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Comment by QSIITurbo | Hacker News Reader

The menial tasks you can do in these games were a mistake in my opinion. For example, the overly complex UI in Ultima Underworld and Ultima VII was more or less just to facilitate the use of these items that you maybe spent 1% of your gaming time on (fishing, putting fuel into light sources, baking bread, selling them, yay! Who gives a crap). UW could have been a real forerunner if it had had a simple mouselook with streamlined combat and without the useless complexity.

Modern games have given up on that for which I am very grateful. Diablo and Black Isle games were the real forerunners in the KISS principle that revitalised the dying 2D RPGs.

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The living world aspects of Ultimas VI and VII were what made them such a great draw for me as a child. Long before I was old enough to understand the "real" gameplay of these titles, I could appreciate the rich nature of their environments, and spent countless hours in them. They represented the gold standard that I held every CRPG to since.

When everyone was praising the depth of Morrowind, for example, I found its environment sterile and lacking in the kind of interactivity I had enjoyed in these games of my youth. Skyrim was the first modern CRPG to really surpass them.

(I do realize that the itch I'm describing is probably better satisfied with something like Minecraft, but I'm getting stubborn in my old age).

I recommend checking out Rune Factory 4 on the Nintendo 3DS. It has some pleasantly surprising dynamic world (well, a single town at least) for a console – let alone handheld – title.

It's definitely a different taste in what folks want out of their RPG. Being able to bake bread and stack crates is exciting as a "world of possibilities" sort of deal, but it's also narratively dissonant from going on a big adventure where you are the Hero. It sucks up a lot of time and once you're done, you've forgotten what the adventure was about - kind of proving the point Sid Meier took home from Covert Action.

However, at the time, again, it was definitely something new and different. Games in the 80's were more often conceived of as puzzles to solve, rather than worlds to explore: adding lots of surface detail was how Garriott perceived possibilities for immersion. A lot of games followed similar-yet-different paths of piling on stuff that made the games tedious in the early 90's. By the middle of the decade people were calling the whole genre dead, which is hyperbolic, of course, but reflective of the move towards streamlining and thinking about UX across the whole design, which left "traditional-looking" games out in the cold.

Yeah, the western RPG genre had become these "inventory management" or "taking notes" games. They made up for the lack of enhancing and balancing combat and developing AI with these gimmicks. Ultima series is one of the worst: you have to manage food, light sources, runes, mantras, finding spells, spell ingredients, spellcasting, moonstones, moongates, gems, two extra alphabets, mapping yourself, and so on and so on. When you start to think about it, it's like having a second job just to kill the bad guys.

As a kid I loved all of that though. I had enough time, skipping on homework while probably still learning more through games like Ultima :)

It's a matter of taste I guess. For me, that kind of details improve immersion, which is a big deal regardless of whether I spend more or less time in them. Better immersion is precisely one of the reasons why I prefer Ultima Underworld to Diablo (not really a RPG) or Fallout.

And yet, this is the very model which has made Eve Online such a sticky game. If subscriber count and total income is your only metric, I suppose it doesn't compare favorably to other examples such as WoW or MOBAs.

That said, its longevity and player retention I do think speak for itself. (Maybe the longevity more than the player rentention.)

> Modern games have given up on that for which I am very grateful.

Except Minecraft.

It wouldn't have killed them to throw in a few crates.

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