A complete history of role-playing videogames: Part 3

Welcome to the third part of this RPG historical review. When last we left off, we had just finished off the Western decade of the 1980s, and were finding out about what happened to RPGs in the East in the early 1980s.

Let’s jump right back in!

The late 1980s saw the return of Hydlide, and this time Hydlide 3 introduced some new innovations including day-night cycles and cut-scenes. Hydlide 3 also aligned its battle system to be closer to The Legend of Zelda’s (that’s how influential the Zelda game was) and it introduced a weight-based inventory to the game mechanics.

The same year that Hydlide 3 appeared, the first survival horror RPG—死霊戦線 (Shiryou Sensen, or War of the Dead [literally, Ghost War]) made its appearance. Although it had many standard RPG elements such as a large, tile-based overworld, Shiryou Sensen also had many of the elements of a survival horror genre, including a (green-haired) girl in the middle of nowhere, limited ammo, creepy enemies and creepy music. Oddly enough, the game’s battle screen switched to a side-scrolling view, where your health and remaining ammo were shown.

By this point in time, RPGs were hitting an immense stride and titles were coming out faster than people could competently play them. 1987 saw a massive slew of important releases include Zelda II and Dragon Quest II for NES, the sci-fi-based Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System, the first Megami Tensei game in the series (also for NES), The Magic of Scheherezade (a major innovation in its own right, introducing multiple time periods, time travel, and team attacks in battles), Castlevania II (which, unlike the first game, introduced RPG mechanics to the action-oriented title) and Square’s クレオパトラの魔宝 (Cleopatra no Mahou, or Cleopatra’s Magic Treasure).

1987 also saw one very important release as far as JRPGs and Western audiences are concerned: Final Fantasy. As anyone who knows anything of the origin of the series can tell you, the game is so named because the series creator, Hironubu Sakaguchi, was hedging all his bets in the videogame industry on this one final game; if the game did not do well, he’d leave the industry. In so doing, Sakaguchi decided that he’d make the game he wanted to make and poured his heart into it.

In essence, it was potentially his final game and it was a title that embodied his own fantasy of what a console JRPG should be. Needless to say, the game did brilliantly and the Final Fantasy series - which is still going strong with the direct sequel to Final Fantasy 13 out early next year — has been a blazing success ever since.

The number of big, blockbuster RPGs continued to snowball in number, both on PC and console, in both the Eastern and Western markets. As titles crossed back and forth, the gamers in each of these territories started showing a distinct preference for certain types of games. Console games gained a firmer footing in Japan and the Eastern regions, while the main platform of choice for RPGs in the West was the PC. It wouldn’t be until well into the new millennium that this statistic in the West would change.

The difference between Western and Eastern RPGs was far more marked than a simple platform differentiation, however, as there were many stylistic and gameplay mechanic differences, and these differences had much to do with the games that were popular in the regions in the early years. The East, for example, preferred more story-driven style games with ridiculously tight narratives, pre-defined characters and very little choice or morality issues to deal with.

Western RPG gamers, on the other hand, began to prefer far more open-ended experiences, allowing the player to choose their own looks and character abilities, often ignoring the storyline for the sheer enjoyment of just exploring the world and revelling in the avatar that the player had created. At the modern extremes, this is essentially the difference between Final Fantasy XIII and Skyrim.

Before I head into the 90s, I need to highlight two 1988 games that changed the RPG landscape forever: Might and Magic II, and the Bard’s Tale III. Although both games released within months of each other, they contributed something to RPGs that no other game had given us until this point, but is something that we take so much for granted these days: automap.

Prior to these two games, all 3D-style RPGs left the cartography to you, which meant lots of graph paper and many hours of meticulously drawing the maps. Granted, part of the fun of playing the old games was the cartography aspect, and this was a throwback to the good ol’ tabletop D&D games, but having the game draw the map automatically as you explored meant that you could spend more time gaming and less time with a pencil. It wouldn’t be for another few years before automapping was the only way to go — many games between 1988 and 1998, 1990’s Eye of the Beholder, for example, still required that you draw your own maps.

Some recent games (such as the excellent yet brutally difficult Etrian Odyssey for the Nintendo DS) even recognized that this was part of the transition from pen-and-paper role-playing to digital role-playing, and have gone back to letting the player draw the maps and get lost as a result of bad mapping skills.

