History of Digital Games by Andrew Williams

Author:Andrew Williams [Andrew Williams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Game Development
Publisher: Focal Press
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Later Role-Playing Games

Since the majority of CRPGs featured a plethora of systems that tracked hit points, experience points, weapon damage, spells, inventory, food, and more, the games tended to feature information-dense interfaces spread out across multiple different screens. Players typically toggled these interfaces through keyboard shortcuts that added to the already significant number of regular keyboard commands. Dungeon Master (1987, FTL Games) was one of the first CRPGs to use the mouse to move between different information screens. The player was able to check inventory, character stats, equip weapons, and change the marching orders of party members in the first-person dungeon crawler, using boxes with character names and icons. Movement, spell casting, weapon attacks, and picking up items from the ground also could be executed with the mouse, creating a more seamless approach to interaction.

The game was also significant for its departure from the systems of the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons that had shaped the CRPG genre. Dungeon Master was played in real time, rather than in turn-based movement and combat, meaning that careful consideration and board game-like strategy was replaced with a need to react and make decisions quickly. Spell casting in Dungeon Master was brought about by building spells from sets of symbols powered from a pool of mana points, instead of the Dungeons & Dragons system of limited spells cast per level, per day. Another notable departure was that characters in Dungeon Master increased their skills through practice, much like the earlier Moria on PLATO. This allowed characters to uniquely develop according to each player’s individual play style rather than as a fixed progression of gaining levels. These elements, plus the game’s large windowed, first-person perspective, made Dungeon Master an immersive experience that garnered multiple awards and served as inspiration for a number of later CRPGs.

By the early 1990s, nearly all CRPGs were designed for mouse input. Icon-based interfaces, particularly beneficial for CRPGs, helped simplify the complex text-based control schemes. The Amiga and Atari ST versions of several games published by Strategic Simulations Inc. such as Phantasie (1987), Demon’s Winter (1988), and Eye of the Beholder (1990, Westwood Associates), along with Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990, Sir-Tech Software, Inc.) and Richard Garriot’s Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990, Origin Systems), all featured redesigned interfaces that promoted efficient management of the game information. Mouse-based interfaces for CRPGs remained the basis for interaction through the 1990s and early 2000s despite great diversification in design and gameplay.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.