How "Old School" is "Old School"?

[Farwalker]

On the one hand, there is old school with heavy emphasis on the old - the nostalgia factor. When it conjures up those fond memories of good times way way back... well that's a kind of old school to me.
Very early years for me that was mostly pen 'n paper, table top (in many flavors - dungeon!, cosmic encounter, and yes car wars come to mind), even combat book games when they came out (remember Lost Worlds?).
On the CRPG side, for example, Sword of Fargoal is old school to me just because we happened to have some great (admittedly semi-mindless) fun with it long ago...

On the other hand, most of the time I think of an old school RPG as one where figuring out how the game ticks and making that work for you is a great part of the fun (if not outright necessary for survival). Where your characters die or suffer significant loss if you're not careful. Where the diligent explorer is rewarded, and where with skilled gameplay bold and decidedly non-linear ventures can sometimes pay off big.
Lots of good "old school" CRPG mentions here already, I'll just add Realmz to the list of examples.

[azraelck]

Old school to me, means a certain character about the game that simply is lacking in today's games. It extends to other genres than RPG's as well. It's less about the age or graphics, or even style of game, than certain things which are hard to describe, and very few can seem to get. I liked Eschalon because it had that feel to it, which overrode all of it's shortcomings, and has me waiting for Book II (I've already budgeted the cost of the game out, and am tempted to buy a second copy for my brother, just because).

In recent years, there has been a massive simplification of games to create greater sales. Compare Civilization: Revolution to Civ II, or Dark Messiah of Might and Magic to Might and Magic VII. Or, perhaps, Mega Man Battle Network vs Mega Man 2. As a result, they have lost the character, the feel of the originals. Even otherwise good games, like Dragon Age, pale when set next to their predecessors like Baldur's Gate.

It's not really an issue with graphics. Graphics are a means of expression, an addition (or subtraction) to the game itself. Dragon Age would be little different with a modified version of the Infinity Engine (BG series, etc), other than being able to run on pretty much any machine built in the past decade. Nor is it an issue with how old a game is. Just look at Mega Man 9, which has the same feel and character of Mega Man 2.

The earliest RPG I've played is Alkalabeth. In fact, it's on my computer now (the Ultima Collection version). The first was The Bard's Tale. I don't recall Alkalabeth well enough to note anything about it, but there is little I'd change about the BT series other than the canned BT4 being released (there was a BT4 partially developed by EA, but was canned. Screen shots have surfaced online though). Then again, it'd probably have ended up on a poor note like Ultima (IX... ugh) of Might and Magic (Dark Messiah...).

I kinda laughed at the complaints of Eschalon being hard. It was easy. Try the teleport maze in the Summoning, or the Snares in Bard's Tale 2 before you complain about Eschalon being "hard"! Dragon Age got the same complaints, and even got a patch to dumb things down even more.

[Grindstone_82]

The first RPGs I played were from the early 90s, so that's what I mean by oldschool. The first one was Ultima 7 - The Black Gate, closely followed by Dark Sun - Shattered Lands.
That also means I missed the Goldbox games, and I never got around to playing them, because I found them too dreary and too user unfriendly. The games I started out with had a more varied gameplay/ better graphical representation/ easier-to-use mechanics.

Basically, that means I want a "typical" fantasy background, lots of statistics, and a "living" world with lots of side quests. Also, I don't think it makes a background more "mature" if you delve into things like sex between Elves and Dwarves or racial tensions between Orcs and Gnomes


It also means I want a minimum of graphical representation and user friendliness. Roguelikes therefore aren't on my list.

[azraelck]

IMO, sex in games is so badly done that it can't help but be immature and a failure. Same for romance options. The problem is is that it's always tacked on last minute stuff, and gets only a small amount of polish compared to say the combat system.

IMO, when designing, if I can't spend as much time on one specific feature as the combat system, then I'm going to set it aside until/if a sequel gives me the time to do so.

