Three Moves Ahead 436: To Infinity Engine and Beyond

Three Moves Ahead

Idle Thumbs

Strategy, Games & Hobbies, War, Strategy Games, Games, War Games, Video Games

4.8 • 532 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2018

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Games like Baldur's Gate cast a long shadow but, like a racist grandparent, come along with too many caveats of being a product of their time. There have been many attempts to capture the magic of early CRPGS while adding modern accoutrements, and the financial success of games like Pillars of Eternity and Dragon Age: Origins are clear indicators that the public is looking for such a product. But have any of these attempts actually nailed the CRPG formula? Is a modern CRPG truly worth pursuing, and were the originals as good as we remember? Join our host T.J. Hafer, Rowan Kaiser, and Cameron Kunzelman as they travel from the Gold Box to the most recent iteration of Pillars of Eternity in search of the perfect CRPG.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host for this week, T.J. Hafer.
0:05.3	In my party today, our video game critic Cameron Kuntzlman.
0:10.2	Hello.
0:11.7	And 3M.A. Veteran Games Beats Rowan Kaiser.
0:16.0	Hello.
0:17.0	And today we're talking about specifically, somewhat specifically, Pillars of Eternity 2, but also more in general, the infinity engine family genre of RPGs.
0:33.2	Not our normal thing.
0:35.1	It's, are they strategy games?
0:38.1	Why are we talking about this at all?
0:40.7	Rowan, why are we talking about the Infinity Engine games on 3MA?
0:45.1	Got a short answer to a long answer,
0:46.7	and the short answer is fairly simply that tactics, games, and RPGs are often dealing with the same sorts of questions.
0:53.2	Your, you know, X-coms and your darkest dungeons are, you know,
0:57.8	running parallel with your fallouts and your Shadow runs and your Infinity Engine games.
1:03.0	So looking at the two of those makes a certain level of sense.
1:07.7	The longer sort of version going into the history of specifically the Infinity
1:12.8	engine is that these were games that were designed to be the ultimate RPGs. These were
1:22.2	the RPG Messiah. And that included that they were both for role-playing as in
1:27.9	roll-as-in-dice and role-playing as in character.
1:31.0	So they were supposed to be good for people who both cared a lot about combat
1:35.7	and didn't care at all about combat.
1:39.5	And this is partially because of the RPG collapse of the mid-90s,
	...

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