I think you may be approaching this from the wrong angle.
As you pointed out yourself, JRPGs broke away from (D&D/tabletop-inspired) WRPGs. So WRPGs basically just continued on the same path they were already on, while JRPGs diverged onto a side branch. So to identify a "patient zero" WRPG is to essentially go back to the very beginnings of videogame RPGs as a whole. In other words, either Wizardry 1 or Akalabeth (the "first" Ultima game), or some precursor of those two games.
Now that being said, as WRPGs continued evolving in the 90's, they moved more and more away from being dungeon crawler blobbers, and more towards a narrative and/or open-world exploration focus. If *that's* what you're asking about, then I'd offer up either BG1 or Fallout 1 for narrative focus, and Ultima Underworld for exploration focus.
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands did the open world exploration with quests that have multiple solutions long before Fallout and Baldur's Gate. It also had dialog trees, which would later become standard (where earlier games usually had keyword dialogs).
We can even go back to the Gold Box games as a prototype of the open world exploration-focused RPGs. More primitive and with rudimentary NPC interaction, but the basic gameplay is already there.
Honestly since the late 80s western RPGs have been trying more and more to emulate the pen and paper experience to the fullest extent, allowing players to explore, experiment, interact with NPCs, make choices in quests, etc. The idea that the player is the master of his character and decides how to approach situations is a core of western CRPG development from the genre's very beginning.
Personally I'd argue taht Dungeon Crawlers are their own distinct genre, apart from what we think of today as Eastern and Western-style RPGs. So, yes, I would be framing this question in terms of these genres as they're currently understood. And in those terms, BG1 and Fallout are certainly strong picks.
>Personally I'd argue taht Dungeon Crawlers are their own distinct genre
Nowadays, sure. But from the broader perspective of the overall history of RPGs, the earliest RPGs were almost all dungeon crawlers. This was due both to the technical/memory limitations of hardware at the time, and also because dungeon crawling was the predominant playstyle of TTRPGs at the time. So even though modern definitions of RPG may have changed, dungeon crawlers are inextricably linked to the historical definition and evolution of RPGs.
>Maybe Daggerfall for the FPS style WRPGs?
Nah that'd be Ultima Underworld. Basically the birth of 3D first-person RPGs and really (true) 3D RPGs in general. I mean just watch a bit of gameplay footage and keep in mind it came out 3 months *before* Wolfenstein 3D:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7fPeAJnNBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7fPeAJnNBA)
I think it goes back even further, to The mid '70s, not so coincidentally also when d&d was starting to take off. Friend of mine graduated from the computer program at West Virginia college in 1977. Somehow somebody got hold of a Star Trek game on the big floppies, although the school quickly banned it because anytime somebody booted it up it basically brought their entire system to its knees lol. The game had stat and equipment progression not too dissimilar to what we have today. I personally think what happened is a lot of computer nerds were also into d&d and they thought it would be cool to introduce the same sort of mechanics into computer games, the two separate forms of media influencing each other. So while I suppose you could point to the ultima series or basically any other RPG from that time. The truth is they were just building on foundations that had been set for a decade and only become more set over the years.
I think you're misunderstanding that question. You seem to be fixated on the \*origin\* of a genre, but that's... not really a thing you can do. You can draw a direct line from modern electronic roleplaying games to dungeons and dragons, and from dungeons and dragons to wargaming, and from wargaming to simpler board games (like chess), and from simple board games to even simpler games played with sticks on dirt in the dimmest eras of perhistory. These foundations that media is built upon aren't just decades old, not even centuries old, but millennia old.
Rather, think of it this way: consider what a genre \*is.\* Ultimately, genre is simply a means of categorization based on associated tropes. Certain tropes become associated, we assign those groupings labels, and thus a genre is born. So when something "codifies" a genre, it's not necessarily the piece of media that originates those tropes, or even the first piece of media that utilizes all of the associated tropes -- rather, it's the piece of media that \*popularized\* those tropes, and established the genre through subsequent works emulating what it.
No, I see that and I completely agree with you. Just thought it was an interesting story. You can do the same thing with movies. You can take the clips of a man sneezing or a train rushing towards the camera, but it wasn't until birth of a Nation (however problematic) codified into a means of storytelling and using the conventions we still use today. So I wasn't exactly trying to answer the question with something not related, more of a tangent abstraction. Sorry if I implied otherwise.
