Vote for the Best DOS RPG - Discussion [Archive]

Zakhary

July 24th, 2007, 23:19

Might & Magic IV and V were originally meant to be as a one single game.. and they are available nowadays combided as "World of Xeen" so I felt it would make no sense to have IV and V separately.

I'm pretty sure in a week or two I'll be coming back and changing some of my votes... nethack is in great danger of being replaced of some of the classic games I'm gonna try soon for the first time!

EDIT: Some of The votes made by HiddenX (for example) are games that I'm gonna try soon! Very interesting games indeed.

Oh, and the early Wizardry games (1-3) were never technically
released for DOS. They were only released for Apple II, Commodore 64, NES, PC booter. I checked from two different sources so I believe this really is the case.

MasterLich

July 24th, 2007, 23:31

Note: Bard's Tale I is on the list with the name "Tales of the Unknown, Volume I: The Bard's Tale" in case someone wants to vote for it.

Doesn't qualify for my list as I played it on C64.

HiddenX

July 24th, 2007, 23:37

Wizardry 1,2 and 3 were released for DOS -
look here (http://www.thelegacy.de/)

I think Fallout is a PC Windows game.

Zakhary

July 24th, 2007, 23:41

Fallout 1 was released for both DOS and Win.
My info for the early wizardry games came from:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/wizardry-iii-legacy-of-llylgamyn and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry_III:_Legacy_of_Llylgamyn

Edit: Even the link you gave me shows:
http://www.thelegacy.de/Museum/game.php3?titel_id=5825&game_id=5876
publishing
1983:Apple II/+
1986:IBM PC (Booter)
1989:Commodore C64/128
....No MS-DOS.

EDIT2. ahh.. You must be talking about the trilogy release? But the list does not include shovelware (like the Wizardry 1-3 box).

Lucky Day

July 24th, 2007, 23:45

is there a poll somewhere I'm missing? I don't see a poll on this thread.

I would hardly call the Wizardry series "shovelware". Besides my copy of Wizardry I: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord was both Apple and IBM compatible in the same box; a rarity for 1983.

Alrik Fassbauer

July 24th, 2007, 23:46

What does "IBM PC (Booter)" actually mean ?

By the way, I've saved the list on my harddisk - wanted something like that for quite some time now, thanks. ;)

Alrik Fassbauer

July 24th, 2007, 23:46

is there a poll somewhere I'm missing? I don't see a poll on this thread.

The Poll is here : http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2298

HiddenX

July 24th, 2007, 23:48

Okay MS-DOS was not needed, but a DOS IBM-PC - I would include Wizardry 1-3 in the list.

What does "IBM PC (Booter)" actually mean ?

They included a mini-OS in the bootblock of the game disk.

Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_booter)

Zakhary

July 24th, 2007, 23:50

I don't mean that wizardry games are shovelware. I just mean that the list includes only games that were originally released for the MS-DOS operating system. The list does NOT include games that were later released for MS-DOS as a part of some compilation(=shovelware) release, for example.

I did my best with the list and I'm sure I made some choices that not all of you agree with. Also I'm not going to bother Jaz again with uploading an updated list without a very good reason (If I started doing this... I'd have to update that list many MAANY times :D )

So please let's try to have fun with it. It was quite a bit of work compiling that list. I'm sure you can vote for some other game in the wizardry series or some other game alltogether. This is not a matter of life and death.

Zakhary

July 24th, 2007, 23:57

By the way, I've saved the list on my harddisk - wanted something like that for quite some time now, thanks. ;)
Yeah, this is a usefull list even without any of the voting results themselves.
Nice to have a nice compact list of all the dos games with the release year.
Glad you liked it!

Lucky Day

July 25th, 2007, 00:17

well you do realize that with the Ultima and Bard's Tale games most of them were first released on the Apple ][ and later to IBM so by your definition they shouldn't belong there either. For example you list Ultima I as 1987 when it had been around since 1980.

Rogue was built on Unix systems. DnD even predates this going back to 1974 for the Plato.

Otherwise its a great list.

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 00:30

well you do realize that with the Ultima and Bard's Tale games most of them were first released on the Apple ][ and later to IBM so by your definition they shouldn't belong there either. For example you list Ultima I as 1987 when it had been around since 1980.
Otherwise its a great list.

Umm.. no. They were still released for the MS-DOS operating system without them being a part of a compilation. We are voting for individual games. One game at a time. Not trilogies or collections.

azraelck

July 25th, 2007, 00:30

I'm curious as to why King's Bounty is included as an RPG? It's the forerunner to Heroes of Might and Magic, with a generic fantasy setting, and a TB strategy style. While it's very simplistic in any respect, I wouldn't consider it an RPG.

