Breadth, Depth, and Immersion (ft. The Seventh Link)

The party continues to explore The Seventh Link's large world.

             

This entry posits a thesis that I've never explicitly articulated before and probably haven't spent enough time thinking about its flaws. I thus particularly invite you to join me in the comments and add or modify the thesis's tenets. It doesn't feel to me like a particularly original argument, so I'd also be glad for any references to other writers who have argued something similar.

The thesis is that a perfect game (although this might apply to films and novels, too) is something like a cube--equal and balanced on three dimensions. I am calling those dimensions breadth, depth, and immersion.
           

Fate: Gates of Dawn (1991) had an enormous game world and not enough happening within it.

          

Breadth refers primarily to the physical size of the game. It can be measured in dungeon squares or tiles, or in modern games the length of time it takes to travel from one end to the other. It also refers to the length of time it takes to play and win the game; while this is often a function of size, it can also be manipulated to make a small game seem larger or a large game seem smaller; for instance, in the use of fast travel (making a large game seem smaller) or the re-use of maps (making a small game seem larger).

Depth refers to the things that you find and to the things that happen within that game world. The specific elements depend on the game's genre, but for RPGs it includes things like the backstory, lore, NPCs, quests, and character development.
            

Two separate multi-volume book series covering the biography of a single NPC might be too much for some games--but not for The Elder Scrolls' huge game world.

           

We'll get to immersion in a minute, but for now let's pretend that my thesis has only these two elements, and I'm arguing that a good game is like a square: you want a breadth equal to its depth and vice versa. The easiest way to engage the thesis is to imagine the extremes. A game with extreme breadth and almost no depth would be something like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Fallout 4 if all you could do was explore the map. You'd get bored pretty fast.

The opposite--a game with extreme depth and no breadth--is harder to envision because it almost wouldn't be a computer game at all. Imagine a game of only a couple of dozen squares in which every time your character moves, you have to read paragraph after paragraph of text and engage in hours-long dialogues with multiple NPCs. The computer part would feel superfluous. The Star Saga games are the closest I can imagine in real life.
               

Star Saga (1987) mostly used the computer application to direct "players" to chapters in a several hundred-page book.

           

My thesis is that a good game doesn't have to feature a lot of breadth or depth, but rather than it needs to keep them in balance. It is thus not absurd to argue that Ultima IV is a better game than Dragon Age: Inquisition just even though the latter is bigger and has far more story and lore. The issue isn't which has more but which does a better job balancing the two. Ultima IV has just enough backstory and in-game dialogue, lore, and other content to support the size of Britannia and the length of the game. If had featured 200 books with as much text as those found in The Elder Scrolls, it would have gone too far. It would also have gone too far it if had featured the same content as it does, but in a world four times the size.

I have seen the phrase "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" applied numerous times to Skyrim. I find it unfair, but only a little. I'd say that it's as wide as the Pacific Ocean but deep as the Arctic Ocean. The game has plenty of depth. It would be insane to argue that it has less depth (e.g., less content, less meaningful NPC interaction, fewer choices, less role-playing) than fan favorites like Dungeon Master, any of the Ultima titles, or even Planescape: Torment. But people aren't objecting to its absolute depth; they're objecting to its depth relative to its breadth. When I say a game is "too long" in my GIMLET, I'm not saying that crossed some objective threshold so much as I'm saying that it's too long for its content.
             

Ultima Underworld (1992), through a combination of graphics, sound, and interface, is one of the first games to make you feel truly "immersed" in the setting.

           

Let's talk about the third axis. I debated for a while about including it, but I do think it's important. Immersion deals with the game's capacity to make you feel like you are truly "occupying" its world, and it's primarily a function of graphics and sound--although we must allow for skilled developers who can engage the player's imagination in the absence of these things, as a good author does.

To understand the importance of this axis, imagine a large game that you believe balances breadth and depth well. Fallout: New Vegas seems to be a fan favorite. Now imagine that it has no sound and the wireframe graphics of Wizardry. Is it still on your top 10 list? No matter how well a game balances size and content, there's a point at which it becomes "too much" if it can't fully engage your senses and immerse you in its world.

None of these variables is completely objective, and immersion is probably the least objective of the three. Its importance has a lot to do with your age and experience level with older games. I still think the graphics in Morrowind are beautiful, but last week, I stumbled on a Reddit thread in which someone posted an image of a horse falling over in Red Dead Redemption 2 and leaving a horse-sized imprint in the mud, and half the commenters were complaining that the imprint wasn't realistic enough. Even among those of us with a high tolerance for primitive graphics, immersion is a mutable characteristic. A game that seems like a solid cube today will slowly flatten as we become used to better graphics and sound.
                

Watching the sunset in Morrowind (2003) still seems lovely to me, but to some people these graphics are hopelessly outdated.

            

The greatest developmental sins are committed by RPG authors who fail to consider these elements of balance. Take Fate: Gates of Dawn, which took me 272 hours to win and featured both an enormous outdoor game world as well as enormous, multi-leveled dungeons. It was a game of ridiculous breadth, and while it had a certain amount of depth--perhaps even more than the typical RPG of the time--it didn't have enough depth to equal the breadth. I still recommend that modern players limit themselves to the opening area and the Cavetrain quest, as those first 50 hours let you experience everything good about the game; the remaining 5/6 of its length is utterly superfluous. Knights of Legend, Wizardry V, and all three Bard's Tale games are all good examples of games whose size greatly exceed the amount of interesting content they provide.

