Same as @Ardanis and @Ammar I also learnt English with RPGs. The first one I ever played was Might and Magic VI back in 1999. It was the first time my very strict grandmother accepted to let me have a computer and that game pretty much hooked me for months.
The oldest RPG I've played however is Wizardry. The original. It was in 2011 or something like that when playing Elminage Original on the PSP addicted me to dungeon crawlers. So I wanted to experience the classics that inspired the genre.
The ending of Dark Queen of Krynn has you facing down Takhisis, but you end up freeing Raistlin and he fights her while your characters get the hell out of Dodge.
My favorite part of that game was the undersea elf city, Naulidis. The fish would swim by in your view and it was just gorgeous...
The ending of Dark Queen of Krynn has you facing down Takhisis, but you end up freeing Raistlin and he fights her while your characters get the hell out of Dodge.
My favorite part of that game was the undersea elf city, Naulidis. The fish would swim by in your view and it was just gorgeous...
I loved DQoK when it came out, but when I replayed some of the gold box games I stopped the Krynn series very early in Dark Queen. It is the most modern of the series, but ironically has aged the worst for me... the old interface was spartanic, but still works for me. Dark Queen somehow feels sluggish and cumbersome.
Strange, but I have similar feelings about Ultima. Ultima V is still completely playable for me, but Ultima 6 is a struggle. The engine was a huge advance in so many ways, but I felt they only really perfected that time of interface in Ultima 7. Some things that really bother me nowadays about Ultima 6. E.g. the view distance is just too short...
One bit of amusing trivia on the old Ultima games:
starting from Ultima 4 had this Virtue system (compassion, honesty, sacrifice, etc...) that the Britannians tried to follow and the Avatar embodied. In UW 2 the Avatar visited some parallel dimensions, including one where the inhabitants followed the evil Guardian (main antagonist of Ultima 7-9) and had their own twisted version of the virtues. Those included sobriety, diligence, conformity, obedience, silence... i.e. everything to make the follower an efficient cog in the machine.
Even more amusing, there are eight original virtues of the Guardian. They adopted all of them, including obedience, conformity and silence, except one: sobriety.
Nowadays, there is a considerable part of the gaming community always whining about how the SJWs are ruining their games (just look at the SoD controversy).
In Ultima 7 (released 1992) you meet Miranda, who:
Is a high-ranking elected official
Also has a small son at the same time
Has clearly a more prestigious job than her husband (who does not complain about that or anything)
Writes a bill to clean up a polluted late (so is an environmentalist)
Wants to see more women elected to positions of power
Would like to get rid of scantily clad women in fantasy paintings
Note that she is portrayed positively, and also plays a key role in coordinating the castle in UW 2.
All those SJWs must have traveled through time to ruin U7 back then...
Heck, I'm pretty sure you could give the avatar a non-binary gender in the first few Ultima games.
Yes, though not necesarilly the Avatar. There was non-binary gender ("Other" as 3rd option) in Ultima III: Exodus, which was the only Ultima which had you create an entire party of four characters. Exodus took place before the Avatar became the Avatar.
Anyway, it was a retcon that the Avatar was also the hero of the first 3 Ultimas (this was never assumed before the Ultima VI manual).
Nowadays, there is a considerable part of the gaming community always whining about how the SJWs are ruining their games (just look at the SoD controversy).
In Ultima 7 (released 1992) you meet Miranda, who:
Is a high-ranking elected official
Also has a small son at the same time
Has clearly a more prestigious job than her husband (who does not complain about that or anything)
Writes a bill to clean up a polluted late (so is an environmentalist)
Wants to see more women elected to positions of power
Would like to get rid of scantily clad women in fantasy paintings
Note that she is portrayed positively, and also plays a key role in coordinating the castle in UW 2.
All those SJWs must have traveled through time to ruin U7 back then...
It just wasn't a problem back then, like it is has become nowadays.
