Kickstarter Games - Nox Archaist
 

Nox Archaist is an 8 bit retro RPG in the style of Ultima and Bard's Tale which is currently on Kickstarter.

More information.

Way too old school.

At least they made sea storms and big Tentacley monsters on the Apple, which game features AFAIK did not exist then and are revolutionary? Of course they should have come out like 33 years ago?

But…why? Nostalgia can be great, but it's the gameplay of many older titles I'm missing, certainly not the graphical limitations and the horrible UI's…

Why not? Looks cool to me. Graphics aren't everything, I play pretty much anything other than ASCII (and only because I can't be bothered to learn and remember what every ASCII symbol stands for :lol:)

When it comes to classic roguelikes, I actually far prefer ASCII to graphics. ASCII is nice and perfectly clear at a glance and you can use your imagination. On the other hand, the tile graphics that come with those sort of games are usually ugly as hell.

Anyway, on topic, if these guys cared at all about making an interesting game then they wouldn't be writing it in Apple II assembly language, they would be using modern tools and techniques instead of re-inventing the wheel and artificially constraining themselves. Obviously more of a project for Apple II groupies than RPG gamers.

I actually got to try it out, the windowed UI is a step up from those old games, and there's some solid quality of life improvements over how we played them back in the day. After about 10 hours of play, I was still having fun and wish I had more I could keep going with.

If you want a closer look, here's all the videos a friend and I made about it.

Live Stream: https://youtu.be/aHWIhLKBQPU
Preview Discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_HTgGoHTCc
Interview with the Dev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meKsUgzc-zQ

If the graphics turn you off, they turn you off… but I wouldn't rule this one out quite yet.