It's tough to find reverse examples--too much depth and not enough breadth. I mentioned the Star Saga games earlier, in which you make a move in a computer application and then read pages of text in an accompanying book. I ended up rejecting them not because they weren't RPGs because they weren't really computer games. There are other examples of games that wanted to do something epic with their themes but struggled with an interface that could support their intentions. ICON: Quest for the Ring is a good example. The three Richard Seaborne games--particularly Escape from Hell and The Tower of Myraglen--had deep philosophical ambitions that weren't quite matched by the gameplay experience.
              

The Tower of Myraglen (1987) wanted to be more profound than the breadth of the game could really support.

             

But even games near-perfectly balanced in depth and breadth often suffer when we consider the immersion axis. I will grant you that there's a somewhat high threshold before it becomes important. It arguably never becomes important in simple arcade games, and even with RPGs, anyone who argues that Wizardry or Ultima or Dungeons of Daggorath are bad games because of their graphics is expressing an opinion so out-of-touch with my own values that I'd almost regard it as a character flaw. But even I would argue there's no place for a soundless wireframe game that takes 200 hours. There is a degree to which good descriptive text can substitute for graphics, which is why I often praise games for including it, but even I would probably balk at an all-text Fallout 4. 

Deathlord is a good example of a game that's reasonably square with breadth and depth but still largely fails because it's just too big for an iconographic game. I think we're going to start to see this a lot more with 1990s titles, as the use of hard disk installations allows for physically enormous games that are still a bore to explore. The first Elder Scrolls title, Arena, will probably be an example.

Most people probably wouldn't argue that a game's graphics and sound are too good for its breadth and depth, but there are times that you feel that the developer's wasted immersive engines on limited content. Myst is arguably a good example, if you don't love its type of puzzles. Eventually, we reach a point at which depth and immersion almost merge--where the graphics and sound are so good that they let you see, hear, and otherwise experience things that would otherwise have to be rendered as dialogue or written text--and that has implications for this thesis that I haven't fully considered.
                

Fully half of Red Dead Redemption 2's game map exists mostly to look nice, with no significant gameplay content.

          

This thesis gelled as I play The Seventh Link. If you haven't been paying attention, developer Jeff Noyle paid a visit in the comments to my last entry and offered some tips and maps, which motivated me to keep going with the title. The game is mechanically sound: Noyle did a good job replicating the basic experience of Ultima III and IV, including combat, while arguably improving the economy and inventory system. The problem is a reduction in content accompanied by an increase in size. Elira alone--let alone the three other planets--is as large as Britannia (from Ultima IV), has almost as many towns and dungeons, and its towns and dungeons are larger. And yet in the entire game, there is less dialogue than a single Britannian town. While an Ultima player has lots of side-quests and sub-quests to accomplish (find the mystics, find the runes, learn the words of power, meditate at shrines, etc.), the Seventh Link player has a much simpler quest with fewer stages. In short, the game's breadth far exceeds its depth.

When I last blogged about the game, I had explored a couple of dungeon levels but was worried about overextending myself. I think the developer intended a larger, stronger party before tackling the dungeons. Back on the surface, I soon encounter what I most needed: a pirate ship. After slaying the pirates in combat, I was able to board the ship.
           

Blasting enemies with the ship's cannon.

         
As in Ultima III-V, the ship has cannons that can be used to mercilessly wipe out approaching enemies, but doing so offers no experience or gold. They're best used to eliminate enemies you don't want (e.g., anything that causes poison) so you can spend your hit points and spell points on easier and more lucrative prospects.

I used the boat to reach previously-inaccessible land areas and thus visit a few more towns. In one of them, I got a third character, a cleric named Tharon. One of the towns sold a "flying disk," but it's a bit above my price range. I need it to continue exploring the town, although I don't know if you can take it with you when you leave.
            

A second NPC joins the party.

           
There are some interesting graphical vignettes in the outdoor area, including doors in the middle of mountain ranges, archipelagos connected by bridges, towns at the end of mazes, towns with lakes in the middle of them, and so on, but none of this interesting geography leads to any depth in gameplay. The towns have the same identical services and one or two lines each of useful dialogue. This makes the land somewhat exhausting to explore, which is why I'm now using the maps that Jeff provided with no shame.
             

An interesting environment, and yet the town has no more depth or character than any other town.

          
I'm going to make a push to win this in one or two more entries, before I get started with Star Control II, which will require a large devotion of time this weekend.

The final thing I'll say about breadth, depth, and immersion is that my GIMLET doesn't reflect them very well. The considerations aren't entirely absent, but the GIMLET definitely rewards more of everything rather than good balance among the three axes. So far, it hasn't been a huge problem,  but I think it will become one as time marches on. Mediocre games from the 2000s will end up getting much higher scores than excellent classics just because they have more of everything--more NPCs, more character options, more history and lore, better graphics and sound, and so forth. I'm concerned that the GIMLET's purely additive system will result in relative scores that I balk at, like Might and Magic IX ranked higher than Might and Magic III or a bore-fest like Kingdoms of Amalur outperforming Pool of Radiance.

