What is an RPG? In a role-playing game, the player assumes the role of a character, or avatar, controlling his or her every aspect. Where he goes, what he does — it’s all up to the player. A character could spend all his time traveling the countryside, sitting in a bar, farming, or engaging in any number of other activities. Normally, though, a character will be wandering through some type of dungeon, battling all manner of creatures. While the player is the person who decides what the character does, the developer is the person who decides what activities the player has to choose from. At the very least, as a developer you need to give the player some places for the character to explore, creatures to fight, and treasure to find. These things are usually bound together in quests or missions. (The name may vary depending on the genre of the game — quests in fantasy-based RPGs or missions in sci-fi RPGs, for example.)

A character’s abilities in a role-playing game are usually based on stats and skills. Stats are such things as Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. These stats are represented by a number, which indicates how developed that stat is. The higher a character’s Strength stat, for example, the more he can lift and the more damage he can cause with melee weapons. The higher his Intelligence stat, the easier he can learn things such as spells or languages. Most RPGs have these stats in one form or another, and almost all have additional stats, such as Constitution, Agility, Wisdom, and Charisma. You could also consider things like Health and Mana.

Skills are such things as using a sword, firing a gun, and walking a tightrope. Almost every action the character performs, except normal activities like walking and talking, will usually involve using a skill. There are different ways these skills are represented in an RPG, but like stats, skills are usually represented by some numeric value that indicates how well the character can perform that skill. When performing a skill, a value is also usually assigned to the difficulty of the effort. For example, walking a tightrope is difficult. Doing so in a windstorm is much more difficult. Doing so in a windstorm while being shot at by several enemies is insanely difficult. Some activities will be so simple that they automatically succeed. The sum of the character’s skill score and the value of the difficulty factor are used to determine if the effort succeeds. Computer role-playing games (CRPGs, but called RPGs from this point on) sometimes hide both stat and skill values, but most allow you to at least see the stats and skills and determine how the character develops by improving them.

A (Relatively) Brief History of Computer RPGs

When gamers talk about the beginnings of RPGs, whether computer or pencil and paper, they’ll usually point at Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as the ultimate sire of the genre. While it’s true that the genre really gained steam with the release of D&D in 1974, you could say that computer RPGs also have games like Zork and Myst in their lineage. These were games in which the actions of a person, not a creature or object, in the game were dependent on the player’s decisions. One early RPG that many people cite is Akalabeth: World of Doom, by Richard Garriot. However, you can go back to the world of mainframes and find examples of simple (and not so simple) RPGs.

The same year that Gary Gygax released Dungeons and Dragons, games started appearing on some mainframe systems. Probably the first of these was a game called pedit5. It featured such RPG staples as dungeons, monsters, treasure, and a magic system. Because many administrators deleted games whenever they could, it’s not totally clear if this was the first mainframe game, but it’s the first for which we have some clear record.

Other notable games during this period were dnd, Dungeon, and Rogue. dnd featured a “level-up” system based on experience points, a store where players could buy equipment, and an actual story and quest — killing a dragon to get an orb. Dungeon allowed the player to control an entire party of characters instead of the single adventurer in previous games. Rogue included randomly generated dungeons and ASCII-based graphics and also featured complicated gameplay. Games that are termed “Roguelike” can still be found today.

Around 1979 the next era of RPGs began with the release of at least two commercially published games. One is the aforementioned Akalabeth: World of Doom, which featured first-person perspective and graphics using wireframe for objects and the dungeon itself. The other was Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai.

Temple of Apshai was somewhat unique in that it used an on-screen room number that could be looked up in the game’s manual to provide the player with a description of the room. This description could give the player hints about monsters that might be in the room before the player enters or hidden objects in the room, such as secret doors. The game spawned two add-ons, Upper Reaches of Apshai and Curse of Ra, which were later packaged with the original as one game, The Temple of Apshai Trilogy, featuring improved graphics and sound.

In 1980 gamers saw the release of Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. It was the first in the Ultima series, which would become one of the premier series in the genre. The Wizardry series also debuted around this time. Other games appeared during the next couple of years, but these are probably the two most well known.