I don't mind "user-unfriendliness" myself, since I grew up with it. Hand drawing the maps (sometimes restarting a dozen times or more due to getting lost or anti-magic zones, spinners, and so forth), 1 wall tile to ensure you have no landmarks to go by, etc... Most Rogue-likes though, are pretty simple to just play. You have a relatively small selection of keys you use constantly, with a huge number that pop up on occasion. Dwarf Fortress, on the other hand...

[Lhoric]

Ultima #1 through #5. Bards Tale, Wizardy I & II. Zork/Infocom games, and other text adventures from Scott Adams IIRC. Mines of Moria, that was a great game. Does Wumpus count? A bunch of early 80's Apple // stuff. Actually, *all* of the early 80's Apple // stuff. There was one called Mobius that I liked a lot.

XYZZY

--> Lhoric

PS- Looking forward to Eschalon: Book II!!

[Sympathy156]

Most of the games I play are from the late 90s-early 2000s (stuff like Planescape: Torment, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Might and Magic, Wizards and Warriors, 2D stuff)...so for a lot of people (ie. FPS gamers who play all the newest, graphically-enhanced 3D games), they could be considered old school. I also love 80's text based games though, and I reckon they'd definitely be old school.

[Evnissyen]

I guess there's probably nothing more old-school than text-adventures.

...Well, King's Quest is technically older...

It makes me wonder... there really doesn't seem to be anything at all you can do to expand on those old Infocom games... you can't modernize them, you can't expand on them... well, you can expand on them, but it won't make them much more attractive to a modern audience. So... text games... they sort of just came, made their statement, and left.

It sort of makes me wish that someone at that time had sought to make a really expansive, in-depth game worthy of a corporation, rather than just another game that any intelligent 14-year-old programmer with enough time on his/her hands can program.

...Just so we could go back and say: this was the pinnacle of text-adventures.

...I mean, it's sort of sad that the highest potential of text-based adventure games was not really exploited (at least, based on what I've seen) at the time that they were popular, for the very reason that next to nobody wants to go back now and revisit them.

Can anybody think of any text-based adventure games that really sort of pushed the potential of the genre?

[silverkitty]

Well, whether you believe it or not,

a) those text games weren't programmable by 14 year olds when they were invented - the background knowledge wasn't codified into beginner's programming books yet. Infocom in particular was pretty cutting edge with its parser. Yah, the two-word parsers like Adventure and Scott Adams games would have been a lot easier to throw together, but Scott Adams games were always the "cheaper knockoffs of Infocom" (and Adventure is excused for being first and thus inspiring Dungeon) - incidentally, by Dungeon, here, I mean the name Zork was released under originally, before they changed the name because an older game also called Dungeon (which was more of a early Hack/Rogue game) came to their attention (before the modern internet, even programmer communities tended to be insular by geography).

b) those text games were pushing the limits of the computers they were on in terms of memory and disk storage. There's a reason Infocom had to break the mainframe-based game Dungeon into 3 parts to release it to micro-computers as the Zork series. Which, incidentally, is another reason they weren't just something a 14 year could whip up in their spare time - they required some fancy tricks to squeeze into the poor, tiny computers available at the time.

c) Kings Quest is not older than text adventures. Adventure and Dungeon were running on mainframes long before people had computers in their homes. And before fancy gizmos like "graphics". Specifically: Adventure, 1975. Dungeon(Zork), 1977. King's Quest, 1984.

oldest "actual" game on wikipedia: a tic-tac-toe game in 1952. not a good time for gaming

[Evnissyen]

Okay... so, I should've done some research, I suppose, before posting that about King's Quest.

One of my problems, sigh... .

Anyhow: If I'm not mistaken: text adventures were popular up into the late 80's. I was programming text adventures and really really primitive graphic-based games, in BASIC, just after that, at the end of the first Bush administration. I never stuck with them, but... I do know that at that time I knew everything that was necessary to make a text-based adventure. It was easy... I just didn't spend enough time on them.

Programming abilities when the genre was actually invented, therefore, is irrelevant, and not what I was talking about.

