Some Musings about CRPG Narratives

For the student who asked me some questions for his or her thesis but needs a verifiable written source to cite:

      

Would you consider a CRPG to have an inherent narrative to it?

     

I don't think a particular narrative is inherent to the definition of a CRPG, but almost all of them have one. Many CRPG developers, early ones in particular, tended to be programmers first and storytellers second, so their games sometimes lack a coherent narrative. The tendency in the early era is for the narrative to be rather threadbare, often encapsulated in what I call a "framing story"--an excuse for the game that appears mostly in the documentation but is rarely referenced in the game itself. For instance, the very first CRPG for which we know any detail, The Dungeon (1975), opens with a paragraph that sets the adventure in the year 666 in the country of Caer Omn. None of the information in the paragraph is necessary to play and enjoy the game, and indeed you could replace it with a different paragraph and the player would be none the wiser.

      

It isn't much of a narrative, but it's something.

     

Framing stories persist deep into the CRPG timeline. For instance, I just finished Eye of the Beholder III: The Ruins of Myth Drannor (1993). The documentation for the game contains a short story that sets the backdrop, and this story has far more text than the game itself. Unlike The Dungeon, the story is referenced throughout the game, and some people might object to my calling it a "framing story" for that reason. But those references are never in the gameplay itself; they're all in cut scenes that could easily be swapped out to tell a completely different story.

Even when more complex, integrated narratives started to appear around 1980, they were often light on detail. To some degree, this is a good thing. CRPGs have always been about self-identification with the player character. Modern CRPGs tend to enhance that self-identification by giving you lots of quest choices and dialogue options, but as a player who got started in the 1980s, I can tell you that it was great fun to simply imagine your own dialogue and motivations and to engage in behaviors that I like to call surplaying, or doing things for role-playing reasons that aren't even recognized by the game itself. Creative players made their own plots and interpersonal dramas within the confines of the game mechanics. Thus, even games without inherent narratives to some degree inherently supported player-created narratives. Some early games, like the Dunjonquest series (1978-1982) or Stuart Smith's Fracas (1980), explicitly encouraged players to make up their own stories as they played.

 

What do you think qualifies as the first CRPG that has a narrative? What about one with a branching narrative?

 

As I mentioned, the first CRPG with any narrative is the first CRPG: The Dungeon (1975). But let's expand the definition of "narrative" a bit, and assume it means a game that a) establishes the setting; b) clearly identifies the player character's part in the setting; and c) offers a denouement at the end, rather than just a congratulatory message. For that, I think we're looking at a 1979 game also called Dungeon, although renamed Maces & Magic: Balrog Sampler when it was redistributed a couple years later. Dungeon is a hybrid between a text adventure and an RPG, and as such, it has an ongoing narrative throughout. Text adventures had already existed for years, of course, going back to William Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) and including the first games in the Zork series. Thus, the innovation of Dungeon, and other hybrids that followed like Eamon (1980), was not to add narratives to an RPG but to add RPG elements to a narrative.

   

You might then ask what is the first graphical CRPG (not a text game) to feature a full narrative as defined above. That distinction belongs to a crop of 1981 games, and I don't know which is technically first. Ultima, Wizardry, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves all featured not only introductions and conclusions but in-game plot points along the way. Their approaches are all very different, and Ultima is the least coherent, but it did establish a tradition of telling a full story along with the mechanics of a tabletop RPG. None of them really supported enough material that they could be made into a novel or film (although somehow, Japanese animators managed to eke one out of Wizardry), but they could have at least supported a short story.

           

Wizardry (1981) not only had a beginning and an ending but also developments in the middle.

        

The first CRPG to support a "branching" narrative depends largely on what you mean by "branching." The early text/RPG hybrids let you encounter text and thus plot points in a variety of orders, but they all ended at the same place. True branching narratives with alternate endings took a long time to develop. The earliest are in games that aren't really full CRPGs. Apventure to Atlantis (1982) had two endings, but it was practically at the game's end that they "branched," and the game is arguably not an RPG. There were a couple of very literal adaptations of choose-your-own-adventure style gamebooks in 1984 (The Citadel of Chaos, The Forest of Doom, Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark), but again, I have trouble calling them CRPGs for the lack of mechanics. I think we're all the way to The Return of Werdna (1987), a game I'm just finishing, before you see anything complex in the "multiple endings" department. Even after that, alternate paths and endings are rare into the 1990s.

What does become a lot more common in the RPG timeline is giving players an open world so that although they all reach the same end, they've gone through different experiences and had different accomplishments when they get there. Many such games also allow players to achieve things specific to their character classes and alignments along the way. The Might and Magic and Quest for Glory series and the Dungeons & Dragons "Gold Box" titles from SSI are notable in this regard.

The Quest for Glory series offers special content for each of the four character classes.

        

I've always considered an RPG a game that lets you customize to some extent your character and lets you sway the story somewhat. You define it differently, however. Why is that?

 

Tabletop role-playing has always featured some level of player agency in the evolution of the story. A human dungeon master can adapt quickly and creatively to such player choices. But a game developer doesn't have the time or resources or (sometimes) foresight to be so flexible. In the early days, of course, disk space and computing power also put lots of limitations on how much the player could bend the story.

