Kordanor
Wastelander
- Joined
- June 2, 2012
- Messages
- 4,717
Its a question if old games were really that good or if they were just good because they were a new experience. When I say old I mean back in the mid 90's or earlier. I personally think some of the games in the early 2000 were really good they just lack graphic fidelity but most of the really early games that I remember were very simplistic by any standards including both technical and conceptual.
Ah, yeah, I’d totally agree to that.
Personally I started with RPGs in the mid 90s and the oldest RPG I played before was Wizardry 6. And in the beginning of the 90s you can still see some weird and by todays standard totally outdated game systems, like straight adaptations from Pen and Paper systems which just hardly work in a Computer environment. Like random rolls for character creation and development, which you can just maximize by loading as you don’t have the “Master” of a pen and paper game which would prohibit that (and on the other hand would also kind of protect your party from most horrible luck). You can still find that in the EOtB and Realms of Arkania games.
There is actually a great podcast by Sothis Spielwiese (German) covering the really early RPGs from 79 onwards. And there you had even more extreme simplifications. As in “just enter your character values and when you stop playing, note them down. Next time you start, just manually enter the values you noted down”. Pretty much the same principle as random character rolls, just that it’s now completely in the player’s hand.
So yeah, I am glad that RPGs developed forward quite a bit since then. However, there are some elements which were missed for quite a while. Turn based combat (which only came back a couple of years ago, but was dead for over 10 years) and in terms of crawlers I’d like to see some more World Building, Story and special events like you had in the EotB games, Wizardrdys and Co.
The classic Bards Tale however…doesn’t really have anything. Yeah, technically the combat is turnbased, but it’s so hands-off and un-tactical, that it’s more like a browser game, where you do basic settings and then wait for the next day to get the combat result.
- Joined
- Jun 2, 2012
- Messages
- 4,717