Swamp Slogger
Posts: 149
Joined: Friday, 17th December 2010, 15:39
Location: Thuringia
Oubliettelikes?
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The dungeon crawler game "Oubliette" (French word for 'dungeon') was first released on the PLATO system on November 18, 1977. It was later ported to the PC platform in 1983.
Oubliette predated Rogue (around 1980) and strongly influenced the first Wizardry game "Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord" (1981).
'Wizardry I' counts as the great-grandfather of all commercial 3D-Dungeon view CRPGs [followers: The Bard's Tale (1985), Might & Magic (1986), Dungeon Master (1987), Eye of the Beholder (1990)]. Robert Woodhead, co-author of Wizardry, explains this in the following excerpt of a post he made on the Slashdot forum on November 14th, 2001:
"Both Andy and I were active on the PLATO system, which was a tremendous influence on us. PLATO had email, chat, newsgroups, multiplayer realtime game, and much more, all starting in the early 70's. The multiplayer dungeon games were particularly good. Pretty much all of the basic concepts of multiplayer gaming were developed there.
Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II."
Most evolved Oubliettelike is 'Demise - Rise of the Ku'tan' (1999), which has to be paid for, but got a long waited-for update last year 'Demise - Ascension' (commercial open Beta 2011). There also exists an illegal for download (if you don't own Demise) renegade-mod called 'Demise - The Revelation' (free Demise add-on, 2003).
In contrast to 'Roguelikes', 'Oubliettelikes' have a complete pre-defined dungeon and no perma-death. If a player character dies, his body can be found by another generated player character and brought up to the town for resurrection. It's all about exploring/GRINDING (!!!) the dungeon for items, experience, gold and monsters to sell . (like Roguelikes you can play these games for years on and on and on...and on...). These games are designed to be played with a lowered state of consciousness, like watching TV after midnight or reading a book without 'inwardly listen to it.' The point in the design is to get this long time excessive play-style to perfection, to make the formulas such, that playing the game don''t let's you fall in total slumber. You have to 'know your dungeon' and be carefull about certain passages or monsters. If you switch off ALL attention - you will most lightely run into a random teleporter, pit trap or a difficult monster group, which spawn randomly new after some time in each room. And the game always sets you some character-leveling aim to jolly you along. But in the end you must define/choose your actual goals for yourself ('story'-expanding, exploring, looting, leveling, monster/item hunt, playing intense but risky etc.). Ultimate end is to tactical blend all these different tasks carefully in your particular character build - at the right time and duration - always trying 'to squish the most out' of your playing time. And you alone set also the level of difficulty by your own play-style. It all depends how deep you go with a particular character/party combination. There comes this point, where things get really hard, dangerous and resource consuming. But this is the point, where the real gain is - getting high loot, leveling experience and strong monsters to sell or take as companions. You can have as much player characters as you like and combine them into a 'party'. Add to this play mix different races, professions, alignments + lots of items, monsters and a dungeon designed 'diversified' enough - with different placed 'visual furnishing' - that one can remember 'routes' in the head after playing/exploring long enough:
Revelation-Creator 'Archi' [villanized, banned and declared the greatest evil that ever existed in the tiny, paranoid world of DEMISE] about the game philosophy:
"...It's an old game with little life in it. Why ruin the little fun people who have played for 10 years have left?
I am not adding any quests. This is not an adventure game. It's a dungeon crawler, extremely repetitive and that's how we like it.
It counters out mental disabilities and turns whatever brain cells we got left OFF. ..."
Oubliettelikes first seem boring, if you look on it like a normal CPRG/Roguelike. But if you have understood/accepted, what the game-play is about (...grinding, grinding, grinding...and...more grinding again...and then again grinding...), they get addictive like drugs. It's all about nerd playing-style evolved to the extreme!
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some Links, - only if you want to become a Oubliettelike-junky:
google translation of some French language blog entry about this topic: http://translate.google.de/translate?sl ... 75&act=url
Oubliette Fan Page by Snafaru: http://www.zimlab.com/oubliette/
Modern Oubliette for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oubliett ... 37764?mt=8
Demise Ascension : http://www.decklinsdemise.com/news.php
Ascension Forum: http://www.decklinsdomain.info/phpbb/index.php
Demise Revelation: http://www.dtr-dojo.com/
Revelation Forum: http://www.dtr-dojo.com/forums/
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Feel free to discuss or add your own info about Oubliettelikes.