RPG Compared

When I got married in 1989 my wife introduced me to Nintendo. Our first summer together we spent in married student housing at the university where I was beginning graduate studies in education. She didn't take anything, and had only a part-time job, so she spent a lot of potentially boring time at the apartment. But she had her son's NES and an "Advantage" joystick. That summer she played Super Mario Brothers II and one of the earliest RPGs, Ultima III, Exodus.

I found that game quite frustrating. It was hard to keep a group going. Every few times you defeated an enemy and picked up a treasure chest one of the characters got poisoned. Between trips to the doctor or inn and the need to buy more food, it was almost impossible to get the money for better weapons, etc. There's a trick to that I'll reveal in the section on Ultima III. My wife called a game counselor and got a different trick -- a cheat of sorts, and that's how she did the game. But we think the other solution is better.

Her son kept bringing home games. Soon we'd tried Dragon Warrior, Faxanadu, Final Fantasy, and even Crystalis. Her son got the SNES a few years later, and we've tried a large number of RPGs for that platform. Most recently my wife got the Sony PlayStation for Christmas, and she's now tried a few games for it. I'll be sharing my impressions, a bit of analysis about the progression of the genre, but very few hints (this site now includes a FF3 walkthrough).

Presentation

RPGs have come a long way from the days of the Ultima series on the Apple II. There has been something of a progression, with a few interesting "side trips." Richard Garriot's early computer games were really "Dungeons and Dragons" games with the computer serving as the dungeon master. In fact, it seems quite certain that the entire RPG genre owes its existence and structure to this game that was popular with college kids in the late '70s.

The Ultima series used two presentations, one quite sophisticated for its day. The main presentation was a modified top-down. (Gauntlet, available for Commodore and Nintendo, used a truly top-down presentation.) The game area was presented as you would expect a map to look, and you walked around on it. The confusing part of this, particularly for young kids just learning about maps, was that they tended to show a front-on view of characters, towns, and mountains to indicate their places on the map. There were also two scales. There was the scale for outdoors, and a much more detailed scale for inside towns and castles.

The second Ultima presentation was used for dungeons. Here you saw what you might expect to see if you were standing in that part of the dungeon. This view style has fallen out of use for RPGs, but is frequently used for some action games, with much more sophisticated movement, etc. An example of this would be the early 3-D action games like DOOM. On the ground and in the dungeons you moved one "square" at a time. This made mapping the dungeons quite simple. In fact, Richard put some interesting patterns in some of his dungeons which were visible only to those who mapped. Anyway, mapping made it possible to play Ultima III. Without maps you would never have finished.

Faxanadu might actually not be considered an RPG. In a number of ways it is more similar to the Super Mario series, not the least of which is its side-on presentation. On any given screen you might stand on more than one level, but only by climbing or jumping. On a level you could walk back and forth across the screen, but only in two directions unless you were entering another area, such as a shop. In addition the scenery was divided into relatively small "areas" that were frequently one TV screen high and about three such screens wide. Simon's Quest was done in this same way, except that each area might be several TV screens high as well as wide. Legacy of the Wizard, another semi-RPG, had one-screen-high, several-screens-wide, playing areas.

There was an interesting difference between how the transition was made between screens. On some games, like Faxanadu, when you passed from one area to another the screen faded out of the one area and into the next. On Legacy of the Wizard the whole screen with the character sprite wiped across the screen opposite the direction of your travel, so that for a moment you could see parts of both areas. (This was for horizontal transitions only, not vertical moves, which were essentially "flashed" onto the screen.)

There is a more modern version of the modified top down which has been used on semi-3D games like Secret of Mana and Secret of Evermore. In these games there is no difference of scale between "outdoors" and "indoors." The character moves around on the play area in a fairly realistic manner.

The technology available to programmers has made a difference in how the play background is presented. Most NES games used "tiling" to make a background. The background was divided into rectangular tiles (usually squares), and a particular tile could be repeated many times. This greatly reduced the amount of memory (and picture drawing) necessary to complete a background. With the arrival of the SNES (and some of the later games for the NES) the tiling system was replaced with fully-rendered backgrounds. The SNES made two other background features available to programmers. The first was multiple backgrounds which could be scrolled by at differing rates and with one "on top" of another, creating a 3D effect. The other was a truly 3D world map. The "Secret..." games and the Final Fantasy games all used this capability for the "flight" sequences.

