Ssi Game Company



Pewpdaddy,

Understand that the social tie-ins will, instead, come to your games. Most gaming companies are already recognizing the ability of Facebook/Twitter style communications, and are incorporating them into their communications.

You have to define what it means when they are talking about these new communications. Are they talking about doing away with a client altogether? Not at all. The existent client-based developers are simply talking about using these new tools to broaden the experience of their games. Fallen Earth, for example, is releasing an iPhone app. Is this a bad decision, or a smart one? And how is a forum any different than, essentially, playing Mafia Wars? Mafia Wars is essentially a MUD, but unlike posting on a forum it is much more involved.

As far as Farmville type games "taking over" or becoming the norm, it is not about that either. It is about games like that showing traditional developers that these new trends are making HUGE amounts of money. Mafia Wars is doing very, very well, and developers of all kinds would be smart to pay attention.

"Regular" MMOs are not going away, but changing and taking on new ideas. And Facebook style games are going to be getting close to "regular" MMOs everyday. The lines are blurring, that's all.

Beau

Reply

Gold Box Games. It’s hard to exaggerate the kind of nostalgic reverie that these words are able to evoke in true fans of SSI’s legendary computer role-playing games (CRPGs). Incredibly, it’s been 18 years since SSI released the ground-breaking Pool of Radiance (PoR) in 1988, but contemporary CPRG makers are still trying to live up to the standards it set. What I want to do here is take you on a brief tour of the SSI’s legendary Gold Box line, starting off with the classic and best-known Gold Box games, which are set in the Forgotten Realms AD&D universe. From there we’ll take a glance at the Dragonlance games and, lastly, the Savage Frontier series. Along the way, I’ll try to offer as much commentary as I can from my own experiences playing these games, both as a youth and as an adult. Hopefully, what will emerge is some understanding of what made these games so wonderful, and why it’s still a challenge even nearly two decades later even to match their appeal, much less exceed them.

There were plenty of CPRGs that made their mark before PoR ever arrived on the shelf. Some of the best known were the Ultima, Wizardry, and Bard’s Tale series. Arguably, the first of these is Richard Garriott’s Ultima, since his Akalabeth: World of Doom showed up on Apple II computers in 1980. This game laid the groundwork for much of what would follow. It featured two modes of perspective: a third-person “overhead” map for exploring outside and a first-person mode for dungeons. It also featured a quest-based plot, and plenty of increasingly powerful creatures to slay. Nevertheless, the game was quite crude compared to the first Ultima, titled The First Age of Darkness and released just a year later. This game added even more innovation by offering a tile-based third-person playing field that would become the standard for Japanese role-playing games. Richard Garriott’s contributions to CRPGs are truly impressive—and what’s even more amazing is that he was only a teenager! It’s no wonder so many people are willing to call him by his self-bestowed and somewhat haughty title, “Lord British.”

Meanwhile, Sir-Tech Software had released Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Wizardry continued in Akalabeth’s footsteps by revisiting and improving on the first-person dungeon crawl. One major addition was allowing players to control whole parties of their own adventurers rather than focusing all the attention on a single warrior. Also, the screen was now divided into sections, with a picture of the dungeon or a close-up of a monster in the top left corner, and various statistics and information presented in other boxes on the screen. This windowed interface would show up again and again in CPRGs of the era, such as The Bard’s Tale, released in 1985 by Interplay Productions (and published by Electronic Arts). The Bard’s Tale featured better graphics than its predecessors, a large town for a setting (Skara Brae), six character classes, spells, weapons, monsters, and dungeons. The Bard’s Tale seemed to represent a new pinnacle, and it’s very easy to find diehard fans of the game even today. CRPGs were beginning to seem less like dumbed-down conversions of AD&D and more like what we might call “turn-based strategy games” today, and the stories and environments were becoming ever more comprehensive and elaborate. Really, by 1985, almost all of the conventions of the genre had been forged, and it seemed like advancement would only occur incrementally afterwards (i.e., better graphics, bigger worlds, and so on).

However, all of these aforementioned games had one thing in common—they weren’t licensed by TSR, owners of the legendary AD&D franchise. TSR seemed hesitant to join the fray, but finally selected a company named SSI to develop an officially-licensed franchise of AD&D CRPGs. SSI, which stands for Strategic Simulations Inc., was better known for making computer war games (what we might call “strategy games” today). Though it’s interesting to consider what would have happened if some of the other bidders had won the license—such as Electronic Arts, distributors of Bard’s Tale—SSI proved to be quite capable of not only adapting the AD&D content to the computer, but also raising the bar on the whole CRPG genre.

