The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [91]
Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero by Lori Ann Cole and released by Sierra On-line, was a single-player game that took a unique approach to gaming. A customized adventurer chose one of three classes: fighter, magicuser, or thief. Although skills were available to all three, the game flexed to accommodate the player’s choice. Skills were advanced through use rather than the traditional Dungeons & Dragons leveling system.
What set Hero’s Quest apart was its level of realism. There were day and night cycles, as in the later Drakkhen, but Hero’s Quest took realism a step further. The character had to eat, had to rest, and increased his magical aptitude through use alone. It was also noteworthy for its combination of pointand-click movement and exploration along with a text parser (Barton 2008:230).
Tangled Tales, by Origin, debuted in 1988. Tangled Tales was noteworthy for how it portrayed statistics; whereas the majority of CRPGs shared the nuts and bolts of the game system with the player, showing statistic numbers, experience points, and so on, Tangled Tales used adjectives instead for its four traits (charisma, intelligence, speed, and strength). It also featured the now familiar interaction tree for communicating with other characters.
Released in 1989, Knights of Legend was a turn-based game with stats for fatigue and foresight. It allowed over 30 character classes to choose from. It also featured a body-part-specific wound system.
Marc Blank published Journey: The Quest Begins in 1989. Under the player’s control was a party of adventurers (Montfort 2003:145). The party consisted of a carpenter, a healer, a wizard, and a merchant. It was the last game released by Infocom before parent company Activision closed the Cambridge office, reducing the company to a brand name only.
In 1990, Drakkhen was released by MicroProse. Drakkhen was notable for being one of the first role-playing games to have a three-dimensional playing field. It also featured a day/night cycle and sandbox-style play. Monsters had bizarre appearances as well as creepy sound effects. Four classes were available for the four-person party: fighter, magician, priest, and scout. Drakkhen was notorious for its random encounter tables full of deadly monsters, using its three-dimensional combat engine to great effect as a shadow man drew itself up out of the ground to attack, a giant cat head roared, or the constellations themselves animated and descended for battle. Mostly, Drakkhen was confusing and frustrating.
The year 1991 saw the launch of Eye of the Beholder, a first-person threedimensional dungeon experience. The player controlled four characters that fought monsters with a point-and-click interface. I fondly remember this series and even beat it, only to discover a lame ending with a blue window explaining how my adventurers killed the beholder and returned to the surface. It was followed that same year by Eye of the Beholder II, with the same four adventurers. Unlike the first game, Eye of the Beholder II had a plot and told a story through animated cut scenes. The third installment of the series didn’t do much to improve on its predecessors.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Vol. II: The Two Towers was also released in 1991. Although an improvement on the first volume of the game and an interesting addition its own right, it was hobbled by a brand associated with cartoonish characters from the animated movies and was not successful enough to warrant a third installment (Barton 2008:205).
The last of the Forgotten Realms series of Gold Box games, Pools of Darkness, allowed characters to reach 40th level. Reaching this level of power was necessary as the monsters were formidable. More importantly, the game had a freeform sandbox-style of play that is now common to many games. As a result of the sandbox style,