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The Platinum Age of CRPGs
Matt Barton writes "I've just posted my third (and final) installment on CRPG history at GamaSutra: The Platinum and Modern Ages. This article covers the many classics released between 1994 and 2004, including Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Ultima Underworld, and of course Baldur's Gate, Diablo, and The Elder Scrolls. It also discusses why WoW and other MMORPGs aren't descended from these CRPGs (but rather MUDs). The Platinum Age produced the finest CRPGs ever made — but the future of the stand-alone, single-player CRPG looks grim."
Bah. The single-player CRPG is not dead, and it never will be. I've only ascended 3 of the total classes, now working on Monk :)
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
..for Fallout 3.
Bethesdasoft + original Fallout universe, atmosphere, and dark humor = cannot possibly fail.
At least that's what I'm desperately hoping for.
Blerg.
The trouble with Platinum is, where do you go from there? It's like an amp that only goes up to 10.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Part of the reason for the rise and decline of these games can be traced to the computing power of the eras. RPGs were getting better and better because the ability to make them more appealing - graphically, sound (voice quality, etc) were improving. It became easier to develop a more immersive environment, and so more and more attention went to writing a story that could show off the quality that was possible.
Unfortunately, with the rise of greater and easier connectivity, the ability to play RPG's with more friends came - and thus we saw the rise of the MMORPG. Although they might have first envisioned being more RPG than MUD, the popularity of the games erased Role-Playing very quickly. (Joe Sixpack likes killing monsters, but doesn't give a damn about "Thou and thee.")
What would it take for a great single-player RPG now? A game so enjoyable that it overshadows the enjoyment factor of playing a similar game with hundreds of others. Humans are social creatures, by and large, so that will be very tough to do. It won't be a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler in any case; that genre is utterly oversaturated in MMORPGs.
If another great RPG series is developed, my money is on a Fallout/Shadowrun-genre RPG; it's about the only genre not super-satured (ignoring the embarassing Matrix attempt at it) in the MMO world. (Though, in all honesty, the idea of playing a Shadowrun MMORPG....whew. I'm in, chummers.)
Technological competence assures no more intelligence than any other form, just more elitism.
the Palladium Age of CRPGS to come.
That is a CRPG where the single player story is good with a good engine to go with it. And it has multiplayer that allows you to play the campaign with friends, and better of all you don't need to pay a monthly subscription.
Sort of like Neverwinter Nights, but prettier, more flexible. Also ideally, I would like a game where you don't have to churn through combat to earn level advancements, sort of like some of the Ultima games (Ultima 7) but have enough activity to satisfy younger players with oodles of time.
FYI, here's Part I (The Early Years 1980-1983) and Part II (The Golden Age 1985-1993).
Might save you a little digging as for some reason part I doesn't show up on his bio.
forgive my ignorance, but what does CRPG stand for? Is this some new phrase used instead of RPG?
Ahh, the sole reason I was learning english at the age of 8, perhaps 9, I don't remember it quite well. My best gaming memories revolve around this game, the perfect mix of gameplay, graphics, sound (the intro music is literally burnt into my mind) and plot, and, considering not only games, but also computer hardware was quite hard to get where I live at that time, I'd say I'm quite lucky to know it. I even have my old notebook, where I wrote down all the mantras and runespells I've discovered. It's the little memories like this that make me happy... Which reminds me, I've got to play it again some time :) .
TREACHERY AND DOOM! MY BROTHER WOULD UNLEASH A GREAT EVIL... BRITTANIA IS IN PERIL!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Ok Might and magic 6-8 are personal favorites, and morrowind is amazing, but when I want to really "RPG" I spent my time on different MUDs, because they gave the player freedom to do what they want and play in which world they wanted. It was a great and different experience every time you logged onto a different mud. Interconnected worlds where you could chat with people, unique monsters you could never find anywhere else. I worked on a mud and the best part is a week of code could create something radically different, versus working in the game industry where it will take at least a month of code + animators to even implement simple thoughts.
But calling something the ______ age always makes me think that the people can't remember crap. You know how the NES was the "golden age of games" Heaven forbid we remember that most games used odd passwords (Willow, river city ransom) for saves, there was at least 10 games that were clones of the "classics" we cherish now. Games were unbelievably hard to the point that they made the game genie and so on. We can still play the "classics" but wishing us back into that hell where crap piled up faster then the gems would only make the masochist happy.
