If someone dedicates three years of their life and countless hours with no certain paycheck, they only deserve less than the price of a cup of coffee for each one they sell.

Thanks for the quality info, RWarehall. Useful stuff.

Seems to be an interesting line and possibly a better alternative to D&D4.

Also, love RGP with some strategy elements, be it larger battles, faction/fief/town/kingdom management etc. So yes, this looks especially promising.

The card game is probably the closest one can get to RPG with card games by now (rather fun).

From what I hear, Undertale's Japanese translation did this. (There is, for example, a character who talks in the older style of Japanese writing, which starts in the upper right and goes down vertically before going to the next column to the left.)

(For those who don't know, this particular game uses a lot of puns and wordplay that does not directly translate into other languages, so making a good translation of this particular game is not an easy task.)

Imperial, Royal and Noble are quite expenisve, even if somehow justified in any way. I bought Explorer edition on gog, and soon to have my slasher backer key on steam.

This looks really promising! Very classic and that it's using an established rule-set makes me hopeful that the combat will be fun and fleshed-out. That was one of the major problems when D&D fell out of fashion, as every developer started feeling the need to reinvent the wheel, which they rarely did well and cost time that could have been better spent on working on other parts.

As for the price, it's more than fine if this is truly a new, full-fledged, beefy RPG. Those have been away for a while, but have always been full-price the same as any other major new game.

Honestly, I don't think the D&D ruleset is that great.

For example, the use of accuracy based combat has its issues. At low levels, attacks miss too often. At high levels, AC becomes useless, as attacks either almost always hit (in which case AC is of no use), or they almost always miss (in which the only way to deal decent damage is to find attacks that don't use to-hit rolls, like many spells).

Also, the syatem does not scale well into high levels. As an extreme example, if we use the d20 SRD's epic rules, I note that a 40 level difference is the difference between almost always hitting and almost always missing. At typical levels, this might seem reasonable, but once you get up to level 4,000, a 1% difference in level can make way too much of a difference.

Also, the magic system's segregation of magic resources by spell level doesn't make sense, either from a game mechanical standpoint or from an in-world standpoint. (I am out of Cure Light Wounds, so why do I still have the energy to cast Cure Serious Wounds, but not Bless?)

Try the Shadowrun games. They are cyberpunk isometric RPGs at their finest.

That's a bold claim. I assume most Cyberpunk fans prefer the "pure" type, not the one with Elves, Orcs and Magic.

$40 is not too steep, at least it's not Kingdom Come/NMS steep... Plus, it looks to be an incredibly deep adventure... That said, due to the season pass I'll wait a bit myself as I want the whole game in one sitting!

That is a tautology. The "pure" (as you write instead of non-fantasy) and the first game is Cyberpunk. So yes, fans of Cyberpunk are fans of Cyberpunk.

Anyway, actually yours is a bold claim. What evidence supports it? Personal preferences and assumptions are just that.

That said, the creator of the second cyberpunk game (see, minuscules), consciously decided to add the fantasy components of the game in order to make it different from the other one.

Some prefer one, others prefer the other. I prefer Cyberpunk because that is the one I played, pen and paper, and I do not see the need to add fantasy, but other RPG players prefer Shadorun. And Shadowrun, the PC game, is a good game.

Remember - no preorders.

It's a bold claim that Shadowrun is one of the best Cyberpunk settings? Or is it bold to state that the games are isometric and awesome?

It's less whether it's good and more that it's good enough, is robust and makes it so that a developer like this one doesn't have to invest in creating a rule-set of their own.

I don't think the D&D ruleset is good enough, actually. In particular, one fundamental issue is that it's accuracy based, which has some issues by itself:
* For it to work, attacks have to miss a lot. This can be incredibly frustrating, especially when you end up losing a battle due to bad luck, rather than due to something like poor planning.
* Such systems don't scale well. At high levels, attacks either nearly always hit or nearly always miss, and there's nothing you can do about it. Since armor in such systems typically only affects evasion instead of reducing damage, armor becomes useless at this point.
* In D&D, HP increases, but damage (particularly physical damage) does not scale with level. The result is that, at high levels, combat can take a long time.

Other issues with D&D and similar systems:
* The magic system doesn't make sense; particularly the segregation of spells by level. (Also, spells being disrupted is a frustrating mechanic.)
* Physical attacks and magic use completely different rules, resulting in more things one has to worry about balance. (An example of a game where physical and magical attacks use similar rules is Final Fantasy 5; note that FF6 is not a good example because the two types of attacks scale differently.)
* There's the whole "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" thing going on.
* It's common for D&D based CRPGs to implement mechanics like encumbrance, which I feel are more annoying than beneficial.
* Healing magic is way too weak until the 6th level spell Heal shows up, at which point it suddenly becomes powerful and Heal ends up being the only worthwhile healing spell. (Starting in 3.0, there's also Mass Heal.) This problem is especially bad in 2e and earlier, and it has affected other games like Wizardry. (Know when *not* to copy a misfeature of another game if you're a game designer.)

In any case, I would rather have something more like the game mechanics of the classic Dragon Quest games. Not without their flaws (spell damage not scaling), but at least it lacks most of those issues I mentioned (in particular, it's damage based, so damage actually keeps up with HP, and armor (which provides damage reduction) is never entirely useless).

Can't deny that this game grabs my attention, but I think I'll wait.

As soon as I see "season pass" mentioned for DLC and whatnot, it's kind of a turn off.