# Good offline CRPG for XP/Vista



## Ranger REG (May 30, 2008)

Any recommendation. Been looking at _Fate_ lately ... for my first new laptop.


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## Thanee (May 30, 2008)

The Witcher (a new enhanced edition coming out later this year, but with the old game it will most likely be a free upgrade then)

Mass Effect (new for PC this month)

Bye
Thanee


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## Mercule (Jun 2, 2008)

Fate is pretty good, especially for the cost.  It's a lot like Diablo 2, with cuter graphics.  I definitely got my $20 out of it.  Nothing earth-shaking, but entertaining.

Currently, I'm playing Neverwinter Nights 2, but I'm late to that game, so you've probably already played it.  If not, it's a lot of fun.  My wife and I had been alternating evenings to play it before I got three new PDFs that require my attention.


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## andargor (Jun 3, 2008)

Thanee said:
			
		

> The Witcher (a new enhanced edition coming out later this year, but with the old game it will most likely be a free upgrade then)




Seconded.

I assume you've played KotOR? If not, you should.


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## Ranger REG (Jun 4, 2008)

Mercule said:
			
		

> Fate is pretty good, especially for the cost.  It's a lot like Diablo 2, with cuter graphics.  I definitely got my $20 out of it.  Nothing earth-shaking, but entertaining.



"Cute" is an understatement. _Fate_ happens to be one of the *My HP Games* feature in my new laptop. Been mulling over whether to purchase it for $20. One thing, though. Don't like playing the game with the touchpad, so I plug in my USB mouse.



			
				Mercule said:
			
		

> Currently, I'm playing Neverwinter Nights 2, but I'm late to that game, so you've probably already played it.  If not, it's a lot of fun.  My wife and I had been alternating evenings to play it before I got three new PDFs that require my attention.



Actually, no. As of May 29, my laptop is probably more powerful than my 7-year-old desktop PC. I've yet to buy _NWN2_ but I doubt it can run on my laptop, which is not really configured for hardcore gaming.

Is it me or are those software's system requirement labels very confusing? I know I have touched upon the topic before but still... most never to bother listing whether they work on multi-core PC.


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## Ranger REG (Jun 4, 2008)

andargor said:
			
		

> I assume you've played KotOR? If not, you should.



I have, on my old PC. I wonder if I could install it on my new Vista laptop.

I tried to install my old favorite, _Arcanum,_ but the cursor won't move. Touchpad or mouse, it doesn't work. Had to bring up Vista's Task Manager just to shut it down.


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## Ranger REG (Jun 4, 2008)

Thanee said:
			
		

> Mass Effect (new for PC this month)



I thought _Mass Effect_ is a pay-2-play MMORPG. Don't think would work on my laptop. Hopefully I will upgrade my desktop soon (probably going with AMD multi-core CPU).


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## Dire Lemming (Jun 4, 2008)

I hated NWN2.  It was the same old crappy pseudo-real-time with pause combat as NWN1, just as much, same old, skirmish, rest to get all your spells/hit points back, skirmish, repeat.  The story was uninteresting.  The characters were either uncompelling, annoying, or minor, and the much vaunted choices are few and far between and most of them don't make any difference in the long run.

I've heard that the expansion pack for it was very good though, and I've heard The Witcher is very good too, but NWN2 is highly mediocre.

Mass Effect is another Bioware RPG which means more of the same.  If you really like Bioware's formula you'll probably love it, if you don't you probably won't.  It's not a MMORPG, it's single player and free once you buy it.  Where did you get that idea?


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## HyannisRPGER (Jun 4, 2008)

I've played mass effect on the 360 and NWN2. Both play totally differently. Also with the real time combat in NWN2, you can set options for it to pause at the end of combat rounds, ect and issue orders. 

If you are looking for a hackenslash/ diablo type RPG, titan quest is goood.


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## Dire Lemming (Jun 4, 2008)

I should also point out in case anyone didn't know that NWN2 was not made by Bioware, but by Obsidian Entertainment.  Same thing with KotOR 2.


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## dvvega (Jun 14, 2008)

> Actually, no. As of May 29, my laptop is probably more powerful than my 7-year-old desktop PC. I've yet to buy NWN2 but I doubt it can run on my laptop, which is not really configured for hardcore gaming.