In PC games (essentially, the Western RPG market), the early 1990s gave us the Quest for Glory series of games by Sierra Online. Although Quest for Glory was not the first game in the ‘Quest’ series — having followed, among others, Space Quest, Police Quest, and King’s Quest - Q4G (as it became known for short) was more RPG-ey than the preceding Quest games, which played out more like straight-line adventure games than RPGs.

What made Q4G different was that it combined the adventure elements reasonably well with RPG elements, despite the painful battle sequences. Subsequent Q4G games, like many older Western RPGs, allowed you to import a saved character from a previously-finished game, making the next experience that much easier.

1993 brought two of my personal favourites from the golden age of RPGs: Betrayal at Krondor and Lands of Lore. What made Betrayal at Krondor so different to other RPGs of the era was that it was built upon an existing fantasy series of books written by Raymond E. Feist and set in a familiar narrative universe. For once, it was an amazing experience to walk through and experience a world that many readers had previously only seen in their minds.

The character system was based purely on a percentage of attributes (e.g. a 43% ability in lock picking, which could be levelled up with practice) instead of the standard ‘experience points and levels’ system that was the staple of 90% of RPGs. Granted, the graphics were a little dated and the turn-based tactical battle system might have been a little unforgiving to novice players, but the point of Krondor was the experience more than the mechanics. And what an experience it was, indeed! The game was successful enough that Mr. Feist would go on to novelize the main plot of the game as Krondor: The Betrayal.

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (by Westwood studios, the same fellows who created Eye of the Beholder), on the other hand, was memorable more for the later CD-ROM re-release than the original release version. In addition to supporting play from within Windows 95, the CD-ROM version also included voice work by some famous actors, including Patrick ‘Jean Luc Picard’ Stewart. The animation was impressive for the time, and had more of a TV cartoon feel than similar games of the age. It was a huge pity, then, that the subsequent games in the Lands of Lore series never quite lived up to the wonderful premise and promise of the first game.

The mid-to-late 90s saw yet another boost in PC hardware power, and riding on the crest of that electronic wave was possibly some of the most iconic games to ever grace PCs. In the mid-90s, the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena, appeared (1994 to be precise), as did several spin-off games based on the Elder Scrolls mythos. Its sequel, Daggerfall, appeared two years later.

1997 was a golden year for RPGs, and saw the first release of the one game that everyone thinks of when someone mentions ‘Action RPG:’ Diablo. Diablo was an amazing game for the time: randomized dungeons and items (just like Rogue!), point and click battles (heretofore seldom seen), hordes of enemies (more than seen in many RPGs until that point) and multiplayer (not common even back then).

Although the story was a little on the thin side, what Diablo brought to the gaming table was sheer accessibility, infinite replayability and so much fun that you had to pour it back into the fun ocean with a rubber boot. So iconic was Diablo that it spawned an entire sub-genre — the point-and-click RPG — and led an army of dozens of clones, all called ‘Diablo-likes.’

One last important game for 1997, at least as far as Western audiences were concerned, is Fallout. Set in a post-apocalyptic future with the stylings and trappings of the 1950s, Fallout was one of the few brilliant RPGs to take a retro-post-apocalypse sci-fi setting and make a complete success of it. Fallout was originally supposed to use the ‘Generic Universal Role-Playing System’ rule-set (better known as GURPS, and itself a parallel system to TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons system) but the deal between Steve Jackson Games — the owners of the GURPS system — and the Fallout developers, Interplay, fell through. Interplay developed the SPECIAL system (which is still heavily based on the GURPS ruleset) for use with the Fallout series instead, and has been part of the game series ever since.

(Incidentally, while GURPS was created by Steve Jackson, it was not the same Steve Jackson who wrote the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, although both Steve Jacksons contributed to the book series… confused yet?)

Next time, I’ll discuss the gradual fall of the PC RPG and the meteoric rise of the console RPG that eventually eclipsed the PC RPG scene, and why this reversal occurred.

Until then!

Thanks for reading part three of Fayyaad’s feature on the history of role-playing videogames - don’t miss out on part one and part two if you haven’t already read them!

Look forward to part four in the near future!