Wizardry vs Ultima

[dr.krap]

Maybe I missed something in the four Ultima games I've played, but I don't remember the combat being much different from PacMan.

 

[DemonKing]

Well I actually managed to finish some of the Wizardries which is not something I could say about the Ultimas, so I've got to go with them.

Saying that, while I enjoyed Wizardry 7 & 8 I wasn't too fond of all the Sci-fi elements that appeared - mind you the same thing happened in Might & Magic and Ultima over time.

 

[SuicideBunny]

People who think CRPGs are defined by PnP RPG-like combat combined with strong adventure game elements

i don't think they are, but they should be. however, ultima just sucks in that regard by having crappy shitfest combat and no non-combat rpg mechanics and the early titles not even having good adventure elements.

quest for glory is much more representative of what core rpgs could and imo should be like, yet nobody would ever call it a genre defining series.

the only reason ultima is considered somewhat important to the rpg genre is that akalabeth is widely accepted as being the first crpg.

will think Ultima is the definitive CRPG game series.

no.

 

[Wyrmlord]

People who think CRPGs are defined by PnP RPG-like combat combined with strong adventure game elements will think Ultima is the definitive CRPG game series.

Strong adventure game elements? Ouch. There goes 95% of the games, old or new, that the Codex likes.

What are the strong adventure game elements in Fallout? An explosive to wall off a cave, a rope to descend down a vault and a research station, and a holodisk of a mutant autopsy are among the top examples of object-clue-problem-solving in the game. Cool stuff, but it seems a very elementary adventure game.

Torment? Perhaps it goes as far as the five or six pieces of quests needed to create a portal to Ravel's maze, and some of the stuff related to a severed arm and tattoos. It's actually very interesting stuff, but compared to even a middle-of-the-road adventure game such as Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, these are not hard problems to solve.

The RPG genre is a pretty miserable failure as an adventure gaming genre, if it has to be held up to the standards of games where a small mistake made at one point in a game leaves you in a dead end two hours later. Darth Roxor's and my favourite RPG is a pretty good Sierra adventure game, however, but it's really an exception rather than the rule of this genre.

 

[mondblut]

Good, so certain old RPGs are not all that different from recent RPGs in their flaws, but it's just that people grew up and are blindly nostalgic about the former and harshly critical about the latter.

Eventually, one can apply this to a lot of games.

If Oblivion or Dragon Age were released back in 1994, with 1994 production values even, everybody remotely involved with playing CRPGs would line up to give their devs a sloppy blowjob. To every one of them. And not a single person in the world would care that axes are blunt weapons, or that every triplet of dialogue lines to pick from leads to the same conclusion. It's a fact.

But after 15 years of jadedness and disappointment, we now know better

 

[mondblut]

People who think CRPGs are defined by PnP RPG-like combat combined with strong adventure game elements will think Ultima is the definitive CRPG game series.

Turn-based Pacman is NOT "PnP RPG-like combat".

 

[Wyrmlord]

Good, so certain old RPGs are not all that different from recent RPGs in their flaws, but it's just that people grew up and are blindly nostalgic about the former and harshly critical about the latter.

Eventually, one can apply this to a lot of games.

If Oblivion or Dragon Age were released back in 1994, with 1994 production values even, everybody remotely involved with playing CRPGs would line up to give their devs a sloppy blowjob. To every one of them. And not a single person in the world would care that axes are blunt weapons, or that every triplet of dialogue lines to pick from leads to the same conclusion. It's a fact.

But after 15 years of jadedness and disappointment, we now know better

To be fair, games like that would be pretty revolutionary in 1994.

What's that? A face that moves when it talks? You can approach somebody and see them looking at you and speaking! And when you give a response, you can see yourself speaking! And every NPC is unique and with his or her own name and schedule for work and play everyday!

Having seen some old reviews, it's astonishing how the pettiest things are celebrated as high level features. Gold Box games have graphical representation of turn-based combat, cool. You can swim in Daggerfall, awesome. Gamers in the 1990s seem to be like starry-eyed awestruck children.

 

[MisterStone]

the only reason ultima is considered somewhat important to the rpg genre is that akalabeth is widely accepted as being the first crpg.

