The History of Computer RPGs

Gamasutra is running a series of articles about the history of CRPGs. The first piece covers the early years, from 1980 to 1983, and deals with with games like mainframe dnd, Wizardry, and Ultima. The follow-up, The Golden Years, touches on the gold box Dungeons and Dragons titles, as well as the Bard's Tale games. "The first Gold Box game is Pool of Radiance, a game which marked an important turning point in CRPG history. The game shipped in a distinctive gold-colored box (hence the nickname for the series), which sported artwork by celebrated fantasy illustrator Clyde Caldwell (Caldwell also designed the covers for Curse of the Azure Bonds and several other TSR-licensed games and books). It was initially available only on the Atari ST and Commodore 64 platforms, though soon ports were available for most major platforms, including the NES."

About the first Wizardry games

[Pluvius]

The first article mentions that the NES versions of those games are the best available. Well, not exactly; the best way to play them is through The Story of Llylgamyn, a compilation of the first three games for the Super Famicom. Unfortunately, it was only released in Japan for the Nintendo Power accessory (not to be confused with the magazine). It was a nifty little device similar to the Famicom Disk System; you could go to a store and load games onto a flash ROM inside of it. Of course, you can't do that anymore.

But then, that's what emulation is for. If you can find the ROM, which is easy enough (hint: The name is "Wizardry I-II-III - Story of Llylgamyn (J) (NP).smc"), then you're golden. You might want to use the translation patch [romhacking.net] for it, but it's not necessary; the games are dual-language, so the only Japanese you'll have to muddle through is in the pre-game menus. A minor note: For some reason Knight of Diamonds is listed as the third game while Legacy of Llylgamyn is listed as a second, which is a transposition. Play them accordingly, or not.

Rob

Re:About the first Wizardry games

[Petrushka]

It might also be worth mentioning that the middle Ultima games can be played in modernised forms: for Ultima IV there's xu4 [sourceforge.net], which is simply a better-looking (and sounding) version of the original, and is also cross-platform; and Ultima V has been recreated as Lazarus [u5lazarus.com], as a mod for Dungeon Siege 1.

Re:turning point

[sholden]

I'm referring to picking the weapon with the highest damage per round, and min-maxing stats, and so on. Casting Harm on the dragon before he goes hostile (because you know from last time you can stand next to him until you trigger the special dialog that sets him off) and killing him with a single hit next round, that sort of stuff...

The computer couldn't throw in something designed to punish the min-maxer the way a human DM could.

If you can keep a journal as the character in the game that doesn't consist of entries like "went to the goblin cave for XP all day" then all is well. It can still actually be a level grind (the Baldur's Gate series, for example) but hopefully there's something to justify it being done from the character's point of view.

Of course the masses like the grind, which I understand in a multi-player game (there's a get better then the next person thing) but not in a single player game, in which you can save all that grind by changing a few bytes in the save file.

I like story, but I'm old and crusty...