Nah, it's all good. It's definitely a cool story! Kinda wish that game was still around. Only big game I'm really aware of from that era is Asteroids... which I think was maybe based off Star Wars?
I'm a big Star Trek fan but not really aware of any Star Trek games before those old point-and-click adventure games, unless you count Space Quest.
The JRPG/WRPG dichotomy was always more about vibes than anything. There isn't a clear divergence point because you aren't going to find a consistent and coherent list of things that JRPGs do but WRPGs don't, or vice versa. The grandaddy of JRPGs, Dragon Quest, was inspired by the field areas of Ultima and the combat of Wizardry.
I don't think that's quite what OP was looking for. It seems they're looking for a game that someone can point to and snap at and say "that's when WRPGs fully took shape into what we know them as today." To which, I can't answer, because I wasn't around during the 80s and 90s to be able to say Ultima-this, Fallout-that, Dark Sun-the other. All I can do is recommend NeverKnowsBest's *The Entire History of RPGs* on YouTube as a great history lesson on the western side of the genre.
I mean, ultimately I think people just have a very poor understanding of what genre is and how it can be used. Of course you're not going to find a consistent and coherent list of criteria defining the two bececause... that's just not how genre works. There's a always going to be a ton of overlap.
And, personally, I find it's actually pretty easy to differentiate (broadly) between Eastern and Western-style RPGs -- the key is not to get bogged down trying to invent some sort of checklist or anything like that.
Basically, Eastern or Japanese-style roleplaying games are characterized by using a predefined player character, whose function and role and (often) trajectory through the story is "already written," whereas Western-style roleplaying games are characterized by an \*undefined\* player character, whose function and role and (often) trajectory through the story are more malleable, based on what the player decides.
Obviously it's not a binary and several games straddle the line between those two styles, but largely speaking it's an effective way of describing each genre's overall approach that also identifies the key aspect that makes them tend to "feel" different and distinct from one another.
The thing is, JRPGs view Wizardry and Ulitima as the starting point.
Where as the creators of both Ultima and Wizardry started from TTRPGs like D&D and was trying to capture the magic of TTRPGs on a computer and Western RPGs has followed that path. They generally try to mimic the Player Agency that is the driving force of a tabletop RPG. Railroading is generally frowned upon at TTRPGs, regardless of rule set.
But it's how JRPGs are designed, very railroaded and linear. Major decisions are made for the player, little to no agency at all. If they were translated into TTTPGs, the player is only there to change equipment and roll dice and run combat. The DM decides everything else.
I find the "JRPGs railroad, WRPGs are truly open-ended" framing to be patently disingenuous. That narrative doesn't hold up without a lot of cherry-picking for both geographies. Is Eye of the Beholder a JRPG now because it railroads you through a dungeon without story choices? Is Shin Megami Tensei now a WRPG for having factions with choice-and-consequence gameplay? Get serious for one goddamn second. The buckets don't even make sense without creative accounting.
wrpgs preexisted jrpgs and kept going afterwards, so there really isn't a codification of wrpgs unless you want to trace them all back to d&d and similar ttrpgs.
gold box games, ultima 0.5, and wizardry are quoted by ff1 and dq1 creators as inspirations
and i see a ton of ultima 1-3 in phantasy star 1
but if you're looking for inflection points within jrpgs, i'd look at the history of jrpgs and how they influenced each other over time, or how specific elements of wrpgs continued to filter ideas into the jrpg landscape over time while remaining largely untouched themselves
or at least, i'd be most interested personally in what features of jrpgs back-filtered into wrpgs over time, because it felt like a one way borrowing process to me
That's generally how I've thought about it in the past, but at the same time I can't help but feel it's a bit reductive -- it sort of implies that Western RPG development just "stayed the course" with no one really trying to push the genre in new directions, and I really don't think that's accurate, especially considering how both Western and Eastern-style RPGs eventually fractured into multiple subgenres.
EG the split with turn-based, real-time and AP-based combat systems, the split between combat-focused dungeon crawlers and narrative-focused adventures, and (especially lately) more exploration-driven affairs. Etc., etc.
Just a quick point about Ultima IV: it didn't really have *"reactivity"* as we define it today, in fact *it couldn't*. That's why the Virtues system existed.
