No doubt about it, there's nothing like a sophisticated computer adventure game to really draw you into a new world of the imagination. Picture it: there you are in room 125 or whatever, a fire-breathing dragon hot on your trail and only a simple wooden door between you and your goal, the amazing magical Fiddler's Briefcase which transmutes soap coupons into Cayman Island bearer bonds. Fingers sweating, you type in the magic words “Open door with key” only to see the sickeningly familiar message, “Which key: the blue key, the green key or the key given to you 548 turns ago by Slugfoot the Wombat ?” - which of course you lost ages ago.
Once you've sorted out that little lot, and dealt with the incidental fact that the idiot program refuses to recognise the words “floor”, “window” or “go”, you devote your energies to polishing off that dragon. You'll probably be there a long time, though, since you will only succeed by typing the command “Kill dragon with small yellow toothpick hidden in Wombat's left wellington boot”. Yes indeed, there's nothing like a good text adventure to stimulate the mind and make you drive a fist through a perfectly innocent screen...
It needn't be like that, however. Though the overwhelming majority of adventure games released in the UK tend to be text adventures, with or without the addition of useless pretty pictures, the American market is increasingly dominated by role-playing games; Computer Gaming World magazine's influential Adventure Ratings have been headed by the classic Wizardry I for the last five years, while the current top four are all role-playing games. As more powerful computers trickle down the market, all the signs are that the same thing is due to happen in Britain.
Role-playing games, as the name implies, are games in which the player creates one or more alter egos with specific abilities and powers, which are then lead through a long (10-75 hours!) series of moves to the conclusion of a quest or adventure. The great difference between text and role-playing adventures is that in the latter, moves and actions are carried out by means of set commands (arrow movement N, S, E or W, for example, or key [O] for 'open') with the additional option of keying in transactional messages, and that the player is given a functional view of his or her surroundings and can move around them - all in all, much more realistic than being told “You are in a goblin's laundry room” and having to figure out exactly how the program must be told to “open latch”!
RPG scenarios tend to either science-fiction or fantasy, with fantasy much the more popular. This is, of course, that oldest of fictional landscapes, the timeless world of sword and sorcery which stretches from Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queen to Tolkien's Middlearth; anybody who has ever travelled in spirit with Jason and the Argonauts or Corwin of Amber will feel at home here. If the text adventure fan gets his fun out of puzzle-solving and double-guessing the programmer, in the best fantasy role-playing games the player suspends disbelief and immerses himself completely in an imaginary world - that is you running desperately through the forest with a pack of werewolves on your heels, not just a blip on the screen.
Depending on their design, fantasy role-playing games can be divided into two distinct categories: on the one hand the older dungeon-based of game, exemplified by Sir-Tech's Wizardry series, and on the other what might be called 'open-field' games, exemplified by the Ultima series. With small variations, every game produced over the last five years comes under one or the other of these groups.
The first category includes the three Wizardry games (still the best of the lot), Bard’s Tale from Electronic Arts, and Alternate Reality, a curiously half-baked game from Datasoft. With the first four, you start out by creating up to 20 player characters of different races and professions; for example, you could get yourself a human priest, an elven mage, two dwarf fighters, a hobbit thief and so on. At birth, your characters receive a number of points in various useful attributes such as strength, vitality, piety, and luck, as well as an allocation of hit points which represent their hold on life - any damage reduces the total, and zero hit points equals a dead character. Formed up in parties of up to six, they must then equip themselves with armour and weapons (paid for in gold - financial considerations play an important role in all these games) before sallying forth into the dungeons.
The “dungeons” in question may represent catacombs, mines, vaults or the streets of a city, but in essence they consist of stacks of one or more two-dimensional mazes through which the party must fight its way. The key on-screen visual is a 'point-of-view' representation of the maze directly in front of the party, complete with junctions and doors; the player moves in three or four directions using either keyboard commands or a mouse/joystick. Other screen windows provide information on current status and a log of ongoing activities.
