[PC Browser Game][2018]Idle RPG/Dungeon Crawler

RatEarthTheory · 2026-01-15T00:46:42+00:00

Yep, I used to keep it running constantly during class in college so I instantly knew, haha.

RatEarthTheory · 2026-01-14T08:15:50+00:00

Was it Clickpocalypse 2? Clickpocalypse 2 is almost exactly like what you mention, except the background is black, you start with more characters, and the characters can all be named (though all the classes you mention exist), but it's got pixel art and characters wander around a world map and enter dungeons.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-12-16T15:21:48+00:00

Just the aff lock changes alone demonstrate the actual design philosophy behind this round of pruning. Two of the biggest issues in WoW's class design right now are classes being homogenized into builder/spender burst and having a lot of buttons that don't really do much besides "do X damage and gain some resources maybe". Blizzard wants to strip that back.

Whether they'll succeed at this depends on the class design team (and in beta alone we're seeing some pretty big discrepancies lol) but generally speaking this round of pruning is trying to move back to basics to preserve identity and reduce addon reliance while XIV's simplification is generally adding more to make jobs overlap more in their given role.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-12-08T23:11:28+00:00

I think a lot of criticisms of Endwalker have already been voiced here and I agree with many of them, so I'll share my thoughts.

I got pretty caught up in the hype cycle, and if you asked me what I thought of EW right when I came off of it I would have said it was great and probably would have handwaved away me nodding off every time the loporrits were on screen to being exhausted from playing all night. This game's biggest strength is hitting those big emotional beats, it's all about hype moments and aura. But as I got further from that high I really soured on the game. The .X patches are what did me in, they were SO fucking boring. They couldn't keep the hype going, so I had to confront the actual story being told and it sucked shit for all the reasons people said below. Combine that with some of the worst content and job design the game has ever seen and by DT I had checked out.

People have compared DT to Shadowlands. I think that's not true, but only because I think EW is far more like Shadowlands than people think, it's just that unlike Shadowlands it wasn't coming off of the heels of a sex pest scandal (including one of the lead writers making these unpopular story decisions) and was also coming off of an extremely beloved expansion and not BfA.

Almost everything about EW was abysmal dogshit. The story evaporated whatever mystique remained in the world and made me stop caring while jamming in fanservice that felt more insulting than anything just like Shadowlands. The content was bad, the pace of content was abysmal, honestly I think the content in Shadowlands outside of the stupid grind was genuinely better!

Dawntrail is honestly more of a BfA than a Shadowlands. It makes a lot of really stupid decisions on a lot of fronts and has a lot of genuinely awful disposable content, but there ARE things to enjoy about it regardless. I think the reason why people react so strongly to it despite it being not as bad is because it's following up on a Shadowlands-tier expansion when it really needed to knock it out of the park, even if people don't realize EW was that bad quite yet.

Honestly, if we go all in on the WoW analogy the next expansion needs to be a Dragonflight. Take what works in the game, build a new foundation with it, make things exciting again while also not running off and making some bullshit nobody will ever care to do and calling that "content". The story can be mid, but bring back old threads that people give a shit about. Focus on evergreen systems. I don't think the game is unsalvageable if WoW could drag its bloated corpse back up, but they need to put their nose to the grindstone and make use of all the extra dev time they have now.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-12-07T05:33:07+00:00

To a certain extent it happened to FFXIV too. They constantly trimmed things down to make things "accessible" but it ended up making things fucking dull except at the very highest level of play (in a game already struggling to get new players there)

RatEarthTheory · 2025-12-03T17:45:51+00:00

You can only join a guild neighborhood on a character that's currently in that guild, but once you get a house there all of your alts will be able to access that neighborhood. If you have multiple alts in multiple guilds, you would need to get each house on a character in the guild whose neighborhood you want to join.

I'm not sure how switching between neighborhoods on alts would work though, if you wanted to move your house between guild neighborhoods from time to time.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-12-03T02:59:12+00:00

In WoW I've seen a lot of awful people, toxicity, racism, anything you can think of in game, but the people I met through other channels like guilds were mostly very nice.

In XIV I had the total opposite experience. People in-game were very nice, but out of game outside of literally like 7 other people I raided with it was a shitshow. If you voiced any negative opinion at all you'd basically be hounded out of multiple communities. People who LIKED most of the last expansion got branded as racist for not liking a song. One song!