I own a 1.6 Ghz Laptop with an AMD Turion chip (essentially behaves as a Dual Core under Windows XP). It has 2GB of memory and a separate NVidia graphics chipset. 

The laptop is definitely not a gaming machine, however I've successfully played The Witcher at Medium Resolution (except in Act 3 where there are just too many AIs running). You shouldn't have a problem playing anything half-decent on your new laptop.

The key here is the graphics card. If it is an onboard one then you will generally have problems, but if you have a card (or chipset) that has a GPU (like mine) then you should not have problems.

D


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## drothgery (Jun 14, 2008)

Ranger REG said:
			
		

> I thought _Mass Effect_ is a pay-2-play MMORPG. Don't think would work on my laptop. Hopefully I will upgrade my desktop soon (probably going with AMD multi-core CPU).




No. It's a KotOR style RPG (though in Bioware's own universe, rather than Star Wars).


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## Bront (Jun 14, 2008)

Ranger REG said:
			
		

> most never to bother listing whether they work on multi-core PC.



That's because they don't need to.  There were only a few games that had consistent problems with dual core PCs, and those were fixed with patches.  Even if you didn't patch it, you can solve it by setting the program to only use 1 CPU manually, so it isn't an issue.


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## stonegod (Jun 22, 2008)

Ranger REG said:
			
		

> I tried to install my old favorite, _Arcanum,_ but the cursor won't move. Touchpad or mouse, it doesn't work. Had to bring up Vista's Task Manager just to shut it down.



Ah, _Arcanum_. My idiot savant half-orc technologist who made his own friends makes me smile (and I'm still playing version of him in D&D)...

As for getting to work on Vista, I've heard running it as Admin under Compatibility mode *should* would. My want to check some of the patches at Terra-Arcanum as well.


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## JediSoth (Jun 22, 2008)

If you have any questions as to whether or not your computer will run a specific game, check out System Requirements Lab. It has yet to steer me wrong.

JediSoth


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## Grog (Jun 22, 2008)

Have you played Planescape: Torment? Best PC RPG ever made, even though it's almost 10 years old now.


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## stonegod (Jun 22, 2008)

Grog said:
			
		

> Have you played Planescape: Torment? Best PC RPG ever made, even though it's almost 10 years old now.



That's a strong claim... though not wrong. 

Torment, Arcanum, and the original Fallouts are my top ones.


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## stonegod (Jun 22, 2008)

JediSoth said:
			
		

> If you have any questions as to whether or not your computer will run a specific game, check out System Requirements Lab. It has yet to steer me wrong.



But _Arcanum_ is not on there.


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## Grog (Jun 22, 2008)

stonegod said:
			
		

> Torment, Arcanum, and the original Fallouts are my top ones.




The Fallouts are good too (well, the first one, anyway; the second one was good too, but was hamstrung by being buggy as all get-out), but I don't think they've aged as well as Torment has. Still worth playing if one hasn't played them before, though.


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## silvermane (Jun 23, 2008)

> If it is an onboard one then you will generally have problems




I bought one of those (GeForce 7050), and boy am I screwed. The salesman lied to me that the played NFS Carbon on it with no problem. Well, he may have *played* it, but conveniently forgot to mention that it froze after 10 minutes or so. I can't even play Doom 3, NWN or any older 3D game without freezing, not to mention newer ones.


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## Bront (Jun 26, 2008)

silvermane said:
			
		

> I bought one of those (GeForce 7050), and boy am I screwed. The salesman lied to me that the played NFS Carbon on it with no problem. Well, he may have *played* it, but conveniently forgot to mention that it froze after 10 minutes or so. I can't even play Doom 3, NWN or any older 3D game without freezing, not to mention newer ones.



Ugh, I didn't even know they made something that... underpowered.

That's worse than most onboard cards.


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## Ranger REG (Jul 5, 2008)

Bront said:


> That's because they don't need to.  There were only a few games that had consistent problems with dual core PCs, and those were fixed with patches.  Even if you didn't patch it, you can solve it by setting the program to only use 1 CPU manually, so it isn't an issue.



So, I can play a game that requires 3.0 GHz single-core CPU on a 2.1 Ghz dual-core PC?

And how does one manually set a program to use 1 core in a multi-core PC?