Yeah, sure, thats the ONLY reason.

Look dumbasses, the Ultimas were not just the first early RPGs, they were the earliest examples of a virtual world: geography on a massive scale, people who reside in certain spots, exist as in-game objects formed from a set of properties rather than just text, who (later on) have professions, and even personalities. These were the first games to have complex puzzles that span more than local area and are more sophisticated than kill x, take y and stick it in slot z (basically what passes for a quest in Wiz and BT games).

As for early Ultima Combat being shit, compared to what I ask? Even AD&D had simplistic as all fuck combat back then. THe gold box games were only more sophisticated in that the classes were more defined, there were maybe a couple of more spells, a larger set of opponents (maybe) and there was a backstab mechanic. The first one came out in 1988, the same year as Ultima V.

 

[Wyrmlord]

You are using a lot of provocative language, MiserStone.

"Dumbasses", "morons", and so on. That too in response to people who aren't swearing and who aren't being nasty to you. Why are you so emotionally invested in defending a videogame? It's not like a friend or a relative made it, and it's not like you funded or put some effort into developing it, so why? Seems rather disproportionate.

 

[Excommunicator]

Ridiculous analogy mondblut. No matter how good a point you might be trying to make, you are making very desperate grasps

Wizardry obviously has the superior RPG system, but as a game series it still doesn't compare to Ultima for me

Well Wyrmlord, he is dealing with the crudely self-styled Ultimate Authority on RPGs and a passive aggressive weeaboo (I guess there's no other kind), so desperate measures and all that..

 

[BLOBERT]

LOLLOLLOL BROS GO BACK TO GAMFAGS TURN BASED GAMES SUCK FINAL FANTASY WAS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL RPGS EVER IT WAS THE HALO OF THE RPG GENRE

WIZARDRY IS OKAY FOR A JRPG BUT AFTER ULTIMA 3 CAME OUT ON THE NES WIZARDRY WAS TOAST BUT ANYWAYS WITH OBLIVION NOW GAMES ARE BETTER

LOLOLLOLLOL WE ARE SO SMART HERE UNLIKE THE GAMEFAGS KIDDIES WHO THINK HALO WAS THE FIRST FPS

HEY YOU GUYS EVER FART IN YOUR HAND THEN PUT IT ON SOMEONES FACE LOLOOLOLOL EINSTEEIN WAS SMART BUT I BET HE DIN'TNI INVWERNOT THAT LOMLNAEFS'O

 

[BLOBERT]

IN OTHER NEWS BROS I FOUND A PAGE SLIGHTLY MORE INFORMED AND INTELLIGENT THAN THIS TOPIC

http://www.gamegoldies.org/diablo-download/

 

[Crooked Bee]

Funnily enough, I can only recall two non-hybrid RPGs with what I would call strong adventure game elements, and they both are blob-style crawlers. Those are Whale's Voyage and The Dark Spire. True, Whale's Voyage sucks as a role-playing game -- skills are worthless, combat is awful, exploration is non-existent, etc. -- but it has a few neat puzzles that would fit very well in an adventure game, like putting a mine in a specific place and then luring a guard there by creating a blackout or finding out the ingredient for alien spaceship fuel. The Dark Spire, on the other hand, succeeds both as an RPG and an adventure game. You go around different levels collecting (or sometimes buying) a lot of specific items like, say, sunflower seeds, which you must then use in very specific circumstances, e.g., to assemble a new item from them, or play dress-up to pass as a pirate, or conduct a necromancy ritual, or even make a squirrel drunk in order to capture it. Cool stuff for sure, but I don't think strong adventure game elements can be used as any kind of criterion of judging the core of what makes a RPG.

 

[Wyrmlord]

"Funnily enough, I can only recall two non-hybrid RPGs with what I would call strong adventure game elements, and they both are blob-style crawlers."

Hahahahaha, well played.

 

[made]

I can see this thread going places.

ITT I've learned that conversing with NPCs is an adventure mechanic, interacting with the environment is an adventure mechanic, solving problems by means other than combat is an adventure mechanic... good stuff. Now I may may not be an expert on PnP so someone please enlighten me if those sessions only boiled down to grinding endless waves orcs and watching your stats go up or if problem solving skills and actual "adventuring" were involved as well. Seeing as pretty much all the RPG devs of old were hardcore PnP nerds, I imagine they were primarly influenced by their own PnP sessions and tried to translate them into computer RPGs as best they could, long before adventure games as we know them became popular.

 

[Relay]

Of course early P&P games were centered around combat. How long do you think a single battle in d&d can take when the game master is not a computer ? Early P&P = wargames with a single party of individual characters.

The most praised Ultima, 7, is lacking in everything that makes a rpg good. It doesn't even succeed as a good adventure game since the setting and story are so puke inducing.

 

[Excommunicator]

Time for retardo

 

[SuicideBunny]

the Ultimas were not just the first early RPGs, they were the earliest examples of a virtual world: geography on a massive scale, people who reside in certain spots, exist as in-game objects formed from a set of properties rather than just text, who (later on) have professions, and even personalities. These were the first games to have complex puzzles that span more than local area and are more sophisticated than kill x, take y and stick it in slot z (basically what passes for a quest in Wiz and BT games).

that's cool and makes them both important to gaming history in general and the sandbox genre in particular, but it has no bearing on how they influenced the crpg genre or whether they are good or bad crpgs.

As for early Ultima Combat being shit

the thing is, it never got better, 'cept for that one time where the series started to allow you to have a party after wizardry did it.

Seeing as pretty much all the RPG devs of old were hardcore PnP nerds, I imagine they were primarly influenced by their own PnP sessions and tried to translate them into computer RPGs as best they could, long before adventure games as we know them became popular.

adventure devs were pnp nerds as well. what seems to have happened during the transition to computers was that what made pnp essentially got split into two separate genres with adventures focusing on non-combat/puzzles/narrative and crpgs on combat/dungeon crawling/simulation based on gariott's and crowther's personal preferences when they wrote their first games. afterwards people who weren't into pnp played their games and started distilling and separating them more and more into what we know as the two genres today.

 

[Wyrmlord]

I can see this thread going places.

ITT I've learned that conversing with NPCs is an adventure mechanic, interacting with the environment is an adventure mechanic, solving problems by means other than combat is an adventure mechanic... good stuff. Now I may may not be an expert on PnP so someone please enlighten me if those sessions only boiled down to grinding endless waves orcs and watching your stats go up or if problem solving skills and actual "adventuring" were involved as well. Seeing as pretty much all the RPG devs of old were hardcore PnP nerds, I imagine they were primarly influenced by their own PnP sessions and tried to translate them into computer RPGs as best they could, long before adventure games as we know them became popular.

What do we mean by conversing with NPCs? If we meant writing a quick keyword to get some information, that's how conversing with NPCs has been done in RPGs for a long time. If we meant choosing one dialogue line out of several, that's definitely an adventure game mechanic, that later became more common in RPGs.

Interacting with the environment? A routine skill check to interact with the environment is a RPG thing. If you see a rope placed in one area and a hole in another area, that is clearly an adventure gaming mechanic, because it is a pre-placed problem with only one result. Not like a skill check, where you may fail repeatedly or get subpar results.

Non-combat solutions to possible combat situations? Well, to avoid combat, you have to have combat in the first place. I don't see avoiding combat as meaning to make a primarily non-combat game. Often, it means buying some time and leaving a fight when you are not ready for it.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

I wonder how many of you never played an actual Ultima and only ever fired up exult once, thought OMG THE PERSPECTIVE HURTZ MY EYEZ, and went back to their first-person RPGs.

How about some of us saw a setting where the game programmer put himself into the game world as it's god-king, the main player is person from the real world sent to this place, and it's called Britannia and everyone talks with "thees" and "thous" and decided that no matter what else was good, it was hard to overcome that.

It's not the reason I stopped playing, but it's why I find people's claims that U7 is immersive and has a great story to be... kind of baffling. How am I supposed to take Garriot's retarded power fantasy seriously?

