MisterStone
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2006
- Messages
- 9,422
Since there is so much (justified) complaining about the handholding that goes on in CRPGs today, I was wondering if anyone would like to talk about the most diffcult CRPG you have ever played.
When I say difficult, I don't just mean difficult in terms of combat... I mean, the puzzle/quest solving aspects are hard to figure out. In some cases, you might not even know exactly what the hell the point of the game is until you have played through a sizable piece of it.
The most ridiculously hard CRPG I can recall is Deathlord, an EA roleplaying game from 1987. This game looked more or less like Ultima, with tiled world and town/dungeon maps. You controlled a large party of your own design. The character classes in the game were a very wide range of fighter/thief/mage/priest variants with Japanese names such as Samurai, ninja, ronin, etc. etc... actually, the Japanese theme seemed more like an afterthought, and didn't really play a huge role in the game. It still more or less resembled an early Ultima in terms of style and gameplay. Combat was like Bard's Tale, etc., in that there was no tactical map, you just gave orders to your characters and the round would play out on a text prompt... if I remember correctly.
There were two reasons this game was fucking ridiculously hard. First, the world was HUGE, and there was an INSANE amount of game content. There was no map with the game package either, it was assumed that your party had no knowledge of the rest of the world, and would have to explore to figure things out. According to the Moby Games entry on deathlord, there were 12 continents in all... most of these were largely empty except for a few dungeons and towns. At the beginning of the game, you don't even know exactly what you are supposed to be doing. Eventually you understand that you are supposed to collect a bunch of words, artifacts, etc. in order to get access to the final ultimate baddie and kill it... and, of course, this involves exhaustively exploring every single continent. One of the cool things about the game was that each continent had a very distinctive style... you start out in a Japa-China style continent, and later come across ancient Egyptian-, snowy northern European-, Arabian- etc. style continents. Too bad the focus was not really on NPC interaction, but on beating dungeons...
The second thing that made this game so hard was the fact that whenever a character died IT IMMEDIATELY SAVED THE GAME. I can't remember how this worked, exactly, but I do know that when I was playing it on the Apple IIc (I was 11 or 12 at the time) I kept the save game disk sticking half-way out of the disk drive in order to avoid this. It was tough having to hear that nasty grinding sound when someone died, but I wasn't about to let my saved game file get written over. On top of this, there were all kinds of ridiculous death traps scattered about the dungeons, and some of the continents were so nasty that merely setting foot on them would get your party wiped out almost immediately. It made for suspenseful gameplay, allright, but come ON!
I don't know what the hell the design team was thinking when they released this game... it was fun, and had lots of content in terms of areas, loot, character abilities, etc., but it was just too frustrating, and pretty much impossible to win. It was probably the only RPG that I ever paid $$ for, but never finished. Has anyone else out there played it? Can you think of any other RPGs to top this in terms of sheer nastiness?
When I say difficult, I don't just mean difficult in terms of combat... I mean, the puzzle/quest solving aspects are hard to figure out. In some cases, you might not even know exactly what the hell the point of the game is until you have played through a sizable piece of it.
The most ridiculously hard CRPG I can recall is Deathlord, an EA roleplaying game from 1987. This game looked more or less like Ultima, with tiled world and town/dungeon maps. You controlled a large party of your own design. The character classes in the game were a very wide range of fighter/thief/mage/priest variants with Japanese names such as Samurai, ninja, ronin, etc. etc... actually, the Japanese theme seemed more like an afterthought, and didn't really play a huge role in the game. It still more or less resembled an early Ultima in terms of style and gameplay. Combat was like Bard's Tale, etc., in that there was no tactical map, you just gave orders to your characters and the round would play out on a text prompt... if I remember correctly.
There were two reasons this game was fucking ridiculously hard. First, the world was HUGE, and there was an INSANE amount of game content. There was no map with the game package either, it was assumed that your party had no knowledge of the rest of the world, and would have to explore to figure things out. According to the Moby Games entry on deathlord, there were 12 continents in all... most of these were largely empty except for a few dungeons and towns. At the beginning of the game, you don't even know exactly what you are supposed to be doing. Eventually you understand that you are supposed to collect a bunch of words, artifacts, etc. in order to get access to the final ultimate baddie and kill it... and, of course, this involves exhaustively exploring every single continent. One of the cool things about the game was that each continent had a very distinctive style... you start out in a Japa-China style continent, and later come across ancient Egyptian-, snowy northern European-, Arabian- etc. style continents. Too bad the focus was not really on NPC interaction, but on beating dungeons...
The second thing that made this game so hard was the fact that whenever a character died IT IMMEDIATELY SAVED THE GAME. I can't remember how this worked, exactly, but I do know that when I was playing it on the Apple IIc (I was 11 or 12 at the time) I kept the save game disk sticking half-way out of the disk drive in order to avoid this. It was tough having to hear that nasty grinding sound when someone died, but I wasn't about to let my saved game file get written over. On top of this, there were all kinds of ridiculous death traps scattered about the dungeons, and some of the continents were so nasty that merely setting foot on them would get your party wiped out almost immediately. It made for suspenseful gameplay, allright, but come ON!
I don't know what the hell the design team was thinking when they released this game... it was fun, and had lots of content in terms of areas, loot, character abilities, etc., but it was just too frustrating, and pretty much impossible to win. It was probably the only RPG that I ever paid $$ for, but never finished. Has anyone else out there played it? Can you think of any other RPGs to top this in terms of sheer nastiness?
- I bought a Collection a few years ago, but to my shame I have to admit that I just couldn't stand the Graphics anymore.
