RPG General News - The CRPG Renaissance, Part 4: …Long Live Dungeons & Dragons!

[HiddenX]

This is part #4 of The CRPG Renaissance by the The Digital Antiquarian:

The CRPG Renaissance, Part 4: …Long Live Dungeons & Dragons!

In December of 1997, Interplay Entertainment released Descent to Undermountain, the latest licensed Dungeons & Dragons computer game. It’s remembered today, to whatever extent it’s remembered at all, as one of the more infamous turkeys of an era with more than its share of over-hyped and half-baked creations, a fiasco almost on par with Battlecruiser 3000AD or Daikatana. The game was predicated on the dodgy premise that Dungeons & Dragons would make a good fit with the engine from Descent, Interplay’s last world-beating hit — and also a hit that was, rather distressingly for Brian Fargo and his colleagues, more than two years in the past by this point.

Simply put, Undermountain was a mess, the kind of career-killing disaster that no self-respecting game developer wants on his CV. The graphics, which had been crudely up-scaled from the absurdly low resolution of 320 X 240 to a slightly more respectable 640 X 480 at the last minute, still didn’t look notably better than those of the five-year-old Ultima Underworld. The physics were weirdly floaty and disembodied, perhaps because the engine had been designed without any innate notion of gravity; rats could occasionally fly, while the corpses of bats continued to hover in midair long after shaking off their mortal coil. In design terms as well, Undermountain was trite and rote, just another dungeon crawl in the decade-old tradition of Dungeon Master, albeit not executed nearly so well as that venerable classic.

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[rjshae]

I remember Baldur's Gate taking a long time to install back then, what with the five (later six) CDs to copy on to disk. But it was totally worth it. I still have the original CDs, but I can no longer read them so I should probably toss.

 

[Carnifex]

Yeah, Descent to Undermountain was a serious mess, at least upon release. I remember just giving up and replaying other games rather than trying to deal with all the issues in this one.

 

[bjon045]

I remember Baldur's Gate taking a long time to install back then, what with the five (later six) CDs to copy on to disk. But it was totally worth it. I still have the original CDs, but I can no longer read them so I should probably toss.

I remember it had a minimal install option that only installed about 50 mb but you had to keep changing CD's! I can't believe some people actually played like that!! I think it was one of the last games that allowed that. I guess HDD's got bigger around that time and it just made the games too slow.

 

[vanedor]

Great article.

The Baldur's Gate games were a revolution for me. They were truly the games that made me fall in love with the genre.

A year or so before, 15-years-old me had played Diablo 1 quite a lot (until its repetiveness and overclicking bored me) and MMVI (which I enjoyed for what it was) but Baldur's Gate 1 is the only game of that period I can still get myself to play.

 

[DungeonHack]

Good old DTUM. I remember getting it leading up to Xmas 1997 and getting it home and just being absolutely floored by what a mess it was. I love a good crawler, but it was hideous. The Dragonplay Tavern forums were in an uproar and calling for Fargo's head. His secretary, I forget her name, came onto them to try and quell the riot but it didn't work. A lot of folks ended up using the forum as a place to talk about the recently released Faery Tale Adventure 2 and had begun playing that instead.

 

[Hastar]

DTUM is the only game I've ever paid for and could not get it to run. After the reviews, I just moved on and learned a life lesson. It's my worst game of all time.

 

[Carnifex]

Yeah, there was a great deal of anger at the time, for sure. And the pre-hype was strong beforehand, one of those times where it'd been wiser to keep expectations in check. We live and learn.

 

[showtime]

Great article.

The Baldur's Gate games were a revolution for me. They were truly the games that made me fall in love with the genre.

A year or so before, 15-years-old me had played Diablo 1 quite a lot (until its repetiveness and overclicking bored me) and MMVI (which I enjoyed for what it was) but Baldur's Gate 1 is the only game of that period I can still get myself to play.

I can name more than few games of that time that are still playable today (fallout2, homm3, starcraft...) But yes BG was first rtwp I played and it was great.

 

[Carnifex]

Heck, I can still play the Ultima games, Wizardry, M&M's, etc. A good story and combat system will overcome less than stellar graphics for me, every time.