I don't have the energy to go through all of his CRPG articles in detail, I've read most of them in the past and here is some choice stuff. That said, I'm not saying he's lying, but he states his opinion often as a fact, when it's IMHO not based on his own experience from playing a lot of these games (or not very in-depth and just cursory), but actually from reading articles and reviews in magazines of them (he's like a more sophisticated version of AdvancedHero, spouting opinions that are the sum of other peoples opinions and a clear lack of played game time).
I don't have to tell anybody how misleading your opinion on games can be if you only read reviews of them instead of actually playing them.
https://www.filfre.net/2011/08/defining-the-crpg/
CRPGs, in other words, are essentially simulation games, albeit what is being simulated is an entirely fictional world.
Of course, I could have also simply used the definition we used in the 1980s: in adventure games you explore and solve puzzles, in CRPGs you explore and kill monsters. But that’s just too easy, isn’t it?
https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/a-word-on-akalabeth-and-chronology/
The other is that this little tale may serve as an example of the process I go through to come to (my version of) historical truth
Which of course leaves me wondering why Garriott has for so many years been saying things I’m almost certain are not true.
Garriott himself turns up in the comment to clear it up, and Maher was wrong with his assumption
https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/akalabeth/
It’s also here that we find the game’s most obvious formal innovation, its use of a three-dimensional, first-person perspective that puts us right into the storyworld. The use of such a perspective was not completely unprecedented even in 1980; there was of course that Escape game that had inspired Richard in the first place. And better remembered is Flight Simulator, the fruit of many years of 3D graphics experimentation by Bruce Artwick, which first appeared on the Apple II in 1979 or very early 1980. Garriott was, however, the first to implement it in a CRPG. As such, it would be very influential on a whole generation of dungeon-crawl games to follow, even as Garriott’s own Ultima series would ironically place increasingly less emphasis on its own dungeon delving in favor of creating ever richer above-ground worlds.
this is patently false, there was Moira and Oubliette on Plato, who inspired Wizardry, which was the title that influenced most of the Dungeon Crawlers that followed, not Akalabeth, which was a footnote in RPG dev. Yes, Akalabeth (late 1980) came out before Wizardry 1 (Sep, 1981), but it is the later most game devs from that gen cite
https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/
mentions the Plato environment and that it inspired the creators of Wizardry, but Maher was oblivious to the fact that Woodhead and Greenberg copied large parts of Oubliette mechanics almost verbatim
https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/playing-wizardry/
Like their forefather, Wizardry-inspired games often take place in a single dungeon, seldom feature more than the stub of a story, and largely replace the charms of exploration, discovery, and setting with those of tactics and strategy.
what, exploration and discovery are part of the core experience of Wizardry, is Maher soft in the head?
What Wizardry lacks in fictional context, it makes up for in mechanical depth. Nothing that predates it on microcomputers offers a shadow of its complexity.
not sure if he's talking merely about PCs or computer systems in general, but again, most of that complexity was copied from Oubliette
https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/the-wizardry-phenomenon/
Dirk Pellett, who did much work on the seminal PLATO CRPG dnd, claims to this day that Woodhead attempted to copy that game and release it under his own name on PLATO as Sorcerer. When he was called out for that, claims Pellett, he and Greenberg then “plagiarized” another popular PLATO game, Oubliette, to create Wizardry. For what it’s worth, I find this claim absurd. Oubliette did pioneer many ideas used in Wizardry, including the first-person view, but the contents of the latter’s dungeons were completely original.
Matt Barton had an interview with one of Oubliette's creators (
http://mattchat.us/?p=990) and the CRPGAddict review of Oubliette show a high likelhood that Greenberg and Woodhead did indeed took a lot from Oubliette. I remember an Interview with either Woodhead and Greenberg where they admitted it more or less, but I can't find it at the moment, might have been a video.
https://www.filfre.net/2016/03/opening-the-gold-box-part-4-pool-of-radiance/
We also have Gygax to thank for Pool of Radiance‘s convoluted method of handling spells. Unlike virtually every other CRPG but like tabletop Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a cleric or magic user’s list of spells in this game isn’t treated as a handy universal repository from which she can fire off the spell of her choice at will (as long, of course, as she still has the mana to do so). No, in the Gold Box games you have to memorize ahead of time the precise spells you think you will actually want to use on your next expedition. Because you usually don’t know precisely what kind of monsters you’ll be fighting in the course of said expedition, you’re continually being caught out with the wrong selection of spells. ... Run into a pack of disease-causing undead without having memorized Cure Disease? Too bad; reload back at camp and try a different spell arsenal. Run into the rare locked door that your fighters can’t bash in, and you don’t have Knock memorized? Take the long walk back to a safe area to rest and memorize it. There’s no strategy to any of this, just rote trial and error.
What else to say, it's an opinion I guess, just a very stupid one
https://www.filfre.net/2017/03/opening-the-gold-box-part-5-all-that-glitters-is-not-gold/
While Secret of the Silver Blades still stands as arguably the line’s absolute nadir in design terms, the sheer pace at which SSI pumped out Gold Box games during the latter two years of this period in particular couldn’t help but give all of them a certain generic, interchangeable quality. It all began to feel a bit rote — a bit cheap, in stark contrast to the rarefied atmosphere of a Big Event that had surrounded Pool of Radiance
Yeah, sure Buck Rogers games, Krynn, Pools of Darkness, all very interchangeable and lacking in quality. Only someone who hasn't played any of those games could have said that. Again, not lying but just making up stuff to fit his agenda
https://www.filfre.net/2019/09/opening-the-gold-box-part-6-a-troubled-marriage/
Shattered Lands was also damaged as a computer game by its need to conform to TSR’s tabletop rules. The boxed set which presented the Dark Sun setting for the tabletop included a whole range of new rules complications and variations to distinguish it from the already convoluted Dungeon & Dragons base game, and most of these SSI was expected to implement faithfully as part of their licensing agreement. And so Shattered Lands came complete with a bunch of races and classes unfamiliar even to most Gold Box and tabletop Dungeons & Dragons veterans, along with a veritable baseline expectation that every character would be double- or triple-classed. Clerics suddenly had to choose an “element” to worship, which limited their selection of spells — and now everyone had access to a whole parallel sphere of magic known as psionics, and had to choose a specialty there as well. No game designer starting a CRPG from scratch would ever have inserted so much cruft of such marginal utility to the ultimate goal of fun; it was the sort of thing that could only arise from a company like TSR throwing rule after rule at the wall over the course of years in order to sell more supplements. Certainly none of it made much sense in a game explicitly envisioned as a new beginning for Dungeons & Dragons on computers, a place for fresh players to jump aboard.
Wow, cruft of marginal utility, Maher really wins the price for not getting it
overall.