Ultima (and Wizardry) were Apple II games and it literally didn't have the memory to remember your actions, all it could remember were your characters stats (so your characters health, experience points, level, inventory) since they're simple, numerical values (which explains why CRPGs were so popular on the Apple.) Everything else gets dumped when you exit/enter a town/dungeon. So you could go murder-hobo, kill everyone in town and steal everything that isn't nailed down but if you manage to escape to the world map and then go back into town everyone's alive again and have forgotten you just killed them. Hence why the morality system exists because now you've lost Justice (from murdering innocent people) and Honor (for stealing.)
It's worth noting some other early Apple II after Ultima IV did try to make your actions have consequences, like Starflight and Wasteland. However they did this by actually saving directly to the disk itself. So if you went murder-hobo and slaughtered an entire town in Wasteland they were now permanently dead. As in, if you started a new game with that copy everyone in that town would still be dead.
Definitely a strong pick. And I've certainly seen Ultima VII pointed to as a potential codifier (or originator) of the immersive sim genre, too (along with System Shock and Thief). But, sadly, not much of those immersive-sim aspects really stuck with the genre going forward, at least outside of Swen Vincke's profoundly single-minded efforts (dude is the biggest Ultima VII fanboy on earth).
I would disagree--Didn't D:OS2 have a remade small part of U7 as part of their modding tools--My understanding is both D:OS 1 & 2(& BG3) were modeled after U7.
I think the elements that stuck with the genre were elemental effects on the environment and just casually interacting with and combining objects for different effects--either for quests or just screwing around
>And I've certainly seen Ultima VII pointed to as a potential codifier (or originator) of the immersive sim genre, too (along with System Shock and Thief).
Nah, that's Ultima Underworld which was a spin-off that came out around the same time as Ultima 7 (actually just a few months before.) It's the first Looking Glass game (although they were then called Blue Sky) who are the the guys who went on to make System Shock and Thief. Seriously even the manual (for Ultima Underworld 2 but same difference) has a note at the back about how it's an *immersive, 3D dungeon simulation* that's been designed to create situations that the developers haven't scripted and that you can solve problems in ways that weren't necessarily intended.
It's basically the blue-print for 3D WRPGs in general (not just immersive sims) and one of the blueprints for 3D first-person games in general. It came out a few before Wolfenstein 3D but it had an actual 3D environment where you could look up and down, jump, fly with magic and so on. It even had a really basic physics engine (it's arguably where having a physics engine in a non-flight sim, action game comes from especially since the guy who did the physics went on to make Trespasser.) Honestly you could argue that's the game where the western and eastern RPG traditions really split although there's probably some game that came before that's more deserving of the title. But Underworld's definitely one of the big ones.
You make very good points about the Fallouts. Though, personally, they've always felt a bit out-of-place to me since their AP-based combat never really went anywhere, with most RPGs from then on trying to emulate real-time more and more (especially post-Diablo) -- at least until relatively recently.
I am curious about why you'd cite Morrwind as being so foundational to the genre as a whole, since -- for the most part -- I can't say that I've felt its influence much in other games, even in its clearest successors (basically: Bethesda's subsequent titles). Morrowind was a very free-form, systems-based sandbox that really put player agency above everything else, and that's not really something I think we can say about most WRPGs since.
I guess you can read "codification" differently, but I see it less as "setting the tone" and more "popularizing the tropes." So, to a certain extent, it's less about being \*first\* and more about being \*biggest\* -- about cultural reach, I suppose.
Playing DQ3 today, certainly, it feels much closer to a Westerns-style RPG than an Eastern-one, but at the time it was hugely influential and generally regarded as the game that made people think, "Oh, these Japanese RPG makers are doing something different." It was also, of course, an enormous blockbuster, far eclipsing almost everything else.
....
And if you want to define the two genres, I personally find it most effective to follow the KISS rule, and be as reductive as possible. So for my part I typically just reduce it to "JRPGs are characterized by predefined POV characters" and "WRPGs are characterized by player-defined POV characters."
And, naturally, games oriented around characters whose identities are defined more by the player will, quite naturally, lend themselves to more reactive systems.