The rest of the ’80s was a great time for RPG players. The Ultima series continued, The Bard’s Tale series debuted, and Strategic Solutions, Inc. (SSI) released several good games, including its Phantasie series.

As an aside, one of my personal favorites among the earlier computer RPGs and the earliest I remember playing was The Bard’s Tale for the Commodore 64. You viewed the world in kind of a first-person 3D perspective, although the sprites were 2D as shown in Figure 1-1.

Like most RPG players, I spent hundreds of hours playing these early RPGs and enjoyed almost every minute of the time. Having my characters die suddenly was a bit frustrating, but it made advancing through the game feel like more of an accomplishment because I’d actually earned the rewards instead of just picking them up along the way, as is the case with many RPGs these days.

Figure 1-1

In 1988 the so-called Gold Box series of games saw its first release with Pool of Radiance. SSI had managed to snag the very coveted AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) license and this game was the first that used it to officially ship.

After Pool of Radiance came three sequels — Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, and Pools of Darkness. The same engine that drove these games was also used on a series of games based on the Dragonlance novels, several games set in the Forgotten Realms world, and a pair of games set in the universe of Buck Rogers.

1992 saw the end of the engine used to drive the Gold Box games, although game compilations were still released. And in 1993, SSI published a tool created by MicroMagic called Unlimited Adventures that players could use to create their own adventures. In the meantime, SSI went on to release a new series of games, starting with Eye of the Beholder in 1991.

Earlier we noted that fantasy-based RPGs weren’t the only game in town. Science-fiction games also appeared in many different forms. In 1985 a game called Autoduel was released. Based on a pencil and paper game called Car Wars, published by Steve Jackson Games, it had stats for cars and players had skills like driving, mechanics, and marksmanship. This was basically the beginning for games like Grand Theft Auto and was a very popular and successful game. And like all popular and successful games it spawned similar games.

Autoduel’s post-apocalyptic setting was used in many other games during this time, one of which was Wasteland. The very popular Wasteland was the progenitor of what is thought by many to be the most famous post-apocalyptic RPG (and possibly RPG in general) of all time, Fallout. Wasteland was set in a world devastated by World War III. Players controlled characters that had to overcome obstacles in an interesting game world that could be developed using a fairly intricate system. Characters learned from a set of 27 skills such as metallurgy, lock picking, and sleight-of-hand and could use them to accomplish the same task in more than one way.

The late 1980s saw the increase in popularity of games that used an interface similar to that in The Bard’s Tale. Games like Dungeon Master, released in 1987, and the aforementioned Eye of the Beholder were highly successful and spawned follow-ups. Like many advances in computer gaming, the increase in hardware power allowed developers to do things that weren’t possible previously and gamers, for the most part, snapped up the games that were released. There were a few less-than-terrific games, but RPG fans were in general experiencing games with increasingly complex stories, RPG systems, and graphics.

Probably the three most successful RPG series in the history of computer gaming were released during these years. There’s probably no RPG fan that hasn’t at least heard of Ultima, Wizardry, and Might and Magic. Between these series, several dozen games fed gamers’ RPG habit. Not all of them were great, but the name alone was usually enough to ensure the continued development of games in the series. The games brought new elements to RPGs, such as the morality-based Ultima games. Players didn’t develop their character by assigning numbers to stats. Instead, the direction the character took was based on answers to questions about moral dilemmas. Much speculation has arisen as to why Richard Garriot, the creator of the series, took this direction. No matter the reason, this new direction was a hit with both players and reviewers alike.

The Wizardry series took a different, if not as unique, approach in its fourth installment. Rather than controlling a hero, players controlled a villain, an evil wizard named Werdna (the wizard that players set out to defeat in the first game in the series). Arguably the most difficult RPG ever created, Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna wasn’t really an evolution of the series except for this difference in the character being controlled by the player.

The Might and Magic series, on the other hand, contributed several new features to the RPG genre. The first game featured a huge world in which players could wander around. There were over 4,000 locations and 55 areas in the game, and players could explore it however they wanted. Most other RPGs of the time guided the players through the game in a much more fixed manner.

Also unique at the time was the element of having the race and gender of the character affect the gameplay. Certain areas would not allow a party if the members were all male or if they were of a certain alignment (i.e., good, neutral, or evil). This made the game more of a challenge, but the overall difficulty of the game was less than that of its peers so this element appealed to many who found other games too difficult to get through.