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## Ranger REG (Jul 5, 2008)

stonegod said:


> Ah, _Arcanum_. My idiot savant half-orc technologist who made his own friends makes me smile (and I'm still playing version of him in D&D)...
> 
> As for getting to work on Vista, I've heard running it as Admin under Compatibility mode *should* would. My want to check some of the patches at Terra-Arcanum as well.



Tried running it under Admin and set compatibility to XP, but still my mouse (or my touchpad) won't move the cursor.


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## drothgery (Jul 5, 2008)

Ranger REG said:


> So, I can play a game that requires 3.0 GHz single-core CPU on a 2.1 Ghz dual-core PC?




You probably can, but it's mostly not because the extra core makes up for the difference. It's because all CPUs aren't created equal, and no game would require a 3 GHz CPU unless it was talking about a Pentium 4. Which did less per clock cycle than most other mainstream desktop CPUs, but compensated by running at a somewhat higher clock speed. Eventually, though, it ran into some issues which kept the clock speed from scaling as high as Intel planned, so AMD's Athlon 64 ended up outperforming it at lower clock speeds, and so ended up getting replaced with the Core 2 family of chips. A 1.8 - 2 GHz Core 2 Duo or a 2-2.2 GHz Athlon 64 is generally considered about the equivalent of a 3 GHz Pentium 4.


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## Ranger REG (Jul 7, 2008)

drothgery said:


> You probably can, but it's mostly not because the extra core makes up for the difference. It's because all CPUs aren't created equal, and no game would require a 3 GHz CPU unless it was talking about a Pentium 4. Which did less per clock cycle than most other mainstream desktop CPUs, but compensated by running at a somewhat higher clock speed. Eventually, though, it ran into some issues which kept the clock speed from scaling as high as Intel planned, so AMD's Athlon 64 ended up outperforming it at lower clock speeds, and so ended up getting replaced with the Core 2 family of chips. A 1.8 - 2 GHz Core 2 Duo or a 2-2.2 GHz Athlon 64 is generally considered about the equivalent of a 3 GHz Pentium 4.



Well, I'm hoping the software developers would make it easier for us to glance at their software's system requirement labels (both minimum and recommended), especially when we now phasing out single-core for multi-core CPU. The last thing I want to do is convert the single-core requirement to multi-core standard, if there is such a formula.

It's bad enough trying to read the food's nutrition labels, no matter how much they claim they're understandable than before.


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## Plane Sailing (Jul 7, 2008)

My vote would be to install dosbox or vmware player and obtain a copy of "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" and/or "System Shock", two of the most fun games I've ever played on a PC.

OK, they are old, but they are still two of the most fun games I've ever played on a PC!


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## drothgery (Jul 7, 2008)

Ranger REG said:


> Well, I'm hoping the software developers would make it easier for us to glance at their software's system requirement labels (both minimum and recommended), especially when we now phasing out single-core for multi-core CPU.




It's not really single-core vs. multi-core. For PC purposes, it's Pentium 4 (and Pentium 4 derivatives, like the dual-core Pentium Ds and the Celerons of the Pentium 4 era) vs. everything else. My desktop at work (which I'm using right now) is a 3.4 GHz Pentium D (dual-core Pentium 4). My notebook at home is a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo. In virtually any benchmark and in observed performance running the same applications, my notebook is _faster_.

It really wasn't the software guys' fault. If the development path Intel started with the Pentium 4 had been successful in the long run, Intel would have stuck with it and AMD would have come up with something similar, and clock speed numbers would work going forward (and, really, the high clock speed / low instructions per clock type of design isn't dead; the Xbox 360, PS3, and IBM's POWER6 server CPUs work like that). If Intel had never bothered with the P4 (and covered the 'Pentium 4 era' by extending the Pentium 3's life a little longer and then making a desktop version of the Pentium M), then clock speed numbers would have been pretty comparable. 

But instead we had a bubble where the dominant CPU platform (at least in terms of sales -- and for a year or so in terms of performance) was very much out of sync with anything that came before or after it. It would have been silly, in 2002 or 2003, to write specs that weren't based on a Pentium 4 (and indeed, AMD's Athlon XP model numbers at the time -- no matter what they were supposed to stand for officially -- were intended to give some indication of which Pentium 4 to compare it against); that's what the vast majority of new desktops used.


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