Today, of course, the capabilities of machines like the PlayStation (and others of the same generation) make fully 3D maps, scenes, and characters possible. This allows a level of realism not before attained. You play on and fly over the SAME map. There still is separate scaling in many games for "inside" and "outside" maps, and many inside maps are not rendered in 3D, but are realistic multilevel drawings which allow your characters to move around and behind objects in the scene.

Character Representation

The eight-bit NES relied, like its PC cousin, the Commodore, on "sprite" animation. You might not understand the sprite concept if you never tried to program a machine like the Commodore. The sprite was a hardware-based facility that allowed a programmer to greatly reduce the code load on the CPU by allowing the hardware to work out the difficulty of deciding which character pixels to put on the screen in place of the background. The picture data for each "sprite" was stored in memory. The Commodore had the capacity for only seven active sprites, but game programmers found ways to make this look fairly sophisticated anyway.

The NES did not have the seven sprite limitation, but it did have one limitation that occasionally slipped past programmers and made game play a bit irritating. I discovered it playing Ultima III, and was later able to explain a number of interesting-looking glitches by the knowledge. The NES only has the capacity to display four sprites across the same horizontal section of the screen. If the programmer allowed a user to put more than four sprites beside each other, the NES compensated for this fault by rapidly turning successive sprites on and off, making all the adjoining sprites "flicker." If you lined enough of them up horizontally it actually got difficult to see where your characters were. Depending on how the game permitted character movement (see the next section) this limitation only applied to the portion of a sprite in line with more than three others.

This glitch made one cheat possible on Ultima III. In the final castle the characters encounter invisible enemies; "floors" they are called. When Richard Garriot's people programmed his games for the NES they represented these enemies with invisible sprites. The NES, unaware that they had no image on the screen, made other characters start flashing if one of these "invisible" characters moved into position so that more than four characters were standing beside each other horizontally!

Most of the early games, and even many of the titles for the 16-bit SNES, relied on a single "sprite" for each character and for most monsters. Granted, SNES sprites had more room for picture detail. and by then most programmers had become more sophisticated about character movement, making for slightly more realistic animation.

Faxandu relied on a small implementation of a character representation technique developed by action game programmers who needed more realistic characters with more actions. Each character was shown on the screen with two or more "sprites." Faxanadu added another refinement which took several years to catch on -- a character's look on screen changed as the equipment that character wore changed. There could be quite a bit of sophistication in sprite development. NOA (Nintendo of America) used a super computer to develop the sprite images for the Donkey Kong game it released on the SNES.

Again the modern character is a 3D object composed of many "polygons" and "assembled" by the computer as the character moves. I can only guess at how this is programmed, and I think it would be interesting to learn more. Some games, however, go to what I think are extreme lengths to show continuing movement. My wife and I have joked about the "bobbing" of characters in the game Legend of LeGaia! And there are varying levels of character sophistication. Final Fantatsy 7, when compared to Final Fantasy 8, has quite "cartoonish" characters.

Character Movement

There are actually two types of character movement. The first is the animation which makes the "sprite" appear to move something like a real person. Some of the earliest games, including Richard Garriot's first Ultima games, used only two sprite pictures per character. These two images replaced each other at regular intervals, giving the character a "walking" appearance. In fact, Ultima III used this to determine the success or failure of the lowest level magics. If the player hit the button during one of the cycles, the magic "missed." If you hit the button during the other cycle the magic had its intended effect. The trick to using these (Undead was one of the two) magic spells was to always hit the button at the right cycle. A player soon learned what position each of the enemies held when the "time was right."

It wasn't long before game programmers started using more individual images for each character, replacing the image more frequently for smoother-looking movement. They also soon replaced the continuous alternation, which could get irritating after four or five hours playing a game, with animation that happened only when you actually moved the character around on the screen.

The other type of character movement involved its movement around the world (town, dungeon, or castle) map. The Apple versions of the Ultima series actually moved characters immediately from one square on the screen to another. (Recall that the Apple II did not offer the sprite capability of the Commodore, but still had limited memory and CPU capacity [both machines used the same 6502 microprocessor]. It would have been foolish to try to implement a truly sprite-like image placement, so Richard didn't bother.) By the Nintendo versions a character would move smoothly from one square to another, but could stand in only one square or another, not between.