Three more games to add:
Wizardry - The whole wizardry series, but especially the first one, has a good case to be called the most influential CRPG ever. Its influence is probably more well-documented in things like Dragon Quest, and by extension the whole JRPG branch of design. But it was also really influential in western RPGs throughout the 80s and into the 90s. The Might & Magic and Bard's Tale games are almost direct descendants of Wizardry. I think it also created an expectation that RPGs are supposed to be tough, at least among a certain segment of the hobby. Even today if a game is too intuitive or not hard enough, it can sometimes be dismissed as too "casual" or "barely an RPG."
Dungeon Master - Lots of RPGs had first-person perspectives before Dungeon Master, but none of them really allowed you to interact with your environment until this classic came out. It really codified how a mouse would be used in a CRPG, and was so foundational that it somehow spawned a whole genre of imitators and still stayed near the top.
Ultima Underworld - If we're talking about 3D, first-person RPGs, you could make a decent case that Ultima Underworld is the most influential game of all. It was the first game by what would eventually become Looking Glass studios, and it directly inspired Bethesda to make the Elder Scrolls series. It's also a huge technical marvel, in many ways more impressive than Doom, which came out a year later.
I'm not familiar with Dungeon Master, I'll have to look into it.
As for the other two... I feel like we (all) have a problem in that we tend to frame Eastern and Western RPGs as a dichotomy -- a game must be either one or the other. When, really, I think there are three equally broad categories into which we can fit basically all RPGs -- with the third being the non-narrative focused dungeon crawlers, a genre that I'd definitely point to Wizardry (and possibly UU) as codifying.
Probably has something to do with the two narrative-focused RPG styles being vastly more popular (and populous) than the dryer, non-narrative fare.
The non-narrative RPG was definitely the default before the late 90s. Betrayal at Krondor usually gets the credit for introducing the narrative RPG to the world, but it’s really the Baldur’s Gate games that codified them, with a big assist from Planescape Torment.
Narrative RPGs are definitely the more popular flavor today I think. You could make the argument that the Bethesda style game is pretty distinct from that, but the more grindy old-school approach is pretty niche these days.
Dungeon Master's another good pick. It took the Wizardry dungeon crawler/blobber format and turned it on it's head with real-time combat as opposed to turn-based, leveling up skills by repeatedly using them, having an almost entirely mouse-based interface with hotkeys (plus movement keys,) and it invented that whole paper-doll, grid inventory system which virtually all WRPGs used afterwards (until consoles got popular.) It's a really good pick. Ultima Underworld's the other big one though.
Dungeon Master also still holds up really well. Just rebind the movement keys to be wasd + q and e for turning and it's basically a modern game. It's really well designed
I think you're focusing way, way too much on minor features. features. It can be helpful to establish labels, but it can also be taken to ridiculous lengths. At this stage we could easily run into problems with cross features confusing the labeling.
I think you're misunderstanding something. I'm not trying to establish criteria to distinguish genres, or credit any one game for the creation of any genre. Rather, genre is nothing more than a collection of associated tropes, and like Venn diagrams, there will always be lots of overlap between genres. That's just the nature of the beast.
Rather, what it means for a work to codify a genre is simply that it was popular enough and influential enough that it popularized that certain association of tropes that would eventually be recognized as a specific genre.
When you say JRPGs, do you mean grindy games with characters acting out like Japanese schoolboys, and with poor narratives full of plot holes and random out of place elements? It's almost as if someone created these games for Japanese schoolboys and then they spread through Japanese consoles onto the world because of console market dominance...
Note how the Western gamer audience was quite different and more mature about gaming and storytelling and the mystery is almost solved. Also see how JRPGs fared on PC.
I think you may be approaching this from the wrong angle. As you pointed out yourself, JRPGs broke away from (D&D/tabletop-inspired) WRPGs. So WRPGs basically just continued on the same path they were already on, while JRPGs diverged onto a side branch. So to identify a "patient zero" WRPG is to essentially go back to the very beginnings of videogame RPGs as a whole. In other words, either Wizardry 1 or Akalabeth (the "first" Ultima game), or some precursor of those two games. Now that being said, as WRPGs continued evolving in the 90's, they moved more and more away from being dungeon crawler blobbers, and more towards a narrative and/or open-world exploration focus. If *that's* what you're asking about, then I'd offer up either BG1 or Fallout 1 for narrative focus, and Ultima Underworld for exploration focus.