Also Mars Saga was released as Mines of titan for MSDOS. It was Mars Saga on the C64 and maybe other systems.

Nice list, now I have a resource to use when digging for ancient games to play.

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 00:32

I don't know. It is listed in mobygames as a roleplaying game. As I said in the voting thread.. the first post.. Please guys.. Let's not waste this possibility arguing about what is or isnt an rpg or what should or should not be included in the list....

Please.

Jaz

July 25th, 2007, 00:40

I LOVE the fact that Mystic Towers is on it :). It's not anywhere near my favorites, but I played and liked it, and it never appeared on any other list before.

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 00:40

Thanks for those who have already voted and thanks in advance to everyone else, please vote. The more we get votes the better the ranking list will be!

BTW. There can be seen already some popular games that just seem to pop
on almost everyone's list. Interesting. Very interesting.

Also.. Any estimates on how long we should keep this thing open to get a satisfying number of voters? Few weeks? A month? Two months? More?

Lucky Day

July 25th, 2007, 00:47

So the real test is that it had to be released for IBM not as a compilation? Then Wizardry qualifies as one of the first big IBM games. All of them were released as individually as PC games.

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 00:48

Not IBM. MS-DOS. I just took the games from mobygames that were listed as RPG and released for MS-DOS and then I removed Compilations, Addons etc...

As simple as that.

Lucky Day

July 25th, 2007, 00:54

IBM's PC-DOS = MS-DOS. They were virtually identical.

I'll let you off the hook though. These games were PC-Booters. I personally think that PC-Booters should qualify, especially since most of them were developed in DOS to begin with, but c'est la vie.

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 01:03

Thank you. Really appreciate it.

azraelck

July 25th, 2007, 03:42

Who's arguing? I was just curious.

magerette

July 25th, 2007, 04:39

You guys are vying for the ultimate crown of geekdom here you know.

More power to you. Let the old things live, I say. Respect the ancestors. :)

JDR13

July 25th, 2007, 07:28

I know it's not 100% role-playing, but System Shock gets my vote.

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 13:50

I think I'm gonna give a really good try to all the games that make it to top10 no matter what they are.

Alrik Fassbauer

July 25th, 2007, 16:18

I LOVE the fact that Mystic Towers is on it :). It's not anywhere near my favorites, but I played and liked it, and it never appeared on any other list before.

It is ? I wouldn't call it an RPG, though. (I have it, too.)

Maybe after this poll we should send the results and comments to Moby, asking them to update their classifications.

Jaz

July 25th, 2007, 17:10

I didn't even suspect that Mystic Towers was a CRPG, but hey, personally I'm not a category purist, anyway. I like games of all sorts, no matter which genre they're supposed to be, as long as they are fun... and what's not to like about a game where you play an old geezer with a walking cane who farts and cackles all the time?
Grabbed it on floppy all those years ago (when my rig still had a floppy drive).

Fenris

July 25th, 2007, 17:24

So many great Games back in the Days... :sigh:

While I had no Problems to choose my first 3 Choices, I really had Problems to choose only 2 more ;)

The only Game on my Shopping-List for the next few years is the NWN 2-AddOn...

Lucky Day

July 25th, 2007, 20:34

so..anyone think these games are harder than today's?

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 20:38

If the DOS RGPs are generally harder than the modern 2000+ windows RPGs?
I do. I haven't seen a challenging puzzle,for example, in any of the modern RPGs - arx fatalis being the only exception... i remember it had a two or three pretty hard puzzles. And also, you can't actually get lost into the dungeons in any of the modern games. I can play most of the modern RPGs (Fable, Oblivion, etc etc etc...) with my brains turnded off. I couldn't do that in M&M3 for example. No way.

EDIT: I also feel that combat in these older games is generally speaking a bit more challenging (and fun). To have at least some challenge is really important to me.. I don't know.. somehow accomplishing something feels so much better if I've actually had to do something to get there (Besides bashing the left mouse button)

Fenris

July 25th, 2007, 20:59

Recently I got lost in a Dungeon in the NWN 2 Mod "Keep on the Borderlands" - the last time that happened was IIRC in "Chaos strikes back" :)

The new games are by far easier than the old classics.

Alrik Fassbauer

July 25th, 2007, 22:12

I'm currently trying out the Eye of the Beholders Trilogy, and I must say that one get easily lost without any automap ... This is kind of a "tour de fiorce" for my memory.

Also the difficulty ... Maybe it was a mistake to import the mid-game chars from EOB1 into EOB2 ...

