turn off enemy animations, although you need to identify the enemies fully first to do so. Not sure if there's just an option to shut them off completely without the identify mechanic. It's pretty good, just depends on if you are fine with the price.

Wiz1 isn't hard if you know how to break it

What a retarded thing to say.

Atlus

A dev

consistent

Firstly they're a publisher, chuckledick. Secondly they suck the fore-mentioned dicks. While chuckling.

Leveling up works fine. There's two scripted encounters with your nemesis that levels along with you, and if you're too high of level when these happen, you may encounter a brick fucking wall.

RPGs have really fallen off and lack the complexity that survival games and roguelikes provide today.

Are there any that have old school levels of difficulty and challenge?

Black Souls if you're going for a SL1 run.

The problem with SL1 BlackShit is that it serves more as proof that the game is balanced like dogshit rather than as an effective difficulty modifier.
If stats and level don't matter in your RPG, then you failed at creating an RPG.

no way of preparing for it

But you can prepare

Man blobbers have such fun battle systems but they are stuck in games where you 'explore' the same fucking corridor for 90% of the game. Where are the games with that style of combat but actual fun exploration?

are the wizardry games actually fun? they seem to be hellishly difficult for no reason other than fuck you, you lose
anyone who gets validation from torturing themselves with cryptic, borderline impossible challenges and RNG is as mentally ill as speedrunners

Fight Elegy of the Soul in Metaphor and say this.

play bussin

This is only like half of the crazy shit. The stuff he left out is arguably even more insane.

And he wasn't exaggerating about not being able to get out of the first room. Wizardry IV, even with all the other crazy shit in it, is actually most infamous for the (alleged, but seriously probably true) fact that most of the players who played it in the 80s never got out of the first room.

PEE PEE POO POO

In reality

Fighters dodge every attack during the first round

Small chance someone gets beheaded, can be ressed after the fight

The two mages cast an aoe spell

75% of the enemy team dies

The player characters also get incredibly OP in this game during late game when they got good gear and high levels.

think you're bullshitting

there is a single playthrough of kowloon on hard

8 hours long

part 1 of 21

god damn anon, you autistic bastard !

You beat the game by going first and killing all of the enemies with your most powerful spell before they act, repeat until you run out, teleport back to town to rest and get your spells back, teleport back, repeat.

makes sense and also showcases why games aren't made like the one in OPs pic anymore. It's just rocket tag, either you kill them all in round 1 or you lose so to win you just need to figure out what the most OP build is and run that. That's not an interesting challenge once you have that build

They matter if you're just a regular player playing normally. Challenge runs like that are for autists who want to test their knowledge of game mechanics and how to cheese them. Puzzle combat based on your equipment is the probably the most tried and true method of making a turn-based game feel challenging, not counting simply throwing bullshit RNG at the player. Also, when discussing balancing in BS you need to remember that the games were made with the intention of being replayed multiple times through NG+. I dunno about you but I think that previously challenging enemies quickly turning into 1-shot fodder is a preferable to making them always be challenging when you're going through the same areas for the third time already.

Lands of Lore
Wizardry 7-8

Possibly Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, but I've not played that one and so can't really say for certain.

Replayed it recently. Love it.

This doesnt sound fun at all