The Essential One Hundred
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Before it became one of gaming's most repeated quotes, Fallout's opening set the stage for something special. "War. War never changes," drawled a weary Ron Perlman as players were introduced to scenes of bleak humor intermingled with widespread devastation. This was the future as envisioned by American pop culture in the 1950s and '60s, blown to smithereens in a nuclear holocaust. With such a wide range of themes to pull from, the game was free to integrate elements of the past and future without being tied to reality. Ray guns and power armor coexisted with vacuum tubes and two-headed cows, resulting in something decidedly different from the typical fantasy RPG.
A network of underground bomb shelters had been built across america by Vault-Tec Industries, many secretly rigged to conduct social experiments that would have made the folks at Aperture Science blush. In the wake of a thermonuclear war these vaults became permanent habitats. Tasked with finding a replacement chip for a malfunctioning water filtration system, your vault dweller stepped out of Vault 13 and into the southern California wastes for the first time in their life with little more than a snazzy tracksuit and a, "Good luck". What followed was wide open on many levels.
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System Shock is much more than a first person shooter. The developers at Looking Glass worked on the seminal Ultima Underworld games, and their RPG experience is on display as you develop your character and interact with the environment. You identify items, drag and drop objects, use your inventory on the world, and throw things just for the heck of it. Panels are accessed to solve puzzles, email is read, and you even enter Cyberspace, which is precisely as trippy as you'd hope. There are hardware upgrades to improve your abilities. Destroying a camera lowers an area's security level. You can crouch, lean around corners, and climb ladders. This is all in true 3D, mind you. When System Shock came out in 1994, games entirely dedicated to shooting offered fewer movement options and still rendered many objects as sprites.
The breadth of your interactions gives weight to Citadel Station and your place within it, driving home the fact that this is not a romp through a shooting gallery. The station is stark and foreboding, and making your way along its too-empty corridors calls to mind a character in a scary movie slowly advancing through a shadowy hallway. Your situation is bleak, and the air is thick with tension.
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Wizardry didn't have a world to speak of; it had a dungeon. Within that dungeon, players led a party of warriors and wizards as they explored the labyrinth and battled against overwhelming odds. Wizardry didn't play nice; it borrowed its workings more or less directly from D&D and promptly put them to work kicking the player's ass. It drew heavy inspiration from early D&D First Edition modules like Tomb of Horrors: Game variants that revolved primarily around dungeon-diving, collecting treasure, and killing as many monsters as humanly possible. (Or elvenly possible; or gnomically possible; or whatever your racial preference for your party.)
In short, Wizardry represented one possible extreme of the role-playing genre. With emphasis entirely on exploration, combat, and survival, Sir-Tech's seminal creation established a sort of baseline for the pure mechanics-based role-playing game. While the genre has become synonymous with narrative over the years, Wizardry demonstrated that the backbone of a great RPG lies in its mechanics. Wizardry offered a startling array of options for players: Five races and four classes to mix-and-match, with the potential to graduate to prestige classes should a character survive long enough to make it that far. Weapons and equipment, while not exactly plentiful, came with advantages and tradeoffs: Was it better to go for the most powerful gear at the expense of evasion, or better to prioritize THAC0 and hope the ability to dodge the vast majority of enemy attacks would make up for greater defensive vulnerability? Better to lean on equipment-dependent physical attacks or to rely on spells with all their restrictions?
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At no point does Rogue's plot make the leap from "pretext" to "narrative," and neither should it. Rogue, perhaps more than any other role-playing game ever, exists simply to challenge players. Sure, Wizardry was hard -- preposterously hard -- but Rogue is the RPG equivalent of a game like Bit.Trip Runner or Robot Unicorn Attack. You start at the beginning, see how far you can make it, inevitably screw up, start over and try again, hoping to make it a little further each time. Every time you play, you learn a little more about the game's design, remember when to react, count on your instincts, and pray for the best possible outcome.
The roguelike (yes, that's "roguelike" as in "inspired by Rogue"; the game launched its own subgenre, you see) isn't for everyone. RPG players tend to be completist rather than competitive. By and large, the people who sink 100 hours of their time into a single game advance cautiously and play conservatively. They value "perfect" playthroughs and may break into a cold sweat at the prospect of not being able to acquire one of every item in the game. Binary choices upset them. The thought of using irreplaceable expendable items wakes them up at night in a cold sweat.