This made it possible, of course, to "count" steps, and a number of games made use of this feature. An example of this is the location of a special medallion in Dragon Warrior. Once you had rescued the princess and won her "love" you could call on her telepathically to tell you how far away you were from her castle, in "sqaure" coordinates. Another clue told you exactly where to look for the medallion. By using that information and the princess's love you could find the medallion's exact location.

An interesting sidelight to this in Dragon Warrior is that once you knew where the medallion was you didn't need the princess's love to find it. It was possible to defeat the Dragon Lord (the ultimate boss of the game) without rescuing the princess. For added confusion you could rescue her on the way back to her father's castle. During the closing scenes the princess comes rushing down from the throne room and asks to go with you. The Dragon Warrior's programmers apparently never figured anyone would be dumb enough to wait until after the game was "over" to rescue the princess. You would come into the main castle carrying the princes (a special "sprite" represented this). At the given time the princess, who was still in your arms, would rush down out of the throne room!

It remained for later games, like Crystalis, to break this square-by-square map movement. Even the first Final Fantasy used it. Side-on games like Faxanadu were an exception since, while you could move anywhere from side to side, your vertical position was decided by the floor space you stood on. (An important fight strategy in Faxanadu was to jump, altering your vertical position. Several monsters could not be damaged by attacks if you stood on the floor. This included the final boss. But if you jumped and hit at the same time you could score a hit and damage your opponent.)

The semi-3D games allow your character to move freely within the "allowed" confines of the current map. This freedom of movement becomes critical in the real time battle situations. Fully 3D games allow similar kinds of free movment. In some of these an "analog" control is useful in getting smoother control of the characters' movements.

Character Selection

Richard Garriot was ahead of his time in another important way, one which was a direct result of the close link between his games and Dungeons and Dragons. You could select from a very wide range of characters and abilities. Ultima III had a list of roles and races and each character was also assigned a gender. The races depicted are very similar to those in J. R. R. Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" books. The capabilities of each race made it more suited to some roles than others. We found that our play style best suited us to two dwarf rangers (the rangers could do both white and black magic and could use long-range weapons), a fuzzy wizard, and a bobit cleric. Only the cleric would be female.

Games like Dragon Warrior, Faxanadu, and even Crystalis, forced you to play the part of one "hero" character. Final Fantasy stepped out of this limitation by allowing you to select four players from at least six types. There was the main fighter; a thief; a martial arts user; and white, black, and red mages. The Final Fantasy Strategy Guide suggested you choose a fighter, a martial arts user, and one white and one black mage. My wife played the game so many times she tried just about every combination possible, including all martial arts users (you couldn't use magic), and all red mages (the hardest, according to her).

There has always been a certain amount of story in any RPG. But by the Final Fantasy games for the SNES (II, III, and Mystic Quest) the story began to take on more importance. For these games each character had a specific identity. In Final Fantasy II you would encounter and use quite a wide range of characters as the story progressed, retaining only the one main character all the time. Final Fantasy III put an interesting twist on this by not making any of the characters the "main" character. Only at the early stages of each "world" and at certain critical story junctures were you limited in what characters you could use to accomplish a given mission. This freedom has not often been replicated. FF7 requires you to have the main character, Cloud, in the group at all times except in the early stages of disk two. FF8 clearly has a main character, Squall, but it is possible to use a team that does not include him.

Character Growth

The Dungeons and Dragons game had a system of character growth. RPGs have used many variations of that, some of which I'll discuss in the section on individual games. But there's one major foundation for it all. Your character gains experience in battle, and with a certain amount of experience the character's level increases, along with attributes like strength, intelligence, maximum hit points, etc. The range of ability statistics available and the means for increasing them have varied so greatly it's really not possible to cover them except in the section on individual games (and even there I'll only be able to comment on the games with which I am familiar).

Battle

I have never encountered a RPG in which fighting is not included. For most games, including the recent PlayStation titles, battles take place on special battle screens. The early Ultima games used strict turn-based battles. You would select the actions of each character (fight, magic, move, or item), and then your characters would execute those actions. After that the enemies did what the computer chose for them to do, and it was your turn to select your characters' actions again.

Final Fantasy altered this just a bit. You didn't always get to enter commands first. And even after you entered commands for one battle round, your characters and your enemies got to make their moves at random.