Twenty years ago you could make a quirky character and nobody would really care. Today it's considered mandatory to add such content, publicly congratulate yourself with how progressive and morally superior you are and wave a "oh, you don't like it? get banned, you bigot" banner. So of course there'll be people fed up with this arrogance.
Frankly, I'm sure it's perfectly possible today as well, just need to prevent the more ardent and vocal evangelists from getting into touch with audience. There's enough gay and trans characters in Japanese productions, yet hardly anybody gives a damn.
Nowadays, there is a considerable part of the gaming community always whining about how the SJWs are ruining their games (just look at the SoD controversy).
In Ultima 7 (released 1992) you meet Miranda, who:
Is a high-ranking elected official
Also has a small son at the same time
Has clearly a more prestigious job than her husband (who does not complain about that or anything)
Writes a bill to clean up a polluted late (so is an environmentalist)
Wants to see more women elected to positions of power
Would like to get rid of scantily clad women in fantasy paintings
Note that she is portrayed positively, and also plays a key role in coordinating the castle in UW 2.
All those SJWs must have traveled through time to ruin U7 back then...
It just wasn't a problem back then, like it is has become nowadays.
Twenty years ago you could make a quirky character and nobody would really care. Today it's considered mandatory to add such content, publicly congratulate yourself with how progressive and morally superior you are and wave a "oh, you don't like it? get banned, you bigot" banner. So of course there'll be people fed up with this arrogance.
I am sorry, I do not see that at all. Those things that with the bigots looking for content like that and then raising hell, not the companies publicly congratulating themselves. Saying "We want X to feel included" is not congratulating yourself... and if you look at it you can find Richard Garriott saying that there being an equal amount of female party members in Ultima 4 was not a coincidence. This would now also been seen as virtue signalling.
What has changed is how vocal the toxic part of the gaming of the community has become...
What has changed is how vocal the toxic part of the gaming of the community has become...
The pro-PC part? Yes, it certainly has.
With British, I don't know much about him, so it could be one of the two - either he's got in too early, or see what I said about Japanese. You can be inclusive without being a jerk about it, even if most of Western media is trying hard to prove otherwise.
I bet if any company congratulated themselves about how many straight white dudes they put in their game, not a single person who uses the excuse "I only complained because they put diversity in for a quota" would complain.
What's changed is social media. Back in the day you might have wondered why certain character types were included or excluded from certain games but apart from maybe talking to your buddies about it, that was as far as it got. In short order it was forgotten about and nobody cared. Now it's just too damned easy to find a bunch of people that think the same way as you and raise Holy Hell about every meaningless little supposed slight.
I'll just state two facts.
1) I'm unaware of such complaints against non-traditional characters in Japanese games/anime, only in Western productions.
2) I used to (casually) support the diversity and view its vocal advocates as one the same side. After SoD's release had forced me to look deeper into Gamergate, I still don't mind diverse cast much, despite having developed disdain to the likes of Sarkeesian.
I bet if any company congratulated themselves about how many straight white dudes they put in their game, not a single person who uses the excuse "I only complained because they put diversity in for a quota" would complain.
I take it you haven't seen any complaints on progressive outlets against a game that didn't reach a quota. I have, more than once or twice.
Wow. I always liked the Gold box games because I could (and did) make parties entirely composed of women. I always liked playing my own female hero in Original D&D (my first character was named Zenobia, after the Queen of Palmyra, who raced camels, among other deeds. At 14, I thought she sounded awesome. And she was. (Even more Awesome than Cleopatra.)
@Ammar that's the best bit of internet trivia I've seen in a while. Absolutely on par with Dolphinsex. Thanks for sharing; how did you possibly find that gem?
And, to make up for the necro with some on-topic, have any of you played the Ultima V and VI remakes in the Dungeon Siege engine? They are among my favourite games ever made, and lose almost nothing of the appeal of the originals.
@Ammar that's the best bit of internet trivia I've seen in a while. Absolutely on par with Dolphinsex. Thanks for sharing; how did you possibly find that gem?
