Well that's better than just standing there asking for it.

They obviously should have gone with "Shadowrealms"

Obviously with the requirements for a detailed RPG like Darklands, design will be a major element at the start. This design will probably take the longest so unlike a self made mod, this will need the design work of a full game even though it will be a mod. Given the 25 years experience multiple team members have with regards running the Darklands message boards on Yahoo, I am still confident that the right respect will be given to the original. Where original code may be needed is if they go with the same procedural quest system that created quests on the fly. That's all I can say at the moment.

Yet again:

Why Morrowind, Why Oblivion, Why Fallout, Why Skyrim, Why whatever? You say that design is an important aspect: Okay, what was the rationale behind what seems like a REALLY peculiar choice?

And, shockingly enough, I don't think running a message board is something that makes you qualified with respect to game design and the like.

Honestly, at this point, all you have done is convince me that:
They have a HORRIBLE PR team
They are going to get their asses sued
THis is yet another case of "Dude, you know what would be cool? If we made a mod that was like, totally, this game I liked growing up"

How do you answer "why?" If I had said "Fallout" someone would have said "why not Oblivion" or some other game!

No, if you had said Fallout (meaning the originals, somehow), nobody would really bat an eye. Because the engine makes sense for the gameplay.
Instead, we ask "why" because it is an engine/gameplay style associated with pretty much every modern complaint by the target demographic for such a remake.

It is the same reason why, upon seeing the XCOM remake, just about everyone said "Huh?"

So, why was Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout3/Morrowind chosen? What benefits does that give for a game of the same style as Darklands? Is this going to be a "remake" in the sense of the new XCOM or Syndicate? Or are the modders going to somehow manage to overcome every limitation of Bethesda's particular brand of gamebryo? I already pointed out multiple reasons for why such an engine is not a good fit for this kind of game (ESPECIALLY the text-adventure parts).

Well, I can see why so many projects die. So little support, just biases. Sorry I started the thread.Not much joy here, just complaint of one form or another! And yet look at Ur-Quan Masters.I bet thy got support before anything existed!

Ur-Quan is a bad example for you. That was a custom engine designed from the ground up to accomplish the goals set forth.

And you are right, a LOT of mods die horrible deaths (I should know, I was involved in 4 or 5 during the height of the good Unreal Tournament).

"Remakes" tend to fail the most because there is no "creativity" involved. Don't get me wrong, it takes a LOT of work to make anything, but there is a big difference between "I am going to recreate this map" and "I am going to design a map from the ground up". When you are putting hundreds of hours (of your free time) into something, it REALLY helps for it to be your baby, not somebody else's.

Combine that with people who don't seem to understand game design (that is what you painted the team of message board mods as...), and there is a reason my hopes aren't high. Especially since, if memory serves, an established dev (I forget if it was Dwarf Fortress guy or Garry, and I don't feel like scrolling up) is working toward the same goal, but with a much more faithful end-goal.

Maybe the moderators know what they are doing. For all I know, they are geniuses. But all you have done is make me question them. So I do think you should try to avoid making threads like this in the future for things you like. Don't get me wrong, tell people (although, it is generally a good idea to wait until things are established), but don't try to answer questions you can't. And DEFINITELY do not respond to a question regarding a design choice with "They are experts at designing. They banned a few people for advertising free porn!"

Well, as I said they are helping the design because they know Darklands back to front - and for you to wish a mod to die is what should get YOU banned! I have already said they have outside people to do things to plug into the mod and I also said the mod was in design stage - which is what they are expert at because of their knowledge and 15 years of reading and writing comments and giving help in detailed areas of the game don;t mean anything to you. You are one sad bastard mate an I hope no mod YOU want gets finished!

Where did I say I wanted it to die? I would actually love either a true remake (like the dev I mentioned earlier is working on) or a re-imagining with modern gameplay mechanics. I just don't see this mod going the distance, and you have not convinced me otherwise.

And again: If it is in a "design stage", there should be a rationale for a design decision.

If the design stage is still not at the point where they have picked an engine (it has been around for two years or so, right? Then they should REALLY know what they are talking about by this point...) then they should not advertise an engine. If they have PICKED an engine, they should have a reason.
If I am going to make a first person shooter (or a shooter of any form), I will probably pick an engine that is designed for that style of play (or a super-generic one, like Unity). If I wanted to make a mod with bullet penetration, I would NOT pick the first or second Unreal engines (I am not sure if the third one finally switched to an additive approach that makes modeling projectile penetration easier than the subtractive one).
If I were making an isometric game of ANY form, I would probably not pick the Bethesda engines (apparently Skyrim is NOT Gamebryo anymore, so it might have solved a lot of the problems. But I doubt it :p). I would probably take a look at whatever the last Bioware-ish game that had an editor was (did Dragon Age:Origins have one?). Why? Because that will greatly limit the amount of time I spend shoving a square peg into a round hole.

Johnny, trust me, you are NOT helping them by acting like this. Seriously, go actually read what you have posted: You can't answer a very simple question (Why did they choose engine X), you repeatedly answer questions about design choices with "They are moderators at a forum, they know what they are doing because design is important", and now you are just screaming like a petulant child.
Imagine you are talking to a politician (any party or nation) and ask "How will the initiative you are pushing help increase the employment rate so as to help the economy recover?". A very simple question. And said politician replies "I live in this country and money is important!". Maybe said citizenship gives the politician a deeper insight into the economy of that region, and money IS important. But it does NOT answer the question and just makes the politician look incompetent (even by the ever-so-high bar for that occupation...).