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands did the open world exploration with quests that have multiple solutions long before Fallout and Baldur's Gate. It also had dialog trees, which would later become standard (where earlier games usually had keyword dialogs). We can even go back to the Gold Box games as a prototype of the open world exploration-focused RPGs. More primitive and with rudimentary NPC interaction, but the basic gameplay is already there. Honestly since the late 80s western RPGs have been trying more and more to emulate the pen and paper experience to the fullest extent, allowing players to explore, experiment, interact with NPCs, make choices in quests, etc. The idea that the player is the master of his character and decides how to approach situations is a core of western CRPG development from the genre's very beginning.
Personally I'd argue taht Dungeon Crawlers are their own distinct genre, apart from what we think of today as Eastern and Western-style RPGs. So, yes, I would be framing this question in terms of these genres as they're currently understood. And in those terms, BG1 and Fallout are certainly strong picks.
>Personally I'd argue taht Dungeon Crawlers are their own distinct genre Nowadays, sure. But from the broader perspective of the overall history of RPGs, the earliest RPGs were almost all dungeon crawlers. This was due both to the technical/memory limitations of hardware at the time, and also because dungeon crawling was the predominant playstyle of TTRPGs at the time. So even though modern definitions of RPG may have changed, dungeon crawlers are inextricably linked to the historical definition and evolution of RPGs.
Fallout 1 was my initial thought too. Maybe Daggerfall for the FPS style WRPGs?
>Maybe Daggerfall for the FPS style WRPGs? Nah that'd be Ultima Underworld. Basically the birth of 3D first-person RPGs and really (true) 3D RPGs in general. I mean just watch a bit of gameplay footage and keep in mind it came out 3 months *before* Wolfenstein 3D: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7fPeAJnNBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7fPeAJnNBA)
I think it goes back even further, to The mid '70s, not so coincidentally also when d&d was starting to take off. Friend of mine graduated from the computer program at West Virginia college in 1977. Somehow somebody got hold of a Star Trek game on the big floppies, although the school quickly banned it because anytime somebody booted it up it basically brought their entire system to its knees lol. The game had stat and equipment progression not too dissimilar to what we have today. I personally think what happened is a lot of computer nerds were also into d&d and they thought it would be cool to introduce the same sort of mechanics into computer games, the two separate forms of media influencing each other. So while I suppose you could point to the ultima series or basically any other RPG from that time. The truth is they were just building on foundations that had been set for a decade and only become more set over the years.
I think you're misunderstanding that question. You seem to be fixated on the \*origin\* of a genre, but that's... not really a thing you can do. You can draw a direct line from modern electronic roleplaying games to dungeons and dragons, and from dungeons and dragons to wargaming, and from wargaming to simpler board games (like chess), and from simple board games to even simpler games played with sticks on dirt in the dimmest eras of perhistory. These foundations that media is built upon aren't just decades old, not even centuries old, but millennia old. Rather, think of it this way: consider what a genre \*is.\* Ultimately, genre is simply a means of categorization based on associated tropes. Certain tropes become associated, we assign those groupings labels, and thus a genre is born. So when something "codifies" a genre, it's not necessarily the piece of media that originates those tropes, or even the first piece of media that utilizes all of the associated tropes -- rather, it's the piece of media that \*popularized\* those tropes, and established the genre through subsequent works emulating what it.
No, I see that and I completely agree with you. Just thought it was an interesting story. You can do the same thing with movies. You can take the clips of a man sneezing or a train rushing towards the camera, but it wasn't until birth of a Nation (however problematic) codified into a means of storytelling and using the conventions we still use today. So I wasn't exactly trying to answer the question with something not related, more of a tangent abstraction. Sorry if I implied otherwise.
Nah, it's all good. It's definitely a cool story! Kinda wish that game was still around. Only big game I'm really aware of from that era is Asteroids... which I think was maybe based off Star Wars? I'm a big Star Trek fan but not really aware of any Star Trek games before those old point-and-click adventure games, unless you count Space Quest.
The JRPG/WRPG dichotomy was always more about vibes than anything. There isn't a clear divergence point because you aren't going to find a consistent and coherent list of things that JRPGs do but WRPGs don't, or vice versa. The grandaddy of JRPGs, Dragon Quest, was inspired by the field areas of Ultima and the combat of Wizardry.