1992 saw the release of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. Developed by Blue Sky Productions, the game had an advanced 3D engine that pushed the boundaries of hardware at that time. Although it wasn’t a huge financial success, its technological advances let gamers immerse themselves more fully into the world of Britannia, the setting for the Ultima games. It was successful enough, however, to have a sequel released in 1993, Labyrinth of Worlds. This sequel added digital sound effects and a larger viewing area but wasn’t really innovative technologically. It did, however, have a more complex storyline and was closer to the main Ultima series. It was also a huge game as the main character traveled through eight dimensions during the course of the game.

The main Ultima series also saw a new release in the same year that The Stygian Abyss came out. Ultima VII: The Black Gate is thought by some to be the best game in the series, although others believe Ultima III to be better. In any case, Ultima IV stands out as the first to use real-time gameplay and have the ability to be completely controlled using a mouse. It also provided much interactivity with the game world, going so far as to allow the player to change a baby’s diaper.

The next several Ultima games failed to maintain the high standards of The Black Gate, severely disappointing fans. These releases were bug-ridden, seemed to have been rushed to market, and, somewhat puzzling, deviated from the gameplay that had made the series a huge hit.

While Origin was enjoying the success of its Ultima series, SSI was spiraling downhill with the TSR license. Lackluster graphics and animations, bugs, and other problems couldn’t keep fans playing, despite games based on TSR’s Ravenloft campaign and one of the company’s most famous characters, the dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden.

Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar saga, a major fantasy novel series, was given the RPG treatment starting in 1993 with Betrayal at Krondor. Developed by Dynamix, the game utilized a turn-based combat system and the character developed by increasing his skills rather than using the popular level-based development of other games. The sequel, Return to Krondor, was released in 1998 and was considered by fans to be better than the original, most notably due to that game’s subpar graphics.

The first couple of years of the ’90s saw dozens of RPGs — some as good as we’ve seen, some merely okay, and some bad. Gamers certainly weren’t lacking for games to play. Once id Software released the blockbuster hit Doom in 1993 though, RPG makers struggled to make their games look as good as Doom and still play as well as the previous hit games. That would change in 1994 with the release of the first game in the Elder Scroll series, Arena.

Although far from perfect, Arena raised the bar for other games that followed. The size of the world and the open-ended gameplay made the game one in which the experience lasted as long as the player wanted, although the main quest was still fairly linear. The combat system was also unique in that the position of the mouse determined which of eight different attacks the character would utilize.

The main problems with the game were that it had a lot of bugs and it required a pretty high-end machine for the time, thus limiting the gamers who could play.

After Arena, two spinoffs were released along with several sequels, Daggerfall and Morrowind. The latter game allowed the player to switch between first- and third-person perspective, something new to the series. Another new feature in Morrowind was the splitting of the leveling system into two groups — primary stats and secondary abilities. Players could improve their character’s secondary abilities by using them and increase skills by paying for training or finding and reading books.

The one big problem, if you choose to look at it that way, was that eventually the player could develop his character to a level sufficient to make enemies no challenge for the character, even the most powerful ones. There were also ways to level the character in ways not considered normal, otherwise known as exploits. The player could make his character more powerful without danger, eventually to a point where he could only have died by not doing anything.

Two expansions for Morrowind were released in 2002 and 2003, both of which had good reviews. The next game in the series, Oblivion, was released in 2006 and was an overwhelming success. A new Might and Magic game, Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, showed up in 1998, following the gameplay style of the Elder Scrolls games, but with two major differences — the player controlled four characters instead of just one and the combat could be resolved in either real-time or turn-based modes. The leveling system also deviated in that the player could spend “skill points” in any way he wanted, distributing them between four areas — weapon, armor, magic, and miscellaneous.

Although the leveling system made character development a bit different, it still required the player to spend money in order to train his character to reach a new level. Since money wasn’t easily obtained, some thought had to go into how best to advance your character — should something be bought, such as a new weapon or magic scroll, or should the money be spent to level the character?

