new RPG Maker 2 Shots

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Originally posted by Ammadeau


If you want the best, you have to pay for it. :p

I actually upgraded my comp right before getting Morrowind and it cost me $500, 200 of which was for Win2k (more money to MS...)

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I have a feeling my 233 would take a bit more cash than that to make it Morrowindable. Maybe some elements of the editor will make it to the XB rev as an add-on disc, who knows?

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If all you want to do is play around with a RPG maker, that's fine, but I'm sick of the sort of limitations that they all seem to posess when they're made for consoles. Of course, I expect RPG maker 2 to be better than most, but the memory limitation will still definitely be there and I doubt it will be nearly as customizable as Morrowind.

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As customizable? No, but 40 megs of hard drive space should be adequate for anyone's purposes.

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But then again Morrowind is pretty far from the Japanese style RPG mold and might not be the sort of thing everyone wants to create in the first place. It has no turn-based battles or the ability to create cut-scenes to make the story more active, instead of passive.

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Hey, a Jap style rpg is what I've got in mind anyway...sort of. And Morrowind's fights...maybe I haven't seen enough of them, but what I did witness was like a really shitty version of the Maken X scheme. Not that it'll stop me from getting it, but they didn't seem to put as much work into the combat as they did the rest of the game.

No, it's definitely better than Maken X, but sadly not by a whole lot. Supposedly this was one element they altered a bit for the Xbox version, but I wouldn't expect too much.

But that's only for the melee. Ranged attacks are a whole other story and then some. The battles I tend to get into are pretty nerve wracking too since the higher level monsters can kill me with two or sometimes one hit. So if I goof, it's reload time. But there's usually quite a few tricks and strats I can use to make sure I don't end up as monster food.

A 233? Well, you would need a new CPU, motherboard, memory, and video card. Maybe a new case too, but those a real cheap. Everything else should be salvagable, and if you don't mind running Morrowind a bit choppy (runs like silk on my comp), you probably could upgrade in the range of $300-400 US. I played it first on a 1GHZ machine and didn't even notice the choppiness until playing it on my upgraded one.

Upgrading is only really expensive if you always go top of the line. Go a few steps down from that and you'll find its actually pretty affordable.

I have a p3 500 MHZ computer. Do you think Morrowind will run smoothly if I upgrade it to 1GHZ and buy some old graphic card like a TNT2?

GeForce 3: $90
Motherboard: $50
1.4 ghz chip: $80
Any sound card will do, but you get what you pay for. I'm still running an SB-16. :)
256 RAM: $25

Total: $245

It probably won't run Doom III very well (from what I can predict), but you can run anything that's out just fine with that.

Why would I need a new motherboard?And is 128 RAM enough?$245 still seems good though , im thinking that it would be better to upgrade my Pc than to buy an xbox.

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Originally posted by Ammadeau
No, it's definitely better than Maken X, but sadly not by a whole lot. Supposedly this was one element they altered a bit for the Xbox version, but I wouldn't expect too much.

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Aside from the fact that you have more options due to the presence of magic and such, why do you say better? I ask because from what I saw Maken's was more fluid and had better collision. I realize the "misses" in Morrowind are the game's concession to rpg style roll-of-the-dice fighting, but it seems so much more could have been done with a first person real time fight scheme.

As for the PC cost, before I upgrade it it's probably worth my while to just get a decent laptop, since I need one and I'm not a huge PC gamer anyway. But yeah, my PC needs pretty much everything but a monitor and case. It's a glorified type writer and Dreamcast setup. My graphics card is so sad it can't even run Samurai Shodown II properly (official release, not Neo Rage or anything).

I'm only using a SB Live card because I got it for free myself. :)

A 500MHZ can run Morrowind with all the effects off and be only be somewhat choppy if you tweak it as much as possible. 1GHZ machine will run it completely without tweaks, but you're best off getting some flavor of Geoforce card.

As for Morrowind's combat, the misses aren't just because of the hidden dice rolls. NPCs will dodge and block both melee and ranged attacks. Morrowind makes more use of the enviroment than Maken X did, and I don't remember being able to summon a Scamp as a decoy while I took down a demon lord in Maken X. :p

This is mainly ranged attacks though. The melee ones tend to be 'hack until it's dead', which is a shame. I wish they at least gave you manual control of your shield, but oh well. Having a fist fight is actually pretty fun though.

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Originally posted by xS
Why would I need a new motherboard?And is 128 RAM enough?$245 still seems good though , im thinking that it would be better to upgrade my Pc than to buy an xbox.

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Motherboards only support a certain range of clockspeeds, and I can guarentee that a motherboard running a 500 mHz chip will not support a chipset at most above 1 gHz. My motherboard is currently running its most powerful supported chipset (an 800 mHz Duron), and I believe its range is 500-800. So if I want to get, say, a 1.8 gHz chip, I'd need a new motherboard to run it.

The prices I listed were grabbed from a brief looking at www.pricewatch.com, you'll need to do a brief amount of research to make sure everything's compatible (always nessecary when building your own puters). 128 is a decent amount of RAM, but at $25 (that's what I bought my chip from Micro Center from, so you might be able to find it for cheaper online) it's hard to pass up (at least for those of us who mess with puters). Remember, whatever you can find in stores can be found much cheaper ordering online.

There's only one tough part about building your own puter if you've never done it before: matching up all the wires to the motherboard. You've got to make sure you've got the manual out and read it right. Follow the directions and you'll be fine, everything else is easy as pie.

StriderKyo: Just remember laptops are always tons more expensive then desktop (used to be an easy $1000 more for the same specs, but that might've come down since I no longer pay attention to laptop prices).

In any case, Morrowind's more about raising stats and skills then it is about being a refined game. It's got problems, it's got holes, it isn't the smoothest game, but it's so damn open to anything and everything it's hard to believe any other game that claims to be free-form.

My only major complaint about the game, the one thing that annoys me, is that stats only go up if they're successful. As I think of it (and as how we do it in pencil and paper role-playing around here), if you're using the skill, you should be getting better at it, as you're learning. If you fire a bow and arrow, you're learning at the very least what not to do, but the game only rewards when you hit. It almost creates an Catch 22: You can't succeed until your skill goes up, but your skill won't go up until you succeed.

You could think about the skills another way though, that all those repeated failures are just leading up to your eventual success that you are finally rewarded to. Also, reversing this would make getting the highest skill levels almost impossible. I almost never miss with my bow now at 65%. If I only learned through failure, I doubt it would pass 80.

Even at their lowest, my skills work fairly well. I had a shield skill of 5 and the shield actually saved my ass in a fairly early fight by blocking two seperate shots.

Almost forgot something really cool about the combat. You can actually deflect spells with arrows. They might have to be magic arrows, but if you shoot the spell effect dead on and have a high enough skill, the arrow will set it off. Had an amazingly cool fight with an Ash Ghoul who would have otherwise destroyed me this way.

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Originally posted by Ammadeau
You could think about the skills another way though, that all those repeated failures are just leading up to your eventual success that you are finally rewarded to. Also, reversing this would make getting the highest skill levels almost impossible. I almost never miss with my bow now at 65%. If I only learned through failure, I doubt it would pass 80.

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No, you misunderstand. What I mean is that you learn through simply doing, whether or not you succeed or fail is trival. By using you improve a skill. Now, if succeeding normally gives you, say, a five point increase, then a fail could give you maybe two points instead, but nevertheless an increase. As it is, I hit one arrow out of about every fifteen-twenty on average, which is highly annoying to me.

Pretty cool about shooting spells, didn't know that.