I don't have the answers to this conundrum yet, but sometime this year we'll have a discussion about potential revisions to the GIMLET that better take these factors (and others) into account. This would be a good time to start organizing your arguments.

Missing and Mysteries

I thought I would centralize, in this entry, all of the games that we either can't find or that I've found unplayable or unwinnable in some mysterious way. This should make it easier for readers who stumble across the blog to offer hints. I'll remove titles (or otherwise flag them) when we find solutions and add titles as I verify their "missing" and "NP" status.

I appreciate any leads, but please do not take it upon yourself to reach out to the original developers unless you somehow know them personally. Chances are, I've already tried to contact the most promising leads, and I don't want the authors (or people with their names) to get repeated contacts. If you feel you have a promising lead I may have overlooked, please verify with me first.

Bugs 'N Drugs (1977, PLATO). An early game of the DND lineage. The lesson name was BND. It isn't part of the lessons catalogued on Cyber1.

Castle of Tharoggad (1988, Tandy Color Computer 3). Nothing seems to happen upon reaching top floor and killing monsters. See this entry. 

Dungeon (1975, PLATO). A game of this title exists, and it's possible to load the title screen, but there doesn't seem to be any way to start the game. (Note: this is not The Dungeon, or pedit5, which I have already played and reviewed. This one is by John D. Daleske et. al.)

Dungeon (1975, PDP-10). This game by Don Daglow no longer seems to exist. See this Wikipedia article.

Dungeons of Avalon (1991, Amiga). Culminates in seemingly unwinnable final battle. If you cheat your characters to high enough values to win the final battle, nothing happens. See posts here and here.

Empire III: Armageddon (1983, Apple II). No one seems to have turned up a disk image.

GayBlade (1992, DOS). Famous lost RPG with LGBTQ themes. Some of my commenters were pursuing some leads, but that was weeks ago, and nothing seems to have turned up. Reviews, box art, and various commentary prove that the game existed, but no one seems to have a copy. See here for more.

m199h (1975, PLATO). Perhaps the first CRPG ever written, deleted by PLATO admins.

OrbQuest (1981, CP/M). Rare CP/M game derived directly from PLATO Game of Dungeons. No known publicly-available disk images exist. (Note: if you're going to try to help search for this one, please do not bother the individual with the initials B.L. who posted on his site that he acquired the game about a decade ago. Multiple people have already written him and he clearly either can't or won't supply the images; there's no point in continuing to harass him.)

OrbQuest: The Search for Seven Wards (1986, Macintosh). I've been unable to find a place to download this first Mac-only RPG.

Star Crystal: Episode 1 - Mertactor: The Volentine Gambit (1985, Apple II). It seems that this game was never officially released. Edit: Solved in the comments!

TaskMaker (1989, Macintosh). I've been unable to find a copy of the original version, just the color remake from 1991.

Twin Morg Valley (Unknown, Commodore 64). See the bottom of this entry. We still don't know when this was released or what its "deal" is.

The Final Word on Daniel Lawrence's DND

The title shows that, just as with The Game of Dungeons, "DND" was just a file name, not the game name.

        

If you haven't had a chance to check out the "Data Driven Gamer," it's worth a visit. The author, Ahab, is still building his readership base, much like I was in 2011. He's more expansive in his selection of games than I am, but his particular focus is to analyze the games' quantitative elements, while still supplying a lot of commentary on the qualitative ones.

Ahab did a great job in the last couple of years analyzing The Dungeon and The Game of Dungeons, prompting me to go back and win those games. But those contributions pale in comparison to what he did last month. For the first time that I'm aware of, he figured out how to get a version of Daniel Lawrence's DND operating on a VAX emulator. For decades, we've had to reconstruct this missing link between the PLATO Game of Dungeons and the commercial Telengard based on player memories, adaptations, and interpretations of source code. Ahab not only showed the game in action, but he won it and supplied a full set of maps (for one of the three dungeons) as part of the process. His material is key to understanding this particular, peculiar line of CRPGs. Among other things, the ability to actually play this game shows that only the file name was DND; the title was--copyrights be damned--Dungeons & Dragons.
         

Gameplay in the VMS/VAX DND. My graphics are all messed up because of a line feed issue that I can't solve. The dungeon walls don't really look this chaotic.

         
Untangling the history of this particular lineage has been difficult, largely because of horrendous misinformation, much of it perpetrated (or at least not corrected) by Lawrence himself, who died in 2010 at the age of 52. (Among other things, he explicitly designated this page, which is so hopelessly confused I don't know where to begin, as the "official DND site." The authors do deserve credit for aggregating and preserving important files.) To read some sites, Lawrence is the father of the entire CRPG line, having written the first DND as early as 1972--two years before tabletop Dungeons & Dragons! His game was so popular, some articles have alleged, that students at the University of Indiana decided to adapt it as The Game of Dungeons. (Of course, it was the other way around.) Even writers who haven't so thoroughly confused the timeline have accepted Lawrence's assertions that he wrote "his" DND entirely on his own, with no reference to any other game, despite that it clearly borrows elements from the PLATO Game of Dungeons and Lawrence went to a university (Purdue) connected to PLATO. In a 2007 interview with Matt Barton, he suggests that his "play testers" might have played The Game of Dungeons and brought ideas to him. To me, such a scenario doesn't begin to explain the similarities between the games.
          