[Rustybolts]

My first computer was a spectrum and i can remember playing a game called the valley.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... loadpics=1

Above World of spectrum Listing i would say this is most definitely old skool.

[Evnissyen]

Rusty: Strangely, that game is one of the most interesting-looking really primitive games I've seen in a long time. Thanks for that. Now I'm gonna go download it and see if I can get it to work.

EDIT: Oh. Just Commodore 64. So I can't play it, oh well.

IMO, sex in games is so badly done that it can't help but be immature and a failure. Same for romance options. The problem is is that it's always tacked on last minute stuff, and gets only a small amount of polish compared to say the combat system.

Hear, hear! But I'd go further, actually, because I can't actually think, offhand what I would do differently to make a romance option not seem silly, stupid or gratuitous. I understand that if you want a realistic world with realistic human interactions: this tends to come up, it's only natural.

I think... the best way of dealing with it is to deal it in a way that alludes to a friendship in an open-ended way. To bring up a game I always bring up and just brought up in another thread today: I think NwN2 did it best with Neeshka. "Neeshka, don't do this, I need you" said everything, whether your character was a friend of hers or whether your character was in love with her -- however the player wants to interpret it. (And, of course, without the character depth that she was given: the weight of this line would not have been possible.) That line can be interpreted strongly in two different ways. Also, Black Garius' line: "Let's start with dear Neeshka, just to drive the blade home."

To me: that's the height of RPG romance, and it's barely even stated!

And then you take the actual romance options in NwN2 were just simply ludicrous . . . and pointless. One night with a full moon and that's the end of that. Back to business, and a vague ending!

[Rustybolts]

Rusty: Strangely, that game is one of the most interesting-looking really primitive games I've seen in a long time. Thanks for that. Now I'm gonna go download it and see if I can get it to work.

EDIT: Oh. Just Commodore 64. So I can't play it, oh well.

Actually the other link was for spectrum, but I have just found a freeware remake available in dos.
http://www.hotud.org/component/content/ ... g/39/24641

[Evnissyen]

Thanks, man. I just downloaded it . . . I'll run it through DOSbox & see if it works.

DOSbox hasn't been to reliable, for me, though -- on either Mac or Windows -- so I'll see.

[TNoyce]

I grew up during the PC revolution, before the Internet was so prevalent, and so accessible. Back then, using dial-up with a 300 baud modem was cruisin' man. No graphics, only text or variants on text-based graphics, if you were lucky. And, I had to walk to school every day, uphill both directions, in 12 foot snow drifts... But I digress..

To me, Old School generally means pre-3D, though I think some of the games which are pseudo-3D, or a combination of 2D/3D might also fall into this category. Text based certainly is included. Games of this type definitely include a fair number of stats, skills, items (armor, weapons, etc) as well as a wide variety of enemies. Games that actually came with a physical printed manual (no electronic distribution back then), which contained detailed information on how the game mechanics worked, as well as a substantial back story.

Also, it means more may be expected of the person playing the game. In some cases, taking actual notes or mapping locations was required, as there was no real easy way to figure out exactly where you were. Some of them contained frustrating puzzles involving secret doors, levers and other devious ideas. Honestly, some of these were not a lot of fun in my opinion.

Early CRPGs were also very linear, with only one way to accomplish a specific quest. Exploration was a key part of these games as well. Some of them had much larger worlds than others, some were pure dungeon romps. All of them have fond places in the dusty corners of my memory.

To be honest, I have played so many different games on a wide variety of platforms (PC, Amiga, C= 64, teletype) and Display methods (text, ascii, monochrome, color (CGA, EGA, VGA)) I cannot hope to mention all of them. However, like a lot of other people on this forum, ones that come to mind from older times:

Rogue, Moria, Ultima (I-V), Bard's Tale (I-III), Wizardry, Eye of the Beholder, to name a few. Most of the CRPGs I played, were on the Apple II, Amiga, and later PC. I have steered clear of the consoles, not really interested in them.