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The History of Computer RPGs
Gamasutra is running a series of articles about the history of CRPGs. The first piece covers the early years, from 1980 to 1983, and deals with with games like mainframe dnd, Wizardry, and Ultima. The follow-up, The Golden Years, touches on the gold box Dungeons and Dragons titles, as well as the Bard's Tale games. "The first Gold Box game is Pool of Radiance, a game which marked an important turning point in CRPG history. The game shipped in a distinctive gold-colored box (hence the nickname for the series), which sported artwork by celebrated fantasy illustrator Clyde Caldwell (Caldwell also designed the covers for Curse of the Azure Bonds and several other TSR-licensed games and books). It was initially available only on the Atari ST and Commodore 64 platforms, though soon ports were available for most major platforms, including the NES."
Is leisure Suit Larry considered a roleplaying game since its the only time I ever get to be a suave ladies man. That game rocked. Same as Space Quest series and Kings Quest series on the Tandy 500.
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
Daggerfall was a great RPG in my opinion. So open ended with a large world. So what if it was randomly generated. I think that was one of the games that made a huge success in my world followed by Morrowind and Oblivion. Never played much of Areans though. (TES I)
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I disagree as well. I loved Pool of Radiance and probably played it all the way through 6 or 7 times or more on my old C64. I liked the fact that the gold box games all pretty much used the same system, I could go from one to another and gameplay was almost the same. I would liken it to the expansion packs of todays mmorpg games, the later gold box games added to the earlier ones, you could even import your party from the previous games with all stats intact.
I never really tried Ultima games until 7 or 8 so I know I missed out with them, but I did try Wasteland and never really got that far into it. I loved the premise of the game, but the gameplay was just not my style.
I was not a D&D paper gamer, just someone that liked computers and those were the games that had an impact on me. From Pool of Radiance, I played the entire Gold Box series. I even got the PC versions when I finally got a PC.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I remember being young (very young, I was born in 1981) and playing Dungeon Master on my dad's Atari ST 1040...according to my parents, I learned how to read so I could play play Planetfall and Hitchhiker's Guide!
The one gripe I have with this article is that it neglects the now mostly-extinct genre of interactive fiction. Sierra and Lucasarts both expanded on the Infocom format and made games that I think were as much role-playing games as all the hack-and-slash dungeon games. Both were only able to capture certain aspects of table-top RPG's, and I liked both but always enjoyed the adventure games more. You don't see too many RPG's today that don't rely and tons of mindless combat to fill up space, and these were long, involved games which had few or no combat sequences for the most part. Most early RPG's were pretty light on the RP....
Absolutely - all this represents the evolutionary tree of cRPGs. Diablo in particular is quite interesting: as any roguelike player knows, Diablo was very clearly inspired and heavily influenced by roguelikes. It wasn't until quite recently, however, that I heard a story that demonstrates just direct the inspiration was.
...
(the following is unsourced, and comes to me from that awesome vector of "some dude at work":)
It seems that Diablo, the story goes, was originally turnbased! Some engineer had the kooky idea of converting the game over to be realtime, which noone he worked with was to fired up about. So, he did it on the side as a pet project. When finished, he checked it in and had everyone give it a shot. They of course realized they had a winner on their hands
they followed neither the spirit nor the rules of the system they were supposedly based on, and gameplay was just constant grinding with very little story, puzzle solving, or individuality. The graphics were bad even by the standards of the day.
(Score:1, Flamebait)
Flamebait? I think Nomadic has a point on many counts! Compare Pool of Radiance to Dungeon Master, which came a year before it. I enjoyed some of the Gold Box games, but I always felt like they were stamped out of a machine. The Ultima series and Dungeon Master were dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly ki- sorry. I meant that they felt like they were lovingly created by hand. You could tell that their designers lavished care on them.
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D&D has always had its roots in wargaming, from complex range, movement and initiative rules in earlier editions, to the numerous tactical combat examples in 3E and 3.5. In that way at least, the Gold Box games were true to that.
The first article mentions that the NES versions of those games are the best available. Well, not exactly; the best way to play them is through The Story of Llylgamyn, a compilation of the first three games for the Super Famicom. Unfortunately, it was only released in Japan for the Nintendo Power accessory (not to be confused with the magazine). It was a nifty little device similar to the Famicom Disk System; you could go to a store and load games onto a flash ROM inside of it. Of course, you can't do that anymore.
