The Limit Break - new RPG column by Kat Bailey at Rock Paper Shotgun

[samuraigaiden]

Called Dark Souls a "dungeon crawler"

Yeah, this part really hurt my brain.

 

[TheBreadcrumb]

• Called Dark Souls a "dungeon crawler"
• Praised Undertale

 

[Sergiu64]

tl;dr: Deadfire is not RPG, because it doesn't give you real choices, gameplay wise or storywise, and it's story is shallow and disjointed mess.

Most rpgs have railroaded stories. You're being a bit harsh.

As for game system balance - it did make the game more boring - but some builds are still a lot more effective than others.

 

[Spectacle]

Poor Dave Arneson must be rolling over in his grave.

I gotta ask, how does gravity work in this place? Water seems to be flowing randomly in multiple directions at once.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Poor Dave Arneson must be rolling over in his grave.

I gotta ask, how does gravity work in this place? Water seems to be flowing randomly in multiple directions at once.

In the Blackmoor setting, any oddities can be explained either by advanced technology indistinguishable from magic or by the doings of cosmic entities such as the Egg of Coot.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Does this media still have that gay practice of banning people? You will not know you've been banned. You will still be able to login and comment but your comments will not be visible.

So this is the reason why I cannot comment anymore.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Deadfire is not a RPG now?

It mimics one, but it's not. Deadfire creates illusion od choice - you've got stats, but they are meaningless - each class is equally strong and equally boring to play. You've got story and choices, but in the end you have nothing to say - Eothas will do what he wants to do and you can only chat with him about it. First Pillars gave you some kind of choice and agency, in Deadfire you are only a spectator, truly a watcher - but I don't know if that was intention behind it.

So, for me (and mind it, I backed it) it's not RPG, it's visual novel, and not a good one. It has walls of meaningless text, it has characters acting outside of setting, and it has plot separated from the rest of the game, being in contrary even. On one hand you've got this world threatening god and on the other pirate-themed expolarion thing, muddled with colonial questions, but viewed not through the eyes of people who lived in the period and had different points of view about it (mostly about cost efficiency and so on), but through the eyes of XXI century californians, who had patchy at best knowledge about the issue, but also very strong ideological view. I, for one, condemn most european countries for what they done to native Americans and Africans, but would very much welcomed better and more deep analysis of said issue, and not the poster caricature of things.

tl;dr: Deadfire is not RPG, because it doesn't give you real choices, gameplay wise or storywise, and it's story is shallow and disjointed mess.

This must be the one 2020-registered member who understands RPGs.

 

[kreight]

Does this media still have that gay practice of banning people? You will not know you've been banned. You will still be able to login and comment but your comments will not be visible.

So this is the reason why I cannot comment anymore.

Theres a way to check this out. Try registering a new account with the same email. You should get a notification about the ban.

 

[Infinitron]

Last week's article was a weeb thing: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/wh...f-atelier-ryza-2-says-about-pc-gaming-in-2021

This is more interesting: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-rpgs-that-made-us-legend-of-the-red-dragon

The RPGs that made us: Legend Of The Red Dragon
We'll get to the dragon killing. First, we flirt.



Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, I was lucky enough to have a dad who happened to be in IT. It meant that from an early age I was banging away at keyboards, playing games like MadMaze on a laptop the size of a briefcase. I eventually fell into to the nascent world of online gaming, which was how I discovered Legend Of The Red Dragon, or LoRD as it’s often known.

Developed by Seth Robinson, a teenager with a bare minimum of programming knowledge, Legend Of The Red Dragon was an extremely popular example of the “Door Game,” a sub-genre of social gaming that grew out of a desire to cultivate a community around online bulletin board services. BBSes were a fixture of the pre-internet days of the 1980s and early 90s, a place to gather, play social games, and download new demos. I’d dial in on my blazing fast 19.2k modem, suffer through the screech and groan of the connection, and then dive into Trade Wars and Legend Of The Red Dragon, which were the Facebook games of their day owing to their time-limited nature and social hooks.

Legend Of The Red Dragon was both my first taste of roleplaying and online gaming at large, teaching me the joys of grinding for experience and loot while giving me a glimpse of the connected world to come. I didn’t know much about RPGs at that time, but I had an inkling that the accurately-named Death Sword sitting in the shop was probably a good thing to have, and that it would be fun to chop up other players with it. It was an experience unlike any on console at that time, and the novelty of playing in a large community drew me in - along with thousands of others.

Today, Legend Of The Red Dragon and the BBS Door Game sub-genre at large is half-forgotten, which is one reason I’m blatantly cribbing from Netflix’s recent series of pop culture documentaries in creating what may or may not be an ongoing mini-series (we’ll see). When we think of the dawn of online roleplaying we generally cast our minds back to World Of Warcraft, EverQuest, and Ultima Online, or if you’re a little older, the MUDs and MUCKs of the 80s and 90s. But Legend Of The Red Dragon also deserves to be part of that conversation, if only because it was willing to lean into a topic that elicited nervous titters from game developers in the 90s and even into the 2000s: sex.



In Legend Of The Red Dragon, you play as a faceless man or woman on a quest to slay the titular wyrm. Wielding little more than a (scary-looking) stick, you stride into a town filled with shops, an inn, and a training dojo, with a monster-filled forest just beyond. When you’re not grinding levels, you can battle with other players, flirt with Seth the Bard, and contract the odd STD.