SSI released Pool of Radiance in 1988, where it sat on shelves next to competition like Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom, Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, and Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny. Needless to say, the CRPG market wasn’t exactly faltering. Nevertheless, SSI’s key advantage of being able to marshal the considerable might and clout of AD&D’s horde of licensed content, combined with their own expertise at developing strategy war games, proved decisive. I think it’s important to bear in mind the impressive competition SSI faced in developing its Gold Box Series—if PoR had been anything short of fantastic, it would’ve been swallowed up, probably along with SSI’s license.

So, what exactly did Pool of Radiance offer other than TSR’s clout? After all, the game mostly borrowed or adapted techniques developed in older games, such as the windowed look of Wizardry and the colorful town of Bard’s Tale.

Combat in PoR: Note the highly stylized images of the characters. Your characters will miss a lot. Just hope the monsters do as well.One of the most interesting of SSI’s innovations concerned combat. When the player’s party battles foes, the perspective changes from first-person to third. All pretense of “role-playing” disappears. Players can now see their characters and must move them along, like pieces on a game board. This aspect seems strongly reminiscent of popular “war games” at the time, many of which required miniature soldiers and equipment. It also made the battles seem more dramatic by (all too often) watching their beloved characters hacked to death by vicious monsters that were physically much larger and a great deal more fierce-looking. During combat, the player became much less of a “role-player” and more of a general, rapidly devising tactics and plotting each “turn,” or “round,” with careful calculation. Magic-users became the artillery, hiding behind the fighters and launching powerful mass-effect spells like fireballs from behind the lines. Clerics were the support troops, healing injured warriors and blessing them to keep up morale. Fighters performed the obvious function of battling back the horde. And rogues? Well, they slinked in the background, seldom of much use in the fray. Probably the closest equivalent is army engineers, who help an army overcome obstacles and negotiate dangerous terrain. Most players probably multi-classed their rogues like I did, sacrificing a bit of a warrior’s prowess for some skill in picking locks.

Another aspect of PoR that sets it apart from much of the competition is its lack of dungeons. Much of the action takes place above ground or inside buildings, which range from the “slums,” a dangerous frontier roaming with monsters, to a deadly pyramid inhabited by a wizard. Also, at some parts of the game the screen switches to a “wilderness cam,” particularly when the party is traveling great distances.

The player advances in the game both by attacking monsters and fulfilling missions assigned to it by a commission. The missions, or sub-quests, are varied, and as the party fulfils them, they gain prominence in the town. I mentioned earlier that The Bard’s Tale was set in a monster-infested town called Skara Brae. Pool of Radiance follows a similar structure. The adventure begins in a town called “New Phlan,” a settlement being reclaimed after being taken over by various forces of evil. Of course, the party will eventually get to explore the ruins of “Old Phlan,” discovering all kinds of treasures and secrets of this once-powerful city. It’s really a massive adventure. I’ll never forget opening the box and discovering four, double-sided disks and two thick booklets; an extensive set of instructions and a “journal.” This was definitely not a game for someone suffering from ADD.

Curse of the Azure Bonds: Curse had a somewhat more traditional narrative structure than Pool.Pool of Radiance is, at least in my opinion, the best of the Gold Box Games. This could be simply because it was the first I played, but I’ve met several like-minded gamers of the era. Nevertheless, I enjoyed SSI’s follow-ups to PoR, such as Curse of the Azure Bonds Secret of the Silver Blades, and Pools of Darkness, each released a year after the other. Perhaps the weakest game in the series is Secret of the Silver Blades, which seems much more like a typical dungeon crawl than its predecessors; the emphasis on hack’n slash might appeal to some players, but I much prefer the more story and exploration-focused earlier games.

SSI also released three games set in the famous Dragonlance universe: Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, and The Dark Queen of Krynn. These games were released from 1990-1992. These games had an instant appeal among fantasy enthusiasts familiar with the popular Dragonlance novels by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. The Dragonlance games tried to incorporate as much of those novels as possible—though stopping short of actually having the player use the same characters (Raistlin, Tanis, Tasslehoff, and so on). Instead, the party would encounter characters from the novel in various situations. The results were, in my opinion, somewhat disappointing. Again, the Gold Box games always walked a line between letting the player create his own drama and foisting it upon him. The Dragonlance games tend to borrow a bit too heavily and awkwardly from the novels and thus aren’t quite as much fun as the Forgotten Realms series. Now that the popularity of the novels has diminished (at least, as far as I don’t see any teenagers reading them anymore!), these games seem destined to be forgotten.

Amazingly, at the same time as all these other games were being released, SSI was also developing two games based on Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday and Matrix Cubed. Unfortunately, I’m unfamiliar with these games, so I can only pass along the obvious—they are set in a science fiction universe rather than the familiar, Tolkein-inspired worlds of fantasy. I’m also uncertain how well these games fared in the market, but it seems pretty clear that they did not achieve the legendary status of Pool of Radiance.