Accurate mapping is essential in dungeon games, and could be said to represent the main strategic activity. Each successive level is tougher than the previous one, both in terms of navigational trickery and in the strength and numbers of defending monsters. Fortunately, the invading party's abilities also increase; successful encounters provide not only gold and booty in the shape of improved hardware and magical items, but also generate 'experience points' which eventually allow characters to move up a level. Each promotion brings an increase in attribute points and hit points; and in some cases allows certain characters to join more exalted professions - for example, a fighter might become a lord. The game ends when the party has penetrated to the end of the maze and accomplished its objective.
In the case of Wizardry it is possible (indeed, mandatory from the first to the second scenarios) to move characters from one game to another, whilst Bard’s Tale provides an intriguing bonus in that it will accept characters from any Wizardry scenario or from Ultima III. Alternate Reality is an odd game with a maze consisting of a single 64x64 line grid, a large number of inoperative commands (i.e., the options are there but remain "not available") and no discernible objective, so that a player can rattle about forever without accomplishing much other than surviving - it gives the impression of a game clumsily cut down from a vastly ambitious prototype.
Dungeon scenario games are basically linear, depend largely on navigation and carnage for their kicks, and can generate a high adrenalin count: there you are, six levels deep with one fighter dead and two more badly wounded, your priest got you hopelessly lost twenty minutes ago, the mage is down to one cheap spell for cheating at pinochle and the thief is dying of poisoning - what are the odds on anybody making it out alive?
Open-field games, on the other hand, are much more complex, include a greater element of true fantasy, and require more imagination to play. The grand-daddy of programmers in this field is unquestionably Richard Garriott, whose Ultima II is still selling briskly from Sierra, while his own company, Origin, has produced two sequels (with another in the pipeline), Ultimas III and IV. Origin is also responsible for Moebius, a so-so martial arts RPG adventure, while wargames giant SSI is now plunging heavily into the fantasy RPG field with Questron, Phantasie, Phantasie II and the recent Wizard’s Crown.
All these games have as their principal arena large, two-dimensional scrolling terrain maps (the main map in Ultima IV is on a 256x256 grid) which use variants of the familiar wargaming icons for different features such as mountains, swamps and forests; travel across these is “bird’s-eye view” with the player or group icon always occupying the centre of the screen. Terrain considerations affect movement speed and (in the more sophisticated versions) visibility, and the maps also contain symbols which represent towns, villages and other structures. The player can “enter” these, whereupon the countryside map is replaced by a larger scale map of the site through which the party moves to visit shops, temples, oracles and other essential establishments.
Finances are still important, but a new wrinkle is often added in the form of food supplies, which diminish with each move and must somehow be replenished before starvation strikes. Most movement is on foot, but other means of transport may be available such as horses, ships and even flying devices. Gold, booty and experience accumulate as in the dungeon-type games, but overall strategy is more complicated; there is no obviously “right” way of doing things, and much travelling back and forth and transaction with non-playing characters will be necessary in order to collect vital clues to the environment and even the quest objective. Dungeons in one guise or another are usually still a feature, but they are only a small part of the game and tend to pose fewer navigational problems; in general, plot line is what counts, and there are few or no puzzles to hold up the action.
As far as combat is concerned, in most dungeon-type games the screen view of the maze is replaced by a static image of the enemy, and commands are issued to each party member in turn along the lines of “fight”, “parry”, “cast spell” and so on, with the computer resolving each round until one side or the other is wiped out (or, where allowed, flees). In open-field games, combat takes place between party and attacking icons with a greater or lesser degree of complexity depending on the game; in the two latest Ultimas and in Wizard’s Crown, for example, the location map is replaced by a detailed battlefield map, and each party member can be fought individually.
A quick overview of currently available open-field games confirms that Ultimas still have the best scenarios. The early single-character Ultima II lacks the sophistication of its later siblings and depends unduly on mayhem, but remains a highly-playable classic. My favourite is perhaps Ultima III: Exodus, which maintains a very real sense of enchantment and wonder throughout the entire game. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the most complex roleplaying game around today, is a miracle of programming which makes a determined effort to come up with a new and different objective and is only slightly let down by a rather inconclusive endgame.