Daniel Lawrence in an undated photograph. Credit unknown.

       
The best truth that I can determine with the available evidence is that Lawrence wrote his first version of DND in 1976 or 1977, clearly after being exposed to The Game of Dungeons on PLATO. I'm inclined to think that 1977 is the more likely date, since DND is closer in similarity to Version 6 of The Game of Dungeons, which wasn't released until 1977. Then again, elements of The Game Version 8 (1978) also seem to show up in Lawrence's work, so it's possible he went back to the well several times during the development of his adaptation. The existence of several mainframe versions would support this thesis.

As we'll see, Lawrence made plenty of additions, and to recognize that he plagiarized from The Game is not to deny his own skill and innovations. His primary contribution was releasing the game to the wider world, first by writing a version for Purdue's DEC RSTS/E system. (In Lawrence's own words, the game was "the cause of more than one student dropping out" and "made me very unpopular with the computing staff at Purdue.") Engineers from DEC maintaining Purdue's system became familiar with the game and liked it so much that in 1979, they asked Lawrence to come to their Massachusetts headquarters and write a port for DEC's PDP-10 mainframe running the TOPS-20 operating system. (There are hints within DEC documents that Lawrence may have been paid for this, and that DEC's intention was to offer the game with its installations. The specific agreement between Lawrence and DEC has not come to light.) This version was subsequently disseminated in many locations where DECs were installed. The VMS/VAX version that Ahab got running seems to have been ported from this mainframe version.

By then, Lawrence had already been porting the game to the micro-computer. In 1978, he wrote a version for the Commodore PET that he titled Telengard, which had been the name of one of the explorable dungeons in DND. Representatives from Avalon Hill ran into Lawrence demoing the game at a convention in 1980 or 1981 and offered him a publishing deal, which ultimately saw PET, Commodore 64, Apple II, TRS-80, Atari 800, and MS-DOS releases starting in 1981 or 1982.
          

The title screen from the Commodore PET version of Telengard. The 1981 date seems unlikely as the actual release year.

             
(None of the histories of Lawrence or Telengard mention the specific convention at which this meeting occurred, but I found a likely session in the GenCon XIV program from August 1981. Unless Lawrence ran the same competition multiple years [I can't find the previous year's catalog], it seems unlikely that Telengard had a pre-1982 release date despite the copyright date on some versions of the game.)
          

In 1981, Lawrence ran a "contest" in which players competed for high scores or other status in some version of DND. Someone from Avalon Hill attended the session, and the result was the commercial Telengard.

            
From then on, Lawrence and Avalon Hill waged war on the ubiquitously-released free versions of the game, ordering their removal from every system on which they appeared. For its part, DEC acceded to legal threats from Avalon Hill, resulting in the modern difficulty reconstructing what those early versions looked like. You can read a long, fun e-mail chain here in which DEC employees try to argue law with their own legal department. Hilariously, various employees request assistance in finding the Orb throughout the thread while their exasperated bosses remind them that the game isn't supposed to exist on any DEC machine anymore.
            

A DEC executive orders the deletion of DND from DEC machines.

            
If Lawrence was guilty of some disingenuous behavior in trying to quash free versions of a game he partly plagiarized, it came back to bite him in repeated plagiarisms of his versions. We've seen plenty of them on this blog, including the so-called "Heathkit DND" (in actuality, also titled Dungeons and Dragons) of 1981, R.O. Software's DND (1984), and Thomas Hanlin's Caverns of Zoarre (1984). There are other BBS and shareware versions of the game that we haven't tried.
              

A DND "family tree."

            
That's the history. But what is Dungeons & Dragons? It's a text-based game with ASCII graphics in which a single character navigates one of three 20-level dungeons in a quest to retrieve a magic orb from a dragon. The layout of the dungeon and the locations of many of the special encounters are fixed, but the locations of combats and miscellaneous treasure finds are so random that you could encounter a never-ending stream of them from the same dungeon square. Combats are with a small menagerie of enemies, each with different strengths and vulnerabilities to the game's various spells. The character gains experience through both combat and treasure-finding, with miscellaneous encounters increasing and decreasing his attributes and providing him with magical gear. When he feels strong enough, he takes on the final dungeon level, recovers the orb, and--if he makes it back alive--gets his name on a leaderboard of "orb finders."

As I mentioned, there are too many elements copied directly from The Game of Dungeons for it to be remotely possible that Lawrence never saw it. These include:

• The basic approach to game mechanics and goals, including the existence of permadeath.

• A character creation process that includes a "secret name" for each character, serving as a kind of password

         

The need for a "secret name" is drawn from The Game of Dungeons, but the full set of attributes, the choice of character classes, and the choice of dungeons is new to DND.

        

• The number of dungeon levels.

• A main quest to recover an orb.

• Carrying treasure out of the dungeon converts it to experience points.

