Futuristic/Sci-FI RPGs....are there any?

[MarionDeputy]

All this talk about the classics got me thinking about an old game I used to really enjoy. It was called X-Com. It wasn't quite an RPG in the true sense that you controlled a single soldier, but you could manage each one in a limited sense. To those who don't remember it. The concept was that aliens began to invade earth, your team of soldiers was developed to stop them, the most interesting part of the game to me was diversity of the game play. Globally you had to manage the funding and expenditures of your force, but then you also had a tile-based, turn based combat that was really done well. As the story line moved along, you had specific aliens that you had to capture, to learn more about the plot and how to stop them. One of the most unique parts of the game is that you could take the weapons of dead aliens have your research team study the technology, and then reproduce them in numbers for your team. It was a great game, and one that I played for hours on end. And the music score was awesome, it added a ton of tension, to the missions. Does anyone else know of any futuristic or sci-fi ish RPGs?

[BasiliskWrangler]

X-COM rocked. Anyone remember Syndicate on the Atari ST/Amiga? That was a bitchin' sci-fi turn based game.

Sorry that didn't answer your question MarionDeputy...just had to chime in.

[Gallifrey]

Fallout 1 and 2.

An arguement could probably be made for the System Shock games. While they are first-person "shooters", they require the player to take much more care and put more thought into how they respond to situations and overcome obstacles. Not sure about SS1, but in SS2 you could choose one of three "classes", each giving a very different approach to the game.
Fantastic atmosphere, lots of tension, high-risk, lots of discovery and uncovering of a mysterious plot. In SS2, you're aboard a space vessel in which something terrible has happened, and you're largely on your own, trying to make your way to a survivor who is able to contact you, and things unfold from there.
While not really an RPG in some of the traditional senses, it's far more immersive than many of what has been touted as an RPG for the last few years.
Both System Shocks are freeware now, too http://www.the-underdogs.info/search.ph ... stem+shock

Also Deux Ex. Again, an FPS, but you have a wide array of options in developing your character, and a reasonable amount of choice to make throughout the game, which has more impact than choices available in many "RPGs". It's a cyberpunk-like setting too, which is always fun.
The sequel was not as good, but still enjoyable.

[MarionDeputy]

X-COM rocked. Anyone remember Syndicate on the Atari ST/Amiga? That was a bitchin' sci-fi turn based game.

Sorry that didn't answer your question MarionDeputy...just had to chime in.

I do remember Sydicate, that was an awesome game....

[Rollor]

Ohh yeahh X-com 1 aka ufo: enemy unkown was and still is an awsome . I still play it now and then. The reaseach was very well made. You really did everything you could to get new alien weapons, and just stun the bastards so you could take them home and toture them till they told you about their base:). Such nice game..

Has anyone tried the new ones?
Ufo: afterlight / aftermath / aftershock
Another developer is making one too: ufo Extraterrestrials

[dteowner]

Has anyone tried the new ones?
Ufo: afterlight / aftermath / aftershock
Another developer is making one too: ufo Extraterrestrials

Aftermath and Aftershock didn't fare too well. I didn't buy either one after spending some quality time with the Aftermath demo.

Extraterrestrials looks like it has promise. Seems like a blatant xerox of the original XCom, but I wouldn't call that a bad thing at all. Production delays have been the name of the game, though--they just pushed their release date back from "Summer 2006" to the Christmas season, and that's something like their 4th multi-month delay. Unfortunate, because I'm honestly looking forward to the game.

[MarionDeputy]

These guys are working on a remake too.... http://www.projectxenocide.com/

[Rollor]

Aftermath and Aftershock didn't fare too well. I didn't buy either one after spending some quality time with the Aftermath demo.

Shame the fucked it up:/
I didn't care to download the aftermath demo so i played some enemy unkown instead. Glad I didn't miss anything

I will look into this Extraterrestrials...
Also the remake looks cool...

[syrio]

Albion was a very nice rpg though I haven't played it at that time, and dosbox can't emulate it well for me.
Anachronox was also very good.
Maybe Kotor 1-2.

