[HN Gopher] The Secret Origin of the Action RPG
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The Secret Origin of the Action RPG
Author : polm23
Score : 69 points
Date : 2020-07-29 04:25 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Zelda is definitely not an ARPG
| anon73044 wrote:
| Yeah, more on the Action/Adventure side than RPG. Though the
| modern ones do have a lot more RPG elements than the old school
| NES games.
| bodhiandpysics1 wrote:
| A good way of thinking about this is that the Zelda games are
| genetically rpgs, in the sense that Miyamoto was doing his
| spin on the style of game that Nihon Falcom had introduced.
| Obviously, the absense of numerical character abilities in
| LoZ makes it feel somewhat different than quintessential
| Japanese ARPGs like YS or Seiken Denetsu (Legend of Mana).
| mouyes wrote:
| Zelda II can be considered an action RPG, but the rest of the
| series is a bit light on RPG elements.
| kbenson wrote:
| Why don't you think it qualifies? You have an inventory, you
| have money and buy items, you advance your character (not
| through experience points, but through finding secrets and
| beating major enemies).
|
| What specifically do you think it's missing?
| henryfjordan wrote:
| You don't really make choices in most Zelda game. All the
| character advancement is coupled to story progression (you
| get an item in the 1st dungeon that lets you access the 2nd
| dungeon and so on). I think that reduces the "role playing"
| that goes on and makes Zelda more of an Action/Adventure
| series.
| merb wrote:
| not true for botw
| whateveracct wrote:
| I think some people think RPGs need to have numbers on the
| screen?
| bodhiandpysics1 wrote:
| Those numbers are important! In classic rpgs, both western
| and Japanese, skillful play consists in strategically
| manipulating those numbers to defeat challenges. It's a
| very different feeling than in an action game where
| skillful play is about manipulating the virtual physics of
| your avatar.
| krapp wrote:
| Zelda was pretty much the standard for "Action RPG" until the
| Souls games overshadowed it.
| skuthus wrote:
| Anyone interested in an Action/rougelike from yesteryear should
| check out Cave Noire for the original Gameboy. Surprisingly
| comprehensive rougelike for the time.
| subsubzero wrote:
| So many great action role playing games,
|
| for NES all I played was Zelda, I felt like snes really turned
| out alot of great titles, Lagoon, Wanders from Ys III, Secret of
| Mana, possibly Equinox(maybe more puzzle than rpg) but all great.
| jandrese wrote:
| Caverns of Freitag was beaten by 2 years by Adventure on the
| Atari 2600.
|
| It seems to me the definition of Action RPG is somewhat arbitrary
| and where you draw the line determines who is first. The only
| hard requirements being that it is not turn based and is role
| playing in some respect.
| pvg wrote:
| Leveling/character progression of some sort would probably be
| in most ARPG definitions and that's in CoF and not in
| Adventure.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The Tower of Druaga was an arcade game, release in June 1984,
| that has many action-RPG elements. No "stat points", but lots of
| items, akin to Zelda.
|
| With this "Dragon Slayer" game from September 1984 being pushed
| in this article... I'd argue that Tower of Druaga has the
| realtime elements (being an arcade game), as well as being
| released a few months earlier.
|
| I don't know if Tower of Druaga is the earliest "action RPG"
| game, but... it has to be one of the earlier ones. Just a few
| months predating Dragon Slayer.
|
| ---------
|
| Tower of Druaga as the nasty arcade game that was unbeatable if
| you forgot to pickup items from earlier floors. Once you advance
| to the next level, you can never return to an earlier level. If
| you have an "unbeatable" scenario, then I guess try harder next
| time, thank you for your $0.25.
|
| --------
|
| EDIT: With that being said, this "The Caverns of Freitag" game is
| 1982, predating both Dragon Slayer and Tower of Druaga. So
| Caverns of Freitag sounds like the earliest known Action RPG.
|
| The article doesn't go into Freitag until a bit later. I guess I
| read the lead and assumed it'd be about Dragon Slayer.
| brootstrap wrote:
| Hmm i thought dark souls was the best and only ARPG.
| wcarss wrote:
| Diablo was far from the first ARPG, but given how influential it
| has been for the genre, I was floored to learn that it was
| actually designed and implemented as a turn-based game, and only
| turned into an Action RPG by request of folks at the main
| Blizzard office.
|
| The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a
| dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a
| large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget
| milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely.
|
| Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an
| afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and
| responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after
| seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually
| work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold.
|
| He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent
| post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago.
|
| 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc
| iphone_elegance wrote:
| It's a shame that when ever I hear of Blizzard all I can think
| about is their anti-democracy shenanigans
|
| they did have some pretty cool days in the past though
| tych0 wrote:
| Thanks for the link!
|
| I spent thousands of hours playing Diablo 2 through middle
| school-graduate school, developing bots, etc.; it's where I
| really got interested in computers and reverse engineering. My
| dad locked the disk in our family's safe at one point to
| prevent me from playing, and I've had hundreds of cd-keys
| banned from Battle.net. I'm sure many people out there are the
| same, but it's hard to overstate how much that one game
| influenced my life. Awesome to see that it was made by such a
| great guy.
| RobRivera wrote:
| This post portem is gold. I recall seeing it before and
| realizing how sometimes gold really is just a few brushes of
| dust and dirt away, but you need to be diligent in testing out
| new ideas for the sake of seeing a product in different
| versions. Its an exciting process
| jlawson wrote:
| It must have been the original "time only moves when you do".
| setgree wrote:
| The part of the video discussing real-time vs turn-based begins
| around 22:50
| [deleted]
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