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posted by takyon on Wednesday September 02 2015, @07:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the games-going-their-own-way dept.

Game history blogger Felipe Pepe is up to part three of a series on computer role-playing games (CRPGs) that did things differently. These games might not have been the best, or even really particularly good as a whole, but they did something in a way that hadn't been done before, or since.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Most of them are fairly old - evolution is most rapid when expanding into a new niche, after all - but there are a number of newer games as well. They range from the well-known and well-regarded (Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic all have mentions) to the obscure (ZanZarah, The Magic Candle). For the old-school gamer, it's a nice trip down memory lane. For the new-school, it's an interesting look at the things game designers tried that never really caught on. And for game designers, it's a treasure trove of mechanics that might deserve a second chance at success.

What are your own suggestions for interesting RPGs? I would personally go with On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 3. It's a bit of a stretch to bundle with CRPGs, since it's much more along the lines of Final Fantasy than Ultima, but it takes a new approach to a number of common mechanics. The combat system is where it really shines - combat is turn-based with actions taking variable lengths of time, and taking a hit (as a PC or NPC) will delay your next action. Crucially, taking a hit in the period between queuing an action and taking it has a much larger "knockback" than taking a hit while recharging, which makes it a lot more strategic than your typical ATB system. It also changes up random encounters (all encounters appear on-screen, and only in the arena do they respawn) and items (your inventory of consumables refills after each battle). It simplified quite a lot, but that simplicity gave it a focus and elegance not often seen in RPGs.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:05PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:05PM (#231210)

    Dungeons of Daggorath (1982)

    This would make a good phone/tablet remake game.

    It was a stereotypical roguelike. I enjoyed it when it was new.

    An aspect of sound that the article missed is not just listening to your heartbeat, but you'd hear monsters before you saw them, and they all had different sounds (oh oh I hear a knight coming!) Using modern sound technology would be interesting for a CRPG.

    Another aspect not mentioned in the article is your light source controlled what you saw to a level I don't think I've ever seen in any other CRPG. And... your torches burn out... so you have a limited amount of real clock time to advance or get killed in the dark. Wood torches and you'd only see a dotted outline until the monster was practically on top of you and wood only lasted a short time, the top tier WTF-torch lasted like an hour (of clock time) and would render as far as the machine could display. That was a very interesting game mechanic.

    A final observation was the enemy AI was fairly dumb and the game relied on you figuring out the AI was dumb at the higher levels, so this meta game which is usually seen as a fail, was an interesting aspect not often seen in CRPGs.

    It was very innovative because being done so early in history, there was no "thats how its done" so it seems hyper creative, but its really just an example of what happens when programmers are let off the leash and aren't constrained to "make me a 3-d graphics rogue" or "make me an ultima clone" or "make me a diablo clone"

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  • (Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:17AM

    by VortexCortex (4067) on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:17AM (#231512)

    You may be interested to know that Roguelikes (and Roguelites) are one of the fastest growing game genres.

    Roguetemple forums [roguetemple.com] aggregates new roguelikes and hosts various related discussions from updates to classic rouguelikes to new games in-development.

    The mechanic combinations you mentioned are in many new rouguelikes. The 7DRLs [roguetemple.com] (dev challenge, make a RL in 7 days) often have inventive new mechanics one wouldn't risk spending time on adding to a bigger game.

    Lots of devs are rethinking the RL formula for mobile interfaces. While I enjoy the wide input surface of classic RL interfaces, the minimal input for mobiles is tolerable for portable RLs since the turn based nature of the game lets one put the game down/away and pick it back up as necessary.