There were, but you had to manage them carefully. For example if you gave Ian a SMG, you better got out of the way :P

The first witcher game is a good one. The combat system becomes a little repetitive after a while. Other than that the game felt mostly well developed. The atmosphere was engrossing. The characters seemed to have distinctive personalities. Reading books, playing minigames (dice poker, for fistfight felt to be awkward), witcher contracts (those noticeboard things) all add variety to the gameplay.

Levelling up at the beginning of a chapter can help to ease the difficulty of combats.

Go for it. A lot of people including myself have reported that as they got older, all those 100 to 200 hour Mega-RPGs that were the hottest shit back when you had all the time in the world to spare, started to feel like they were just tediously long to complete. Shorter games without that much backtracking or the ever regretted choices of choice & consequence mechanics get much more attractive for some people. Shadowrun Hong Kong fits that bill, and it's the best of the three Shadowrun games in my opinion.

A tip for you, and will try to make this as spoiler free as possible. If you play the royal background dwarf you will get a guy later on who provides you with lots of cash - this is useful if you solo, but do note this. You don't get this character as casteless.

Personally I avoid NPCs in RPG's and DA:O is no exception. Play through once with them, but I just find them always to be shallow pointless quest accessories.

Oh, and don't play DA2, fecking awful.

As I said, I'm a completionist who only ever plays RPGs once. As such I always take NPCs with me and never solo, but thanks for the advice. And I intend to check out all of these CRPGs at some point, if I live long enough, even DA2, and then decide for myself whether it's enjoyable or not. ;)

Regarding the Witcher I didn't mind the combat in the average encounter, even though it was a bit boring (and I see no relation to Jade Empire's combat, which was way more fun), but there were several small design decisions that annoyed me, e.g. how fenced off all the paths were in the village, so you couldn't take shortcuts across the meadows, and how much you have to backtrack back and forth on these paths; it's just a waste of time. Or the looting system, which seems to be a remnant of the NWN engine but is utterly pointless in The Witcher. So many containers with nothing worth picking up in them. You can't even carry excess weapons to sell them, so why put the same kind of items in these containers over and over again if you can't pick them up? And I absolutely hated the first boss encounter. Long dialogue followed by almost instant death, reload, click through the whole dialogue again, try to figure out within a few seconds what went wrong the last time and what tactic you need to use in order to win this battle before you die again and have to go through that long dialogue a third time. After looking up the solution online, the fight was trivial, unless you got unlucky, but that didn't make it better, maybe even worse.

As for KotOR, I don't know, I don't dislike Star Wars, but I've never been a real fan of it either. And NWN I mostly like for its user created content, not because I enjoyed the official campaign or the gameplay mechanics (although I got used to the latter).

I loved the other two Shadowrun games, and what I've seen of Hong Kong was nice, too, but maybe I got burned out on it a bit. So far, I still think Dragonfall was the best one, but maybe I'm biased because I liked the Berlin setting so much. I acknowledge that Hong Kong has improved on a few things though (mainly the hacking). I'll definitely try to get into it again this year.

Fallout is not only highly regarded but seems to be the shortest game on the list, which makes it more likely for me to play through it.

But as I said, at the moment I'm trying to get into DA:O, and so far it's managed to keep my interest, even though I think the origin stories are a bit uneven (some being way more interesting and giving you a much better idea about the character classes than others).

You couldn't directly control them, if that's what you mean. You could equip certain weapons and armor to them (in a very awkward way) and at least in Fallout 2 give some generic orders like how they should try to fight (melee or ranged etc.)... but for the most part they had a mind of their own which was a bit problematic if you wanted to set up an ambush outside a door, but the damn party members would just rush in through that door instead of waiting with you outside for enemies to come out.

Fallout Tactics gives you the ability to control each party member directly, which I like.

In Fallout 1, I think I had only two party members though, the stupid dog and someone else IIRC. It didn't really occur to me to try to maximize my party member count until in Fallout 2, where in the end I had four party members (with charisma 8).

I was a bit surprised when I happened to watch someone else's gameplay video of the first Fallout, and he had four or five party members with him. It seemed awfully crowded to me.

No, I mean I didn't even know you could have companions, except for the dog. I went throught the whole thing solo and it never occured to me.

Ian, Tandi, Dogmeat, ummm....I forget whoelse you can get, a mutant maybe?

they were a pain in the ass to manage in F1 though, but fun to have along for extra meatshield damage doing mules

Leroux, after some consideration, I think you should just play Fallout 1 first

it is a bit clunky and takes a bit of patience to get into the swing of managing the clunk - if you play more refined RPGs too much before playing it it will be more of a turn-off but it is an exceptional RPG that should not be missed

unless you spend endless hours roaming around the map looking for random encounters you will have plenty of time, and if you're worried about it just hire the water caravan and get an extension on finding the water chip, then just focus on finding the water chip, and then play the rest of the game

then play Fallout 2

make sure you get the content patches and restoration kit, they're premium

Tandi I think was just during the quest to rescue her? It was Ian, Dogmeat, the Desert Ranger and the Boneyard girl. I had to look up the names, it was Tycho and Katja, respectively. Funny how we all remember Ian...probably for his SMG antics :p

Mutant was in F2, Marcus.

See my comment above; I'm not new to CRPGs at all - if playing too many newer and more refined titles will eventually spoil Fallout for me, then I guess it's already too late by now. But I don't think that will be the case. I played Gothic for the first time only a few years ago, so I know all about clunky, but I was able to enjoy it regardless. ;)

(And I still love and occasionally play Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures from 1993; I suppose Fallout is quite modern in comparison!)

yepyep

more notes:

I think KotOR is overrated, but decent enough, and if you're a Star Wars fan the story is decent enough. Repetitive feeling gameplay, cliched characters and story, but also with a few interesting / more uniques as well.

I tried playing The Witcher twice on two far apart (more than a year anyway) occasions and severely disliked it, mostly due to the specific writing and story, not only poorly written but juvenile and bland as well.

How could you forget Tycho! He was my favortie companion, I imagined him as an amalgamation of Han Solo and Obi Wan helping this kid to repair his moisture farm equipment. Plus his combat taunts brought back pleasant memories of Wasteland. Katja was disappointing, she's a melee focused character that you only get once melee becomes useless because everyone is packing high powered ranged weapons. Unless you are in a melee only playthrough there is no real reason to pick her up, wnd even then she is inferior to Dogmeat.

I'm just going to asume the english translation is really terrible because that's the only remotely sensible explanation I can see.

my brain is fried lately from stress and shit - I'm sure I'd have remembered better at a different point (even in the future), I absolutely remember now, it hasn't even been very long since I played

of course, tycho is fucking beast

@breja - yeah I have no idea how it could seem less immature teenage boy-fantasyish regardless of the translation though, even if the is better in original

I really have no idea what you mean. Like, I'm not even offended (we are talking about what is probably my favourite RPG ever), just confused :D