Which CRPG should I play?

Thanks to various sales and/or overestimated free time I own Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced, Wasteland 2: Director's Cut, Pillars of Eternity + The White March, Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenara. Which one should I start?

Pillars of Eternity

Divinity if you want combat, Torment if you want a heavy focus on narrative.

Pillars and Tyranny are a good balance between the two but are also real time with pause which some people seem angry about nowadays. Of those two I'd say PIllars since it sticks the landing a lot more gracefully.

Not a lot to say about Wasteland. It seemed okay but didn't really have much of a hook in me.

Pillars and Tyranny have a more coherent story. So if that's what you're looking for, then have at it.

Tyranny is the most focused. I liked it best. A lot shorter.

Pillars is a lore dump.

Divinity is a lot of combat and stealing. More whimsy.

Wasteland 2 is falloutish.

Torment is a book. Be prepared to read.

Pillars of Eternity is a very good modern update to the Baldur's Gate formula and my favourite but Tyranny would likely be the easiest for a newcomer to get into.

Of those, Wasteland 2 is probably the best at actually telling a story (as opposed to providing a lore dump about a world), and Divinity has the best gameplay.

However, the best CRPGs in recent years have been the Shadowrun games (except Chronicles, which was a different developer). I'd highly recommend them if you also have them somewhere in library. Returns is the first one, but its a little rougher than Dragonfall and Hong Kong; and the games aren't connected.

Divinity! Mix spells and environmental hazards like a motherfucker. Can't remember much about the story besides something to do with Pandora's Box but goddamn the combat was fun. Never played the others, sorry.

If you're ever keen to pick em up, then I'd totally second the new Shadowrun games as well.

And yeah with a pile of games like that further recommendations are probably not what you're interested in but echoing that Shadowrun Dragonfall and Hong Kong are just incredible.

@efesell: @fezrock: Owned and played Returns, Hong Kong and Dragonfall already.

I don't have the nostalgia some have for older cRPG's but I found Wasteland 2 to be mostly dull with regards to gameplay, though I think the story was well told. Divinity on the other hand has the most rote story of the above mentioned, while I found Pillars' commentary on dead gods to be really well done. I haven't played Tyranny so can't say much about that.

This is the same list of games I've been looking at lately, trying to figure out which to play. Letting CRPGS pile up isn't a great move; knowing that such a small list of games is going to probably take a couple hundred hours of your life to play through is daunting. I think I've decided on Original Sin, so that's what I'm going to recommend to you.

Also, have you heard of Serpent in the Staglands? God knows you don't need even more options to slow this process down, but that game is wonderful.

Depends what you're in the mood for. I think the all-around best game of the ones you listed is Pillars of Eternity. It's not without issues, and suffers from an overabundance of lore-dumps, but in terms of balancing between good mechanics and effective storytelling it's the one to pick. On the other hand, Divinity Original Sin has fantastic combat and some fun systemic interactions stuff, but a decidedly boring story. Tyranny benefits from being short and focused (aside from its rushed ending), but it also has super boring combat. Wasteland 2... isn't terrible, but it's not exactly amazing either. It has some serious UI problems and seems to think that watching a meter fill over and over again to perform a skill check is a good use of the player's time. Of the games on this list, it's the one that you'd be the most okay skipping.

I'm writing something up about Torment: Tides of Numenera right now, but to give the cliff notes version it's well written but left me a little cold. It never quite grounds its plot or super-weird world in the same way Planescape did, and as a result I had trouble caring about any of the characters or situations I found myself in.

Diablo III is still the best I think. It has the most fun endgame. Also, seasons are coming to consoles soon as well.

EDIT: Right, I spaced on the part where you didn't actually list it. Don't mind me.

Divinity has some great combat and is a good kind of odd. Tyranny is short, entertaining, good, and unique. Either of those.

Divinity IMO.

Everyone else is just trying to make a 90s RPG, Divinity pushes the genre forward. But if you care more about story than gameplay I guess I'd go with Tyranny.

Pillars of Eternity is the best, most comprehensive recent one. Tyranny is a nice, short story but combat is a breeze. Divinity has the best combat and gameplay, a bit different to a classic CRPG but its 'story' is trash and boring.

Pillars of Eternity is really underwhelming. The world building is so dry in my opinion, because they had the brilliant idea of making their own universe, so they are constantly trying to explain what the world is about in the worst ways possible. Also the companions are really bland, I honestly don't remember a single one on top of my head, which is pretty telling. The combat is pretty nice though, but I never finished it, too many game breaking bugs and then the witcher 3 came out, so I left it at like 80% complete and never went back.

I just finished Tyranny the other day and it was pretty good, I liked the unique setting, which is probably why I liked it a lot more than Pillars. Though the combat AI is wonky as fuck. It's relatively short though and ends abruptly, though I was expecting that, so it I didn't bother me as much. I liked that the game took place during a war and that being "evil" was more fleshed out than usual. Same combat as Pillars but more simplified.