Its heyday was in the early 90s, where it thrived alongside MUDs on one side and Neverwinter Nights (no, not that Neverwinter Nights) on the other. Compared to its contemporaries, Legend Of The Red Dragon was straightforward and easy to understand, which was to its benefit. You would head into the forest and kill monsters for gold and experience, which you could then use to buy better weapons and armor. Advancement came via beating the master of the local training dojo. Once you reached a high enough level, you could take on the Red Dragon itself.

Adding color to the experience were special events in the forest, where you might encounter a fairy, or maybe a spooky decapitated head with a story to tell. You could take on CPU-controlled versions of other players in the field, or bribe the innkeeper and kill them while they slept. And as I already mentioned, there was the flirting.

Legend Of The Red Dragon was able to implement the sort of roleplaying that was mainly limited to chatrooms in this period (and still is to a great extent), underlining the baudier elements of fantasy fiction. Robinson got the initial idea from a futuristic casino game where it was possible to spend the night with characters you met, and soon implemented it into Legend Of The Red Dragon. It wasn’t long before it began to grow in complexity, incorporating everything from marriage to raising kids.

“I wouldn't have bothered if it was simply a thing with an NPC, probably," Robinson said in a 2008 interview, "but actually getting married to a real player and then sharing the event had a lot more meaning, [and] was more engrossing."

All of this admittedly flew over my head when I was dialing into SmartStuff to play Legend Of The Red Dragon in 1993. Playing with my friends at school, we were in a race to see who could defeat the Red Dragon first. Unfortunately for me, I fell behind when I opted to upgrade to a Blood Sword rather than invest in new armor, which resulted in me taking far too much damage from high-level monsters in the forest. It was an abject lesson in where my priorities should lie, one that still rattles around my brain to this day when I wander into a shop to buy some new gear.



I was also hampered by the turn limit, an early limitation that presaged the mechanics that would come to dominate free-to-play mobile games. The turn limit in Legend of the Red Dragon was mostly there to keep people from grinding ad infinitum, killing the Red Dragon, and then quitting, but knowing that didn’t make it any less annoying. I eventually discovered that if I disconnected the modem at just the right time, I could get all my turns back and go again, which made me feel like the most brilliant of budding 11-year-old roleplayers.

Like everyone else I eventually moved on from Legend of the Red Dragon to more advanced online games. Robinson himself would become engrossed in Ultima Online, playing all-night sessions with friends in the barn he purchased with the money from LorD. He eventually made Legend Of The Red Dragon 2, a graphical adventure referred to as a “unwholesome marriage of Ultima, ZZT, and Habitat,” but it never captured quite the same audience as Legend Of The Red Dragon. In the end Robinson sold both games to a company called Metropolis Gameport and cashed out.



Metropolis shut down all of its BBS serves in 2008, but it’s still possible to play Legend Of The Red Dragon thanks to a user named "falknhayn", who created Gear LoRD by re-writing a version that had been running through an MS-DOS emulator for nearly 20 years before finally going dormant in 2019. Gear LoRD features a handful of changes from the original game, including three unique realms and modern amenities like browser and touchscreen support. For nostalgia’s sake, I rolled up a new character last week and ventured back into the forest to battle creatures great and small. I was doing alright into someone called “Bran the Warrior” surprised me with a sharp blow from the short sword and, well, yeah.

 

[Communist]

''Rockpapershotgun''
Stopped reading there. God I hate gaming ''journalists''

this is the thing calling you an incel online

Jokes on her(?), I'm voluntary celibate. I bet she's(?) the same kind of person who complains about women in video games looking ''unrealistic'' IE: more attractive than her(?).

Speededit: Misspelling

Too many words to express "I want to fuck her because I feel a kindred spirit in her"

Hell, all the latest trends remind me of the collision of the Crying Freeman manga.
Hey guy! This woman will not come to you on her own to destroy your cock. Take the initiative! That is, take not your penis, but the keyboard, and write to her! These bastards work for food, and whatever your social status, for her you will be a god. Go brat! show whether you deserve to be called a MAN!

 

[kreight]

this is the thing calling you an incel online

oh my... no wonder shes writing about videogames from 80-90s

 

[Nifft Batuff]

It's a male.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

It's a male.

 

[Ol' Willy]

manga

Fuck off with this shit

 

[Grauken]

why RPGs matter more than ever

Why does everyone always have to pretend that the things they like are some kind of cosmicbrain artform necessary for the continued evolution of mankind?

Otherwise they would have to admit that their life is meaningless and they've just found an enjoyable way to waste time

 

[Communist]

It's a male.

She is woman. And she's pretty attractive. Being a game developer indicates her status as an outsider. An extremely engaging character for male gamers.

manga

Fuck off with this shit

Oh oh, haven't you read the manga? Well then, you should have been watching a movie with Mark Dacascos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx_yHgcpTX0
An extremely great film by Christoph Hans.
The one who directed The Brotherhood of the Wolf and Silent Hill.

 

[Thac0]

I gotta say 80s erotic text based online rpgs are an odd way to get into the genre.

 

[Jigby]

Lasted for 3 months. Incredible. RIP