SSI's games betray their wargaming pedigree; they are slickly programmed, but the emphasis tends to be on ingenuity rather than true suspension of disbelief. The oldest, Questron, is to my mind one of the best, but it never achieved great popularity and a projected sequel appears to have been axed. The two Phantasy games are fast, very good on detailed procedure and fun to play, but betray what might be described as an ‘engineering’ rather than a ‘creative’ design philosophy; for example, it should have been possible to come up with more imaginative place names than Hobbitown and Greentown! Only just out, Wizard’s Crown looks like being a success. I haven't had a chance to go into it very deeply, but the main wrinkles involve an extensive selection of skills and attributes which must be built up, and a very complex tactical combat option which includes such varied parameters as kinds of blows, position, direction and individual tactical assignments.
Once you've sorted out that little lot, and dealt with the incidental fact that the idiot program refuses to recognise the words “floor”, “window” or “go”, you devote your energies to polishing off that dragon. You'll probably be there a long time, though, since you will only succeed by typing the command “Kill dragon with small yellow toothpick hidden in Wombat's left wellington boot”. Yes indeed, there's nothing like a good text adventure to stimulate the mind and make you drive a fist through a perfectly innocent screen...
It needn't be like that, however. Though the overwhelming majority of adventure games released in the UK tend to be text adventures, with or without the addition of useless pretty pictures, the American market is increasingly dominated by role-playing games; Computer Gaming World magazine's influential Adventure Ratings have been headed by the classic Wizardry I for the last five years, while the current top four are all role-playing games. As more powerful computers trickle down the market, all the signs are that the same thing is due to happen in Britain.
Role-playing games, as the name implies, are games in which the player creates one or more alter egos with specific abilities and powers, which are then lead through a long (10-75 hours!) series of moves to the conclusion of a quest or adventure. The great difference between text and role-playing adventures is that in the latter, moves and actions are carried out by means of set commands (arrow movement N, S, E or W, for example, or key [O] for 'open') with the additional option of keying in transactional messages, and that the player is given a functional view of his or her surroundings and can move around them - all in all, much more realistic than being told “You are in a goblin's laundry room” and having to figure out exactly how the program must be told to “open latch”!
RPG scenarios tend to either science-fiction or fantasy, with fantasy much the more popular. This is, of course, that oldest of fictional landscapes, the timeless world of sword and sorcery which stretches from Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queen to Tolkien's Middlearth; anybody who has ever travelled in spirit with Jason and the Argonauts or Corwin of Amber will feel at home here. If the text adventure fan gets his fun out of puzzle-solving and double-guessing the programmer, in the best fantasy role-playing games the player suspends disbelief and immerses himself completely in an imaginary world - that is you running desperately through the forest with a pack of werewolves on your heels, not just a blip on the screen.
Depending on their design, fantasy role-playing games can be divided into two distinct categories: on the one hand the older dungeon-based of game, exemplified by Sir-Tech's Wizardry series, and on the other what might be called 'open-field' games, exemplified by the Ultima series. With small variations, every game produced over the last five years comes under one or the other of these groups.
 |
| Plain vanilla: A dungeon in the original Wizardry I |
The “dungeons” in question may represent catacombs, mines, vaults or the streets of a city, but in essence they consist of stacks of one or more two-dimensional mazes through which the party must fight its way. The key on-screen visual is a 'point-of-view' representation of the maze directly in front of the party, complete with junctions and doors; the player moves in three or four directions using either keyboard commands or a mouse/joystick. Other screen windows provide information on current status and a log of ongoing activities.
Accurate mapping is essential in dungeon games, and could be said to represent the main strategic activity. Each successive level is tougher than the previous one, both in terms of navigational trickery and in the strength and numbers of defending monsters. Fortunately, the invading party's abilities also increase; successful encounters provide not only gold and booty in the shape of improved hardware and magical items, but also generate 'experience points' which eventually allow characters to move up a level. Each promotion brings an increase in attribute points and hit points; and in some cases allows certain characters to join more exalted professions - for example, a fighter might become a lord. The game ends when the party has penetrated to the end of the maze and accomplished its objective.