And, to make up for the necro with some on-topic, have any of you played the Ultima V and VI remakes in the Dungeon Siege engine? They are among my favourite games ever made, and lose almost nothing of the appeal of the originals.
It was posted every year or so on the old Horizon Tavern, which was the most active Ultima forum back in the days. One of my favorite communities. Now I think some of the various Ultima Dragon Fansites might still mention it somewhere in their trivia section. Also both Mobygames and TvTropes have it on their pages.
I played the U5 and U6 remakes and while they are great, I would say they are very different from the originals in term of gameplay. So while they appeal to me it is a different sort of appeal than that of the originals. Ultima 5 in particular was the most perfected version of that type of game engine, which is hard to recapture.
'Tis true, in terms of gameplay they had to make compromises, but for me the feeling of exploring one seamless Britannia with all its lively NPCs and hidden secrets is what really counts, and that is gorgeously implemented. In terms of music they are even a step up , I would argue.
'Tis true, in terms of gameplay they had to make compromises, but for me the feeling of exploring one seamless Britannia with all its lively NPCs and hidden secrets is what really counts, and that is gorgeously implemented. In terms of music they are even a step up , I would argue.
Yup, it was well done in that regard. But for example you could tell that the NPC schedule were sort of hacked into the engine, with them refusing dialogue while on the move.
Regarding music I think they are some excellent pieces, especially in Lazarus. The Lycaeum piece is the one I remember best.
Still, for midi, Ultima 5 itself had some excellent tunes: Engagement and Melee, Lord Blackthorn, The Missing Monarch and especially Worlds Below are all great. And of course, Ultima 5 had the first version of Stones... most Ultima's had good music but I enjoyed Warriors of Destiny, Martian Dreams, Serpent Isle, UW 2 and Pagan the most.
The down-side was that back then the PC version did not include music, but was by far the best version otherwise (best graphics, least number of bugs). I still love the Shadowlord sprite. But the midi music only got patched into the PC version by a fan patch long after release.
I only started with Ultima VII, so I could never quite ignore the blocky graphics of the older titles, even though V is now definitely my favourite story among all of them. I played it on a friend's MS DOS back then, with no computer of my own, but today Exult gives us the best of both worlds.
Jared Ellsworth and the other composers for Lazarus really surpassed themselves. I like to listen to those pieces on long train rides or walks through the countryside. The Empath Abbey theme and the travel pieces are particularly memorable to me. They exude a particular calm and get me thinking of interesting stories. My favourite Stones may be the vocal performance by Brad Venable.
To get back on topic, has anyone enjoyed the Realms of Arkania games? They had their own particular, weird humour and were quite unforgiving of mistakes, but I liked their atmosphere much better than that of their GoldBox equivalents. I improved my German a lot with them because I only had the German versions as a kid. I still read it quite well. Just as @Ammar observes above, it's curious to note that the most recent title of this series has also aged less well than the others, because it attempted to partly implement 3D graphics. They're all really worth playing though; they offer some of the coolest reactivity ever implemented in a CRPG.
In fact, I never completed any of the GoldBox games - are there any which you would recommend for reasons other than nostalgia today?
Sure, though it depends on what you want out of your RPGs.
Decent framing stories? Sure, they are usually quite good. But it's mostly framing.
Lots of side quests? No.
Good dialogue with interesting NPCs? No.
Choices and consequences? Not really.
Rewarding exploration? Fair bit.
Good character development through levelling and equipment? Yes.
Great tactical combat? Absolutely.
I prefer the lower level ones, especially Pool of Radiance and Champions of Krynn. As always, tastes differ, i.e. LadyRhian liked Silver Blades, which I think is the worst part of the series.
I just came upon this gem and didn't really know where else to share it. Perfect moment of nostalgia. makes me wish I had ever lived across the pond to get a chance at experiencing moments like this with the Ultima creators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35oztAXv6P0
There are some seriously good old RPG games out there with more depth than you would expect.
