Caltrops - Might & Magic X: Legacy





	[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]...strategy-adventures by decoupling character progression from game progression. If you absolutely must have experience points, at least copy oldschool Dungeons & Dragons, which handed out 1 XP for every 1 gold piece worth of treasure the adventurers managed to collect. That way it's still a game about cleverly obtaining the maximum amount of loot with the minimum amount of personal risk, a la Conan the Barbarian or Bilbo Baggins, with your XP total acting as a literal score display when your incredibly fragile little man inevitably dies young or retires happily at the ripe old level of two or three. Of course, the obvious solution to overleveling in conventional <i>computer</i> RPGs is to scatter some incredibly difficult and equally rewarding encounters around the map, and provide enough clues that a smart player can seek them out while skipping over all the low-level cannon fodder. But I suppose that conflicts pretty badly with player expectations of 30-50 hours of dull lawnmowering. This is one of the reasons why the original Fallout is more or less the only RPG I can stomach. The developers really made an effort to provide enough narrative context for each battle that it was meaningful for reasons other than powering up, and usually still gave you the option not to participate anyway. The time limits encouraged you to prioritize your character's ostensible mission over ~FANTASY GENOCIDE~, and there's very little chance you could make the entire game last more than a dozen hours no matter how much you dragged your feet. This is probably also why everybody else likes the sequels better, since they added more dungeons, more mobs, more fucking <i>content</i> to satisfy the RPG gamer's traditionally bottomless appetite for fucking content (not to mention Doritos and Jujubes and pickled eggs and and and).[/quote]