One other way in which Might and Magic VI differed was in the relative absence of bugs. This wasn’t to last, however. The next game in the series, For Blood and Honor, was released soon after the previous one, with only a few improvements. The next game, Day of the Destroyer, which was released in 2000, suffered from many issues including unbalanced gameplay (mostly due to the ability to add a dragon to the player’s party which, although interesting and unique, did nothing good for the gameplay).

Considering how bad Day of the Destroyer was, you would think another game in the series would have gotten more testing and had more time spent on development. This wasn’t to be the case, however. In 2002, Might and Magic IX was released with a slew of problems.

Even though several companies slid downhill with their sequels, at least one started out strong and only got better. Any RPG (or real-time strategy) fan probably drools a little when you mention the name Blizzard, in an almost Pavlovian manner, and with good reason. Although Warcraft: Orcs and Humans wasn’t the first game the company released, it’s the game that started Blizzard on its journey to becoming one of the most solid and successful game development companies in the industry. RPG fans snatched up Diablo when it was released in 1996, and it’s still seeing action today, although its sequel and the Lord of Destruction expansion are more popular.

Diablo and its sequel boiled down RPG gameplay to the core, simplifying almost every aspect of the RPG experience. Only three classes were playable in the first game and Diablo II featured five. Only four stats were used in the game — strength, magic, dexterity, and vitality. While a skill tree was used, it was fairly simple and not as deep as the more “hardcore” RPGs.

Another unique feature was the fact that the dungeons in the game were all randomly generated and populated. Some fans said this greatly increased the replay value of the game, but others said it was not as well constructed as the set-in-stone dungeons of other games.

After a long wait by fans, Blizzard announced Diablo III at the Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational in June 2008. The announcement spawned a flurry of activity on the Internet, most of which centered around the change in artistic direction. Many fans were extremely upset by the change and an online petition was even started to try to convince Blizzard to return to the style of its previous games.

The success of the Diablo series games meant the inevitable release of clones, some bad, some good, and some greatly improving on the gameplay, although the latter in at least one case, Sacred by developer Encore, goes so far beyond that it almost changes the Diablo model. The fantasy world wasn’t the only setting for this style of game. Irrational Games’ Freedom Force took a superhero turn on the style of play and was fairly well received. It even spawned a sequel in 2005, Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich.

One of the more popular of the action-RPG (as the gameplay style became known) games was Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games. Released in 2002, the game used a real-time 3D engine that allowed the entire world to be traversed without any loading of data to be necessary. The game also used a skill-based system for leveling the character, meaning the player was free to change how the character developed at any point in the game. The player could equip the character with a different weapon or have him start using spells and the character would eventually become proficient with whatever he used.

Another interesting feature of the game was the use of a mule as one of maximum of eight the party members. This allowed the player to carry more loot at the expense of a more skilled combat character (the mule was capable of defending himself, although not well).

A lukewarm reception of the expansion Legends of Aranna the following year didn’t kill off the series. Dungeon Siege II was released in 2005, featuring a Diablo II style skill tree. An expansion, Broken World, followed in 2006.

Although it seemed like real-time gameplay might be the way the genre was to go after the Diablo series and its successors and clones, Interplay showed that turn-based games still had some life in them. Released in 1997, Fallout did for post-apocalyptic RPGs what Diablo did for the fantasy genre. It was rich in style, featuring almost morbid bits of humor and references to many bits of pop culture. Even normally boring elements like interfaces for leveling a character were made interesting by the use of illustrations graphically depicting skills. Indeed, the manual resembled a survival guide created as a government publication.

The inevitable sequel appeared the following year, and was as well received as its predecessor. Although there were slight improvements to the graphics engine and gameplay, the company wisely seemed to follow the motto “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Several other releases that take place in the Fallout universe saw the light of day but weren’t nearly as well received.

As early as 2004, Fallout 3 was mentioned, but it wasn’t until 2007 that information really started to become available. Bethesda Softworks developed the game using the same engine that powered Oblivion. Fallout 3 was released in October 2008, and based on reviews, did justice to the series.