In the Exile trilogy, you create a party of adventurers with a character creation system similar to Daggerfall, where you can add special abilities and drawbacks in addition to your skill set. Some interesting perks there, like pacifism, with no ability to fight in battle but who levels up much faster. If you attacked a merchant you could take their entire inventory. No "magically disappearing merchant goods" here! Is easier to look at than the Gold Box games and has those old conversation systems which I always liked, in which you type in key words and phrases to ask about specific things in the world. This is always a better system than dialogue choices in my opinion, since you have to think about what you are asking.
There is also Castle of the Winds, the first roguelike I ever played and one that still holds up to this day.
!988 old? Hah! I seem to recall a Dragon 32 game called "The Ring Of Darkness" by Wintersoft from 1983. It was entirely written in basic and fitted entirely in the 32k of ram available. Ah, the 8 bit days... (insert here the Monty Python 4 Yorkshiremen sketch)
Wow... I'm really having to think back to try and remember the first RPG that I played. I'm certain that it must have been one of the original generation of Gold Box games like Curse of the Azure Bonds, as I vaguely remember watching my cousin play it on his (now ancient) 386 IBM PC and demanding a go. I couldn't make head or tails of the controls and commands though, so I gave up just as quickly. I do remember the first D&D CRPG that I got absolutely sucked into though; it was SSI's Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. Following that game, I went and found several other games by SSI such as Menzoberranzan, Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, and Al-Qadim: the Genie's Curse. In later years I also would purchase other D&D games from that generation such as Dungeon Hack or Fantasy Realms, but they didn't quite capture me the way the earlier games had. And then Baldur's Gate 1 came out, and you guys know the story from there. XD
Comments
The oldest RPG I've played however is Wizardry. The original. It was in 2011 or something like that when playing Elminage Original on the PSP addicted me to dungeon crawlers. So I wanted to experience the classics that inspired the genre.
My favorite part of that game was the undersea elf city, Naulidis. The fish would swim by in your view and it was just gorgeous...
Strange, but I have similar feelings about Ultima. Ultima V is still completely playable for me, but Ultima 6 is a struggle. The engine was a huge advance in so many ways, but I felt they only really perfected that time of interface in Ultima 7. Some things that really bother me nowadays about Ultima 6. E.g. the view distance is just too short...
starting from Ultima 4 had this Virtue system (compassion, honesty, sacrifice, etc...) that the Britannians tried to follow and the Avatar embodied. In UW 2 the Avatar visited some parallel dimensions, including one where the inhabitants followed the evil Guardian (main antagonist of Ultima 7-9) and had their own twisted version of the virtues. Those included sobriety, diligence, conformity, obedience, silence... i.e. everything to make the follower an efficient cog in the machine.
Amusingly, the Florida Department of Corrections stumbled over those virtues via a fan page and decided to adopt them for themselves. The page is down now, but can still be seen on the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20061006124151/http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/compass/0305/2.html)
Even more amusing, there are eight original virtues of the Guardian. They adopted all of them, including obedience, conformity and silence, except one: sobriety.
It just wasn't a problem back then, like it is has become nowadays. Twenty years ago you could make a quirky character and nobody would really care. Today it's considered mandatory to add such content, publicly congratulate yourself with how progressive and morally superior you are and wave a "oh, you don't like it? get banned, you bigot" banner. So of course there'll be people fed up with this arrogance.
Dig Dug
Paperboy
Back then, you had a role, and the developers decided it. Even something like Battlezone, WHO you were made no difference,
You could be a male tank driver or a female tank driver. Your color, etc. didn't matter.
With British, I don't know much about him, so it could be one of the two - either he's got in too early, or see what I said about Japanese. You can be inclusive without being a jerk about it, even if most of Western media is trying hard to prove otherwise.
1) I'm unaware of such complaints against non-traditional characters in Japanese games/anime, only in Western productions.
