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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While hardly the first open-world game of its kind, the third numbered entry in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series cemented a formula and a set of expectations that are still alive and well today in games like Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. It was an artistic and technical leap forward for mainstream role-playing games in the summer of 2002, and, for many, a beautiful and novel experience. A vast ashen landscape teeming with psychedelic flora and fauna — equal parts Jim Henson and George Lucas, with a dash of Tolkien — here was a game that resembled no other.
For the people who made it, Morrowind was the product of tough crunch, a pressure-cooker basement environment, and constant uncertainty about the company they worked for — which many felt could have shut down any day. But the island of Vvardenfell, and its unique pantheon of gods and demons, seemed to exist independent of the concerns upstairs.
Whatever the company's fate, it seemed the game was destined to find an audience. In the darkest of moments, when it seemed the writing was on the wall for Bethesda, project leader Todd Howard took the team to a nearby hotel for a private meeting. There, Howard rallied the developers' spirits, handed out personalized business cards, and assured them it would all work out, as long as they were willing to keep going.
That speech, one source says, probably saved the company.
Over the last year, we tracked down 10 former Morrowind team members, including Howard, concept artist Michael Kirkbride, and lead designer Ken Rolston. We discussed the very conception of Vvardenfell, the strangest bits of Elder Scrolls lore and the "shits-and-giggles" philosophy that informed them, and what it means to build a game world that withstands the test of time.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
Related: 40 Computer Role-Playing Games That Did Their Own Thing
The OpenMW (Morrowind) Project Has Released Version 0.39.0
How 'Baldur's Gate' Saved the Computer RPG, or Did it?
(Score: 1) by NickFortune on Wednesday September 02 2015, @07:36AM
Excellent support for roleplaying, a leisurely pace that lets the story emerge as you play rather than forcing it down your throat, a truly alien setting, fascinating main quest and the flat out best game lore ever.
Nothing really like it before, and sadly unlikely to be anything like it again, judging by the direction Bethesda have been taking since.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 02 2015, @11:07AM
I really enjoyed playing it for about 2-3 years
But.. 'twas easy to game it by exponential grow in potency of intelligence boost potions* (make one, drink it, repeat; keep the last ones to sell to get money for ingredients to make the next batch); once you get a potion boosting your intelligence with >500 for 3-4 days in a row, you'll never lack gold or encounter enemies able to stand after the first blow - weapons may be a problem though, you get to wear them after 2-3 enemies.
* for the ones unaware: intelligence attribute had effect in potency/duration of the potions one prepares (assuming decent level in alchemy skills/equipment)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by NickFortune on Wednesday September 02 2015, @11:43AM
Yeah. you need to exercise restraint with alchemy or the game breaks. Me I use alchemy sparingly and rarely with int levels above 5k, but there are mods that disable that feature entirely if you can't get past it.
On the other hand I love the fact that it lets your character do things befitting the demigod status he eventually acquires. Run across the map at super-speed? Jump over a mountain? Beat a storm atronach to death with your bare hands? No problem!
Even now, throw in some graphic enhancing mods (MGSO is a good starting point) and I'd sooner play Morrowind than Skyrim.
(Score: 1) by riT-k0MA on Wednesday September 02 2015, @01:00PM
I never did get the hang of alchemy in Morrowind...
Oblivion and Skyrim, on the other hand, were dead easy (after a UI overhaul mod).
(Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:26PM
Morrowind is a roleplaying game, and single player at that. If you want to break it, you're doing it wrong. In any case, just hit ` and you can do anything, or open the construction set if you're too lazy to look up the commands: you can literally just give yourself stuff or edit your stats either way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:51AM
.. was for me the game.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday September 04 2015, @01:51AM
The list doesn't have any of the rogue-likes. That causes me to dismiss it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:05PM
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"
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:17AM
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by WillAdams on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:09PM
Having a lot of fun w/ the new Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate --- they play wonderfully on a tablet w/ an active stylus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday September 02 2015, @12:16PM
I thought it interesting that in page 2, Arcanum got the treatment I expected Vampire the Masquerade to get for the same reasons. In both games your selected class dramatically significantly affected gameplay. The example for Arcanum wan't too interesting but in the Vampire games you'd have to play sections of the game entirely differently.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:08PM
(Score: 2) by Marneus68 on Wednesday September 02 2015, @02:45PM
That's an interesting list, that's for sure.
I'm glad to see Arcanum in it, however, I don't really understand how Fable and Omikron got on here, as far as I'm concerned they belong in the vague action adventure category. There is now way to even consider these as RPG's, let alone CRPG's.
Something that's also lacking in the list is Inquisitor. It's close to Arcanum in terms of pure gameplay, but the writing and the stories are much more psychological and interesting. That's definitely something to check out if you liked Arcanum or Fallout.
After playing a lot of them and more, I am still drawn to Arena and Daggerfall. Now that the Elder Scrolls series reached critical success you're unlikely to see them mentioned on Gamasutra, that's not hipster enough for them, but somehow these games always hit the right spot in terms of immersion, freedom and sheer size of the worlds they offer.
Now I don't know why but I was never able to really get into these games that have you controlling a complete party. I always figured that role-playing was playing a role, not 4 or 5. To this day I'm still not quite comfortable playing these. That breaks the immersion a lot for me.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @03:57PM
If the first three digits of your game release year starts with 199, you ain't old school.
GTFO my lawn, Skippy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2015, @07:09PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vECZ_6PF9U#t=13m25s [youtube.com]
Problem is the common version out there is the broken one. Has a missing characters due to the break.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Thursday September 03 2015, @11:20PM
I'd go with Ar Tonelico, a personal favorite. This series was produced under the EXCLUSIVE creative control of Akira Tsuchiya; he's even listed under the endgame credits under TOTAL COMMAND. Ar Tonelico is his life's work.
Ar Tonelico is a JRPG series whose primary focus is not on combat, but the character interactions and character development.
Ar Tonelico uses the best random encounter system I've played so far, and I don't say that ironically. The encounter chance is indicated visually: right after a fight, the encounter bar is blue, which prevents encounters from happening at all. As you walk around, the bar changes to green, yellow, orange, red, as the encounter chance increases. This guarantees that on average all random encounters are spaced apart by a reasonable amount of time. Running away from battles will always succeed, and after a certain number of battles, the encounter bar will empty, disabling all encounters for the area until you leave it, allowing you to explore and find chests without stopping for battles all the time.
This keeps the combat from getting in the way, allowing the story and characters to shine.
However, I'll stop digressing to keep this short. The Ar Tonelico games themselves are pretty good, but not outstanding. What really sets them apart is the lore.
Let me put it this way: which other game's setting has 4000 years of detailed back history, four constructed languages, and its own laws of physics? Yes, Akira Tsuchiya wrote the laws of physics for the world he created, as well as four languages. These aren't gibberish or character substitutions either, this are complete languages; in fact, most of the (excellent) songs in these three games use these languages. If that's not artistic vision, then I don't know what is.
(Here's an overview of those 4000 years of history: http://artonelico.wikia.com/wiki/Chronology_%26_Timeline [wikia.com]
This is for the place where the first game takes place. The other two games take place in different locations, each of which has their own 4000 years of history. Akira Tsuchiya does not half-ass things.)
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday September 04 2015, @01:57AM
But I still occasionally fire up a game of Slash'em or Advanced Rogue. In tty mode of course. Don't seem to get as far as I used to back in the day.