Not long after the release of Diablo, a company that has gained at least as huge a following as Blizzard released what some consider one of the best, if not the best, RPG ever released. The company was BioWare and the game was Baldur’s Gate, released in 1998. Picking up the valuable TSR AD&D license, BioWare pumped life back into the franchise, bringing to life a game that plays almost exactly like a pencil and paper game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Letting the player control only one character, but with the ability to recruit up to five other characters, means that the player gets all the fun of an adventuring party without the need for any other real persons. The characters even interact depending on their different outlooks, going so far as to be able to betray the group. For the true RPGer, this is part of what it’s all about.

The game goes from real-time to a turn-based hybrid during combat, which allows the player plenty of flexibility in how battles are fought. The player could press the Spacebar to pause the game in the middle of combat, specify actions for characters that they might not have otherwise performed, and then let combat continue. This system appeals to both novice and more experienced gamers, letting them manage the character to whatever degree they want.

The game did include a multiplayer mode that allowed friends to take the place of the AI characters in the party, but it was buggy and felt almost tacked on. It did make the game attractive to the Diablo crowd that had been using Blizzard’s servers for online gaming.

A year later an expansion pack was released. Tales of the Sword Coast added new locations, spells, and items, and some gameplay improvements. It also added new quests, the staple of RPGs. Like most expansions, it served to tide gamers over until a true sequel came along.

Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn was released in 2000 and became a huge hit. An enhanced graphics engine upped the resolution to 800 x 600 and many new features were added. Additionally, several of the characters from the first game made it into the new one. Creating a game in which players form an attachment to the characters can help entice fans into buying sequels to that game. Many people still consider Baldur’s Gate II the best RGP ever made.

The game picked up where the first one left off, which meant that if you hadn’t played the first game and enjoyed the sequel, you just might want to go back and see how the characters got to where they were. It also meant that players of the first game got to enjoy more of the story that they had already experienced.

Like the first game, Baldur’s Gate II received the expansion pack treatment a year later with Throne of Bhaal. If you played either of the first two games, this was almost a required purchase in order to get the final chapter of the story. More new spells, items, and skills were added along with a new dungeon that could even be accessed during part of the original game.

Like Blizzard, BioWare has become known for solid, fun, and interesting RPGs. So solid was the engine that drove the Baldur’s Gate series games that BioWare licensed it to Black Isle, the company that made Fallout 2. Released in 1999, Black Isle’s Planescape: Torment wasn’t the huge hit that Baldur’s Gate was, but it was a solid, fun game that gained fans. Like the Ultima games, Planescape had a lot to do with getting the player to think about morality, as the character had the opportunity to join one of several factions and doing so gained him friends as well as enemies. None of the factions could be labeled good or bad; they were more varying shades of gray, which might have been the whole point.

One point that could be looked at as a negative was the use of the abused “character suffering from amnesia” device. Fortunately, it was done well enough that it didn’t drive away players. Another often used element was to inject some comedic aspects into the game which, like the amnesia device, was handled very well and probably was one of the reasons the game did as well as it did. Getting the right mix of humor and seriousness is difficult, but Planescape managed to find it.

Black Isle struck again in 2000 with the release of Icewind Dale, again set in TSR’s Forgotten Realms. The big difference with this game was the ability of the player to create not just one but six of the characters in his group, a major difference from every game before it. Of course, this added some pressure since the game was very combat-oriented, so a very balanced party meant the difference between defeat and victory.

Unfortunately, Icewind Dale wasn’t the rousing success that other games using the BioWare Infinity Engine were. In focusing so much on combat, the rich story of previous games was neglected. In addition, the smash hits Diablo II and Baldur’s Gate II provided stiff competition in the RPG arena. Icewind Dale must have made a profit, however, as the expansion pack Heart of Winter was released the following year. The expansion was a quality product that was recommended for fans of the game.

The 2002 release of Icewind Dale II was better received due to improvements throughout the game as well as the move to the 3rd Edition AD&D ruleset. It was still a mostly combat focused hack-and-slash affair, but a worthy addition to the genre.

The Infinity Engine powered games mentioned so far were the only TSR-licensed games to be released around this time period, but they were better than several others that appeared. The bug-ridden, plodding Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, released in 2001 by Ubisoft, and the more successful 2003 release by Troika of The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure proved that a good license isn’t a guarantee of success. The latter has received some patches even though the developer is no longer with us.