          

My character levels up from a treasure haul.

        

• A list of successful characters called "finders."

• The existence of a transportation device, called "Excelsior," that moves you among the levels.

• Basic combat options of (F)ight, (C)ast, and (E)vade.

• A small number of monsters who have numeric levels assigned.

• Many of the magic items are identical. Items can be trapped (although Lawrence's traps are more creative).

• Treasure is found in both chests and random piles. Chests contain vastly more gold than the random piles.

• Magic books that can raise or lower your attributes.

       

DND's handling of chests and books is the same as The Game of Dungeons.

      

• Pits that you can fall down, dumping you on lower levels.

          

Luckily, I spotted this one.

        
It's also possible that Lawrence took a few elements from the earlier The Dungeon, including the organization of spells into a number of "slots" per level as well as some of the treasures you can find in the dungeon and their relative conversion to gold.

But Lawrence also added some new things to the Game of Dungeons template, some making it better, some making it poorer. These include:

• DND has no graphics. Walls and corridors are ASCII characters and the main characters is represented as an X. The Game of Dungeons had graphics for geography, the PC, monsters, equipment, gold, and so forth.

• Instead of just "gold," the player finds a variety of different treasure types that are converted to gold.

• DND dungeon levels are much larger.

• The Excelsior transporter exists on every level in DND, not just the top one.

• A full set of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons attributes. The Game of Dungeons just had strength, intelligence, wisdom, and dexterity. DND adds constitution and charisma.

          

A DND "character sheet."

         

• While the character in Game was a multi-classed fighter/magic-user/cleric, DND has the player specify a choice of these classes. As such, combat is rebalanced so that you don't need to cast particular spells to ensure victory, and a pure fighter has a shot at winning. Spells, which could reliably one-shot certain enemies in The Game, are significantly reduced in power. They're also more in line with tabletop Dungeons and Dragons and, it must be said, a lot less silly than The Game.

• There's no distinction between experience and gold in DND, as there was in Game through Version 5. The Game also changed to a single experience pool starting in Version 6, so Lawrence may have been influenced by the later one.

• DND offers three dungeons to explore--Telengard, Svhenk's Lair, and Lamorte--each of which might contain the orb.

• Game resolved combats all at once. DND shows round-for-round results.

            

DND's approach is generally better, but sometimes you wish it would just hurry up and get it done.

          

• DND completely randomizes the appearance of treasure. The Game "seeded" each level with gold and chests whenever you entered, and you could clear the level, but in DND, treasure has a chance of showing up in every square as you move to it, including those you've already explored.

• DND adds more special encounters at fixed locations, including thrones, altars, fountains, dragons' lairs, and doors with combination codes.

         

Special encounters with altars are a new element in DND.

       

• Lawrence replaced the awkward "teleporters" with stairs that remain in a fixed location.

• DND includes a greater variety of equipment, including magic weapons other than swords. The pluses go much higher, too. Where The Game capped at +3, DND allows higher than +20.

• DND adds cute atmospheric messages as you explore. Examples: "A mutilated body lies on the floor nearby"; "'Turn back!!!' a voice screams"; "The room vibrates as if an army is passing by." There's even a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure and its hollow voice that says "PLUGH."

Finally, it's worth noting some of the changes between DND and Telengard:

• Telengard has no main quest. The only objective is to get stronger and richer. For years, I thought this was a defining feature of the sub-genre, but it turns out that it's actually quite rare. Most variants have some kind of main quest.

• Telengard's has only one dungeon, randomly drawn every time you start a new game.

• The appearance of thrones, fountains, altars, and other special features are completely randomized, just like monsters and miscellaneous treasure. A player can encounter everything that Telengard has to offer by passing time in a single square. [Edit: This might only be true for some ports.]

• Telengard has graphics.

• Telengard has an expanded selection of items, including potions and scrolls.

        

Telengard is a nicer-looking game, but the greater randomization creates a chaotic experience.

          

Only the last item is a clear "improvement." Telengard is arguably a dumbing-down of gameplay in DND. The lack of any main quest is particularly notable, and one wonders why Lawrence or Avalon Hill made the decision to exclude one. Perhaps they thought the game had greater replayability if the only goal was to create a stronger character.

For all the ink writers like me have spent on Lawrence and his game, it arguably had the least impact of the major lineages that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During its day, DND offered perhaps the best simulation of the mechanics of tabletop role-playing on a computer, but its arrival on the micro-computer scene was far too late to have any impact. By the time that Telengard was released, it had already been outclassed by Ultima and games in the Moria/Oubliette/Wizardry line. The direct influence of DND can only really be felt in its few clones, for which there was so small a market that they had to be released as shareware.

             

Gameplay from the Heathkit Dungeons and Dragons (1981).

Gameplay in R.O. Software's DND (1984)

           

Gameplay in Caverns of Zoarre (1984)

            

There is one small exception, and to analyze it we must first note that DND did a reasonably good job anticipating the roguelike sub-genre. In fact, it's hard not to call it a pre-Rogue "roguelike," what with its random encounters, permadeath, and MacGuffin on the 20th floor. And yet it's hard to detect any direct influence on Rogue. (To some extent, Rogue feels like a game created by someone who heard about DND but never played it.) To my knowledge, the developers of Rogue have never acknowledged any direct influence except Star Trek (1971), Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), and a general desire to emulate table-top role-playing.