Finally, as if SSI’s CRPG engine wasn’t being adequately tapped, three other games showed up in the same period: Gateway to the Savage Frontier, Treasures of the Savage Frontier, and Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical MMOPRG and featured on AOL. The Savage Frontier games are perhaps most noteworthy today because of their setting in the popular Neverwinter Nights world of the Forgotten Realms. Gateway and Treasures of the Savage Frontier were outsourced by SSI to a company named Stormfront Studios. The key innovation here seems to be a refinement of “wilderness play,” a perspective device that made the game world seem much larger. Readers hoping to learn more about the Neverwinter Nights game of this period would do better to read the Wikipedia entry, since I, alas, have never played it.

Unfortunately, there’s also another so-called “sequel” to Pool of Radiance. That cull is called Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, a true, ripping travesty of a game. Please—don’t get that game confused with the original Gold Box series; it has little to nothing in common with the classic.

As you can tell, there’s an extensive Gold Box universe here to explore. Rather than gloss through each of the games, though (you can easily do that yourself on Wikipedia!), I think it’d be more interesting to look at some of the key issues surrounding the series.

Playing a Party vs. a Solo Character
One of the most common topics that CPRG fans like to explore is whether it’s better for a game to limit players to a single character or allow them to create and play an entire party of adventurers. The issue has obviously been left undecided by the industry, which seems just as likely to release a solo-character game (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights) as a party-based game (Icewind Dale, Temple of Elemental Evil). There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but I think the main emphasis in this discussion ought to be about role-playing versus strategy.

A party-based game is first and foremost about strategy. Although the Gold Box games feature rich stories and playing environments, they seldom try to force a linear structure on the player. True; there is a meta-quest and scores of related and unrelated mini-quests that build up to it, but much of the drama and “role-playing” is left up to the player. For instance, the characters aren’t shown to interact with each other. They don’t have canned dialogue like so many modern games. Does this mean that they “have no character?” Of course not! What happens is that players will quickly create and assign personalities to their characters, and imagine them in a variety of dramatic situations that don’t actually occur on the screen. For instance, perhaps a fighter is in a romantic relationship with a cleric or rogue. Likewise, players can yell out battle cries for their characters and egg them on like spectators at a sporting event. Only dull, unimaginative players just sit there, focused on numbers and stats.

Also, the Gold Box games let players choose “alignments” for their characters, which range from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil. Obviously, not all combinations will work together, and in some cases players will experience different interactions with non-player characters if their party is of a different alignment. Mostly, though, the alignment issue serves as more fodder for the imagined drama and scenarios going on in the player’s imagination. It’s fun to imagine, for instance, how a “lawful neutral” character and a “chaotic good” character would respond to a given ethical dilemma, such as killing a fortuneteller.

What actually happens on the screen during a party-based game is mostly strategic. Just creating a party of six adventurers can be a daunting task for the novice. There are dozens of decisions to make, some of which have major repercussions. Dedicated players will have to learn all kinds of terms like “dexterity” and “THAC0” and how all these numbers and percentages affect their success in combat. As I mentioned earlier, veteran players act mostly as generals, marshalling their magical resources before (buffing spells), during (attack), and after (healing) a major confrontation. The magic system is fairly involved, and requires that magic-users “memorize” a spell before they can cast it, which requires rest and relaxation. Thus, players will have to be frugal, only using magic when it is necessary.

Secret of the Silver Blades: Unfortunately, the word "yawn" pretty much sums it up.Games like PoR seem almost insanely difficult when compared to so many modern games, which make every effort to baby-step novices through the game. As I mentioned earlier, PoR came with an extensive manual, which players would almost certainly have to familiarize themselves with very carefully. It all seemed frightfully realistic. Items had weight, for instance, and even finding too many coins could encumber a character (there was actually a currency system). Characters who were knocked unconscious during combat must be “bandaged” before the battle ended—or they might die. Monsters might show up while the party was encamped, spelling certain doom for adventurers still recovering from a terrible battle.

Solo-character games, in contrast, are often focused much more on the story and linear development of a character than party-based games. For instance, in Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights, the player can (and it’s probably safe to say “must”) hire a non-player character called a “henchman” to accompany her. These henchmen come equipped with their own store of dialogue and set interactions with the character; in short, it’s an effort to “do the work” so the player won’t have to imagine all of the interaction herself. Furthermore, combat shifts from a focus on strategy to a more action-based mode. Combat decisions are reduced to a minimum. The benefit here is that combat tends to go by much faster (often in “real-time” as opposed to turn-based), and gets players back into the story much sooner. Indeed, one of the chief complaints heard about The Temple of Elemental Evil, released by Atari in 2003, was that the battles took too long. It was “just too difficult” for the modern gamer. Most gamers by that time had been conditioned by Blizzard’s 1993 release, Diablo, to a very humble click-and-point combat system and easily-grasped rule system. These “instant gratification” CRPGs have only recently waned, replaced perhaps by the ubiquitous MMORPG.

