The Secret Origin of the Action RPG | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Origin of the Action RPG

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124 pointspolm2352 comments

Diablo was far from the first ARPG, but given how influential it has been for the genre, I was floored to learn that it was actually designed and implemented as a turn-based game, and only turned into an Action RPG by request of folks at the main Blizzard office.

The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely.

Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold.

He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

This post portem is gold. I recall seeing it before and realizing how sometimes gold really is just a few brushes of dust and dirt away, but you need to be diligent in testing out new ideas for the sake of seeing a product in different versions. Its an exciting process

The part of the video discussing real-time vs turn-based begins around 22:50

Thanks for the link!

I spent thousands of hours playing Diablo 2 through middle school-graduate school, developing bots, etc.; it's where I really got interested in computers and reverse engineering. My dad locked the disk in our family's safe at one point to prevent me from playing, and I've had hundreds of cd-keys banned from Battle.net. I'm sure many people out there are the same, but it's hard to overstate how much that one game influenced my life. Awesome to see that it was made by such a great guy.

sojs = lol

It's so nice for me to read this and be able to relate. I probably wouldn't be working as a software developer today if I hadn't spent those countless hours as a kid hacking the game, setting up (d2jsp) bots, fiddling to run multiple instances on the same computer, scripting together bot detection evasion patterns etc etc.

Recently installed it again during lockdown after not playing for a good 10 years. Still has some 20k+ people online at times. Really solid game.

It must have been the original "time only moves when you do".

Does anyone recall how Ultima 1 works?

Can you be attacked while you are standing still or do you have to make a move to clock the game?

(I think the early Ultima games I've tried are 2 and 3, and I think enemies could attack you while you were standing still but I'm not entirely sure.)

I think 1 is strictly turn based and in 2 and 3 a turn happens automatically if you do nothing for a few seconds.

I’m pretty sure NetHack works that way (Perhaps the whole genre all the way back to the original Rogue, but nethack is the one that I’ve personally played)

Yes, of course, that's how they all work. A real time game wouldn't work over a tty.

It could on a reasonably good glass tty over a low-latency connection, just not on an old one over a high-latency connection.

I swear there was a real-time game I played over a tty long ago. An ascii shooter, maybe star trek or similar?

At first I thought snake did it, but now I think that might have been move-countermove.

Muds work over tty don’t they? I played a MUD for many years that was just as fast paced as Diablo

That’s a super hot idea.

Crypt of the NecroDancer has a "you move only when time does" mechanic.

PC-88 and PC-98 software is super fascinating. Thousands of games, many with mind-blowingly beautiful pixel art which was leaps and bounds better than their American counterparts. Displays really needed to be better in Japan because of the challenge of displaying elaborate Japanese characters.

As an aside, both were infamous for huge libraries of pornographic games (eroge). Game companies like Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom made eroge for those platforms before they found mainstream success.

Anyways, there's a ton of very cool and cutting edge gaming history, and the sad thing is how inaccessible a lot of it is since most of it never saw translations. For example, Yu-No was a groundbreaking visual novel that influenced games like Steins;Gate (both had similar themes of parallel worlds), but never got brought over because it was text heavy and (unsurprisingly) laden with smut. Many japanese games and series that we now consider classic first came about on PC-88/PC-98/MSX2 or had side games on them.

One of my favorite twitter bots is PC-98 Bot, which posts screengrabs of PC-98 games: https://twitter.com/PC98_bot

Someone needs to feed that stream into a GAN and make https://thispc98gamedoesnotexist.com

The Tower of Druaga was an arcade game, release in June 1984, that has many action-RPG elements. No "stat points", but lots of items, akin to Zelda.

With this "Dragon Slayer" game from September 1984 being pushed in this article... I'd argue that Tower of Druaga has the realtime elements (being an arcade game), as well as being released a few months earlier.

I don't know if Tower of Druaga is the earliest "action RPG" game, but... it has to be one of the earlier ones. Just a few months predating Dragon Slayer.

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Tower of Druaga as the nasty arcade game that was unbeatable if you forgot to pickup items from earlier floors. Once you advance to the next level, you can never return to an earlier level. If you have an "unbeatable" scenario, then I guess try harder next time, thank you for your $0.25.

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EDIT: With that being said, this "The Caverns of Freitag" game is 1982, predating both Dragon Slayer and Tower of Druaga. So Caverns of Freitag sounds like the earliest known Action RPG.

The article doesn't go into Freitag until a bit later. I guess I read the lead and assumed it'd be about Dragon Slayer.

Caverns of Freitag was beaten by 2 years by Adventure on the Atari 2600.

It seems to me the definition of Action RPG is somewhat arbitrary and where you draw the line determines who is first. The only hard requirements being that it is not turn based and is role playing in some respect.

Leveling/character progression of some sort would probably be in most ARPG definitions and that's in CoF and not in Adventure.

