There was a very brief window where it was possible to make games like this - where the game market was large enough to spend time making an expansive game, but before the demand for highly polished games came in.
Daggerfall was the game in line before Morrowind and it had a lot more freedom, but it was a lot less polished and more glitchy. But there was so much you could do - you could set a teleport spell in the daytime towards a shop, teleport in at night, and rob the shop. That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense that players always want to do in a game like that, and Daggerfall let you do it.
But it was broken at times, dungeons would load broken configurations, and the game wasn't polished with finesse. Morrowind is a much, much more polished and overall satisfying experience than Daggerfall, but it's much more streamlined (though, still immense amounts of freedom compared to a normal game).
There's other games that offer a great deal of freedom - Baldur's Gate and Darklands come to mind. They came after the games market had started to get much bigger, but before the standard became extremely polished. It'll be good if there's a trend back towards more freedom, and eventually someone will get pseudorandom design and encounters right in terms of polish. I've largely moved on from games, but if someone can give a Darklands amount of depth in a game with as many different choices as Fallout 2 and as much polish as a modern game - well, I might have to block out a month at some point to waste a lot of time with it. But, this seems like it's still quite a ways off.
Despite its lack of graphical flair, I enjoyed Fallout 1 and 2 more than any other RPG to date, besides Planescape: Torment, and Baldurs Gate to a lesser extent. It seems that a lot of the drive to create really compelling and believable worlds and stories has been redirected to help sustain the huge amount of effort required to keep up in the graphical arms race. It's unfortunate, because I've found no correlation between graphical quality and fun in the RPG genre.
Oh, me too, I was just explaining based on market forces, not my personal preferences. Try Darklands if you haven't yet, it might be right up your alley:
The list of games you like is very similar to mine - Planescape, Fallout 2, and Baldur's Gate are some of my favorite games. The review on the Abandonia page is kind of junk, but the screenshots will give you a little idea. The combat is real time tactical with pausing - similar to Baldur's Gate, and the majority of moral and skill-based choices are text based on beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds.
It's a really, really hard game with a tough learning curve, you'll die a lot before you get the hang of how to start and play, but it's really rich and rewarding. Probably the most unique RPG I ever played - it's historical fantasy set in the Holy Roman Empire, and the systems of the game are all based on the superstitions of the day. You can pray to actual saints to help you perform miracles, there's no magic per se - just alchemy that you mix from different ingredients. There's so many ways to play it and so many different options, but it is really hard and you'll get killed a lot in the beginning.
These sites have helpful info if you get into the game:
Try it out, if you like sandbox-style fantasy games with tactical combat, detailed character customization, and don't care about graphics - this is quite the game for you. There is a plot and a main story (there's actually three of them), but you find it over time, you just start out the game trying to get rich and famous and you can totally ignore the plot if you want. Maybe worth a spin - you'll probably need Dosbox to get it working, also spend the time to customize the sound in Dosbox so it starts playing, the sound on the game is really, really good.
Oh yeah, I wasn't disagreeing, just throwing my two cents in the ring.
I'll have to check out Darklands. Not much time for gaming these days, but I love the old DOS games as well, although they were before my time the first time around.
If you've never tried it, you might like Mount & Blade, an indie game that's more action oriented, but you can build your own personal army as you go for fame and wealth. You can even get your own fiefdoms and castles and collect taxes from those, protect them from opposing factions, etc.
That window also came before the advent of today's high-resolution displays, leaving more budget for the unimportant parts like story and gameplay. (Though I'm definitely
wearing rose-tinted glasses, art drpartments for a big-budget game today are huge!)
Comments
There was a very brief window where it was possible to make games like this - where the game market was large enough to spend time making an expansive game, but before the demand for highly polished games came in.
Daggerfall was the game in line before Morrowind and it had a lot more freedom, but it was a lot less polished and more glitchy. But there was so much you could do - you could set a teleport spell in the daytime towards a shop, teleport in at night, and rob the shop. That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense that players always want to do in a game like that, and Daggerfall let you do it.
But it was broken at times, dungeons would load broken configurations, and the game wasn't polished with finesse. Morrowind is a much, much more polished and overall satisfying experience than Daggerfall, but it's much more streamlined (though, still immense amounts of freedom compared to a normal game).
There's other games that offer a great deal of freedom - Baldur's Gate and Darklands come to mind. They came after the games market had started to get much bigger, but before the standard became extremely polished. It'll be good if there's a trend back towards more freedom, and eventually someone will get pseudorandom design and encounters right in terms of polish. I've largely moved on from games, but if someone can give a Darklands amount of depth in a game with as many different choices as Fallout 2 and as much polish as a modern game - well, I might have to block out a month at some point to waste a lot of time with it. But, this seems like it's still quite a ways off.
Despite its lack of graphical flair, I enjoyed Fallout 1 and 2 more than any other RPG to date, besides Planescape: Torment, and Baldurs Gate to a lesser extent. It seems that a lot of the drive to create really compelling and believable worlds and stories has been redirected to help sustain the huge amount of effort required to keep up in the graphical arms race. It's unfortunate, because I've found no correlation between graphical quality and fun in the RPG genre.
Oh, me too, I was just explaining based on market forces, not my personal preferences. Try Darklands if you haven't yet, it might be right up your alley:
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/194/Darklands.html
The list of games you like is very similar to mine - Planescape, Fallout 2, and Baldur's Gate are some of my favorite games. The review on the Abandonia page is kind of junk, but the screenshots will give you a little idea. The combat is real time tactical with pausing - similar to Baldur's Gate, and the majority of moral and skill-based choices are text based on beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds.
It's a really, really hard game with a tough learning curve, you'll die a lot before you get the hang of how to start and play, but it's really rich and rewarding. Probably the most unique RPG I ever played - it's historical fantasy set in the Holy Roman Empire, and the systems of the game are all based on the superstitions of the day. You can pray to actual saints to help you perform miracles, there's no magic per se - just alchemy that you mix from different ingredients. There's so many ways to play it and so many different options, but it is really hard and you'll get killed a lot in the beginning.
These sites have helpful info if you get into the game:
http://www.darklands.net/index.shtml
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/darklands/
Try it out, if you like sandbox-style fantasy games with tactical combat, detailed character customization, and don't care about graphics - this is quite the game for you. There is a plot and a main story (there's actually three of them), but you find it over time, you just start out the game trying to get rich and famous and you can totally ignore the plot if you want. Maybe worth a spin - you'll probably need Dosbox to get it working, also spend the time to customize the sound in Dosbox so it starts playing, the sound on the game is really, really good.
Oh yeah, I wasn't disagreeing, just throwing my two cents in the ring.
I'll have to check out Darklands. Not much time for gaming these days, but I love the old DOS games as well, although they were before my time the first time around.
If you've never tried it, you might like Mount & Blade, an indie game that's more action oriented, but you can build your own personal army as you go for fame and wealth. You can even get your own fiefdoms and castles and collect taxes from those, protect them from opposing factions, etc.
Those were some of my favorites too. Maybe there's a profitable niche that isn't being exploited by game companies.
That window also came before the advent of today's high-resolution displays, leaving more budget for the unimportant parts like story and gameplay. (Though I'm definitely wearing rose-tinted glasses, art drpartments for a big-budget game today are huge!)
I wonder if such an undertaking could be crowd-sourced somehow? Something like a wiki-fallout?