hrose
Educated
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2003
- Messages
- 90
I spent the last couple of days looking into "classic" dungeon crawlers of a certain kind. So I looked up Demise, the two Labyrinth of Touhou, Elminage Gothic, Wizardry Empire 2, the one just done for the SNES and Stranger of Sword City.
I'm looking especially for mechanically complex and heavy on exploration and level features. (please suggest if you have more examples, any kind of mechanically complex RPGs, even pen&paper or tabletop, but I'll likely know them already)
Of course I don't have the time and endurance to go through all of this myself, but I spent a lot of time reading threads here and what other players had to say.
What I'm interested about is some kind of game design break down that analyzes what makes first person dungeon crawlers special. Like a complete list of features that the genre has to offer, types of exploration, puzzles, challenges and so on.
Is any of that specific to first person or it can all still be retained in a top-down game? For example in a game like Demise you have a 3D first person window, and then a map window. Of course FP crawlers were built because they relied on the players drawing the map on paper, but more recently even hardcore crawlers like Elminage, or even Fate Gates of Dawn still offer an usable map in-game. So they are essentially top-down.
Is there something that goes away with a change of perspective, some unique flavor of FP?
Put aside graphic or presentation, I'm only interested in concrete gameplay. One aspect I can consider, for example, is pixel hunting. You see some oddly placed stone and by clicking on it you might trigger a secret door. This is an example that couldn't be directly reproduced in top down. What else?
What is that would turn one off if a dungeon crawler was exclusively top-down instead of FP? (beside graphics)
Also, why given the choice one should prefer a blobber to something that considers character positions on a map?
I'm looking especially for mechanically complex and heavy on exploration and level features. (please suggest if you have more examples, any kind of mechanically complex RPGs, even pen&paper or tabletop, but I'll likely know them already)
Of course I don't have the time and endurance to go through all of this myself, but I spent a lot of time reading threads here and what other players had to say.
What I'm interested about is some kind of game design break down that analyzes what makes first person dungeon crawlers special. Like a complete list of features that the genre has to offer, types of exploration, puzzles, challenges and so on.
Is any of that specific to first person or it can all still be retained in a top-down game? For example in a game like Demise you have a 3D first person window, and then a map window. Of course FP crawlers were built because they relied on the players drawing the map on paper, but more recently even hardcore crawlers like Elminage, or even Fate Gates of Dawn still offer an usable map in-game. So they are essentially top-down.
Is there something that goes away with a change of perspective, some unique flavor of FP?
Put aside graphic or presentation, I'm only interested in concrete gameplay. One aspect I can consider, for example, is pixel hunting. You see some oddly placed stone and by clicking on it you might trigger a secret door. This is an example that couldn't be directly reproduced in top down. What else?
What is that would turn one off if a dungeon crawler was exclusively top-down instead of FP? (beside graphics)
Also, why given the choice one should prefer a blobber to something that considers character positions on a map?