So, are there any old school PC RPG fans here at Giant Bomb? People who have fond memories of game series like Might & Magic (not Heroes), Wizardry, Ultima etc. or are perhaps just beginning to discover those or similar games? Don't worry; I'm not a reactionary elitist or anything (I like several of BioWare's games, for example) - or even unusually knowledgeable about these games myself - but since I've had a lot of fun recently with games like Wizardry 8, Temple of Elemental Evil and Might & Magic 6 I'd be interested to know if there are other people here who appreciate this particular type of older, less action-oriented PC RPG gaming...
Any fans of old school PC RPGs?
If you'd call Fallout 2 and Diablo old, I did have a Dungeon Master addiction back in the day though.
It's of course impossible to define once and for all what "old school RPG" really means, but my own personal feeling regarding the games that were recently mentioned is that;
- Dungeon Master is very old school (first person perspective without seamless movement is very old school!),
- The Fallout series are reasonably old school (because it's turn based, isometric and heavily stats based)
- The Baldur's Gate games are almost but not quite old school (controlling more than one character is a classic CRPG feature), and
- Morrowind and the Diablo games are not old school (because they combine focus on a single character with action-oriented real-time combat)
"I enjoyed Morrowind, it was pretty good for the time.
"
Morrowind isn't really an old school RPG. When I think old school, games like the first few in the Dragon Quest series on NES come to mind. Then again, most of the people on this site probably weren't even alive when those games came out. That was in the prime of my game playing days, just when I was old enough to really start appreciating RPG's.
I never really played PC RPG's too much. I did play a bit of the Wizardry series and there were some top-down AD&D games that I played on PC. One that comes to mind I think was called Shattered Hand or Shattered Sun, or something like that.
MB: I think you're referring to Dark Sun: Shattered Lands or Wake of the Ravager. Definitely old school. Haven't played those ones yet, though, but I have them on my computer.
only if Return to Zork counts.
I also got into 7th Guest and Myst a lot. Not exactly RPGs...but they are kinda.
If Giant Bomb is to succeed long-term, it needs people who are into old-school RPGs (and every other game type) to find a home here. I wouldn't say I play a huge amount of them now, but I like the older RPGs. Yesterday for example I played the old-school Neverwinter Nights just to check whether it had experience points as claimed on here.
As you hint though, the RPG genre has become so melded into other game-types that it ceases to be useful after a certain point. It might be useful to give the early generation of RPGs a better name than 'old-school' and clearly define the time period they inhabited.
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