"There are only a few people that go back in the industry further than I do," muses Portalarium creative director Richard Garriott.
In that light, it makes sense to kick things off with the first commercial video game release to capture the essence of D&D: Ultima, the brainchild of designer Richard Garriott.
When possible, we’ve spoken to the people behind these landmark games to better appreciate the reasons they made the choices they did, and to better understand their relationship with the genre. The goal: To understand what it means to be an “RPG,” precisely, and how different designers have reinterpreted the concepts that D&D laid down.
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Over the coming months, this series will explore the history and evolution of computer and console RPGs by documenting the milestones of the genre. So, too, do players… which is where those semantic debates come in. Computer and console RPGs attempt to distill these elements into combinations that work within the constraints of digital media, remaking the act of role-playing in a format where the human-driven element-the game master guiding the players’ quest-is replaced by a CPU as a matter of necessity.Įvery RPG designer has a different idea of what it means to transform the tabletop experience into something that fits within the boundaries of a computer. It introduced the standards that continue to define RPGs more than four decades later: hit points, character classes, the chimerical combination of rules and luck that drive combat, and finally the need for some sort of narrative framework to motivate players. D&D adapted tabletop war gaming into a modular format focused around small teams of adventurers. We can at least refer to an objective standard for defining the RPG: Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop gaming phenomenon that debuted in 1974 and served as the inflection point for the genre as a whole. Is Dark Souls an RPG? Is Castlevania? Call of Duty multiplayer has experience levels and character classes-is that an RPG? Can any computer-based experience actually be an RPG, when you get down to it?
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Fans of Final Fantasy sneer at the notion that the Zelda games should be classified as RPGs, while in turn hardcore PC gaming grognards shake their head in disgust at the superficiality of Final Fantasy’s approach to RPG concepts. What is a role-playing game? Perhaps no other question in video gaming has launched quite so many forum debates over semantics. This is the first entry in an ongoing series in which Retronauts co-host Jeremy Parish hopes to explore the evolution of the role-playing genre, often with insights from the people who created the games that defined the medium.
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