Favorite dungeon crawler of all time?

Originally Posted by Hastar
There can be only one answer to this question, Dark Heart of Uukrul.

Some of the best puzzles of all time. Dungeon was huge and had a great save system with sanctuaries. Large selection of monsters and magic items. Great story with a great ending. Loved the character advancement.

To this day it still has the best cleric spell system and the magic user spells were also fantastic. Had to read the manual because there were clues in it to help you with the dungeon.

The character creation system was unique. Answered questions instead of rolling for stats. All these different systems make it my favorite dungeon crawler.

Ahh, another classic I missed

Noticed an automatically moderated post by QueenKate, invisible to everyone, on the first page that now has been made visible.

I had an Amiga but never played the Black Crypt. I might give it a go at some point, I still quite like poking around in old Amiga and C64 games from time to time.

Great list and explanations, DeepO! I enjoyed reading that. Not sure I have a favourite - I guess the ones I have fondest memories of are the ones I played first when I didn't really know the genre, like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder, and a series called Ishtar. More recently I really enjoyed both the Grimrocks as well. So I'm kinda going to sit on the fence with this one.

Every time this thread comes up I answer, "Wizardry Four: The Return of Werdna". True then, and still true today. I'd give a lot to be able to play the earlier Wizardry games on my current computer.

Dark Heart of Uukrul! Okay, Prey. It's basically a dungeon crawler.

I am not sure if my understanding of "dungeon crawler" is similar to understanding of this term by others. The best dungeon crawler in my opinion is Mordor, the Depths of Dejenol and Demise, Rise of Ku'tan (see also Demise, The Revelation).

Mordor, Depths, Demise are dungeon crawlers, just like any other games focused on mechanics, combat, looting, an exploring an enclosed area (as opposed to an open world) Type of combat and party size is unimportant. Diablo is a hack & slay dungeon crawler, Wizardry is a party based turn based one. Mordor's automated combat wasn't my kind of thing, though I did like how much character building options are in the game and its successors.

Minimum to zero interaction, minimum to zero quests, a lot of character building, hunt for gear, mighty dragons and ancient vampires at the bottom of the dungeon and no way to get there without spending at least 100 hours fighting rats and goblins. That's "my" dungeon crawler

P.S. and it should be first-person view

May I suggest Path of Exile then? The levels are massive but it meets a lot of the criteria. Did you play it, Lev? Fun game though the skill tree boils my nutty brain.

"What is a dungeon crawler" could become an entertaining subset of the old "what is an RPG" question.
I think I agree broadly with Lev, but if we go with ForgottenLor's description my answer is definitely Dark Souls, for what it's worth. I've never really been able to get into isometric ARPGs like Diablo and Grim Dawn.

I remember Black Crypt! Sort of. I remember playing it on my Amiga and thinking it was absolutely amazing. But I don't remember anything about why I thought that. Other then something about some very epic spells.

Dark Heart of Uukrul was amazing too, and I remember that one a lot better. I tried playing it again more recently with an emulator but I just couldn't. The lack of a manual definitely didn't help.

Wizardry 6 is probably the one that stands out the most to me. I loved the pacing, level design, puzzles and story. Though it did jump the shark a bit in the second half.

I haven't played a ton of pure dungeon crawlers yet, even though I love the subgenre. I'd say so far, my favorite would be Wizards & Warriors, if you count that. But some others I've played recently that I really liked were:

Elminage Gothic (PC) - Dark and surreal dungeon crawler with a high challenge level. Wiz 1-3 style.

The Dark Spire (Nintendo DS) - This was made by the original Wizardry team as their "dream game". It's very good.

Etrian Odyssey (Nintendo DS) - This is like a JRPG-esque dungeon crawler, also pretty good.

Arcana (SNES) - This one was a surprise and recommended by Aubrielle. It's also a JRPG dungeon crawler and pretty unique, with more of a story and things like that.

Lords of Xulima (PC) - It's sort of an open-world dungeon crawler, if that makes sense. Reminds me a bit of the Wizardry design except set in a large world.

I know I'm forgetting some, ah well.

My favourites are Bard's Tale 2, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2, Wizardry 6-8, Ultima Underworld 1&2, Lands of Lore 1, Anvil of Dawn, Might & Magic 2-7, Dragon Wars, Amberstar and Ambermoon.

Bard's Tale 2 was hard. Still have nightmares of the Gray Crypt

Uukrul! it was so awesome for the time. It was the end of an era: the end of the Apple ][ and probably the best Dungeon Crawler ever made for that system (can't remember if there were any specific GS ones).

Wizardry I, Bard's Tale I and II, Might and Magic I, II, and III all stand out.

The turn based ones are so much better than the smooth scrowling ones

There can be some debate on what is a dungeon crawler.

Does 99% of the game take place entirely in a dungeon? If so, then city and overland games like Bard's Tale don't count.

Is it a blobber? If so, then third person games don't count.

Is it turn based? If so, smooth scrolling games don't count.

Is it first person perspective? If so, then text based games like DND, Wizard's Orb, and rogue don't count.

As far as I'm concerned, if you spend the majority of the game crawling around in one or more dungeon-like locations - it's a dungeon crawler.

I deliberately asked the question openly, so I could get as many answers as possible.

That said, when people say "dungeon crawler" - the first game on my mind is Dungeon Master - because that was always the definitive dungeon crawler for me.

So, the more the game resembles Dungeon Master - the more pure it will be as a dungeon crawler

In terms of the evolution of the genre, I think of Dungeon Master as the first modern dungeon crawler - and Ultima Underworld is the natural next step in that genre.

There hasn't really been that much evolution since then, except for System Shock and its sequel - but that's more about taking the genre in a slightly different direction than evolving it.

That said, I tend to think of TES games as taking the same genre and expanding upon it with more traditional CRPG elements, including open world stuff. Arena (the first TES game) was also more of a dungeon crawler than anything else, really.

Yeah, even Daggerfall was mostly a dungeon crawler. I was bummed at first that Morrowind's dungeons were mostly tiny. Of course, that was comparing them to Daggerfall. They're really normal compared to many games. I shouldn't talk about TES. It always makes me want to load up Skyrim….I've played that enough.

I'm not sure what is meant by "modern" dungeon crawler, but to me it starts with Wizardry although its a clone of Oubliette, at least in style. They both share the first person perspective with an invisible party (does this count as a blob?) crawling through a dungeon.

DND and games like it used an overhead map, as do rogue and the PC port of Oubliette. But are they crawlers? They spend all their time in a dungeon and they are RPG's.

One of Intellivision D&D's you ran around the mountain in First Person, but the dungeons were all generated from set patterns and you had no party.

Ultima has dungeon crawling but most of its overland and the towns are mapped out (and its technically not turn based because the turns have a timer on them).

OTOH, Bard's Tale, especially BT3, has plenty of overland but because of its first person perspective, it has more in common with Wizardry than Ultima.

In my mind the dungeon crawler stops with Ultima Underworld because its a smooth scroller. In today's thinking it would be called a hybrid.

NetHack

Yeah yeah yeah, it's a rogue-like. In fact it's probably the most rogue-like outside of Rogue itself. But not the way I play it! I back up my save files and restore them after the game deletes them, thank you very much. If you do that, suddenly it's very much a dungeon crawler with <ahem> somewhat dated graphics.

P.S. And it made the latest PC Gamer top 100 games list!

Diablo 1. Don't hate.