So many great action role playing games,

for NES all I played was Zelda, I felt like snes really turned out alot of great titles, Lagoon, Wanders from Ys III, Secret of Mana, possibly Equinox(maybe more puzzle than rpg) but all great.

If anyone reading this has not played Secret of Mana try it out, you are in for a treat. IMO the best game on SNES with a good story, playable for three players at the same time and AMAZING music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3oxjanw72w

If you don't have time to play but love music check out the soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFN0GLAMJ3k&list=PL30CA55009... according to wikipedia it has "inspired several orchestral concerts"

The sequel Seiken Densetsu III is great too, got playable for non japanese through fan translations. You can choose your party of three from six characters. Found a nice video intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSTwjVnlNss

The Sountrack contains some gems too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hymtc5BBPQ8&list=PL4649F0DBF...

edit Originals are rereleased in Collection of Mana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnhkGt09NQI Both have been remade for the Switch, have not played them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AR5So5gdSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blpWJVwDTo tide

(Disclaimer: just a fan)

Anyone here remembers "The Maze of Galious" from the MSX era?

It was released in 1987 by Konami and it was a masterpiece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xczSIuB2J68

How about 1982 Indiana Jones Raiders of the lost ark, could that be considered an Action RPG?

Many more people likely became aware of it thanks to homages in La Mulana.

Anyone interested in an Action/rougelike from yesteryear should check out Cave Noire for the original Gameboy. Surprisingly comprehensive rougelike for the time.

This was an interesting, fun story. The I was pleased that it took place in Beep. I visited Beep last time I was in Tokyo and was just amazed. It’s tiny, but packed with Japanese PCs, many of them running games you can play, along with software, and more. Well worth a visit.

This recent video by Games Developer Toolkit also had in depth information about the genre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJiwn8iXqOI

Gateway to Apshai was also early in 1983, though I think it didn't have a level up mechanism. Same pathfinding tricks were required to survive harder monsters.

Zelda is definitely not an ARPG

Yeah, more on the Action/Adventure side than RPG. Though the modern ones do have a lot more RPG elements than the old school NES games.

A good way of thinking about this is that the Zelda games are genetically rpgs, in the sense that Miyamoto was doing his spin on the style of game that Nihon Falcom had introduced. Obviously, the absense of numerical character abilities in LoZ makes it feel somewhat different than quintessential Japanese ARPGs like YS or Seiken Denetsu (Legend of Mana).

Zelda II can be considered an action RPG, but the rest of the series is a bit light on RPG elements.

Why don't you think it qualifies? You have an inventory, you have money and buy items, you advance your character (not through experience points, but through finding secrets and beating major enemies).

What specifically do you think it's missing?

I think some people think RPGs need to have numbers on the screen?

Those numbers are important! In classic rpgs, both western and Japanese, skillful play consists in strategically manipulating those numbers to defeat challenges. It's a very different feeling than in an action game where skillful play is about manipulating the virtual physics of your avatar.

Paper Mario is clearly an RPG, but it has a similar amount of numbers backing it's system as your average Zelda. It's just that Zelda hides the numbers from you and Paper Mario does not.

You don't really make choices in most Zelda game. All the character advancement is coupled to story progression (you get an item in the 1st dungeon that lets you access the 2nd dungeon and so on). I think that reduces the "role playing" that goes on and makes Zelda more of an Action/Adventure series.

not true for botw

It's not even true for many of the "classic" Zelda games like Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time. Sure, there's a series of mandatory quests with associated items -- but there's also a bunch of side quests to pick up optional items, like extra heart containers, additional bottles, and various tools (like the Cape of Byrna in LttP or the masks in OoT).

Diablo is the ur-ARPG on pc, and it doesn't have any choices to speak of; the story is completely on rails.

I’ve beaten zelda without picking up the sword on the first screen.

There are definitely more “normal” choices to be made. Should you level up with heart containers, or get better at not dying, for example?

Zelda was pretty much the standard for "Action RPG" until the Souls games overshadowed it.

Zelda is NOT an ARPG. An ARPG could be Diablo, Baldur's Gate, Dungeon Siege... but NOT Zelda.

Zelda is as much as of an ARPG as Tomb Raider is.

Brah if u think BG is arpg u can gtfo.

Errr....try starting with Rogue and Roguelikes.

They aren't counting turn-based RPGs as 'action RPGs'.

Wut

It's a silly thing to do. Diablo copies a lot from roguelikes. In fact, it is considered the first commercial roguelike.

"Diablo by Blizzard is considered by many to be a commercial roguelike, a roguelike that was graphical and real-time. Developers Brevik and Schaefer had in mind a graphic version of the "old Unix-based games". Eight months into development, the decision was made to make the game real-time as opposed to turn-based. Diablo is by all accounts a Roguelike, but with graphics and real-time gameplay."

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=D...

Hmm i thought dark souls was the best and only ARPG.

The best, debatable (I'd say yes,) but definitely not the only one.

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