However, I do think that someone on the NetHack development team was exposed to DND, or at least Telengard. I base this on the variety of special encounters that were introduced to the game at some point between Hack and NetHack 2.3e, including thrones that do different things when you sit on them and offer the ability to pry gems out of them; fountains that have a variety of effects; and altars that ask for money. Granted, thrones, fountains, and altars are fantasy staples that may have been introduced independently, but the specific way that you use them is so similar to DND that I think there must be a connection. It's a minor legacy, but still worth acknowledging.

          

Sitting on thrones in NetHack has many of the same consequences as in DND.

       

Ahab was kind enough to send me the instructions I needed to emulate DND myself. I tried for a while, but I couldn't solve an issue (involving line feeds) that created chaos out of the dungeon maps. (The solution he offers on his blog didn't work for me despite us both having the same version of Windows.) Such a win would have been superfluous coming right on the heels of his own victory anyway. I may return to it at some point in the future, just for the statistic, but not soon.

This entry will serve as my final word on this line of games, which we've visited in bits and pieces since the first year of my blog. If any new information comes to light, I'll include edits in this entry rather than writing anew. In the meantime, there are dozens of web pages and Wiki articles that I don't imagine will be similarly corrected. Daniel Lawrence deserves credit for what he accomplished, but he is not the grandfather or even father of CRPGs.

Game 319: Lord of the Rings, Vol. II: The Two Towers (1992)

Vol. II lazily re-uses a lot of the artwork from Vol. I, including the title screen.

         

Lord of the Rings, Vol. II: The Two Towers

United States

Interplay (developer and publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS, 1993 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 5 February 2019

I remember approaching Lord of the Rings, Vol. I with some trepidation, not much of a fan of the source material, not looking forward to a game that recapped a plot that everyone already knows. Role-playing a defined character with a predestined fate, I reasoned, removes any sense of player investment in the character. Meanwhile, if the game simply follows the plot of its source, there's no fun in exploration and no surprises; but if it allows all kinds of diversions, the player is jarred by the dissonance with the source.

          

The game starts with a recap of the story from the beginning.

        

I was thus surprised to find most of my worries unfounded. Vol. I plays like an alternate-universe execution of Fellowship of the Ring--one that begins at the same location as the books but is then free to go off in its own directions. The player can make any character in the Fellowship the ring-bearer. All kinds of non-canonical NPCs can join the Fellowship, including some created just for the game. Even Gollum can join. The open world is full of side quests that Tolkien never envisioned. And it's completely non-linear: a player can exit Moria, turn around, and walk all the way back to the Shire. He'll even encounter new situations and quests if he does so. And it turned out that none of these departures from the book bothered me at all--although we must remember that I wasn't much invested in the book in the first place.

The opening to Vol. II makes me wonder if the developers retained this admirable freedom. The backstory makes this game more of a sequel to the original material than to Vol. I. The first game ends with a non-canonical episode in which the Witch King kidnaps Frodo and Sam (or, I guess, whoever has the Ring) and the rest of the Fellowship has to rescue them from the fortress of Dol Guldur (and keep in mind, depending on the player, the "rest of the Fellowship" might include none of the canonical members). The game thus ends on a triumphant note, before the betrayal and death of Boromir, who might not even be with the party.

         

The intro screens elide some unpleasant events.

         

The backstory told in the opening screens of Vol. II omits the business with Dol Guldur and jumps ahead in time to a point past Boromir's death, the kidnapping of Merry and Pippin, and the division of the Fellowship. It begins with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas (who wasn't even in my Vol. I party) on the plains of Rohan, following the trail of the orcs who kidnapped the hobbits.

            

The game begins.

          

I didn't expect the developers to emulate Crusaders of the Dark Savant and offer a different opening for every potential end state of Vol. I, but I was surprised that the game doesn't even import the save file or offer any concessions to the variances in the plot. As I began, I hoped that didn't mean that it wouldn't feature the same spirit of open exploration and side quests that we found in its predecessor.

The manual does suggest that Vol. II is more interested in adhering to canon. Among other things, it makes a distinction between canonical members of the Fellowship (Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Merry, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli)--who can die but will otherwise never leave the party--and "temporary NPCs" who might join for a little while, but only until their personal missions are fulfilled. There were some of those temporary NPCs in the first game, too, but generally you trust that anyone who joined your party would stick around to the bitter end.

There is thus no character creation process. Characters come with preset levels in certain attributes: dexterity, endurance, life points, strength, luck, and will power. They also come with a variety of active skills, combat skills, and lore. "Active" skills can be directly employed by the player and include such options as "Climb," "Detect Traps," "Hide," and "Boats." Combat skills are used automatically in combat, and lore--including orc, dwarf, wizard, and elven lore--are similarly passive. Skills and lore are binary; you either have them or you don't.

          

The main interface and its various commands are activated with the SPACE bar.