Jaz

July 25th, 2007, 22:25

The dreaded dungeon where you could not sleep... EoB2 sure was a tad difficult at times. Hit and run, mostly: lure single enemies away from the main host, kill them, sleep and recover, lure another guy back from his friends, and so on. Impossible to do without sleep, so rushing through that dreaded dungeon was the only way for me to survive.

I also believe that generally speaking, earlier games were more difficult than 'modern' ones. Interestingly enough, when replaying them, I sometimes find them to be rather easy after all - but that's probably just due to the fact that I played them before and thus know how to navigate around the real problems.

Alrik Fassbauer

July 25th, 2007, 23:13

Yes, probably. I play them now for the first time.
(Okay, EOB1 not really : I've tried it before and ended in Level 4 or so).

Zakhary

July 25th, 2007, 23:54

@Lucky Day:
Your votes are relatively very oldschool.
Ultima III,Ultima IV,Wizardry IV etc...
And from your previous posts I understand you were already
playing & buying games when the early wizardry games were released (?).

As a gamer who is just starting to get into those earlier DOS games
I'd be interested to know if you still actually play games as old as these and do you feel that a gamer such as myself having never played these games before could get into this kinda stuff TODAY? In other words, how much do you think nostalgia weighs in?

Oh.. and I'm not talking about graphics here. I can tolerate pretty much anything graphics wise. How do you feel that those early DOS games standup gameplay wise to the later mid-90's DOS games?

rooroosta

July 26th, 2007, 00:00

Voted in the other thread..shame I couldn't vote for another 20 or so..hehe..

@zakhary
I couldn't agree more with your comment about puzzles in games nowadays..nothing comes close to the puzzles in games like Dungeon Master, EOB2, M&M et al.
They just seem to be a token gesture on the part of the design team.

azraelck

July 26th, 2007, 00:29

RPG difficulty has certainly fallen off nowadays, IMO. Most seem to follow a Diablo-esqe style of combat, highly simplified. The core mechanics seem highly simplified as well. Puzzles are rare and usually much simpler than the stuff like in Bard's Tale II: Destiny Knight. There's also the automap, more often than not which allows for notes to be made so that you can mark where everything is. That's one little thing I like having though, since I no longer have the energy or time to draw a map out only to realize that I made a mistake in counting tiles and have to redraw half the map. Or the dreaded spinners, which made mapping a nightmare.

Artran

July 26th, 2007, 13:10

Only one note about my vote :) I didn't add roguelike games to my list, because I think that RL's are not pure DOS games - they are platform independent, lightweighted and most of them can be played under Win, Linux, Mac OS etc as well. So If this thread is about DOS games, they shoud be symptomatic for DOS OS. Like Wizardry 7, M&M, Arena etc. That's all.

Zakhary

July 26th, 2007, 13:13

Valhalla(aka Ragnarok) was originally a commercially released game even though it is a roguelike. It was released for MS-DOS. It is not available on any other platform. It was later re-released as freeware - also for MS-DOS only.
It is not in anyway platform independent.
I love the game - and it is an MS-DOS game - hence it is on my list.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/valhalla

Check it out, it's a great game even for those who do not like roguelikes. and its available as freeware (not just abandonware).

But concidering nethack.. you do have a point. It's gonna fall off my list soon anyway as I'm getting into more and more of these great old games :D

Artran

July 26th, 2007, 13:38

Check it out, it's a great game even for those who do not like roguelikes. and its available as freeware (not just abandonware).

*sigh* So many good games and so little time...

I would like to mention Stonekeep (DOS, 1995) - also very good Dungeon/RPG game.

txa1265

July 26th, 2007, 14:01

Wow ... this is really cool. I missed out on so much of these while playing FPS and other stuff back through the Apple ][ and DOS days (yeah, played some Wizardry in 80-ish but never got hooked). I haven't really played enough to contribute to a poll - some Betrayal at Krondor, some of the Might & Magic games, some Ultima IV and some of the DOS Wizardry games.

Pladio

July 26th, 2007, 14:28

I'm the same as Mike (above), I'm too young to really have enjoyed that age of gaming. I played Wasteland, BaK, some M&Ms and a few others.
It was actually all those (or most) things you guys are talking about that bothered me about those games (except BaK). The fact that either there is no in-game map (or automap), the fights, the puzzles.
I like story and gameplay which for me are the most important things in a game. When I have to draw a map myself to be sure I get everything and can return later to know exactly where everything is. TilexTile cartography is something I don't find enjoyable, but gamebreaking and time-consuming. IIRC M&M was like that, you could only go forward,left,right or backwards, and you couldn't see more than one step forward, so the only way to go back to a shop was to draw a map.
The fights were alright, but if it was against some form of rat then it was too easy and when it was against some form of stronger creature then I either had to run or get killed. I liked the fights in Betrayal at Krondor, really nicely made, I believe. The puzzles were nice, but in those games the puzzles took more weight than the story. Most of the gameplay were puzzles, which for me was gamebreaking too.
Some puzzles were easy (which was nice for me), some were alright but when I managed to find out how it was supposed to work then I didn't feel any satisfaction, but instead I felt and thought :'How in someone's name could I bring myself to walk about the same room (Tile by tile) to after an hour finding out the mechanism to open the door or something like that?!?'. Other puzzmes were just too hard for me and I either took a walkthrough for them if I enjoyed the game (BaK's chests were the only thing I took a walkthrough for since I had no idea how to open the chests, couldn't find the secret words, but since I was enjoying the rest of the game, I didn't mind) or I just stopped the game altogether if I wasn't enjoying the game.