Although many don’t consider it a true RPG, Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper (released in 1997) and the sequel, Dungeon Keeper 2 (1999) were good games that had one major distinction from the rest of the crowd — the player was the bad guy. You could guess from the title what the player did during the game — create his or her own dungeon — but that was just the start. The player also had to defend his dungeon against invading parties of adventurers. This unique twist on the classic gameplay of the genre was intriguing enough to make the game a relative success compared to monster hits like the Diablo games.

In 2000, Westwood released Nox, a quirky action/RPG mix that received only average review scores. It starts out unlike any other RPG I’ve seen. The player’s character lives in a backwater Florida trailer park — not your typical hero. A wormhole opens up and sucks him into the world of Nox. The player gets to choose from one of three different character classes in his quest to defeat the evil sorceress Hebubah. One nice feature of the game was an included multiplayer feature. This blend of action and role-playing would become more and more popular throughout the next half-dozen or so years.

BioWare continued its trend of quality releases in 2002 with Neverwinter Nights. Using a fully 3D engine dubbed the Aurora Engine, the game was another to use the 3rd Edition ruleset and came with an incredible toolset that allowed players to create their own complete adventures that were limited only by their imaginations. If you haven’t heard of Neverwinter Nights you should probably turn in your RPG members card now.

The game received the expansion treatment with three packs released from 2003 to 2005 — Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark, and Kingmaker. This is in addition to the tons of player-released adventures. You could probably still be playing today if you tried to make it through everything that’s been released for the game.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was released in 2006, but didn’t quite hit the bar set by its predecessor (82.1% ranking compared to 88.8%, according to GameRankings.com). Whether or not this is due to the decision to allow another developer (Obsidian Entertainment) to create it is anyone’s guess, but most fans were disappointed with the game. Even so, it was still good enough that three expansion packs, Mask of the Betrayer, Mysteries of Westgate, and Storm of Zehir, were released in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Another BioWare hit quickly followed Neverwinter Nights. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was published in 2003. It averaged 93.6% on GameRankings.com, blowing away BioWare’s previous effort and continuing its trend as one of the best, if not the best, RPG developers ever.

Taking place before the events portrayed in the movies, the player controls a Jedi character. Throughout the 30-some hours of gameplay, decisions are made that affect which side of the Force the character follows.

Again, Obsidian Entertainment was called on to create the sequel, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and again, didn’t quite blow away critics and players like the first game in the series.

In 2004 Peter Molyneux’s highly hyped Fable hit the shelves. Unfortunately, the hype was so great that it’s doubtful any game could have lived up to it. Many features that Molyneux had talked about didn’t make it into the final game. The features that did make it, however, made the game a success.

The player controls a young boy known only as “Hero.” After his village is raided and destroyed, the character joins the Heroes’ Guild to train. The main quest of the game involves the character’s journey to discover the reason behind the destruction of his village.

As with several other RPGs, the decisions made by the player influence the game’s ending. In the case of Fable, it also influences the appearance of the character, one of the best features in my opinion. Play the game as a do-gooder and the character eventually takes on an angelic appearance, glowing with light. Be a rotten, dirty scoundrel and the character will become demon-like, even growing horns. The character is even affected by eating and drinking, becoming overweight or getting sick and vomiting. The townspeople also respond to the character’s appearance, which affects what happens during the game.

Fable won more than 50 awards and spawned the inevitable expansion in 2005, Fable: The Lost Chapters, and it was only a matter of time before a sequel was announced as well. Again highly hyped, Fable II was supposed to be everything that Molyneux promised with the first game and more. After its release in October 2008, it won three “Best Game” awards and a “Best Original Score” award and had overall scores of 89% and 88.7% on review aggregate websites Metacritic and GameRankings.com, respectively.

Almost unknown outside of its native Poland, CD Projekt burst onto the RPG world in October 2007 with the release of The Witcher. For a first effort (the company mainly had done translations and localizations for Polish gamers) the game succeeded spectacularly overall, even earning an “RPG Game of the Year” award from PC Gamer. Reactions varied around the globe, but with a GameRankings.com average of 81% and user score of 9.1, it can be safely said that the game was a hit. That’s not to say that the game didn’t have problems. The biggest seemed to be the use of a controversial copy protection system that modified the game content to make it unwinnable. The problem was the system’s conflict with certain software and drivers, which caused it to run against even legitimate copies of the game. Although a fix exists, it’s not perfect and the game has to be started over in some cases.