        

You may recall that Vol. I was reissued in 1993 on CD-ROM, with artwork created specifically for the game replaced with scenes from Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film. It also improved several aspects of the interface. (I started with the earlier version and finished with the later version.) Vol. II, developed in between the two releases of Vol. I, benefits from some of the interface improvements but not all of them. The party cannot move diagonally, for instance, but the main actions on the bottom of the screen--attack, view, get, inventory, skills, magic, talk, set leader, and game options--are easily called by keyboard commands. There's also an automap, which reveals itself in large squares. When you turn the interface off, the exploration window is completely uncluttered, which I like a lot.

           

The automap fills in by large squares.

        

The game begins with the three companions locked in battle with half a dozen orcs. Combat hasn't changed from the first game. You select "Attack" then specify the target from the list, with wounded and near-dead enemies annotated with special symbols. Enemies get their turns after the Fellowship members, and sometimes the Fellowship gets a free turn. I'll have more on combat later once it comes back to me.

        

In the midst of a melee.

        

My party destroyed the orcs handily, after which Aragorn did some tracking and noted that the trail of the kidnappers leads north and that the hobbits needed to be rescued at once. So naturally I decided to make my way north via east-west sweeps of the area. (Hey, I was trying to spare Aragorn a broken metatarsal as long as possible.) The eastern border of the opening area is water--I guess the river Isen--and the western border is the uncrossable Misty Mountains. The southern border is open, and you have to be careful not to cross it because the game forces you to switch parties, with I-don't-know-what consequences for the initial trio.

           

Walking alongside the Misty Mountains.

           

As you walk, events and combats are triggered as you enter their appropriate areas. You often don't see anything in advance, which is one of the oddities (and, I think, weaknesses) of this interface. Some of the things I ran into on the first map include:

         

• Remains of an orc encampment with some rations and ale.

• A party of random orcs. Once I killed them, I found a sigil with the white hand of Saruman on their bodies.

          

Note that there are no actual orcs on the screen until after I get the message.

        

• Athelas, which Aragorn can use to heal wounds.

• A Rohirrim warrior named Dorlas, hiding in the bushes, claiming to be hunting orcs who burned his town of Estemnet. He told me that a wizard has been seen on the edge of Fangorn Forest and suggested we look into it. In follow-up questioning (you talk by typing keywords, probably one of the last games in which this is true), he told me that the King of Rohan is "all but dead" and that a "craven council" rules in Edoras. He spoke of Saruman as an enemy, so his betrayal is clearly already known. Dorlas popped up several times. It got kind of annoying.

         

This doesn't seem to be this Dorlas.

        

• A man named "Walcnoth" who just stood there and wouldn't say anything to me.

• Three uruks trying to capture a black steed. They attacked as we approached. There were two such encounters.

• The ruins of Estemnet. A warrior named Bregowine gave us a meal, which healed all our accumulated wounds. Most of the other citizens were angry and bitter about the failure of their king, Theoden, to protect them. The leader, a woman named Leofyn, said that the town wouldn't be helping anyone until "a weregild is paid to compensate us for our losses." Specifically, she wanted her husband's sword, a bag of gold, and the return of her son, who had taken off, vowing to avenge his father. The sword and gold had both been stolen by orcs, with a camp to the north.

         

This was the same portrait they used for Galadriel in the last game.

        

• A warrior named Heof. He offered to teach us the "Riding" skill (how is it possible that Aragorn doesn't already know it?) if we solved a sub-quest to destroy a shrine that the orcs placed in a sacred pool used by the mearas (cool horses). The shrine couldn't be harmed during the day, and at night it's guarded by "spirits of evil." I left this for later because I wasn't yet sure if the slight darkening of the sky that happens every few minutes is "night."

             

That seems pessimistic.

         

• A group of horsemen led by Eomer. He said that they had slaughtered a group of orcs, didn't know anything about hobbits, and not all was right in Edoras. Basically the same as the book.

        

Eomer says nothing about being banished.

        

• In a burned area north of Estemnet, I found the orc encampment. The game warned me that there were too many to fight, but I bungled my way into it anyway. I defeated the first party of attackers but died at the hands of the second.

            

If we all die, Satan gets the ring.

          

After my defeat and reload, I changed my exploration pattern, going all the way north along the River Isen to Fangorn Forest. A path led into the forest--which is anything but dark and brooding--and it wasn't long before we found Gandalf. Saying his name snapped him out of his reverie. He explained that Merry and Pippin were safe with Treebeard and that our priority should be to stop a trio of "messenger orcs" on their way to Saruman (perhaps the same party I already killed as above?), then see about helping Theoden.

            

Fangorn! What madness would make us hesitate to go in there?

         

At this point, the game decided it was time to switch the action, and it loaded up Frodo and Sam on the edge of the Dead Marshes. There doesn't seem to be any way to manually switch between the parties, so I guess the game will do it automatically when certain plot points occur. I wonder if there's any way to artificially unite (or even switch!) the parties. I guess I'd have to find a way across Isen first.

          

I don't care what's canon; I'm glad the films didn't make the hobbits look like goofy old men.

          

The game had us distribute the gifts from the elves (two cloaks, magic rope, lembas bread), after which Frodo recommended that we approach Mordor via the marshes to the southeast. 

