Skellimancer wrote...
MerinTB wrote...
Not much since Planescape and BG, maybe I'll grant you that. If you ignore rules, 3D, real-time, programmable tactics for AI, etc. The RPG stories and such are "similar" in that sense.
The 6 origins would be new if ToEE hadn't sort of done it before (though based solely on alignment, and very tiny openings that really had no later effect on the story.)
I think you can't point at one thing in Bioware games since BG and say "There, look, now you can design the villains you fight as well as your heroes and via choice made at the beginning of the game it crafts the ending of the story for you..." (though that would be cool) level of changes, but small progressions have been made so that comparing Ultima and Rogue or even Phantasie and Bard's Tale to Oblivion, The Witcher, Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins you will see bigger changes than driving backwards.
Name some changes, all i see are more polygons.
I have the funny feeling, Skellimancer, that what I list will be dismissed by you, but here goes.
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Early CRPGs were dungeon crawls. DND, Akalabeth, and even games like Zork. There were choices, but these games for the most part were either glorified "Choose Your Own Adventures" on a PC screen, or once graphics became introduced, carefully using graph paper to map out the area while trying to find all the treasure and either a boss monster or an exit. You almost exclusively played one character only, often with no stats at all, or rudimentry starting stats you either never saw, could never adjust, or had few choices with.
Arguably two of the biggest, earliest, and most influential (to this day) of the CRPGs were Ultima and Wizardry. More on Ultima in a moment -
Wizardry set the gold standard for which many imitations were created - from Might and Magic to Bard's Tale to MANY, MANY JRPGS (seriously, as Disney was to the birth of anime, Wizardry (and Ultima) were to the birth of JRPGS (Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy in particular)). You have the layout of the game, with the list of your party members (yay, you get a party and you created the whole party!) and their stats, then the text window listed exploration information and combat results, and then the "picture" window which either showed your block by block exploriation OR it showed a still image (or a little later the equivlent of an animated gif) of the monster (or one of the montsers) you were fighting. You didn't have much motivation at the start of the game - you just created your party and dove into the dungeon to collect treasure, level up, and face the evil baddie (in Wizardry's case, and most cases, some powerful no-good mage!)
So, we started with text-based "Choose your own adventures" type games with one character, rarely any building of that character - and moved to a graphical layout with your party members (oh, yeah, now you have a party you created - that has races and classes and such, some use weapons, others spells, all the D&D jazz) in a list and a picture of the area you are in (the "square" you stand in, really) or a monster you are fighting, with text detailing your statistically determined (plus random number generation) combat.
Ultima, on the other hand, introduced other concepts. You were a single character in the game, but you did have some stats and could buy stuff (spells were more like scrolls or potions, one-use items that you had to repurchase). What was different was that Ultima had a top-down world view in the 3rd-person style of gaming, instead of the first-person view you got with Wizardry. Ultima also had one of those rare extra stats/items you needed (hitpoints-healing potions, mana-mana potions, equipment-gold) in food you had to consume. Another thing Ultima introduced were areas outside a deepening dungeon to explore, and "quest-givers" - people form whom you got odd-jobs or tasks (usually just go kill this monster at this point) that were usually extraneous to the "main goal" of the game which was, again, to defeat an evil wizard (honestly such a trope - Irenicus, you are as old as CRPGs, honestly - everyone complaining about "saving the world" being cliche and Irenicus being "fresh" have seriously never played the majority of original CRPGs. Whiney wizards wanting or achieving immortality and needing to be taken down is THE big bad of CRPGs.) Ultima gave you more of a sense of story - you were The Stranger, summoned to save Sosaria
So we now added top down, world maps, consumables that are not weapons, and non-main story quests. Oh, and an introductory reason for your character to be pivotal to the story, instead of just a random assortment of adventurers.
Up to this point, with a few exceptions in these games, all fights are random encounters. The boss battles being about the only real exceptions. The whole point of these games is almost exclusively enter dungeon, clean out dungeon. Gather XP and loot, defeat evil wizard who has too much power.
There are tweaks and improvements through games such as Might and Magic, Bard's Tale, Phantasie, and the later incarnations of Wizardry and Ultima. Many of them significant - Wizardry 2 introudced us to porting our characters to the next installment in a series, saving the game anywhere instead of at a save location (this is so big you don't even understand). Wizardry 3 had alignment playing a bigger role, especially with certain areas of the dungeon only accessible to certain alignments. Wizard 4 diverged from the series, instead having you play the villain from a previous game who had to face off against parties of adventurers (some from actual players of the previous games!)
Ultima 3 gave animation to the characters (this also the first Ultima to have a party) and had moved away from randomly generated and deep though depthless (sorry) dungeons to static, designed, story-important dungeons. Ultima 4 was a watershed, where the point of the game WASN'T to defeat an ultimate evil but instead to become a paragon of humanity - the point was to build up a series of virtues, and actions in the game could take away from those virtues. Ultima 4 also was one of the first to do character creation without stats but instead by asking a series of questions (those of you may better know this from the Bethesda games - no, they didn't invent this.) We also saw the birth of a dialog system, although "Name, Job, Health" weren't much for social interaction, it was a start. Ultima 5 really developed a dialog system, allowed you to travel via horse or ship, had story-based scenarios that were not winnable by combat at all (not just a puzzle-solving end boss, either.)
1985 saw SSI and Interplay enter the scene big time with Bard's Tale and Phantasie. Both games really created the concept of depth in combat, by ranks (location on a combat grid) having purposes in the game (both of these are far more "strategic" games than Wizardry or Ultima.) The typical D&D-ness gets watered down a bit with these games, allowing different classes and races (Phantasie having a cool "random" race chooser that gives you options you can't just pick, like Minotaur or Pixie.) These games cemented the old (and basically now forgotten) concept of transferring characters into later games in a series. Bard's Tale all but invented the CRPG notion of buffs via the Bard's songs. While Wizardry sort of had "prestige classes" (to use a 3rd Ed D&D term), Bard's Tale with it's wizards made the ability to chose different (and multiple) prestige classes a thing. Phantasie mixed a bunch of styles of presentation that the earlier games (Wizardry and Ultima) had used. But, again, the biggest thing these two game series added to CRPGs was the strategic elements of turn-based combat, far deeped than what had come before.
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ok, at this point I have my daughter needing my attention and some errands to run - and I can return to further illuminate how CRPGs have changed more than "pixels" up to Dragon Age: Origins.
Modifié par MerinTB, 23 décembre 2009 - 03:36 .
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Was refering to games such as NWN which was 1 step forward 2 steps back, imo. KoToR had many simularities with NWN right down to the core rules. I did enjoy KoToR though, but i never replayed it and I never even touched the NWN expansions.