txa1265

July 26th, 2007, 14:34

I'm the same as Mike (above), I'm too young to really have enjoyed that age of gaming.
I'm certainly not too young, and had a Apple ][+ in high school and college at the time, but didn't game ovrely much, and was more into Castle Wolfenstein and some others at the time.

Zakhary

July 26th, 2007, 14:45

@pladio:
Might & Magic 3, 4, 5 ... all feature nice world maps and in-game automaps.
I'm not too keen on drawing maps myself, either. But I disagree with pretty much
everything else you just said.

I'm young. I was not playing games in the 80's and I did not understand roleplaying games in the early 90's when I started playing. To me the the non-freescrolling movement and pseudo 3D graphics of these older games were - at first - something I had to get used to.
But after I did I can say that in some way I actually prefer that now to the modern scrolling full 3d gameplay. It's easier, it's simpler and you never have to wonder "Did I miss anything? Should I increase my gamma because I missed that chest in the corner? Am I supposed to see that goblin there? Is my resolution sufficient? Should I use higher texture detail settings? Is my framerate too low? Should i buy a new graphics card or update the drivers? etc... etc... etc..."

Also - I don't have to be whipping my mouse all around bashing the left mouse button to play the game.

Instead - if a step on a tile, I see/get/experience everything I'm supposed to.
I can sit in my chair leaning back peacefully with the keyboard in my lap (yes, even in combat!).

It's just so much better. It so much more fun. And it feels so right.

Pladio

July 26th, 2007, 15:07

I'm certainly not too young, and had a Apple ][+ in high school and college at the time, but didn't game ovrely much, and was more into Castle Wolfenstein and some others at the time.

Oops, sorry Mike. Wasn't the way I meant it to be. I meant what you said, not your age :D

@Zakhary :

I don't remember which M&M I played, but I don't remember it having a map.

I never really had those problems you're talking about. For multiple reasons actually. I mostly return to where I was so I find things I've missed. I've never had to change my gamma or any other options to find something neither.

I don't like bashing my button either and that's why I'm not enjoying GIII so much or enjoyed Morrowind, ...

I did however like the FOs, GI & II (keyboard controlled, completely, so you can enjoy the game sitting back with your keyboard in your hand, GI even has some puzzles, good story and gameplay. GII too, but less.).

Actually it's only in the FO games that I missed stuff since some things are hidden behind buildings...

Do you mind telling me where you don't agree a bit more specifically, I'd like to understand and if I may respond to it.

Zakhary

July 26th, 2007, 15:10

I do not mean to attack you or to belittle you or your opinions. I was just stating that I disagree with you, so don't worry. I love the fallout games too btw!

EDIT: And of course I intensified some of my remarks about those modern games - just to make my point clearer. And we've all had major or minor tech problems especially where modern 3D graphics are concerned, so.. I don't believe you there :D

Pladio

July 26th, 2007, 15:12

Alright, I misunderstood you then. Sorry. :)

Alrik Fassbauer

July 26th, 2007, 15:58

My "gaming career" began slowly in the mid-90s - or rather in the later 90s.

I didn't play many RPGs then, so I wonder whether I should really participate in that poll ...

Zakhary

July 26th, 2007, 16:03

If you have played some of the games on that list and really like them, and would like them to have your vote, go vote! :D

azraelck

July 27th, 2007, 06:38

I think the only M&M to not have an automap was M&MI. II did, at least the DOS version did.

I was born too late for the '80's era of gaming. I caught the tail end really. I'm a '90's guy, playing the early '90's stuff more than anything. The only reason I played alot of the older classics is because we had an 80386 until 1998. Then we finally "upgraded" (more like downgraded, IMO) to Win98. Then my brother blew up the 386 and we had to make things work in Win98, which wasn't always easy.

Now, I'm on Linux, and pretty much anything I can play is through DOSBox or the native stuff. All I'm missing is a WWII FPS, but that's another forum.