Another problem involved the game running a check of the system’s hardware when first launched (as opposed to the normal check when the game is installed) and not running if the system didn’t meet the requirements for the game. Although a patch was released in December 2007 that allowed the check to be bypassed, gamers were left with no option until then other than upgrading their hardware.

The Witcher used a heavily modified version of BioWare’s Aurora Engine (the same engine that powered the original Neverwinter Nights and a modified version of which was used in Knights of the Old Republic). This almost guaranteed that the graphics quality of the game would be excellent. That the gameplay matched the graphics made it a game every RPG fan should take a look at.

More and more, the line between RPG and first-person shooters (and even RTS) is becoming increasingly blurred. Some of the top games of the past several years easily fit into both categories. BioShock, released in 2007 by 2K Games on both PC and Xbox 360, won dozens of awards for its incredible environment, sound, and story. It wasn’t without its flaws, however; most notably its Vita Chambers, the recovery system that brought back the character at half-health but left the health of the enemies unchanged, allowing the player to defeat enemies by attrition.

BioWare was back on the scene in 2007, releasing its science-fiction epic Mass Effect. One of the few games to earn a 10/10 by Official Xbox Magazine (BioShock was another), Mass Effect is an adventure spawning multiple worlds where the player encounters many different alien life forms (and can even romance them!). In only a couple of years it won approximately 80 awards and became one of the most critically acclaimed games of any genre.

Not only does the player have to save the world, he has to save an entire galaxy. He won’t have to do it alone though, as other characters will join the player during the journey. As usual, choices change the game and there are a lot of them to make. Hidden behind the conversation system, the choices make the game one that you can truly play over and over again.

Even with the perfect scores and awards, reviewers had some minor criticism. Item and squad management was overly complex, the player has limited save slots (although I don’t consider this a drawback as I can’t see returning to a point more than 10 saves ago), and the AI of the player’s squad could have been better. Still, if you’re a true RPG fan, this is a must-have game. More than likely, the recently announced Mass Effect 2, due out in 2010, will enjoy the same success.

Hellgate: London was released in 2007 and is kind of a cross between a single-player and MMORPG. It was another highly hyped game and with the pedigree of the developers working on it (former Blizzard employees, some of whom worked on the Diablo, Warcraft, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft games were behind Flagship Studios), there was good reason to think it would be a smash hit. However, launch problems caused concern among players and reviewers, as did the seeming incompleteness of the game. Financial problems and legal issues caused the company to shut down the game’s servers at the end of January 2009, closing off the online portion of the game.

The games we’ve looked at in this section range anywhere from kind of similar to completely different in how they look and play. All RPGs, however, have a lot of similar features when you open up the hood and take a look inside. In the next sections, we’ll look at these features and figure out how they’ll work in the game we’ll build throughout this book.

What Makes Up an RPG?

When you think of an RPG from a programming point of view, what types of objects come to mind? Unless you’re really familiar with the workings of an RPG, you might not see as many at first glance as you’d think. Here are a couple of the more obvious ones:

Some of the less obvious objects might include:

Some of these objects are represented on the screen by graphics, but all are chunks of memory that the programmer manipulates as the game progresses. They all work together to make the game an interesting, fun, and exciting experience. If you get one of them wrong, it could ruin the entire game.

Designing an RPG

In my opinion, designing and creating an RPG is one of the more involved tasks you can undertake as a game developer. There are many pieces that must be made to fit together, just like a jigsaw puzzle. Get a single piece wrong and a good-sized chunk of the rest of the puzzle will go unsolved. One of the best ways to ensure that you’ve covered every aspect of the game is to have a complete design document done before you even start writing code.

Our Design Document

The sample game that we’ll develop in this book will be fairly simple, containing only three areas and one quest. However, it will demonstrate how to develop just about every part of the systems found in most RPGs today. The player will be able to select the class type for his character, which will enable him to select different skills and, if applicable, spells.