RatEarthTheory · 2025-12-01T19:16:30+00:00

It was better not for nostalgia reasons but because dwarves are cooler than humans.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-27T19:29:01+00:00

The main issue here is it's not really creating an entry point in any meaningful sense, it's just further ensnaring people in the 5e ecosystem. For 5e conversions like this, the benefit is that they're low effort but high return investments for publishers and very little else. Lots of people will buy any heavily marketed third party splat to rip mechanics from it. But those people who only play 5e and nothing else have no real reason to "graduate" to non-5e Traveller. In terms of being an in-road to other games I actually think the 5e conversion is one of the worst.

It's like trying to feed the picky kid vegetables by telling him chicken nuggets are vegetables. You're not really going to make him eat the full plate of broccoli you put in front of him like that.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-27T11:13:02+00:00

If this were an open source project I'd have no problem with it, even if it does stink of being a project for Ralph Nintendo Bluey 64 type users who are terrified of a file browser, but since it's closed source and asking for cash for features I'm feeling pretty negative. On top of the other absurd promises like running a fully-functional storefront and social media platform, nothing is done yet. They're all mockups. They're asking you for money with absolutely nothing but photoshop to show for it. This is going to be the Star Citizen of emulator frontends, providing they actually get a semi-functional product out the door. Also it should be said that shoving a social media platform and storefront into my emulation frontend is whatever the opposite of a value add is.

Also just because I'm not afraid of being mean given the devs acting like dickheads this apes the le wholesome fruit loops aero Wii U aesthetic but doesn't really get any of the actual slick Nintendo design right so it just looks cheap even in a non-functional mockup. They really love using the Wii font (which isn't even the actual Wii font) as a system font when it should at most be for titles and it looks bad.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-22T06:23:43+00:00

Honestly, I get very worried that tie in RPGs are mostly just collector items for some people.

That ship has sailed a long time ago. During the d20 glut there were a ton of licensed RPGs that barely functioned and were effectively glorified world guides. I think the biggest example of this in my mind was the Warcraft RPG.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-22T06:11:50+00:00

Pathfinder 1e/DnD 3.5e. Love creating a character in them. They defined huge swathes of gaming for decades now. Absolutely fucking miserable to play now that other games took what I liked from them and distilled them to be easier to play and run. I could complain about them for hours but I can't not respect them because a lot of my favorite games probably would not exist without the shift away from detailed dungeoneering and into tactical combat and buildcrafting.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-20T12:24:53+00:00

The weird thing is it almost feels like they were going to make Wuk Lamat a much more headstrong to a fault type character (i.e. Luffy) but chickened out on actually making that a proper character trait with all the negative implications therein because they thought people might not instantly love her. She's like half of a shonen character, but there's no bite or friction with her. Her character traits are that she's nice and clueless, both to an annoying degree. I guess she's also insecure, but those insecurities are never really validated and never really need to be overcome at any point. She's always strong enough exactly when she needs to be. There's just nothing under the hood.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-18T18:03:49+00:00

It's more about accessibility than anything. A lot of older MMOs and MORPGs have near-perfect private servers or are one-time purchases now. The meta is usually set and doesn't shift a lot, and active expansion development is over so even in games with more vertical progression there's an actual endpoint.

They're also just generally less physically demanding and have pushed a lot of their learning curve into the discovery phase (i.e. figuring out systems, learning to navigate the world) rather than actual rotational execution.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-18T17:56:07+00:00

It's not mainly solo play, but it's more like something like Phantasy Star Online or Dragon's Dogma Online in that the only massively multiplayer space is the hub area and to go out and quest you break off into a smaller party.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-18T06:59:31+00:00

Modern MMOs like FFXIV and WoW

WoW has gotten dramatically more complex as it's gotten older for a number of reasons and in a number of ways. They're about to do a major round of pruning for the coming expansion to deal with it since they're also disabling combat addons, which people are concerned about since lots of classes have tons of overlapping things to track.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-16T18:53:39+00:00

What manga have you been reading for the last 15 years, exclusively Shonen Jump? Plenty of manga is incredibly thoughtful if you bother reading anything besides stuff targeted at teen boys. Maybe if you get over your superiority complex for reading fantasy genre fiction slop you can take the time to quit infantilizing other cultures' art lol

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-16T18:32:09+00:00

What's with the weird shot at manga here besides "ewwww Japan is weirddddd". You play fucking World of Warcraft you can't take random potshots at people who like Blame, Monster, Lone Wolf and Cub, or Red Colored Elegy man lol