It seems like this post is dead... I hope that doesn't mean that all interest in a remake is dead as well. I'm a one year programming student with too much time on my hands and I feel that writing a game like this in java is something I could manage.

I used to love Darklands. I would even consider using their old and ugly graphics. I would however not implement their combat faithfully... that was horrible. And crawling through castles (even worse were the mines) - it was a chore.

I would actually consider making combat turn-based - even though I think that is actually harder to code than realtime with pause... I'd like to hear some opinions from you guys.

So if this sounds interesting to you at all and if you'd like to give a hand I could use some help with sprites and sounds... I'm not much of an artist myself.

I'm all for a remake, but I'm afraid I couldn't contribute much beyond some softcoding experience.

This kind of "stop-and-start" combat, imho, is one of the big plusses this game has to offer. There are three problems:

- slow movement speed
- no right-click options for party member's actions (open door, fling potion etc.)
- poor pathfinding (doooors... in 'party mode' it is impossible to navigate through doors and narrow hallways)

these make for a lot of waiting (when moving from room to room, through doors etc.) bc you end up navigating your chars one by one, waiting for them to sluggishly move about and cursing at the broken pathfinding, and lastly at least 2-3 times more clicking while selecting options than necessary. Regarding this, there are of course keyboard shortcuts, but making the 'actions' available from a right-click drop-down menu, clicking on the character or his avatar, would serve to make everything, not just the combat, much less cumbersome.

In short: what breaks the flow in the dungeons for me is this-> You want to move your party into the next room of a robber knight's castle, then set everyone up around a door for a nice ambush:

"hey everyone, lets move on into the next room, just through this door and around the corner"
.. uhm, no? can't move through there? :/
... alright, toggle 'travel as group off',
select char 1, move to square x,
- waaaaiiiiiiiit for him/her to clear doorway-,
select char 2, move to square y - RINSE, REPEAT,
then toggle 'travel single file', get everyone to move to one corner of new room,
toggle 'travel as group off',
select char 1,
move into position for a nice ambush,
select char 2 etc. etc. ad nauseam

Just compare this to i.e. Baldur's Gate, just select everyone using mouse, holding down shift and clicking on the portraits, etc. put your thief in that corner, mage in the other, fighters in front, boom - you´re done, send someone to open that door and let the enemy in to be pelted.

TL,DR: The combat, imho, is fine, it just needs a couple more of modern conventions of interfacing/controls instead of the archaic "switchboard-operator"-style with keyboard shortcuts and menus.

@HenryVonKleist

Hey thanks for all your considerations and input.

Baldurs Gate is exactly the game I most often compare it to when explaining to people that don't know Darklands what I'm working on...

I like Baldurs Gate 2 a lot. Not the first one so much... but I always kind of felt that combat got a bit confusing and clusterfucked... maybe it's just my cubist mind that prefer people to stand in an orderly grid and wait their turn...

I agree completely with you that dungeons were neigh unplayable. castles were one thing, but the dwarf infested mines were torture to navigate... but another thing I had with the combat was that I often felt that I just clicked a target for each party member and then sat back and watched... Yeah you could throw potions, but most of the time I'd not use them because of their cost so I'd save them unless I absolutely needed them.

I played The Banner Saga recently and found that I really liked the kind of combat they had going on. You had these bonus points that you could decide to use to just boost your damage enough to make it a killing blow, characters had different special moves, like cleave and taunt which caused enemies to attack without using special abilites, armor wreck and so forth... it felt like each of your actions mattered and you genuinely had some choices. I'd sometimes sit and analyse as much as if I was playing chess.

I get that this is not what everone wants from their rpg games... I suppose that is why games come with a difficulty setting.

Anyways, what I imagine doing is making exploring a castle and fighting a battle different things. I think castle exploring could very well be done in real time with a top down view or it could be sort of another sort of turn based where you explore a map of the castle/dungeon room by room. Rooms could then have a combat encounter or some flavourtext with some choices or both.

I realise that I asked for opinions and the first thing I do is saying "yeah I'm gonna do it my way"... So I guess I wasn't interested in opinions anyway just like all the other assholes I always hated for doing this. I don't know yet if I'm gonna make it turnbased but that's how I feel it should be right now. Maybe I could download BG2 again and give it a spin... might give me another perspective.

Heyhey,

ah, well you listened to my input, so that´s certainly cool :D
Good to hear you are working on this, anyway, whether you heed people's advice or not!

I certainly agree with your views on combat/dungeons as far as the 'playability'. "Room by room" makes me think of how Darklands handles all the other encounters, i.e. text-interface, so like, you would enter a castle/dungeon like a town, click from room to room, have encounters, making role-playing choices, loot etc, and if a room has a combat-encounter, take the player to an isometric thing, like in The Banner Saga. Which I haven't played myself, but I looked at some videos and what you say sounds good enough for me, as far as turn-based tactic stuff goes.
Anyway, the text-driven stuff - until you go to the battle screen in Darklands - this is just the way the game plays out, and Banner Saga too, correct me if I´m right?

I usually am very fond of the Baldur's Gate combat-mechanic, but you should definitely do your own thing, if that's what you feel like :)

Anyhow, I would be extremely thrilled if you did a faithful adaption of Darklands, regardless of how the dungeons and fighting play out ultimately!