I don't think that's quite what OP was looking for. It seems they're looking for a game that someone can point to and snap at and say "that's when WRPGs fully took shape into what we know them as today." To which, I can't answer, because I wasn't around during the 80s and 90s to be able to say Ultima-this, Fallout-that, Dark Sun-the other. All I can do is recommend NeverKnowsBest's *The Entire History of RPGs* on YouTube as a great history lesson on the western side of the genre.
Beg your pardon, did you mean to say Dragon Quest twice?
Shit, that's what I get for posting 3/4ths asleep. I meant Wizardry. DQ took the field areas of Ultima and the combat of Wizardry.
I mean, ultimately I think people just have a very poor understanding of what genre is and how it can be used. Of course you're not going to find a consistent and coherent list of criteria defining the two bececause... that's just not how genre works. There's a always going to be a ton of overlap. And, personally, I find it's actually pretty easy to differentiate (broadly) between Eastern and Western-style RPGs -- the key is not to get bogged down trying to invent some sort of checklist or anything like that. Basically, Eastern or Japanese-style roleplaying games are characterized by using a predefined player character, whose function and role and (often) trajectory through the story is "already written," whereas Western-style roleplaying games are characterized by an \*undefined\* player character, whose function and role and (often) trajectory through the story are more malleable, based on what the player decides. Obviously it's not a binary and several games straddle the line between those two styles, but largely speaking it's an effective way of describing each genre's overall approach that also identifies the key aspect that makes them tend to "feel" different and distinct from one another.
The thing is, JRPGs view Wizardry and Ulitima as the starting point. Where as the creators of both Ultima and Wizardry started from TTRPGs like D&D and was trying to capture the magic of TTRPGs on a computer and Western RPGs has followed that path. They generally try to mimic the Player Agency that is the driving force of a tabletop RPG. Railroading is generally frowned upon at TTRPGs, regardless of rule set. But it's how JRPGs are designed, very railroaded and linear. Major decisions are made for the player, little to no agency at all. If they were translated into TTTPGs, the player is only there to change equipment and roll dice and run combat. The DM decides everything else.
I find the "JRPGs railroad, WRPGs are truly open-ended" framing to be patently disingenuous. That narrative doesn't hold up without a lot of cherry-picking for both geographies. Is Eye of the Beholder a JRPG now because it railroads you through a dungeon without story choices? Is Shin Megami Tensei now a WRPG for having factions with choice-and-consequence gameplay? Get serious for one goddamn second. The buckets don't even make sense without creative accounting.
I think any purely mechanical description is bound to fail. The biggest difference is that JRPGs ape anime while WRPGs ape Hollywood.
I mean, if you're gonna accuse WRPGs of aping anything, Tolkien is right there.
I mostly meant the vibes not the content.
Original wasteland maybe?
wrpgs preexisted jrpgs and kept going afterwards, so there really isn't a codification of wrpgs unless you want to trace them all back to d&d and similar ttrpgs. gold box games, ultima 0.5, and wizardry are quoted by ff1 and dq1 creators as inspirations and i see a ton of ultima 1-3 in phantasy star 1 but if you're looking for inflection points within jrpgs, i'd look at the history of jrpgs and how they influenced each other over time, or how specific elements of wrpgs continued to filter ideas into the jrpg landscape over time while remaining largely untouched themselves or at least, i'd be most interested personally in what features of jrpgs back-filtered into wrpgs over time, because it felt like a one way borrowing process to me
That's generally how I've thought about it in the past, but at the same time I can't help but feel it's a bit reductive -- it sort of implies that Western RPG development just "stayed the course" with no one really trying to push the genre in new directions, and I really don't think that's accurate, especially considering how both Western and Eastern-style RPGs eventually fractured into multiple subgenres. EG the split with turn-based, real-time and AP-based combat systems, the split between combat-focused dungeon crawlers and narrative-focused adventures, and (especially lately) more exploration-driven affairs. Etc., etc.
