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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

Ultima 7 was probably my favorite game of all time. I don't think I ever beat it, just explored endlessly the amazing world, finding pirate islands, companions, magic carpets, and dragons deep in dungeons.

Modern games have better graphics but they don't have the same richness that Ultima had.

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Plus these games were pre-internet so when you got stuck or lost somewhere you got really stuck. I remember spending over a month looking for something called "the hall of the mountain king" in ultima 8, to the point that I had hand drawn a bunch of maps and carefully planned out exploration paths.

I always thought that was one reason for the death of the adventure-game genre. Ultima at least had parts to it besides the exploration and puzzles, but adventure games that might take 100s of hours without a guide can often be completed in a few hours with a guide.

Yep, I remember Might&Magic to have distinctively different feeling than, say, Skyrim. You'd get a task but no map markers about where to go, and pre-Internet me would cross the world three times to find some hideout.

I'm not sure though if I'd have the time and patience any more for this, even if it felt a lot more rewarding.

It would be interesting to take a tile-based game with adventure story elements and add a procedurally generated map and locations to recreate the sense of discovering a new world.

It's brutally hard to make a good procedurally generated adventure game. Even if your bar of design quality is some of the poorer Sierra games.

Definitely, although my idea is to keep the plot point and characters somewhat fixed, but having geography and in-game item placement be procedurally generated. You could probably inject some additional randomness my having certain plot lines be optionally incorporated. That would reduce the spoiler effect and maybe add some replayability.

IIRC mixed up mother goose randomized item locations, but nothing else.

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