In those early days, everyone understood that the "RPG" part of "CRPG" meant the mechanics of tabletop role-playing: attributes, levels, weapon and armor statistics, monster statistics, and tactical combat that followed a discernible set of rules. No one expected the narrative flexibility of tabletop roleplaying, nor did they complain when they didn't get it. Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s did CRPGs evolve to allow for more ability to "sway the story," and it's absurd to suggest that the CRPG genre didn't exist until 1997. In short, to define it your way would be to eliminate hundreds of games from the 50-year history of CRPGs that no one had any doubts were "CRPGs" at the time they were created. 

     

The Bard's Tale (1985): One of many classic CRPGs that would no longer be considered CRPGs if "meaningful role-playing choices" was part of the definition of the genre.

      

That said, player agency has over the last 20-25 years become an expected part of the RPG experience, except perhaps for a few independent games that inevitably get tagged as "retro." I certainly value those role-playing options. I just don't insist that, say, Skyrim "isn't really a CRPG" because it doesn't offer the same dialogue options as Fallout: New Vegas.

    

Is Ultima IV really the first game to have ethics as a game mechanic?

   

Yes, except in the most superficial sense. For instance, Wizardry would occasionally serve up a party of "friendly" monsters. Attacking them was an evil act, and it could change your alignment if you were good. Letting them go was a good act and could change your alignment if you were evil. There may have been some other games that I'm forgetting that offered some basic good/evil options.

   

But Ultima IV (1985) was definitely the first game to integrate multiple considerations of right and wrong into a complex system. Throughout the game, you have to demonstrate virtues like honesty, compassion, honor, and sacrifice, and the game gives you multiple methods of doing so, including dialogue options, combat options, and creative uses of the economy. I say it's the "first" to offer such options, but as far as I know, it's the "only" game to offer such options. Sure, plenty of later titles have a basic "karma meter" that tracks you on a scale from angelic to satanic, but Ultima IV had eight such karma meters. Not even its own sequels offered that level of complexity.

      

I demonstrate honesty in Ultima IV by not cheating the blind herb-seller.

     

That isn't to say that the system was perfect. You can't win the game if you don't conform to its system of virtues, so doing the right thing isn't really a role-playing option. Modern games are more likely to offer different content and paths for different ethical choices. I enjoy this to some extent, but I also find the ethical systems of most modern CRPGs a bit facile. "Good" means a normal amount of compassion and "evil" means unrepentant sadism. It would be nice to see a CRPG that wrestled more with, say, deontology and consequentialism. I have no idea why so many RPG developers were keen to implement the "good/evil" axis of the D&D alignment system, but so few of them have been interested in the far-more-interesting "lawful/chaotic" axis.

   

Do you think there are games we can pinpoint as the so-called pathmakers for the modern-day CRPG?

 

That's an interesting question. Many games that were landmarks through the era that I've played (part of 1993) have little in the way of detectable influence today, including Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Might and Magic. Even the Ultima series is more admired than emulated today. There's an extent to which I can't even answer the question fully, as my experience with CRPGs post-1993 is very selective.

   

Doing my best, though, I'll nominate the following:

  

• Rogue (1980). For a while, its influence was confined to "roguelikes." That changed with the appearance of Diablo (1996), a franchise that's still going strong. The roguelike subgenre also shows no signs of slowing down.

• There's a direct line to the Elder Scrolls series that starts with Alternate Reality: The City (1985) and passes through Legends of Valour (1992). These games established the idea of a CRPG as an open-world simulation with various factions to join and lots of player freedom.

       

The Elder Scrolls has an acknowledged debt to Legends of Valour (1992).

       

• Dungeon Master (1987) established a sub-genre of abstract, real-time RPGs that focus heavily on mechanical puzzles. They don't quite rise to AAA level, but games of this type still get made today.

• Pool of Radiance (1988), and the entire D&D "Gold Box" line. They showed that Dungeons & Dragons could be adapted faithfully to computer play, paving the way for the Infinity Engine games of the late 1990s, which in turn gave rise to the entire BioWare approach.

• I haven't proven it yet, but I continue to believe that Interplay's Lord of the Rings, Vol. I (1990) and its sequel influenced the later Infinity Engine games. They're an interesting take on your questions about narratives, incidentally. They started with a defined narrative and then tried to find a way to give players meaningful choices while not departing so significantly that they lost sight of the plot.

• Ultima Underworld (1992) pioneered the realistic, continuous movement, 3D dungeon crawler.

      

Ask me again in 10 years, and I may have a more thorough answer. Keep in mind, of course, that my list is heavily biased towards western RPGs for the PC. I could give the same answers that everyone else gives for console RPGs and Japanese RPGs (of course, there's a lot of overlap there), but I wouldn't be speaking from my own experience.

 

[Ed. Commenters below made good cases for Darklands (1992) and Wasteland (1988), and I agree with both.]

Those are my answers; I hope some of my commenters take up the challenge and supplement them or provide alternative perspectives below. If my correspondent has any follow-up questions, he or she is welcome to use the comments or e-mail them to me, and I'll append the answers to this entry.

APA Style:

Bolingbroke, C. (2022, August 3). Some musings about CRPG narratives. The CRPG Addict. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2022/08/some-musings-about-crpg-narratives.html