It was really nice of them to include "/loc" (perhaps by accident?).
Man I miss the days when I was excited to explore a virtual world, and felt like nobody but me and the developer had seen it before, and I drew my own maps and wrote down notes of stuff I wanted to come back to later.
I feel like the internet has ruined that. Sure you could choose not to look on the net, but that's like choosing to enter a boxing ring with a blindfold on; everyone else has a massive massive advantage over you. Even in single player games it feels dumb to me; it's like people who hike up mountains when there's a tram or road up it; for me it totally ruins the hike if I get to the top and find a parking lot full of people who got there the easy way.
One of my favorites was the Amiga game "Dungeon Master" where you made spells by putting together these elemental symbols. You would find scrolls and clues in the game with combos that worked, but you could also sort of deduce them (they were semi-logical), and when you figured one out it was like an awesome eureka moment, and you wrote it down in your little scratch pad. Nowadays that kind of system can't even be in games at all because everyone would just look up all the combos right away (some dumb devs do still try to use this kind of system, but don't let you use a combo until you have unlocked it (by purchase or level up or whatever), which ruins all the joy from it and makes it quite pointless).
Dungeon Master and Bard's Tale on Amiga were the first RPGs I played. Both were utterly unforgiving. You had no choice but to explore. After creating a party in Bard's Tale. I remember just sitting around in the Adventurer's Guild, listening to the bard play The Seeker's Song, not wanting to go into the dark streets because I knew chances were I'd be utterly crushed by some random monster encounter within minutes...
ReplyDeleteSomeone recently did a spiritual remake of Dungeon Master called Legend of Grimlock that's been getting accolades. I can't yet vouch for it personally.