But then, that's what emulation is for. If you can find the ROM, which is easy enough (hint: The name is "Wizardry I-II-III - Story of Llylgamyn (J) (NP).smc"), then you're golden. You might want to use the translation patch for it, but it's not necessary; the games are dual-language, so the only Japanese you'll have to muddle through is in the pre-game menus. A minor note: For some reason Knight of Diamonds is listed as the third game while Legacy of Llylgamyn is listed as a second, which is a transposition. Play them accordingly, or not.
Rob
I presume it was a RPG, but it was sold as space-combat-trading game.
Elite was a flight/trade simulator. I love the game myself. It's far from an RPG (IMHO) because the entire time I played it I never really felt the need to conduct myself like the captain of a space cruiser. I felt it was a video game with a bit of meat that made it worth playing for hours at a time. Anyway...
This is the problem with this whole subset of games (RPGs that is); little, if any, require any real roleplaying. I like to play "rpgs", both on the PC and pen and paper, but I never really roleplay. I guess it's a very very grey area on what real RPGs would encompass. I guess that stuff like D&D and EQ are more like real RPGs since you're taking on the identity of another to the point that you have to deal with "life" from within their abilities. Elite simply doesn't do this. In EQ or DnD I may be a great fighter even if I'm bound to a wheelchair without the ability to lift my arms more than a few inches, it's just about the roll of the dice, it has nothing to do with my own real world abilities. In Elite it was much different, if you sucked at playing the game you just sucked... you needed to be as good a player IRL as what it came out as on the PC. I guess that may be the first sign of a game being an RPG; that barrier between real life abilities and the ability to work within the game scenario. Anyone has the same chance of rolling a 20 from a disabled guy in the wheelchair to the best athlete to a mathematician. In Elite you had to be a good physical player to reflect a good Captain Jameson.
I don't know, just some of my thoughts on the matter.
sorry for being long winded.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The graphics were bad even by the standards of the day.
You want to see some bad graphics? Come to my pen and paper game.
RPGs don't need to be graphically intense to be good.
I will agree that the were wargames to a point, that's what SSI was always best at. I still don't think many CRPGs are story intensive. Sometimes I'm thankful for it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
One of my first RPGs was Ultima III on the Apple IIe (yes, old timer). One of the best tricks that I did to entertain myself was the fact that treasure chests dropped by monsters outdoors were obstacles and permanent (until opened). Monsters also blindly followed you. So I put 2 and 2 together and strategically led and killed monsters until I had created a "monster zoo" outdoors filled with all sorts of helpless meanies trapped in treasure box pens.
The other trick I liked was to build boat bridges between islands using boats captured from pirates but that was a bit harder to pull off.
It's always fun to find loop-holes in games.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
For the small minority of TI-99/4A owners, there was the incredibly fun Tunnels of Doom. It would take forever to load on cassette! Typically, 1st party games were among the worst, but ToD was the exception! It had serious depth for a TI-99/4A game. Later on in life I would meet the author of Legends, another RPG which was pretty fun.
Okay, so we(TI-99/4A owners) had a grand total of 2 RPGs, still, better than none.
I'm referring to picking the weapon with the highest damage per round, and min-maxing stats, and so on. Casting Harm on the dragon before he goes hostile (because you know from last time you can stand next to him until you trigger the special dialog that sets him off) and killing him with a single hit next round, that sort of stuff...
The computer couldn't throw in something designed to punish the min-maxer the way a human DM could.
If you can keep a journal as the character in the game that doesn't consist of entries like "went to the goblin cave for XP all day" then all is well. It can still actually be a level grind (the Baldur's Gate series, for example) but hopefully there's something to justify it being done from the character's point of view.
Of course the masses like the grind, which I understand in a multi-player game (there's a get better then the next person thing) but not in a single player game, in which you can save all that grind by changing a few bytes in the save file.
I like story, but I'm old and crusty...
I played the first 3 Wizardry's with my brother. He was older so he usally got the keyboard and I manned the graph paper mapping and navigating for him. We occasionally fought over the keyboard too.
I remember getting stuck once and called Sir-Tech in NY in fustration. A person who sounded like a kid answered and very patiently explained what I needed to do. Free of charge too! I thought that was pretty cool of them.
If you played Wizardry 1 you'd remember the "Creeping Coins" which gave big XP points but you needed a mass destruction spell else you'd have to leave your chair and come back in 10 minutes until they finished attacking.
I don't need a "Blue Ribbon" to use the elevators here at work fortunately.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning