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CRPGAddict

V_K

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Eh, group effort doesn't say much, every game is. Until some of the developers who actually worked on the game say anything against Brenda, I assume she actually was one of the driving forces behind it.

Cleve might be delusional (occasionally), but Sirotek is just a plain lying motherfucker, so I don't trust anything the guy says
I think Cleveland Mark Blakemore was the one that said Brenda did little to nothing on the game IIRC as well and he hasn't been wrong yet.
I would say Corey Cole's recollection kinda contradicts that. The amount of her creative input is something we will never know, but she obviously was the driving force behind the project.
 

Grimlorn

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Eh, group effort doesn't say much, every game is. Until some of the developers who actually worked on the game say anything against Brenda, I assume she actually was one of the driving forces behind it.

Cleve might be delusional (occasionally), but Sirotek is just a plain lying motherfucker, so I don't trust anything the guy says
I think Cleveland Mark Blakemore was the one that said Brenda did little to nothing on the game IIRC as well and he hasn't been wrong yet.
I would say Corey Cole's recollection kinda contradicts that. The amount of her creative input is something we will never know, but she obviously was the driving force behind the project.
Corey Cole's recollection doesn't mean anything, he's just recalling almost working with her, but never having worked with her and assumes she took over lead designer because that's what's she's taken credit for doing. The Sirotek's account of it being a group effort would imply her role wasn't as great as stated and perhaps other devs didn't get the credit they deserved. No one is going to potentially ruin their career by criticizing a woman for lying about her role in a game. The guy would be accused of being a misogynist and quietly black listed. You can't even criticize a gaming critic that's a woman (Anita). What games has she designed since Wiz 8 anyway?

Grauken You can go to the Sirotek thread and search Brenda within that thread and look at Cleve's posts about it. That's what I did and that thread is a blast from the past. Whatever happened to those documents that were recovered that proved Cleve's story? They seem to have disappeared as soon as Brenda urged a museum to purchase them because she couldn't stand to see "her" life auctioned away.
 
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Mustawd

Guest
Huh... Grimlorn might have a point?

https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/wizardry-8/credits



http://www.gamasutra.com/view/authors/90177/Linda_Currie.php

Previous to joining Blue Fang, Linda was co-founder of the former Sirtech Canada. While at Sirtech, she was the Project Lead on the award-winning RPG Wizardry 8 and Co-designer of the award-winning Jagged Alliance strategy role-playing series.

Still, Project Lead might mean mistly project management duties. Basically organizational type stuff. Per the credits it seems Brenda did a lot of the hesvy lifting design-wise.

Besides overall game design she was listed as doing work on

-Story
-NPC dialogue and scripting
-PC dialogue and writing
-Game manual

Also, notice she is listed first in the credits under game design, which would indicate she had the most input.

More than likely she handled a lot of the design but I wouldn’t be surprised if Currie did a lot of the legwork in running the overall project to make sure deadlines were met and it had proper resource allocation.

So at the end of the day I still think it’s fair to say Brenda could be considered the game design lead, but there was probably a reason behind the scenes Sirotek is giving design credit to a few other individuals.
 

Mustawd

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So at the end of the day I still think it’s fair to say Brenda could be considered the game design lead, but there was probably a reason behind the scenes Sirotech is giving design credit to a fee other individuals


Well this interview seems to kind of indicate that there was a lot of cleanup to be done after the initial build. Kinda seems to me that they let Brenda do her thing and then had to unfuck it a bit to get it working properly.

The first occasion we had where we sat down with the intent to play it saw many of us become a little panicked. The balance was off (OK, we expected that), but it lacked feedback, making some things hard to follow, hard to control (OK, this too we expected since we planned a "polishing" phase). The dialogue needed to give us more information, and so on, but it was still a little hard to sit down to play and go, "Ugh, we've got some work to do." When it became clear that our ideas did work, that if we enjoyed playing it (and we did), then we, at least in part, achieved many of our goals--that was a nice part of the project.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/wizardry-8-qanda/1100-2833273/


EDIT:

Linda Currie: I'm Linda Currie and have been Co-Designer and the Level Designer on each Jagged Alliance product (Jagged Alliance, Jagged Alliance Deadly Games, Jagged Alliance 2, Jagged Alliance 2 Unfinished Business), Designer and Project Leader of Nemesis: The Wizardry Adventure, and finally Project Leader and a Co-Designer of Wizardry 8, recipient of Computer Gaming World's 2001 RPG of the Year award.

https://m.ign.com/articles/2003/01/10/linda-and-ian-currie-interview

:M
 
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V_K

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Still, Project Lead might mean mistly project management duties. Basically organizational type stuff. Per the credits it seems Brenda did a lot of the hesvy lifting design-wise.
I actually listened to what Brenda says in the Barton interview. She never actually calls herself lead designer there (though she also doesn't correct Matt when he says that), nor was I able to find any other interview where she does that. In the Matt chat video she states that they designed the game mechanics collaboratively, naming all 4 people listed in the manual, but that she did most of level design (while also mentioning that she "gave" some areas to Linda and others) and story.
 

Mustawd

Guest
She never actually calls herself lead designer there (though she also doesn't correct Matt when he says that), nor was I able to find any other interview where she does that.

Yah, I also looked for interviews where she claimed she was lead designer of Wizardry 8, and couldn’t find any.

Also, her not correcting Matt Barton immediately in the interview makes total sense to me. Instead she corrects the record later on with plenty of detail.
 

octavius

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Yet another Ultima clone.

How come so many Ultima clones were made by western indie developers, and so few Wizardry and Might&Magic clones?
My impression is that the three series were roughly about equally popular. Is my impression wrong, or is the answer that the storyfags to which Ultima appeals most are more creative than the more "autistic" blobber fans?
 

Morblot

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It's probably easier to clone Ultima due to its simpler graphics. I too could probably make a (bad) Ultima clone, but a blobber is way too graphically intensive to even try. Even Wizardry I had those monster graphics in addition to the wireframe dungeons.

And speaking of dungeons, a blobber with boring dungeon design is probably worse to play than if it was top-down. And it's really hard to design a thrilling dungeon or even several. Much harder than creating an average fantasy overworld for the players to explore.
 

Zer0wing

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Blobbers in general are more complex programs than Ultima Wannabes, the character list is usually bigger, and you have to manage the whole party of them, 4-6 no less.
 

Deuce Traveler

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
I really like crpgaddict 's new article on "Breadth, Depth, & Immersion" and how it affects your enjoyment of a game.

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2019/02/breadth-depth-and-immersion-ft-seventh.html

Breadth refers primarily to the physical size of the game. It can be measured in dungeon squares or tiles, or in modern games the length of time it takes to travel from one end to the other. It also refers to the length of time it takes to play and win the game; while this is often a function of size, it can also be manipulated to make a small game seem larger or a large game seem smaller; for instance, in the use of fast travel (making a large game seem smaller) or the re-use of maps (making a small game seem larger).

Depth refers to the things that you find and to the things that happen within that game world. The specific elements depend on the game's genre, but for RPGs it includes things like the backstory, lore, NPCs, quests, and character development.

We'll get to immersion in a minute, but for now let's pretend that my thesis has only these two elements, and I'm arguing that a good game is like a square: you want a breadth equal to its depth and vice versa. The easiest way to engage the thesis is to imagine the extremes. A game with extreme breadth and almost no depth would be something like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Fallout 4 if all you could do was explore the map. You'd get bored pretty fast.

It is thus not absurd to argue that Ultima IV is a better game than Dragon Age: Inquisition just even though the latter is bigger and has far more story and lore. The issue isn't which has more but which does a better job balancing the two. Ultima IV has just enough backstory and in-game dialogue, lore, and other content to support the size of Britannia and the length of the game.

None of these variables is completely objective, and immersion is probably the least objective of the three. Its importance has a lot to do with your age and experience level with older games. I still think the graphics in Morrowind are beautiful, but last week, I stumbled on a Reddit thread in which someone posted an image of a horse falling over in Red Dead Redemption 2 and leaving a horse-sized imprint in the mud, and half the commenters were complaining that the imprint wasn't realistic enough. Even among those of us with a high tolerance for primitive graphics, immersion is a mutable characteristic. A game that seems like a solid cube today will slowly flatten as we become used to better graphics and sound.

Watching the sunset in Morrowind (2003) still seems lovely to me, but to some people these graphics are hopelessly outdated.


:salute:
 

Sigourn

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If he needed to play that many cRPGs to come to the conclusion "breadth is nothing without depth", then I'd say he wasted his time.

I will go as far as saying I disagree with that statement. If Fallout 4 was as deep as the deepest cRPGs, you would have a massive, MASSIVE game in your hands. Just know there are people out there who play Bethesda games well into the 1000 hours mark. Imagine if these games had depth to them. We would be talking 4000 hours. Honestly, that doesn't sound like the kind of game I would want to play.
 

anvi

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If he needed to play that many cRPGs to come to the conclusion "breadth is nothing without depth", then I'd say he wasted his time.

I will go as far as saying I disagree with that statement. If Fallout 4 was as deep as the deepest cRPGs, you would have a massive, MASSIVE game in your hands. Just know there are people out there who play Bethesda games well into the 1000 hours mark. Imagine if these games had depth to them. We would be talking 4000 hours. Honestly, that doesn't sound like the kind of game I would want to play.
People put thousands of hours into shitty building games, repeating the same thing over and over.
 

Deuce Traveler

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Men, ladies, trannies. This is a moment many of us have been waiting for. The crpgaddict has begun reviewing Darklands:

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2019/05/game-329-darklands-1992.html
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2019/06/darklands-menustadt.html
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2019/06/darklands-iron-men.html

I love this game, despite its faults. It could really use an 'enhanced edition' that modernizes the user interface and sharpens the graphics a bit so you can better make out enemies and terrain. Reading this makes me want to fire it up again. The fictionalized setting really makes the game.
 

Morblot

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Maybe I should start reading his blog again. Got disillusioned after he shilled for Hillary and lost my taste for it.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yet another Ultima clone.

How come so many Ultima clones were made by western indie developers, and so few Wizardry and Might&Magic clones?
My impression is that the three series were roughly about equally popular. Is my impression wrong, or is the answer that the storyfags to which Ultima appeals most are more creative than the more "autistic" blobber fans?

We've already seen some Dungeon Master clones on the blog and we're going to see many more of those. The early 90s is full of them. Motelsoft, a small German company that produced games at an insane pace, has made plenty of DM clones (we've already seen 3 of their games on the blog). Some Eastern European devs made DM clones. It's funny how Grimrock not only resurrected the DM/EoB style blobber, it also spawned a huge amount of clones - just like DM was cloned to hell and back in the late 80s and early 90s.

We're also going to see an interesting trilogy where the first game is an Ultima clone, while the second and third are M&M clones.
Yendorian Tales:
yendorian.gif

yendorian-tales-book-i_6.png

yend3-1.png

YENDOR3.JPG

yend3-2.png
 

Covenant

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(Aside: As a former resident of Salem who really got into the history of the city, I don't care for it when movies, television shows, books, and games suggest that the city was ever the site of any "real" magic and witchcraft. I have a particular distaste for the choice of the Salem Police Department to put a classic witch-on-a-broomstick on its departmental patch. Between 1692 and 1693, twenty residents of Salem were executed on false accusations of witchcraft, and I feel like it insults their memory to suggest that the accusations were anything but unfounded hysteria. I do appreciate, however, how the various museums of the city use the "witch" title to lure in tourists--but then give them a sober account of a tragic history.)

:whiteknight:

He really is Mr No-Fun-Allowed, isn't he?
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
Strikes me as a high-functioning autist with his intense interest (I think he taught in university or something?) in English literature, specifically Arthurian, and his obsession with mapping.
 

Gunnar

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(Aside: As a former resident of Salem who really got into the history of the city, I don't care for it when movies, television shows, books, and games suggest that the city was ever the site of any "real" magic and witchcraft. I have a particular distaste for the choice of the Salem Police Department to put a classic witch-on-a-broomstick on its departmental patch. Between 1692 and 1693, twenty residents of Salem were executed on false accusations of witchcraft, and I feel like it insults their memory to suggest that the accusations were anything but unfounded hysteria. I do appreciate, however, how the various museums of the city use the "witch" title to lure in tourists--but then give them a sober account of a tragic history.)

:whiteknight:

He really is Mr No-Fun-Allowed, isn't he?

He's your typical current year liberal, that means getting his rocks off by playing the victim and being offended on behalf of others while reveling in his imagined moral superiority over everybody else. This particular case is pretty funny because it's over a handful of peasants who have literally been dead for over 300 years. Meanwhile the game devs, the entire town of Salem, their police department, the victims descendants and everyone else on the planet are just having fun with it.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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He's your typical current year liberal, that means getting his rocks off by playing the victim and being offended on behalf of others while reveling in his imagined moral superiority over everybody else. This particular case is pretty funny because it's over a handful of peasants who have literally been dead for over 300 years. Meanwhile the game devs, the entire town of Salem, their police department, the victims descendants and everyone else on the planet are just having fun with it.
CRPGAddict in Comments for First Post on Treasures of the Savage Frontier said:
I've generally supported legalization--or, at least, decriminalization--for years, mostly because I didn't think anyone deserved a criminal record for possessing it. As a middle-aged white guy, I could pretty much smoke it whenever I wanted anyway, and as long as I wasn't stupid (like smoking it while driving past a cop), I was probably never going to get arrested for it in the first place.

Lately, though, I've been coming to regret my support. I'm sick of encountering gormless, shaggy-haired buffoons who think nothing of putting on their marijuana-reeking sweatshirts and going out to breakfast or, god help me, taking a trip on a plane. I'm sick of smelling it EVERYWHERE--walking down the street, getting into my rental car, getting into my hotel room. We finally dealt with all that vis-a-vis tobacco in the 1980s and 1990s, but now marijuana is making it so much worse.
An exemplar of liberalism, in that he'll decry liberal policies when directly affected himself by them but is otherwise content to foster decline and allow others to suffer the ill-effects while he himself avoids them due to his socio-economic position. :M
 
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Some incline thoughts from the CRPG Addict.

My 10 Most Controversial Opinions

I wouldn't have minded if the game had required us to write down the ingredients. I would have welcomed it. I miss the days of gaming with a notepad and graph paper by my side. Quest markers have ruined modern RPGs. Even "hardcore" modes generally don't turn them off.

I don't like Japanese graphics.

I think computer RPGs are superior to console RPGs.

I don't care about voiced dialogue--in fact, I wish it would go away.

But, of course, the CRPG Addict wouldn't be himself if he didn't add a pinch of decline.

I have to admit that [Skyrim is] still one of the best CRPGs I've ever played.

I not only think Fallout 4 is better than Fallout: New Vegas, I think it's much better.

Also, we all know that he hates Rance series, and I suspect he is not going to like Josh Sawyer's games as well:

I don't like games about rape

It may, actually, be the real reason behind his preference of F4 over F:NV.
 

Bruma Hobo

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7. I don't like games about rape

You wouldn't think that one would be so controversial, but on at least one site it makes me a laughingstock.

Don't worry Chet, we I still love you.

Edit: I get it, I get it. You assburgers.
 
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