2) I used to (casually) support the diversity and view its vocal advocates as one the same side. After SoD's release had forced me to look deeper into Gamergate, I still don't mind diverse cast much, despite having developed disdain to the likes of Sarkeesian.
PS I take it you haven't seen any complaints on progressive outlets against a game that didn't reach a quota. I have, more than once or twice.
And, to make up for the necro with some on-topic, have any of you played the Ultima V and VI remakes in the Dungeon Siege engine? They are among my favourite games ever made, and lose almost nothing of the appeal of the originals.
It was posted every year or so on the old Horizon Tavern, which was the most active Ultima forum back in the days. One of my favorite communities. Now I think some of the various Ultima Dragon Fansites might still mention it somewhere in their trivia section. Also both Mobygames and TvTropes have it on their pages.
I played the U5 and U6 remakes and while they are great, I would say they are very different from the originals in term of gameplay. So while they appeal to me it is a different sort of appeal than that of the originals. Ultima 5 in particular was the most perfected version of that type of game engine, which is hard to recapture.
Yup, it was well done in that regard. But for example you could tell that the NPC schedule were sort of hacked into the engine, with them refusing dialogue while on the move.
Regarding music I think they are some excellent pieces, especially in Lazarus. The Lycaeum piece is the one I remember best.
Still, for midi, Ultima 5 itself had some excellent tunes: Engagement and Melee, Lord Blackthorn, The Missing Monarch and especially Worlds Below are all great. And of course, Ultima 5 had the first version of Stones... most Ultima's had good music but I enjoyed Warriors of Destiny, Martian Dreams, Serpent Isle, UW 2 and Pagan the most.
The down-side was that back then the PC version did not include music, but was by far the best version otherwise (best graphics, least number of bugs). I still love the Shadowlord sprite. But the midi music only got patched into the PC version by a fan patch long after release.
Jared Ellsworth and the other composers for Lazarus really surpassed themselves. I like to listen to those pieces on long train rides or walks through the countryside. The Empath Abbey theme and the travel pieces are particularly memorable to me. They exude a particular calm and get me thinking of interesting stories. My favourite Stones may be the vocal performance by Brad Venable.
To get back on topic, has anyone enjoyed the Realms of Arkania games? They had their own particular, weird humour and were quite unforgiving of mistakes, but I liked their atmosphere much better than that of their GoldBox equivalents. I improved my German a lot with them because I only had the German versions as a kid. I still read it quite well. Just as @Ammar observes above, it's curious to note that the most recent title of this series has also aged less well than the others, because it attempted to partly implement 3D graphics. They're all really worth playing though; they offer some of the coolest reactivity ever implemented in a CRPG.
In fact, I never completed any of the GoldBox games - are there any which you would recommend for reasons other than nostalgia today?
Decent framing stories? Sure, they are usually quite good. But it's mostly framing.
Lots of side quests? No.
Good dialogue with interesting NPCs? No.
Choices and consequences? Not really.
Rewarding exploration? Fair bit.
Good character development through levelling and equipment? Yes.
Great tactical combat? Absolutely.
I prefer the lower level ones, especially Pool of Radiance and Champions of Krynn. As always, tastes differ, i.e. LadyRhian liked Silver Blades, which I think is the worst part of the series.
In the Exile trilogy, you create a party of adventurers with a character creation system similar to Daggerfall, where you can add special abilities and drawbacks in addition to your skill set. Some interesting perks there, like pacifism, with no ability to fight in battle but who levels up much faster. If you attacked a merchant you could take their entire inventory. No "magically disappearing merchant goods" here! Is easier to look at than the Gold Box games and has those old conversation systems which I always liked, in which you type in key words and phrases to ask about specific things in the world. This is always a better system than dialogue choices in my opinion, since you have to think about what you are asking.
There is also Castle of the Winds, the first roguelike I ever played and one that still holds up to this day.
TR