I loved Diablo, I didn't love Nox, and the other 5 or 6 clones of Diablo that came out right after Diablo. We can complain about games now but then 10 years from now people will be talking about how great oblivion and World of Warcraft is compared to the "crap" they have then.
It's great that this guy believes that the 1994 to 2004 is the "best time for RPGs" but hell, World of Warcraft is a fun game too. But bitching about the fact that games now are more similar to MUDs than CRPGs ignores the real fact of the industry.
THE PC IS DYING! He approaches this thought but seems to miss it. PC game sales have decreased over the years to the point where the industry is writing it off. A great game on the PC sells less than half what it would if it is on a console. Hell a MODERATE game on the console still outsells the best games on the PC and the industry knows this. The reason is up to the reader to figure out but KOTOR was ported to the XBOX. There's many more CRPGs taking that path (morrowind, oblivion, fable). CRPGs are just appearing in different places than just the PC.
I have been finding Gamasutra to be the rantings and whining of game industry's past heros. Guys who have been there, done that, but never got their name out there. There's good articles but this isn't changing my opinion that in general the articles there are either agenda pieces or rantings.
Maybe you don't know but there's a Free Open Source project to revive the wonderful RPG game Fallout under modern OS's:
http://www.fifengine.de/
and they need your help too.
Grim for us all as well as the games. I've played most of the MMOG's, and even when I'm playing them, I still miss the experience of games like PlanetScape: Torment and Icewind Dale. Elder Scrolls is decent, but I think the best hope for CRPG's is in the console market. Some excellent titles have been released.
My prediction is that we will see a resurgence of the genre after the MMOG furor subsides and virtual economies work themselves out. Then stand-alone RPG's will be seen as a pleasant retro or "getting away from it all" diversion from the mainstream "Online! Online! Online!".
That's what I think, anyway. I frequently find online games totally annoying and go looking for a quality RPG experience that doesn't require 5-25 random people with varying levels of maturity from 6 to 45.
Most CRPG developer simply couldn't keep up or implement user made content. Ultima, Wizardry and basically any Sierra adventure game all failed in this manner. Games like Nethack, Neverwinter Nights 1 (2 is a buggy mess) and the Elder Scrolls succeeded and continue to enjoy success as traditional CRPGs.
There was a point in gaming history when the CRPG was viewed as the "hard" genre; the genre that required the largest investment in time and energy but which offered the greatest rewards.
Yeah, and that point passed by years ago. Nowadays console RPGs require almost 50+ hours of gameplay just to beat the main storyline start to finish without working on side-quests. They also reward you with Hollywood-style cinemas, fully orchestrated music and a profound sense of accomplishment. Last time I checked, Nethack was still offering a silent, static screen of text as an ending with nothing else to do but play again as a different class.
Of all the games I played back then (and i played a LOT), the one i have a great fondness for was Autoduel.
Not because the game was great (it was merely good) but because the game came with a packet of small tools.
Which were very useful in doing computer repairs. I cursed when I lost that tool packet a few years ago during a move.
Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines was great though, despite requiring an unofficial mod at times to get around the occasional bug. It's just too bad that the plot fizzled out at the very end. Troika obviously didn't have enough time (or resources, considering their abrupt bankruptcy shortly after) to properly polish the game, or even branch out the later parts of the story. It's sad to know that true roleplaying experiences are getting rarer and rarer (from already having been rather rare), and all because the majority or so-called gamers would rather play some Final Fantasy-esque J-RPG which requires no interaction and is more like just watching a film, or worse yet, wants to pay a ridiculous monthly fee to kill the same five types of monsters over and over with their friends online while waiting to pay even more for the next expansion pack.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
"THE PC IS DYING".... ...hmm. You uh, miss that whole "World of Warcraft" thing, amigo?
Technological competence assures no more intelligence than any other form, just more elitism.
Apparently, he thinks that Dante wrote Paradise Lost. While I think that he meant The Divine Comedy, he really needs someone to check his work.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
FTA:
To my mind, the games that really represent the best of the genre appeared during the period I've termed the "Platinum Age," which begins in 1996 with the publication of three very important games, Origin's Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992), Blizzard's Diablo, and Bethesda's Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall (both 1996)....
