crpg-book-preview-2

Dungeon MasterFTL Games, 1987DOS, Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIgs and SNES*Dungeon Masterwas a massivehit at the time,becoming the bestselling Atari STgame of all timeand winningdozens of awards,including a “SpecialAward for ArtisticAchievement”from CGW.While most otherRPGs were stillusing text parsers,Dungeon Master’sinterface wasmouse-driven,graphical and veryintuitive.34Dungeon Master is one of the games that havehad the biggest impact on me. I’ll never forgetwhen I faced my first zombie. It was behindbars, I had a dagger, and to my joy throwing the daggerat the zombie through the bars actually worked!Immediately I knew this game was something special.Dungeon Master was a revolutionary CRPGfeaturing a pseudo-3D world presented in first-personperspective. Players controlled a party of fourcharacters that acted as a single “blob” (hence theterm “blobber”), moving in real time from square tosquare. Controlling four characters in real time maysound like a daunting task, but the game is fairly slowand all actions take a certain time to execute, with thevarious types of attacks having different speeds, sothere is no frenetic clicking involved.The combat is the weakest aspect of the game,since it’s too easy to side step enemies, attack them,and side step again – the infamous Two Step Dance– but that is a general problem with all real-time firstperson party- and tile-based RPGs – aka “blobbers”.Apart from the combat, however, Dungeon Masterwas a step forward to RPGs in most respects.The audiovisuals were unrivaled for a long time.DM was one of the first games to use 3D audio, soyou could actually use sound to keep track of yourenemies. And while there’s only one type of dungeongraphics throughout the game, it looked very good.Dungeon Master was also one of the first CRPGsto discard the traditional XP system, and instead useda system where skills increased by usage, somethinglater adopted by the Elder Scrolls games. The game didhave the traditional character classes of Fighter, Priest,Wizard and Ninja, and characters could advance in allclasses. Using melee weapons increased Fighter levels,missiles weapons and generally throwing things increasedNinja levels, casting spells increased Wizardlevels, while making potions increased Priest levels.You didn’t create your own characters, but insteadhad to choose up to four heroes from The Hallof Champions. And what a colorful and diverse lotthose champions were! Who can forget characters likeHisssssa, Wuuf the Bika or Halk the Barbarian?Dungeon Master featured a wide assortment ofenemies, from skeletons and zombies, to shriekingslow moving trees, to giant rats, scorpions and purpleworms. And the most annoying creature of them all –the gigglers, who would run up to the party, steal anitem, giggle and run away.There wasn’t really much of story in the game,but the manual included a well-written back-story tointroduce players into the game. It tells that one daythe Grey Lord found a Power Gem, but unleashing itspower resulted in his essence splitting into two halves– a good wizard and the evil Lord Chaos. The playertakes the role of Theron, Lord Grey’s apprentice, whoselects and controls the four champions. The task isto enter the dungeon, find the Firestaff and then useit to stop Lord Chaos.