           

The Dead Marshes, Frodo. Yes, yes, that is their name.

           

I think I'll wrap up here for the first entry, but a few miscellaneous notes before I go:

• The exposition with Leofyn was delivered via a written paragraph in the manual. Vol. I had these, too, but the re-release put all the text in-game. This has to be just a copy protection exercise because the game certainly hasn't been shy about long in-game paragraphs otherwise.

           

Flashbacks to Pool of Radiance!

         

• I'm not really sure how experience and leveling work. The manual assures that your statistics will increase with experience. I forgot how it worked in the first game.

• The screen trades between dark and light every minute or so. If that's a day/night cycle, it happens very fast. I don't think my DOSBox cycles are too high, though, because if I lower them it's sluggish to respond to commands. Are those periods of momentary dimness "night," or just cloudiness? (If the latter, I haven't experienced night at all, yet.)

• Sound effects are sparse except during combat, when there are about three: a thunk of connection, a whoosh of missing, and a scream of death.

• The manual devotes a lot of space to the History of Middle Earth and a glossary of characters and places, enough that I learned quite a bit despite having been exposed to this material before. The manual also philosophically questions whether Tolkien himself would have approved of a computer game based on his work.

          

I'm not going to have a lot of patience for this.

       

The events of the opening area ultimately assuaged my concern that Vol. II would be too linear and plot-driven. I look forward to seeing how it develops. I suspect I'm due for an encounter with Gollum soon. Can I be smarter than Frodo and just kill him?

Time so far: 2 hours

****

Non-sequitur: I had this dream the other night that the nation of Denmark hired me to create an official Danish tabletop RPG (this despite my lack of experience with tabletop RPGs). The scenario was to be that the melting ice sheets in Greenland were slowly uncovering an ancient civilization. I invited several of you to be a part of the team, and we had a very contentious meeting in Amsterdam (yes, I know that's a different country--I'm just telling you what my dream was) where some of you wanted to make it a pure exploration/archaeology RPG while others wanted to have, like, ice giants awakening in the melting glaciers.

Lately, I've been in the habit of writing down dreams that I think might lead to good song, story, or game ideas. I don't always hit a home run. The other night, I wrote (I have no memory of this):  "Bacon-wrapped chocolate coin. The coin has an image of a woman on it, and you have to convince her to submit before you can eat the bacon." That one doesn't seem so promising now. But the idea of an RPG set in an ancient civilization slowly uncovered in Greenland actually seems like a good one. Anyone has my permission to use the idea.

The Root of All Evil

           

"The CRPG Addict" is about to enter its tenth year. Clearly, it's here to stay. In some ways, it has become as much of an addiction for me as the games themselves.

Unfortunately, it is long past time to consider how I can better justify the amount of time I spend on the blog. I average 15-20 hours per week. If I had spent that time on real work instead, Irene (my patient wife) would have a lot more stamps in her passport.

As my longtime readers know, I have struggled with this for years. Reflecting a sense of humility that would make Lord British proud, I've never felt that my work contributes that much to the world--certainly, not enough that should require people to pay money. I also didn't want to create any barrier, psychological or otherwise, to readership and participation on the blog.

Irene, who is much more of a capitalist than I am, recently sat me down and pointed out a few things:

1. People get paid for ephemera all the time. Some woman has made like $6 billion simply selling a huge list of things that don't suck. There are sites that make money off of reprinting my own content without permission.

2. With the different mechanisms available these days for monetizing writing, I'm literally just throwing money away by refusing to do it.

3. She would really like to go to Greece someday.

Hence, over the next year, I am launching a three-pronged approach to earn some pocket money from the effort I put into "The CRPG Addict." These are the prongs:

A Patreon Account

Readers have been encouraging me to do it for years, so I finally did it. I got through the entire setup process before I realized that you can only use it to make recurring monthly donations. I thought it could be used for one-time donations. (Technically, you can use it that way and just cancel after one month, but that seems like a pain.) I thus don't expect very much from it, but I set a recommended donation level of $12 per year to support an estimated 120 entries. If I get a lot of feedback that says, "Hey, I'd support you with a quick bump, but I don't want to be charged monthly," I'll consider a different platform or just remove it altogether.

My YouTube Channel

Over the coming year, you're going to see more videos posted, and YouTube offers a fairly easy monetization process, which may occasionally require you to watch an ad before the video plays. I need 1,000 subscribers to the channel before they'll allow me to do that, and I'm only a little over half that, so in lieu of making a Patreon donation, I would ask you to subscribe to my channel. I've already passed the "watch time" threshold that they set. Eventually, I'll get around to adding video links to the two play lists.

Addictive Adventure: The Complete History of Computer Role-Playing Games

I'm not promising anything yet in terms of a release date--although shooting for my 10-year anniversary is an obvious goal--but I can say that I've at least started work on editing my material into book form, and that I will make it more of a priority than in the past. The first volume will cover 1975-1983. I may ask for help with aspects of it as we move forward.

I hope none of these mechanisms prove intrusive, nor lessen your enjoyment of the blog. If they do, use the comments section for this entry to discuss the issue or otherwise provide feedback on the plan. It is my intention that none of these efforts will affect the content, approach, and quality of the blog.