So the Platinum Age began in 1996 with the publication of a game from 1992?
Show me ONE flight sim for consoles that sold as well as ANY of the MS Flight Simulator series. Hell, show me one flight sim for consoles, period. They don't exist. The closest you can come are arcade shoot-em-ups that involve shooting from a plane, but there's NO emphasis on accuracy of the flight models, or physics, or anything else except making the explosions look good.
Same goes for racing simulations. Many arcade "racing" games, no real emphasis on being an accurate simulation. Sadly, in the case of racing simulations, the PC world has abandoned simulations for the most part as well.
I won't even get into the MMORPG issue, but again, no comparison. You're right though, some CRPGs are being ported to consoles. But it doesn't change the fact that they were, are, and will be available for the PC, and if not released before the console version, released at the same time.
Until the Wii came along, the ONLY place to find games the casual gamer liked was on the PC. The Wii may steal that market, it may not. Only time will tell there.
And as soon as they start allowing PC vs console gaming (I believe the 360 is planning on doing this via their Live service) the console world is going to get spanked as those that swear by FPSs on consoles find out that the PC truely does have the superior control system.
PC game popularity runs in cycles, almost exactly opposite console popularity. Every time a new round of consoles comes out, PC gaming drops off. After a year or two, it comes right back, as all the graphics whores realize that their precious console looks like shit compared to bleeding edge PC graphics, which kept moving, instead of becoming fixed when the console reached production. In the mean time, the PC faithful still keep buying and playing games, knowing that neither consoles or PC gaming is going away.
Except you seem to miss where 1 game means it's thriving. I said dying. It's far from dead. The world of Warcraft thing though is very different than 99 percent of other games out there.
PC games are thriving in a couple areas, one of those being MMORPG, or games based on a pay to play style where the player is paying for the service rather then the game. I hardly think that means PC games are still viable as anyone who isn't doing a MMO will be selling the game. MMOs sell the service (of playing a game) and they thrive because you have to pay to play and they can easily detect people who aren't paying (they run the servers and payment systems after all).
This doesn't change the fact that outside of the world of warcraft "thing" or MMOs in general (of which Battlefield and guild wars fit) it's bleeding badly. I'm hopeful certain games always have PC components (Elder Scrolls for one) because mods are a great way to liven a game up, but at the same time I can't fault them for jumping on the console bandwagon when they can easily double or triple sales with just that move.
The guy completely miss the point of Neverwinter Nights. He talked only about the original campaign (OC), the scenario that came "in the box", which is IMHO pretty average. The real genius of NWN is that it's more than a game, it's a platform for CRPG development. It created a development community around the game that is not entirely different than what you would find around an Open-Source development platform such as PHP or Ruby on Rail. From modules to custom content (such as artwork, monster, etc) to hackpak that modified the game engine behavior, everything was open to the community. I cannot think of a single game that had as much fan content made and distributed. You could play NWN for years using just the highest rated modules from the community, all distributed for free. Not only that, but Bioware embraced the community, incorporated community developed material back into the product and still actively encourage development to this day.
Forget the OC. Go buy NWN Planitinium from the nearest bargain bin, and play the Dreamcatcher, Shadowlord, Kosigan and Penultimate series of modules. There are hundreds of hours of gameplay to be had from what the community developed, with some of the most engrossing storyline in the CRPG genre. Neglecting to acknowledge this is the the most glaring overlook from this Gamasutra article.
Did I mention it have a native Linux port ?
:wq
For me, it's too much eye candy today. The driving force behind RPG's was to use one's imagination. You couldn't see the six foot flaming sword in the iron golem's hand. And this was true of the CRPG's that we reminisce about. Ultima series, TSR's Gold box series, Wizardry series and the likes. You only saw a static low res pic of what was going on. You had to imagine that the pitiful sound comming out of the PC speaker was the crack of a high-powered round. And they usually had a good story line that kept you interested. I recently cranked up the C64 emulator and played my favs Wizard's Crown, Eternal Dagger, and Wasteland. Still great fun after 15 years. Nowdays, there is very little to imagine. Just eye candy in 'real time'.
FTA:
...|snip|... Freedom Force introduced comic book style superheroes and is probably the best of the bunch. It offered a viable alternative to the "dark" fantasy of Diablo and more tactical combat. Vivendi published the sequel in 2005, Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich.
