Don't get excited -- this Kinect-controlled dungeon crawler does not exist ... yet.
Like many gamers, I spent a good part of the past few days playing with Kinect
Hopefully, a lot.
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Gone ... and soon forgotten?
When it comes to bleeding a franchise dry, no sector of the entertainment industry is as efficient and mercenary as the video game industry. The moment a game enjoys even a modicum of success, it is guaranteed to spawn endless sequels, delivered annually if possible, until the interest of the last possible buyer has been exhausted.
Except classic western RPGs.
We can count on new Mario, Tomb Raider, and Call of Duty games. These and other games will continue to receive sequels far into the future. Meanwhile, most of the classic RPG series of the past have vanished, remembered only by gamers old enough to have played them on an Apple IIc or a 386.
There was a day when the shelves of my local Egghead Software proudly displayed big, colorful boxes, heavy with thick manuals and cloth maps. The titles on these boxes – Wizardry, Ultima, Might & Magic – marked these games as new installments in storied RPG series that many (or at least, I) believed would continue for as long as gamers played RPGs on computers.
Obviously, I was wrong.
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Turn-based combat in SSI's "Gold Box" series of AD&D CRPGs.
In the early days of computer and console role-playing games, turn-based combat was the norm. This was not a compromise imposed by technological constraints, as one might suspect. Most early computer and console video games, influenced by the arcade, were twitch-based action games. Including real-time combat in an RPG would have been no more difficult than including it in any other genre. Early RPGs like Wizardry, Might & Magic, Ultima, and The Bard’s Tale adopted the turn-based combat mechanic by choice, because their designers took their cues from pen-and-paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, which employed turns and dice rolls to simulate combat. This design resulted in combat systems that challenged a player’s ability to build and develop characters, and to think tactically in battle, rather than relying on fast reflexes and gamepad (or, at the time, joystick) mastery.
Some of these games, like The Bard’s Tale, presented turn-based combat as a series of menu choices. The player would consider the strength and number of the enemy, the hit points and supplies of his or her party, and then select (for example) to Attack, Defend, Cast Spell, or Flee. Other RPGs, like Ultima 3 and SSI’s Gold Box series of AD&D games, presented combat on a separate battle screen, where the player and the computer took turns moving party members and enemies around a map like figurines in a tabletop war game.
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Wizardry -- Hope you brought your imagination!
With Etrian Odyssey 3
What is a Grid-Based Dungeon Crawler RPG?
Before Ultima Underworld introduced the ability to move freely through a 3D space, first-person role playing games were strictly grid-based. Each time you pressed the arrow key left or right, you would turn a full 90 degrees in that direction. Each time you pressed the up arrow key, you advanced one square forward on an invisible grid. While this made mapping easy (graph paper was ideal) it also imposed artificial restraints on the dungeon designs. (These evil mages must have hired only the best dungeon contractors to get all of those 90 degree angles and perfectly level floors just right!)
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Fable 3 sure looks awesome....
Fable 3
They say that those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it. Not me. I’ve been burned before. Twice.
So before we start storming Gamestop to place our pre-orders, let’s review five reasons not to get our hopes up for Fable 3.
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