CRPG's in the World of Tomorrow

I wondered, when I played the AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) "gold box" games in the 80's (the original Pool of Radiance for instance), what computer roleplaying games would be like in the future...

At the time, crpg's were all about fantasy melee combat with "swords and spells." In fact, everything, story, quests, the magic system, skills, experience, pretty much funneled back to combat in one way or another. There really wasn't much else to do but have fights.

The crpg's of the day that were not official AD&D titles, games like Wizardry, the Ultima series and The Bard's Tale, used rules systems heavily influenced by AD&D. In some cases, like Telengard and Wizardry, "heavily influenced" would be an understatement. These games lifted their rules almost verbatim from the AD&D books, even to the point of Avalon Hill's crpg, Telengard, using the exact same spell names. (AH vs. TSR?)

Nearly all early crpg's used the concepts and terminology of AD&D --ability scores/stats (Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, etc.), armor class (AC), hit dice, damage represented in dice terms (D6+1, 2D10, etc.), hit points, "added-on" skills, "Tolkien races" (elf, dwarf, hobbit, goblin, troll, etc.), experience points and levels to become more powerful in combat, and so on-- as if Dungeons & Dragons was open source with no license agreement.

There wasn't much difference between these games except for the chrome. This isn't to say they were not fun, not challenging, not cool, etc. The best of them, some of the ones I mentioned above, had unique qualities that separated them from the rest. But in a sense they were all AD&D variants and we were all playing the same leveling game, from game to game, over and over.

And we knew this, my gamer friends and I, and though we lamented it somewhat we bided our time always wondering what innovations the next few years would bring. Certainly, these conventions of paper roleplaying games would be abandoned in favor of systems and features more appropriate to what computers can do. Certainly character sheets and leveling and Tolkien would be abandoned for newer and more innovative game design and a wider variety of settings. Certainly...

But, as they say, it was not to be. After more than twenty years, the core systems, settings and gameplay for most crpg's remain largely the same. Crpg's are still combat-centric. You still have to play a wimp at the start and then "level up." You can't play a character at the peak of his career out of the box unless you play a game like Thief --but more on that in a sec.

You still have to play a dwarf or an elf or whatever. You're still the compleat adventurer who can somehow carry two sets of armor, wear another one, tote four swords, thirteen scrolls and a bag of gold that would break a highway load limit scale AND fight at the same time. (Amazing!)

The trappings haven't changed; the gaffs haven't changed; the settings haven't changed; the rules haven't changed; the game goals haven't changed. Only the graphics and sound quality have been changed to protect the innocent...customer.

But here's the kicker.

Maybe this is a phenomenon that cannot change but can only die, even if it is a slow death. Maybe it's just a matter of the "old farts" giving way to the "young turks." Maybe games like Thief: The Dark Project, GTA3 and Guitar Hero are proof enough that digital roleplaying is finally coming into its own. Maybe I'm done worrying about this now.

Splorch!

The sounds for Digital Eel games, particularly Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, were and are always a lot of fun to put together. They're full of subtleties, gags, incongruities and trivia that few people will notice or ever figure out. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I thought I'd list a few here for posterity and in case anyone is interested.

Consider this as a window into the heady world of Professional Sound Design. I'm winking.

Weird Worlds bridge crew chatter - actual chatter from JPL (captured via internet coverage) during the Cassini probe orbital burn as it neared its first encounter with Saturn's ring system

Tchorak greeting - derived from an obscure recording of an oil and gas refinery being "played" like a pipe organ

Tchorak lava bomb launch - Arthur spitting out untasty Heart of Gold tea, greatly modified (but you can still hear it), from the radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

SAIS splash screen alien speech - a sentence or sentence fragment from a Lovecraft story typed into a text to speech app, reversed, flanged and chopped into three pieces

Golden Disk - the actual recording of a child's greeting in English from the golden record carried by the Voyager probes

Finding life in SAIS - a bunch of short .wav files of animals, birds, insects, etc., just overlapping each other's tail forming "parade of lifeforms"

Black Monolith - just the timpani part (ahem) from Also sprach Zarathustra (not sampled from the 2001 soundtrack though)

Kawangi graviton disintegrator beam - derived from a Hammond organ glissando played by Keith Emerson, from Karn Evil 9 by Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Black hole - pitch-shifted .wav files, random ones, I don't even remember the three I used, shaped so as to form a "churning vortex" of sound, lightly sprinkled with the sounds of ballpark cheers and people screaming on a roller coaster

Whoops, it's getting late. I'll have to explain Splorch! specifically some other time but I think you get the idea, and Don Martin lives on.