Better known Diablo clones include Gathering's Darkstone (1999), Electronic Art's Nox (2001), Irrational Games' Freedom Force (2002)
Seriously, since when has Freedom Force been considered a Diablo clone?
It's true. I have yet to see /any/ environment that provides the same role play environment that classic muds have to offer.
I started mudding in the BBS days, and still actively play today. The immersion factor is surprising to many people who know roleplaying either only as a table-top thing, with a lot of Mountain Dew, or as something that involves graphics.
[shameless plug] MudConnector (http://www.mudconnect.com/top10.html) currently ranks Dark and Shattered Lands (DSL)(http://www.dsl-mud.org/ - telnet dsl-mud.org port 4000) as the number one roleplaying mud. I've played there for 8 years, and would encourage you to try it out if you're looking for a good roleplaying environment.[/shameless plug]
KOTOR was ported to the PC from the XBox.
I find it amusing that the article makes no mention of Final Fantasy, ChronoTrigger or the Mana series to name a few. Actually nothing except 'western-developed' PC games. Just a little myopic.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
So many games have made major steps forward or backward in the genre of CRPGs. The Ultima series stands out on both of those counts (F U EA!). What I find truly interesting is that some games are so good or at least make such an impression on someone that it gets resurrected in some form or fashion.
At some point Ultima IV was re-written for Windows and released on a PC Gamer (?) CD.
Dedicated fans of Ultima V have released an excellent Dungeon Siege mod where you can replay Ultima V (for the most part) in a 3D world. http://lazarus.planetdungeonsiege.gamespy.com/
My point is that if these games were so great there is hope we may see them again. Unless of course the corporate idiots and lawyers make it impossible. Oh Master of Magic 2, where art thou?
...and for $20 all the NWN packs on one DVD offer a hell of a lot of game, not mentioning all of the good stuff you can download and add to it...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I bring this up because it's a biggie - quite possibly the very first 2.5D CRPG. Alternate Reality. Back a decade before his article starts out, this game had most of the same thngs that the modern games in the early 90s had.
It's well worth checking out if you have an emulator installed. The Atari ST version is probably the best. Be warned, though - it's tough. Don't stay out after dark.
you're such a dimwit. console sales have always outstripped PC sales. it's not a recent development. I'll grant you that consoles are reaching more people than PCs, but for obvious reasons. A total moron can set up a console and use it. To put together a PC, even if you order a gaming PC, takes a little more know-how. And consoles are trying to reach out to the non-gamer market, so their target audience is much, much larger than PCs. The PC will never die, because there's so much that can be done on it.
As for the rantings of a group of never heard of developers...at least they've been there, done that. They have the right to bitch and whine because they've done the work...what have you done? I don't know you.
They get to write articles for gamasutra because they are respected in the industry...just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they are good at what they do. Game developers, for the most part, are not like actors in a movie. 95% of all the games you play are made by people you have never heard of, and wouldn't recognize passing them on the street. A few people have distinguished themselves, yes, but they are few and far between.
A few more things:
the tech ( and storage ) wasn't there for save games for most of the "golden age", that's why they used passwords.
there's just as much crap being made now as back then, but it's all covered up by gorgeous eye candy, so most people don't notice.
i don't know about you, but I never had to use the game genie...games were challenging ( but playable ) back then, unlike most games today that cater to the complete inept n00b (the same people that bought game genies).
there's nothing wrong with MMO's being like MUDs....MUDs are just text based MMORPGs
Oh and KOTOR was released on the XBOX first...
And rightly so, considering the huge difference between the media. I'm still hoping for a real single-player RPG for the computer, but I fear that'll never happen. So far, for roleplaying on the computer, email seems to work best (although some prefer IMs).
Take a look at Eschalon: Book 1.
www.basiliskgames.com
Keepin' it real!
I don't think the article does Planescape:Torment justice. I mean, it does call it a cult hit and a work of art, and I realise it didn't sell as well as Baldur's Gate 2 or Falout, but to many die-hard pen-and-paper roleplaying purists who, like me, don't really think most CRPGs deserve to be called Roleplaying games, Torment is the only game that deserves that title, or at least comes close to it. Torment holds a very special place in the CRPG pantheon, and I think that deserved a bit more emphasis.