The other main battle style is usually called real time battle. Semi-action games like Faxanadu, Simon's Quest, and Legacy of the Wizard, used this form. You hit the enemies as you encountered them on the main screen. The semi-3D games mentioned above (the "Secret..." games in particular) also use real time battle. Unlike true RPGs these games require a certain (though limited) amount of manual dexterity to complete successfully.

Starting with Final Fantasy II the people at Squaresoft released a new style which was rather a hybrid of the two. They call it Active Time Battle. It's sort of turn based, but you enter your commands for each character when that character has had time to "recover" from the last action, as indicated by a "ready" bar. Spells like "Fast" and "Slow" affect the speed with which these bars fill. Monsters and your characters hit each other at relatively regular intervals -- though at higher levels the monsters seem to hit several times for each turn for one of your characters.

The more fully 3D games on the PlayStation still have separate battle screens. These are usually fully 3D even when the main screen under you is not, to allow for camera angle changes. Camera angle as a variable became possible with fully 3D landscape renderings. Most games allow you to select how much, if any, camera angle change takes place during battle. I can imagine some players becoming disoreinted by the frequent angle changes some of the programmers seem to delight in, so it's probably good they allow you to turn it down or off.

Music

Video games just aren't video games without music. RPGs have used music from Richard Garriot's days on. The technology of music has really improved. The NES used a 3-voice synthesizer similar to the "SID" (Sound Interface Device) on the Commodore. A musician will be aware that three voices can produce a full harmony for simple harmonies, but there won't be a consistent bass line, and notes will be missing from more complex harmonies.

Music composers for video games used a lot of creative strategies to produce relatively sophisticated music given these limitations. Cords could be "rolled" or the bass note could alternate with two harmony notes to add to the beat of the music. Of course the music suffered when the game needed a battle sound effect because it had to commandeer one of the three synthesizer channels for the sound effect.

The SNES represented a major advance in sound technology. As far as I can tell it offered digital synthesis with some standard instruments provided and the capability for programmers to add instruments to get the music and sound effects they desired. I can recall being "blown away" by the music for Link to the Past. That was before we rented Final Fantasy II. It's my opinion that Final Fantasy II had some of the best game music of any game I've ever encountered. In Japan video game music on CD became quite popular, but the idea never caught on in the US. (Too bad!)

It seems that the SNES made such an advance in sound techology, that little has been gained with the next generation of game machines. A programmer could probably fill you in on detailed enhancements, but the effect for the player hasn't been noticeable.

Future?

What lies in the future for RPGs? There has been some speculation -- and even some sci-fi rendering -- of RPGs in which you so immerse yourself that you seem to be actually in the situation. The "holodeck" on Star Trek, the Next Generation is an example. This, however is probably several human generations into our future. What I think is possible involves sound more than video or touch (the vibration feature of the PlayStation controller is probably the first serious attempt to include the sense of touch in the game playing experience).

First of all, computer voice-generation has come a long way. There's still some advance to be made, but I think it won't be long before characters in RPGs will have their own voices and will speak the dialog to you rather than print it out on the screen. Another sound-based advance is already in limited use in the PC world. Voice recognition software takes a fairly sophisticated computer. Dragon Naturally Speaking requires a CPU of at least 200 MHz with at least 32 Megabytes of physical memory. As the voice-recognition technology advances and as game machines mature, it may well be possible to "speak" commands to your characters. You might even be able, much farther into the future, I expect, to engage them in conversation.

In the section on individual games I briefly discuss the full-motion CG movies that are part of the PlayStation game experience. It may well be that a few years from now they'll put the computing power that makes those movies into the game machine itself. Then the scenery and characters will be rendered at this quality all the time, not just in pre-planned story telling sequences.

It is tempting to think that the dangers of full-immersion game play would make it unlikely that it would ever happen. Who takes the blame if someone gets killed? Yes, there would be safety precautions, but what is just a rough and tumble outing for one person could be fatal to another. And the addictive potential of full-immersion seems quite high. But such concerns haven't stopped us yet. We give our kids games in which the point is to kill anything that gets in your way or irritates you, and then we wonder why they take guns to school and kill teachers or other kids that do the same. Given what's happened so far, it seems unlikely that any concerns about the personal and social effects of the kinds of gameplay the industry provides won't stop anything. (Sorry to be so pessimistic, but the outlook seems quite realistic.)

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