Another advantage of the solo-player game is that they generally have greater replay-value. A player beating the game as a fighter might want to see what the experience would be like as a mage, and so on.

Creating New Characters or Transferring Old Ones
Another topic of debate oft heard among Gold Box gamers is that of transferring versus creating new characters in the sequels. Again, this is an issue with no easy solution. It was possible, for instance, for a player who had finished Pool of Radiance to move his vastly experienced and powerfully equipped characters into Curse of the Azure Bonds. The only problem was that they might be so formidable that the game would become virtually a walk-through, with the monsters posing as little more than annoyances rather than fearsome encounters. SSI tried to alleviate this problem in the third game, Secret of the Silver Blades, by not allowing a transferred party to keep any of its equipment from previous games. The end result was clearly an example of over-compensating; now, even experienced players were left so vulnerable that the initial stages of the game were almost impossible.

The advantage to transferring characters is clear—players may be attached to them and don’t relish the idea of having to dredge up new ones for each new game. Creating a party can be a lot of work, and it may prove discouraging to have to start each game with extremely vulnerable, inexperienced characters. Nevertheless, the problem of achieving balance seems too great for most such “transfers” to be successful. In any event, it’s probably better for Gold Box Gamers to create fresh adventurers each time.

Interestingly enough, this same problem cropped up much later in Bioware's Neverwinter Nights expansions, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark. In both cases, it's probably less of a headache just to create new characters than muck about with old ones, particularly since the expansions offer special classes. Most curiously, in Hordes of the Underdark, Bioware tried a similar approach to SSI's Secret of the Silver Blades. The player can transfer a character from another compaign, but doesn't get to keep the equipment. However, this time the player can get it back, albeit by the time that's possible it's probably not worth the effort anyway, the player having gotten superior gear in the meantime.

Concluding Thoughts
Folks, I could go on and on about this topic. It’s easy to write about the Gold Box Games because they are great games, and there’s a heck of a lot to talk about. Still, at the end of it I’d have to say that the games did less to innovate the genre than they did to refine it. They took mostly existing models and improved them. Most obviously, they revolutionized the combat system, driving it into what we’d call “turn-based strategy” today.

Diablo: Modern CPRG fans with their "lightning clicks" wouldn't last five minutes with a Gold Box Game.Also, though it might strike modern readers as something of a nonsense statement, the “limited” state of computer technology at the time actually had a positive effect on these games. There was definitely something lost in the late 90s, when games like Baldur’s Gate began incorporating more realistic graphics, sounds, dialogue, and speech clips. Although this realism might have been impressive for the eyes, it was somewhat stifling for the imagination. The “primitive” graphics of the Gold Box Games were highly stylized, and that meant that players could inject a great deal of imagination into the way they looked and acted. Modern CRPGs, by contrast, try do as much of this imaginative work as possible for the player, often reducing her to little more than someone who sits and listens, occasionally clicking a mouse. As for me, I cringe when I hear my character in Neverwinter Nights repeating the same speech clip I’ve already heard a thousand times. Also, even though the graphics have undoubtedly improved, I can’t say that they’ve really helped me immerse myself into these games. Although the more realistic backgrounds and structures are certainly welcome, the characters seem caught in that quandary between “realistic” and “fake looking.” Sure, you can see them swinging their swords, but the limitations require that we see pretty much the same few animations over and over again, until they lose their potency. Clearly, this is something that will improve with time, and it’ll be interesting to see what Neverwinter Nights 2 is able to accomplish in this regard.

In short, the Gold Box Games taught us several lessons about what a great CPRG is all about. First and foremost, they are about imagination. The CPRG should bring out the imagination in all of us, not try to reduce it by substitution. Secondly, a great deal of the fun takes place on the micro-management level. Creating a whole party of adventures and duly equipping them, to say nothing of strategically controlling them in battle, requires a huge amount of micromanagement. The difference between the micromanagement in the Gold Box Games versus the far more recent Temple of Elemental Evil isn’t one of kind, but rather of degree. Micromanagement in the Gold Box Games was fun. Temple made it tedious. TSR made the right decision when they selected a strategy-game company to make PoR. I only wish that the great strategy-game makers of our era, most notably Sid Meier, would perform that role today. As for MMORPGs, I see in them really more of a fad than a lasting genre. Surely, once the “new” wears off, and mainstream gamers have some new fad to chase, they’ll suffer the same fate as their textual MUD ancestors. No, what we need is another series of CRPGs willing to take players into those Forgotten Realms once again—SSI style.

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