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

I don't think anyone would say that Ultima is shit, by the way. I just honestly think, both back then and now, that Wizardry is far better. Then again I am pretty much a lover of dungeon crawlers over other RPGs.

 

[MisterStone]

I just feel like games such as WIzardry (at least the first 4 or 5, which I tried) and the Bards Tale games do little more than address the spreadsheet aspect of gaming. You level up and power game, then you walk through a maze until you hit a hoard of monsters and whack on them until they die. At later levels, you basically just turn on a fire hose of insta-death on groups of 99 Super Ultimate POwerful Demons. You grind, you buy skills or mutli-class and make your dudes more potent in combat. You collect lots of cool-ass weapons and other equipment and try to min-max your shit so you can kill stuff better. The problem is, the game is rarely ever consistently challenging, so a determined and experienced PnP player who has all of the mechanics explained in detail can easily build a party that defeats whatever the game throws his way, and at some point you always feel like the combat has become tedious.

If that's what you like, good for you. There's nothing that says this is what has to define CRPGs.

I think one thing people do not understand about Ultima is that so much of the adventure aspect depended on exploring stuff, finding information and learning what the information was even good for. It was not really about finding treasure- treasure was generally generic stuff that served as a limited resource which you had to manage to win the game, not as an UPGRAYDD (with a double dose of pimping) to make you feel more badass than before. The challenge in the Ultimas was not only about finding the coordinates for that special thing you need to win the game, but simply learning that there WERE coordinates for squares on the world map, and what you need in order to measure them. All that stuff in UIV about the shrines, the virtues, the mantras etc. was information I had to learn about sight unseen and piece together into a story. Getting more information, which was not only about talking to everyone everywhere, but also surviving to the bottom of a difficult dungeon, was the point.

Yes WYrmie, these are adventure game elements. You might not have a 'Use Skill X on Tile Y' mechanic in these games, but you were exploring a very large world and finding the solution to a series of riddles which eventually lead to a single larger riddle. This took a lot of work and patience, and it was not based on an immediate awards-based dynamic (yay better armor, time to upgraydd my bros) like you see in dungeon crawlers. In the Ultimas they even made it possible to fuck the game up by killing important people or otherwise making negative progress, which you site as an important element of classic adventure games. And like those games, the reward was the accomplishment you felt from solving a complex problem.

I suspect a lot of you came to the Ultima games having already read about 90% of the information you needed to know how to win the game, in which case you already had the game spoiled from the get go. The whole point of these games was figuring out what the hell was going on, and figuring out which piece of the puzzle you were strong enough to handle at the time. Your progress was measured by how much of this puzzle you have figured out, and the combat and resource management elements were just enough to make the engame difficult and to pose logistical challenges while you went about exploring stuff.

As for the whole Ultima setting being dorky because of the archaic language or the presence of Lord British, I guess that's a personal preference, but what exactly are you comparing it to? Most CRPGS have a pretty retarded setting, the latter Wizardries being full of furries, chewbaccas and fairy ninjas ffs. I suppose the lack of substantial dialogue makes it harder to criticize this because the concept of 'fairy ninja' is really limited to bullshit min-max character building strategy, and is not actually realized in the plot in any substantial way.

 

[Excidium]

God, I hate this kind of thread where people start flinging shit on great series. Did we run out of bad games to criticize? Ultima and Wizardy both did what they proposed well, Wizardry with the rule system / character development and Ultima with the exploration.

There isn't a single CRPG that does everything with the same level of quality, that's the truth.

 

[Reptilian Shapeshifter]

God, I hate this kind of thread where people start flinging shit on great series. Did we run out of bad games to criticize? Ultima and Wizardy both did what they proposed well, Wizardry with the rule system / character development and Ultima with the exploration.

There isn't a single CRPG that does everything with the same level of quality, that's the truth.

End of thread and OP should be sodomized and devoured by a blood-deprived Drac.

 

[Mortmal]

Most voters probably havent played any of them, but voted wizardry , they hae more stats so they thought ti was the cool thing to do. I dont want to oppose two great and very different line of games, but still ulitma rocks and wizardry can suck my dick indeed... ah well ,fell in the trap too.