In the case of Wizardry it is possible (indeed, mandatory from the first to the second scenarios) to move characters from one game to another, whilst Bard’s Tale provides an intriguing bonus in that it will accept characters from any Wizardry scenario or from Ultima III. Alternate Reality is an odd game with a maze consisting of a single 64x64 line grid, a large number of inoperative commands (i.e., the options are there but remain "not available") and no discernible objective, so that a player can rattle about forever without accomplishing much other than surviving - it gives the impression of a game clumsily cut down from a vastly ambitious prototype.
Dungeon scenario games are basically linear, depend largely on navigation and carnage for their kicks, and can generate a high adrenalin count: there you are, six levels deep with one fighter dead and two more badly wounded, your priest got you hopelessly lost twenty minutes ago, the mage is down to one cheap spell for cheating at pinochle and the thief is dying of poisoning - what are the odds on anybody making it out alive?
Open-field games, on the other hand, are much more complex, include a greater element of true fantasy, and require more imagination to play. The grand-daddy of programmers in this field is unquestionably Richard Garriott, whose Ultima II is still selling briskly from Sierra, while his own company, Origin, has produced two sequels (with another in the pipeline), Ultimas III and IV. Origin is also responsible for Moebius, a so-so martial arts RPG adventure, while wargames giant SSI is now plunging heavily into the fantasy RPG field with Questron, Phantasie, Phantasie II and the recent Wizard’s Crown.
All these games have as their principal arena large, two-dimensional scrolling terrain maps (the main map in Ultima IV is on a 256x256 grid) which use variants of the familiar wargaming icons for different features such as mountains, swamps and forests; travel across these is “bird’s-eye view” with the player or group icon always occupying the centre of the screen. Terrain considerations affect movement speed and (in the more sophisticated versions) visibility, and the maps also contain symbols which represent towns, villages and other structures. The player can “enter” these, whereupon the countryside map is replaced by a larger scale map of the site through which the party moves to visit shops, temples, oracles and other essential establishments.
Finances are still important, but a new wrinkle is often added in the form of food supplies, which diminish with each move and must somehow be replenished before starvation strikes. Most movement is on foot, but other means of transport may be available such as horses, ships and even flying devices. Gold, booty and experience accumulate as in the dungeon-type games, but overall strategy is more complicated; there is no obviously “right” way of doing things, and much travelling back and forth and transaction with non-playing characters will be necessary in order to collect vital clues to the environment and even the quest objective. Dungeons in one guise or another are usually still a feature, but they are only a small part of the game and tend to pose fewer navigational problems; in general, plot line is what counts, and there are few or no puzzles to hold up the action.
As far as combat is concerned, in most dungeon-type games the screen view of the maze is replaced by a static image of the enemy, and commands are issued to each party member in turn along the lines of “fight”, “parry”, “cast spell” and so on, with the computer resolving each round until one side or the other is wiped out (or, where allowed, flees). In open-field games, combat takes place between party and attacking icons with a greater or lesser degree of complexity depending on the game; in the two latest Ultimas and in Wizard’s Crown, for example, the location map is replaced by a detailed battlefield map, and each party member can be fought individually.
A quick overview of currently available open-field games confirms that Ultimas still have the best scenarios. The early single-character Ultima II lacks the sophistication of its later siblings and depends unduly on mayhem, but remains a highly-playable classic. My favourite is perhaps Ultima III: Exodus, which maintains a very real sense of enchantment and wonder throughout the entire game. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the most complex roleplaying game around today, is a miracle of programming which makes a determined effort to come up with a new and different objective and is only slightly let down by a rather inconclusive endgame.
SSI's games betray their wargaming pedigree; they are slickly programmed, but the emphasis tends to be on ingenuity rather than true suspension of disbelief. The oldest, Questron, is to my mind one of the best, but it never achieved great popularity and a projected sequel appears to have been axed. The two Phantasy games are fast, very good on detailed procedure and fun to play, but betray what might be described as an ‘engineering’ rather than a ‘creative’ design philosophy; for example, it should have been possible to come up with more imaginative place names than Hobbitown and Greentown! Only just out, Wizard’s Crown looks like being a success. I haven't had a chance to go into it very deeply, but the main wrinkles involve an extensive selection of skills and attributes which must be built up, and a very complex tactical combat option which includes such varied parameters as kinds of blows, position, direction and individual tactical assignments.
First published in ST User, Summer 1986
Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder
Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder
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