In addition to selecting races like elves, dwarves, the decidedly Tolkein-esque bobbits, and others, players also needed to define their heroes' roles.
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(The Dragon Quest series would more famously make a similar transition several years later.) This brought Ultima to parity with Wizardry, its rival franchise, especially in light of its greatly expanded array of character classes for the party. Although Exodus served as a capstone for the first two games - the eponymous Exodus was the demonic offspring of the villains of Ultima (the wizard Mondain) and Ultima II (the sorceress Minax) - it broke from their conventions and mechanics to greatly improve on the concept of computer role-playing.įor starters, Exodus finally put players in control of an entire party of characters rather than dealing in solo combat. However, it wasn't really until Ultima III: Exodus, released 30 years ago this month for Apple II, that the series properly came into its own. Literal worlds: The first two Ultima adventures seemingly drew as much inspiration from John Carter as from D&D and sometimes sent the hero packing into space, taking players well beyond the bounds of the standard primal fantasy so common to RPGs. Combat happened, and quite often, but it came off as a means to an end in service of the grand story and vast worlds to explore. Ultima, on the other hand, dealt more in plot and world-building. Wizardry's approach to dealing with the ephemera of RPGs was to say, "The hell with it," sweep it all off the table, and double down on pure combat and exploration. Ultima III's field map perspective should feel instantly familiar to anyone who has played pretty much any RPG ever. The funny thing is, outside of massively multiplayer RPGs - which work out to be more or less a tabletop session by online proxy - most designers are simply iterating on the principles laid down 30 years ago by the genre's two pillars, Wizardry and Ultima.
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Everyone has their own idea of how to handle the dungeon master's role, but it always turns out to be a loose interpretation.
The heart of D&D isn't fighting but rather the interactions between party members and the world around them, as relayed by the game master, and computers are terrible at recreating those elements.įast-foward several decades later and video games still aren't much good at it, which is why RPGs cover such a wide gamut of styles, from bare-bones dungeon crawlers to elaborate character-driven combat movies. The problem with turning tabletop RPGs into computer programs is that while the computers are very good at replicating the parts of the games that involve numbers - character stats, monster values, combat die rolls - what separates D&D from the war games it built on was all the stuff outside of combat.
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This makes perfect sense: The guys who were obsessed with tricking primitive early computers into becoming entertainment devices were also generally the same guys who spent their free time playing table top war games, which evolved into Dungeons & Dragons around the same time formative computer classics like Zork began to take shape. Role-playing games have been a part of computer gaming for nearly as long as the medium has existed.
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