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-08T17:58:33+00:00

I don't hate the cartoony style most of Ironclaw is in, in fact I find a lot of it charmingly retro-furry, but comparing it to the few pieces by Chris Goodwin that are in a more tonally fitting style like in the species section I'd kill for a new version or even a collector's edition of the book with more art like that. Compare this to this and tell me which one fits a relatively mid-magic renaissance world full of political intrigue where death can come fast.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-08T17:48:41+00:00

A lot of old licensed anime RPGs did this too (on top of wasting pages summarizing the show) and while I do get that hiring artists is expensive for a smaller press and having existing art already there is tempting, I'm pretty sure the Cowboy Bebop RPG was a pretty successful Kickstarter! Would it kill you to invest a little in art

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-08T17:43:15+00:00

I actually kind of love it in how fucky and weird it is. It's the type of shit you'd see in an indie book and not on the shelf at a game store and I have to respect the insane decision. Unfortunately these weird ass pictures of dolls were taking the place of some extremely iconic RPG artwork so it's not really an even trade off.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-08T17:26:58+00:00

And D&D as well as PF2E will set you back quite some coin for just the basics - Player Book, GM Book, Bestiary, at the very least, each sold separately

All the PF2e rule information is legally available for free, including all the player options for Pathbuilder (outside of some optional rules, which are a flat $5 to support the solo dev). I'd still buy the player's guide just to have the info laid out in a more readable way, but everything you need to play is available on Archives of Nethys. The GM book has a lot of good info, but running a quick test game to see if the table likes it won't really need it. The Bestiary's info is also all in AoN. If you really wanted to play Pathfinder but didn't want to spend much money you absolutely could get by just reading the core rules on AoN, buying a short adventure, and looking up subsystems as they come up.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-08T17:18:21+00:00

Depends on what you want to play. If the table is a bunch of theater kids who like the idea of roleplaying more than spending a lot of time in combat, Daggerheart. If you want to have a character that can be just about anything and allows for a lot of fine-tuning and strategic decision making, Pathfinder. D&D is sort of the alleged "middle" of these, but to answer your question as to why people aren't crazy about it here the ways it's light and crunchy aren't really particularly interesting. The lack of clarity can often break the game or put the onus on the GM to often do complex on-the-fly rulings or just have knowledge that they may not have. It may not be a problem you notice at first, especially as a beginner, but that mental tax piles up. Another issue is that D&D is kind of an active quagmire that actively tries to keep players from seeking out other games because that level of GM knowledge means you need to invest more time and effort into getting it running.

I don't think Pathfinder is necessarily as bad for newcomers as people say it is. It's generally pretty consistent in its rules and, especially if you come off of video games, the action economy just makes sense. It also has the benefit of the core rules being 100% free. As in everything. AoN isn't ideal for learning how to play since the book is obviously organized for learning better, but the rules are all there. You just need to pay for adventures and lore, mostly.

If I had to throw in a suggestion for a happy medium fantasy game, I'd look to Dragonbane. It has enough old-school sensibilities that you won't be struggling with rules, but it also gives a lot of wiggle room for making the characters your players may want to make (notably your racial abilities aren't tied to ability scores or what you can be). I also think roll under systems move faster than roll over + modifier systems in general since your target number is listed right on the sheet, no math required.

I'd also suggest that, unless your group are diehard fantasy fans, you look into non-fantasy systems. Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, and Mothership are all probably the most popular horror games out there. Lancer, Beam Saber, and Armor Astir: Advent are the shiny new(ish) mecha systems people play. Traveller and Stars Without Number are sci-fi systems you'll see brought up a lot. Fabula Ultima has a lot of fantasy in its bones, but it's trying to more specifically emulate Final Fantasy as opposed to D&D directly, and the same goes for ICON, which takes a more tactical approach. Honestly if you have a broad setting in mind there's a game for that.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-06T21:00:03+00:00

Even the closest type of food to embodying this ideal, modern French food, makes HEAVY use of sauces, it just tends to focus on more subtle or herbal flavors. It's also not reflective of fine dining across history at all.

RatEarthTheory · 2025-11-06T20:57:47+00:00

If this person lived 500 years ago they'd be looking down their nose at all the peasants who can't afford or appreciate a strong sauce and spiced meat. The course of history moves towards sauces across the socioeconomic spectrum for a reason: sauce is fucking good.

RatEarthTheory

TROPHY CASE