Now I'm starting Torment and it's.. slow, but I expected as much, the predecessor was as well. I don't know what to think of the combat system yet, so far I dislike it, but I've not experienced much combat really. Who knows, maybe it'll grow on me, I'm not much of a turn based guy, unless I'm playing a strategy game like Jagged Alliance or X-com.

Wasteland 2 didn't click with me at all. bought it, and played like 3 hours. Maybe the directors Cut is more compelling, but I haven't gone back.

If you haven't already, I'd recommend playing the original planescape torment, it still holds up and is one of the best written games ever made. Baldurs Gate 2 is good, I really like the companions and locations you go to in that game.

I kinda loved the lore dump nature of Pillars, though that is a game that is more or less made specifically for my interests.

I kinda like Tyranny, Pillars just pooped words at me all the time... Haven't played Torment. And Wasteland 2 is kinda special taste I think. Worth trying it out though.

Yeah Divinity also... that just seems to be a bit too silly for me. But I hear people have had a lot of fun with the combat!

Just wanted to add that Pillars has a really great companion called Durance...

Torment is getting mixed reviews but I really liked it. If you like reading cool lore and talking your way around combat you should have a good time. The story/characters aren't as good as Planescape Torment but that's the best written game ever, so I'm not surprised.

The combat system is pretty bad but it's REALLY easy to avoid combat. It took me 33 hrs to beat the game and I spent maybe 45 minutes in combat.

EDIT: Wasteland 2 felt like a slog and I've given up on it. Tyranny has some interesting stuff going on, I've been meaning to come back to it. I just kept getting distracted by real life and new games coming out.

I've been playing Pillars for the first time recently, and I don't really get the criticism that the game's too wordy. It seems about on par with other RPGs in that respect. Granted, I'm not reading most of the in-game books, but that's also not out of line with similar games.

Regarding its lore, maybe the lore feels overpowering because it's so focused. The game has a laser focus on a single lore concept (souls) and every main quest and almost every companion story is about soul-related problems. On the one hand, I appreciate that discipline, but it does make the lore feel monolithic.

The only thing I am excited to recommend in that list (although I haven't played Tyranny or Torment!) is Divinity Original Sin's combat and mechanics (the story in the game is really bad I think and the art is boring). I didn't even get through the game but I kind of thought of it like I was playing XCOM at some point and I really enjoyed the combat alone basically for 60+ hours. I don't mean to say the other games are bad but honestly I would recommend older CRPGS if you haven't played them, which I think are better games.

The one game I would really recommend against is Wasteland 2 which I think is a pretty bad game. No aspect of it is like actively horrible but it is all so boring.

Also if you haven't played it I would actually recommend Shadowrun: Dragonfall but apologizes if you have. I enjoyed that game. It's probably the recent CRPG game I have the most positive things to say about overall. The first one is not very good and the improved a lot on it. I did not play Hong Kong yet.

I don't agree with the criticism but I see the area it's coming from. For me it's a lore dump because it doesn't do a good job with characters or plot and then it spends a lot of time giving you lore but hey I don't really care about the basics so it seems like just exposition. But I am someone who thinks that game is just okay.

To me that game just feels like they made a world and fleshed it all out and the actual plot of the game and the characters were an afterthought. It did not work for me.

I don't recall the problem with it being too wordy, its more that to me it came across as unnatural forced exposition most of the time. Like that they made a brand new world they had to explain from the bottom up CONSTANTLY. The game is good though, but a spiritual successor to BG2 it is not.

I dunno I think Pillars is definitely the revival type game that has managed to one up its inspiration.

Torment has been surprisingly good so far too, though not quite at the level yet.

@anonymous_jesse:

Pillars is a *good* lore dump.

@palmlykta: I'm finishing up my second playthrough of that game and thinking of writing a whole thing on how spectacular Durance is as a character.

@tothenines:The Wasteland 2 director's cut made a huge number of quality of life improvements to the UI and made inventory management much less of a chore; which I think made the game much more playable. The game's content was basically unchanged though, so if you weren't enjoying the writing and/or the combat I don't think it'll change your opinion.

@prestige: The problem with Pillars of Eternity is not that its wordy, the problem is what those words are. The game spends huge amounts of time talking about the past and almost no time dealing with the present. Even Durance, who I think is the best written of the party members, is essentially just a giant encyclopedia. He'll give tons of opinions and information on a war that happened in the past, but barely even acknowledges the game's plot; and all the party members are like that. Each one is caught up in their backstory, and the game never does the work of fully bringing them into the main story.

The past is so important to the present issues in Pillars that I think that focus is totally fair but I will agree with the companion stories being remarkably weak for the genre.

They're well written and I like them but it does feel like many of them just kinda trundle to a conclusion.