[20mithrandir]

Anachronox was not only good, but a "superior" game. Maybe one of the most underestimated projects that got cut off from the publisher-side and rushed out in very early stage (some neat little bugs). The atmosphere is really great and the overall black humor kept me laughing all the time. For me it was one of the funniest games since the Monkey Islands, but it has just a little classical role-play character and is more kinda interactive movie-adventure (in my opinion).

The also mentioned Syndicate is what most Bullfrog games weare: A great game. It's also one of my alltime favorites that I played not only for years but decades ; - )

Strictly speaking about roleplaying games (I know the Deus Ex and System Shock games and they're also really good ones but I wouldn't call them RPGs) there's not very much in the SF-sector that came after the two Fallout games (and again: great games ; - ). With a little SF-accent you maybe can mention the Wizardry games (but that's more a mixture of classical fantasy with science-fiction elements). One game that I just forgot about is The Fall: Last Days of Gaia (a loft of bugs but a nice game and really appreciable after twelve or so patches ; - ). I didn't like the first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game and don't know the second one.

On the Hack 'n Slash front you can also mention Harbinger. The Diablo-Clone in SF-Setting got a lot of really bad reviews but I actually think that the game has some nice aspects (e.g. the ranged attacks of the culibine character) and you must not forget Space Hack (also known as "Novasphere 13" and some other terms).

UFO: Aftershock/Aftermath/Aftersomething are not soooo bad, but in comparison to the classic X-COM games ... well, ok, they suck. Maybe you want to take a look at UFO: Extraterrestrials that should come out in the next weeks (hopefully):
http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/

[Larec]

Ditto on the anachronox Comment Mith made.

I loved it. Anachronox was like a PC version of the SNES Chrono Trigger with betetr writing and characterization. Turned a friend on to it and he searched ebay for two years trying to find a copy. (He finally found one last week, oddly enough)

It's a shame that Anachronox went unnoticed by the gaming public. It was so much like FF7 that it would have easily cracked the mainstream.

But it was also so much NOT like FF7 that CRPG diehards would love it too.

Sounds silly, but if you played it, you know what I mean.

[durzagott]

There were also the Megatraveller games back in the early nineties. They were lots of fun and very rich in detail.

I'd love to see a modern update to those games

[Saxon1974]

There is Centauri Alliance from the guy who made the first 2 Bard's Tale games. Its on my play list but I haven't got to it yet, it supposed to be good and I loved his Bard's Tale games.

Its only on commodore 64 though so you would need an emulator. Its not difficult to setup though I have been playing through some old C64 games using Vice.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/centauri-alliance

Also the Gold Box built Buck Rogers game are pretty popular, also on my play list.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/buck- ... o-doomsday

[CrazyBernie]

I just started playing Albion... it's an old school crpg that starts out sci-fi and blends in some fantasy elements. You'll need dosbox to play it. I like it, except for the first person elements... bleh.

[Getharn]

This post rambles perhaps a little off-topic, so apologies...

Someone mentioned Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, but there's also now Mass Effect, which is Bioware's most recent offering. I haven't played KotOR, but it got rave reviews in general. Mass Effect also got very good reviews, and it was good fun when I had a brief go on someone else's XBox version. I thought it was perhaps a bit "RPG-lite", though that does seem more or less par for the course with a lot of mainstream RPGs these days. Doesn't mean it's not fun, but it's not another Planescape: Torment.

X-Com was extremely similar to an earlier game called Laser Squad, which I loved on the 8-bit platforms. There's a modern play-by-email equivalent by the creators of X-Com called Laser Squad Nemesis, and looking into it properly has been on my "to-do" list for aeons now. One day I might get around to it.

It occurred to me the other day that it's also the sort of game, turn-based and with low system requirements, that could work fantastically on the new ranges of cheap subnotebooks we're seeing, and even mobile devices like the iPhone and Android-based devices. You have a spare ten minutes, so you take your next turn, which is queued up and automatically uploaded to the servers whenever you've got a wifi or cellular data connection. Then the other player(s) make(s) their turn(s), and you get that downloaded next time you've got connectivity. You could easily conduct a slow game over a week or two even while you're in the office, during 5-10 minute breaks from typing, etc. If you link individual encounters together with strategy phases in between, you could turn it into something much more long-term.