We won’t need most of the sections of the design document template that was mentioned earlier, so we’ll just skip over those parts. What we will need is discussed in the following sections.

Game World Overview

The game world will consist of three different areas — a small town where the player receives his initial quest and can buy and sell items, a wilderness area where random encounters may occur, and a small dungeon that is the target of the quest.

Time will not be considered in our game design. It will always be daytime. This is not something that should be done in a complete game, however. Modeling time is difficult, but makes the game more realistic and immersive in my opinion.

Weather also will not be factored in. Like time, weather should be incorporated in a full game. Just having weather be seen and not affect characters, however, can be a negative. A person does not perform as well in bad weather as in good weather. For example, tracking would be an extremely difficult task in a hard rain. Footprints would be washed out and any damage to foliage by the character being tracked would be difficult to discern. It would still be a possibility, but the difficulty factor would increase greatly. The opposite could be possible of course. A light snow that doesn’t quickly fill tracks could actually increase the possibility of a successful tracking attempt. These two examples should make it fairly apparent that implementing weather requires a lot of design and testing to get correct if you want to have it affect gameplay.

Camera

The player’s view on the world will be the same as that used in the RPG Starter Kit that’s available on the Creators Club website (http://creators.xna.com). Figure 1-2 shows a screenshot of the RPG Starter Kit during gameplay.

Figure 1-2

The camera will track the character, keeping him centered on the screen when possible, but not showing a blank area where the level ends.

The rendering system used in the game will also be similar to that of the RPG Starter Kit. Square tiles will make up the level and some tiles will be inaccessible for the character to walk on. Buildings and other features will take up multiple tiles.

Full lighting will be used throughout the game. This is another area that should probably be changed for a full game. Normally dungeons use ambient lighting for a more realistic atmosphere.

Ambient lighting refers to using all existing light sources in the area to calculate the degree of illumination of all objects in the area. Outdoor areas would normally be fully lit during the daytime. Dungeon areas would vary due to the light sources available (torches, magical lighting, etc.). Only the areas around these light sources are fully lit, with the intensity decreasing with distance from the source.

Game Characters

The player will control one character throughout the sample game. The entity class will be selectable by the player. All stats for the character will be generated randomly.

There will be one nonplayer character in the town level of the game. This NPC will be the one that gives the player his quest.

There will be several types of creatures and monsters in the wilderness and dungeon levels. In the wilderness, the type of creature will be generated randomly whenever a random encounter occurs. The random encounter will occur 25% of the time for each tile the character moves to. Monsters in the dungeon level will be placed by hand.

User Interface

Several user interfaces will be used in the game, besides the menus that will be modified from the Game State Management Sample.

Inventory interface — This interface will show the items in the character’s inventory and allow the player to choose items for the character to use.

Toolbar interface — This interface will display the character’s current health and mana and allow the player to quickly select items (potions, scrolls, etc.), skills, or spells to use. The number of slots will be limited by a number to be determined.

Items

A limited number of items will be available. At a minimum there will be one melee weapon usable for each class, and one ranged weapon for those capable of using them.

Healing potions will be available either from the shopkeeper in town or dropped by monsters when appropriate. The latter will be set by hand as items to be dropped 50% of the time. Potions may also be found in chests that will be placed at various locations in the dungeon level.

A scroll will also be available just like the healing potions. The spell on the scroll will be generated randomly.

Music

Music will be limited to play only while the menu is displayed. Ideally, you could have background music playing in the three different areas — mellow for the town, increasing in tempo and intensity as the player progresses to the wilderness, and at full tempo and intensity for the dungeon.

Single-Player Game

The game session should take no more than 5 to 10 minutes to complete, depending on the number of random encounters that are generated as the player moves through the wilderness. The player will not gather enough experience to gain a level. The game ends when the player interacts with the shopkeeper in town after having completed the quest in the dungeon level.

Multiplayer Game

The game will not feature any multiplayer capability. See Chapter 12 for suggestions about multiplayer enhancements.

Next Up

So now that we know what an RPG is, what pieces we’ll need to implement to create one, and how to ensure we don’t get lost in the process of creating our masterpiece, we’re ready to take our first steps into coding. We’ll start with the most important piece from the player’s point of view — the character he controls and the people and creatures he’ll run into.