Bioware Co Founder: JRPG's Lack Evolution

Continuing on (glad you are enjoying it, Skellimancer) - but before I continue I am going to point out that I am obviously skipping over mentioned features and games. There's much more than I am writing about here. But this s a good overview.

Around 1986 a few new players entered the game, some to become perpetual series, some to fade into obscurity despite being revolutionary.

An aspect to note, at this point, is how much old CRPGs were melds of science-fiction and fantasy. Whether Ultima, Wizardry, or a few of the games about to be mentioned, you had your fantasy world element mixed with aliens and space ships and laser pistols. This has mostly disappeared as CRPGs focused more on the D&D setting or on being pure fantasy, but back in the day a lot of these games were either stories about dimensional travel, alien abductions, or simulated realities (Matrix, you are SO not a new concept.)

I bring this up as two of the new "series" debuting use the simulated reality / alien abduction models. Alternate Reality, a ground-breaking and truly original game series (even down to it's anti-piracy protection) that never saw near completion (NOTE - I want to say something about this at length, but I will wait until later - just know I'm going to bring up "incomplete games being released" at some point) but really changed the way these games were made. It was the most "sandbox" kind of game you had gotten to date; it gave you stats and such but you didn't roll or pick them - they were randomly assigned and you had to live with it; it really tracked day and night cycles, food consumption, need for sleep, disease and drunkeness, in ways that revolutionized the game in ways that you wouldn't see again until games like Gamecube's Eternal Darkness or XBOX's The Thing. Alternate Reality games were such a change from what came before, much of what it used (like raycasting for the "3D" environemtns) wouldn't be seen again for YEARS. Unfortunately, as with most innovative things at the cutting edge, it didn't find an audience and only saw the release of 2 in what was supposed to be about 6 games. AR is one of the poster children for overambitious - the 2 games that were released were really the first of the six planned games split in two.

The Might and Magic series came out around the same time. In most ways it is pretty much a conglomerate of what had come before it - just more of it! It was very non-linear and it was expansive, for its day. For the most part Might and Magic just shows that another series can come along and not really do much NEW but combine things that came before in new ways to grant a similar yet more complete experience.

While Phantasie was SSI's foray into CRPGs, Wizard's Crown was their biggest step forward before the Gold Box D&D games they made (which become the model to beat for a long time.) It is more or less a hack n slash turn-based strategy game, but it was the most strategic of the CRPGs at its release. It had such features as bleeding wounds, shields only protecting the shielded side of a character, different weapons having different effects (spears reaching 2 squares, flails ignoring shields, etc.), very customizable characters in your !8! member party. It was very short on story (retrieve crown from evil wizard who sealed himself in his base) and interactions outside of combat and buying stuff, but for what it did (strategic turn-based combat) it did it VERY WELL.

Bard's Tale continued to add significant new aspects to CRPGs. Bard's Tale 2 allowed you to transfer characters from other games (Wizardy 4 and Ultima 3 as well as Bard's Tale), added real-time puzzles, and the ability to not only summon creatures but to add them to the party even in saved games. Bard's Tale 3 had one big innovation for CRPGs - it was the first to ever include an automapping function. That's right, prior to Bard's Tale 3, you had to use graph paper (or your memory) to navigate the dungeons - most of which, being tile-based, had one square or turn looking like every other square or turn (of course this taught many young gamers the "always turn right" method of exploration.)

Dungeon Master was the first real-time CRPG. It also had an "improve skills by using them" instead of XP point advancement system, used the mouse for combat and interactions instead of a text-based combat, and was "3D" - it preceded Ultima Underworld as the first such game. First real-time, first real mouse-click-to-interact CRPG.

Wasteland - oh, Wasteland. For all the praise (and rightly deserved, sure) that Fallout gets, it's "spiritual predecessor" set the bar so high that Fallout needed to limbo under it to succeed. You have a non-fantasy setting at all (by fantasy I mean magic and elves and such), you have a party where you create some characters but to fill out your party you pick up characters in the game world (yes, this existed before Baldur's Gate) - making this the best of both worlds, your own characters (more than one) AND scripted NPCs with personalities you could pick up. Those NPCs you picked up also might not let you take inventory from you, or do actions you tell them to, based on numerous in-game reasons. The world was wide open to basically go anywhere in any order you wanted (not the first to do this, but one of the better examples) - but more importantly when you made changes to an area you visited, those changes remained when you left and returned AND THIS was pretty revolutionary at the time. It also used the Paragraphs book (a staple of CRPGs at the time - a second book, in addition to the manual, that came with the game it had story segments to read when the game prompted you to (wow, how times have changed - it was cheaper then to print huge books than to have the text in game, now it's cheaper to include PDF manuals than print manuals!) as a means of preventing people from "reading ahead" by having many false entries which, in themselves, you could have fun trying to piece together into an alternate narrative.

And here we finally hit Pool of Radiance, the big dawg. As many at the time pointed out, the game really was a mash-up of what came before. But it did it worlds better than Might and Magic had. Also - this was the first D&D based game that actually used the D&D ruleset. This was a blessing and a curse - it more or less introduced in CRPGs the trope of spell memorization and needing to rest to recover spells (a horrible, horrible PnP contrivance IMO.) While most CRPGs prior had loosely been influenced by D&D (with exceptions like Wasteland being influence by a differen PnP game), PoR was the first to actually use said rules pretty much verbatim. Most of the rest of the game isn't innovative beyond bringing together many different aspects (from Ultima 3, from SSI's older title Wizard's Crown, from Bard's Tale, etc.) into a final product greater than the sum of its parts. And it spawned a 4 part continuing series but also a few other similar gold box games (even 2 Buck Rogers games!)

And we'll take another break there at about 1988 and the intro of the Gold Boxes, a golden age of CRPGs.

#51
Skellimancer

Posté 23 décembre 2009 - 04:18

#52
MerinTB

Posté 23 décembre 2009 - 07:27

#53
IAGTTBleed

Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 12:14

#54
MerinTB

Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 06:35

#55
Skellimancer

Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 06:37

#56
IAGTTBleed

Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 06:38

Bioware Co Founder: JRPG's Lack Evolution

#51 Skellimancer Posté 23 décembre 2009 - 04:18

#52 MerinTB Posté 23 décembre 2009 - 07:27

#53 IAGTTBleed Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 12:14

#54 MerinTB Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 06:35

#55 Skellimancer Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 06:37

#56 IAGTTBleed Posté 26 décembre 2009 - 06:38

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