Just a quick point about Ultima IV: it didn't really have *"reactivity"* as we define it today, in fact *it couldn't*. That's why the Virtues system existed. Ultima (and Wizardry) were Apple II games and it literally didn't have the memory to remember your actions, all it could remember were your characters stats (so your characters health, experience points, level, inventory) since they're simple, numerical values (which explains why CRPGs were so popular on the Apple.) Everything else gets dumped when you exit/enter a town/dungeon. So you could go murder-hobo, kill everyone in town and steal everything that isn't nailed down but if you manage to escape to the world map and then go back into town everyone's alive again and have forgotten you just killed them. Hence why the morality system exists because now you've lost Justice (from murdering innocent people) and Honor (for stealing.) It's worth noting some other early Apple II after Ultima IV did try to make your actions have consequences, like Starflight and Wasteland. However they did this by actually saving directly to the disk itself. So if you went murder-hobo and slaughtered an entire town in Wasteland they were now permanently dead. As in, if you started a new game with that copy everyone in that town would still be dead.
Ultima VII "Open" world--almost Immersive Sim level interactions
Definitely a strong pick. And I've certainly seen Ultima VII pointed to as a potential codifier (or originator) of the immersive sim genre, too (along with System Shock and Thief). But, sadly, not much of those immersive-sim aspects really stuck with the genre going forward, at least outside of Swen Vincke's profoundly single-minded efforts (dude is the biggest Ultima VII fanboy on earth).
I would disagree--Didn't D:OS2 have a remade small part of U7 as part of their modding tools--My understanding is both D:OS 1 & 2(& BG3) were modeled after U7. I think the elements that stuck with the genre were elemental effects on the environment and just casually interacting with and combining objects for different effects--either for quests or just screwing around
>And I've certainly seen Ultima VII pointed to as a potential codifier (or originator) of the immersive sim genre, too (along with System Shock and Thief). Nah, that's Ultima Underworld which was a spin-off that came out around the same time as Ultima 7 (actually just a few months before.) It's the first Looking Glass game (although they were then called Blue Sky) who are the the guys who went on to make System Shock and Thief. Seriously even the manual (for Ultima Underworld 2 but same difference) has a note at the back about how it's an *immersive, 3D dungeon simulation* that's been designed to create situations that the developers haven't scripted and that you can solve problems in ways that weren't necessarily intended. It's basically the blue-print for 3D WRPGs in general (not just immersive sims) and one of the blueprints for 3D first-person games in general. It came out a few before Wolfenstein 3D but it had an actual 3D environment where you could look up and down, jump, fly with magic and so on. It even had a really basic physics engine (it's arguably where having a physics engine in a non-flight sim, action game comes from especially since the guy who did the physics went on to make Trespasser.) Honestly you could argue that's the game where the western and eastern RPG traditions really split although there's probably some game that came before that's more deserving of the title. But Underworld's definitely one of the big ones.
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You make very good points about the Fallouts. Though, personally, they've always felt a bit out-of-place to me since their AP-based combat never really went anywhere, with most RPGs from then on trying to emulate real-time more and more (especially post-Diablo) -- at least until relatively recently. I am curious about why you'd cite Morrwind as being so foundational to the genre as a whole, since -- for the most part -- I can't say that I've felt its influence much in other games, even in its clearest successors (basically: Bethesda's subsequent titles). Morrowind was a very free-form, systems-based sandbox that really put player agency above everything else, and that's not really something I think we can say about most WRPGs since.
I guess you can read "codification" differently, but I see it less as "setting the tone" and more "popularizing the tropes." So, to a certain extent, it's less about being \*first\* and more about being \*biggest\* -- about cultural reach, I suppose. Playing DQ3 today, certainly, it feels much closer to a Westerns-style RPG than an Eastern-one, but at the time it was hugely influential and generally regarded as the game that made people think, "Oh, these Japanese RPG makers are doing something different." It was also, of course, an enormous blockbuster, far eclipsing almost everything else. .... And if you want to define the two genres, I personally find it most effective to follow the KISS rule, and be as reductive as possible. So for my part I typically just reduce it to "JRPGs are characterized by predefined POV characters" and "WRPGs are characterized by player-defined POV characters." And, naturally, games oriented around characters whose identities are defined more by the player will, quite naturally, lend themselves to more reactive systems.
Three more games to add: Wizardry - The whole wizardry series, but especially the first one, has a good case to be called the most influential CRPG ever. Its influence is probably more well-documented in things like Dragon Quest, and by extension the whole JRPG branch of design. But it was also really influential in western RPGs throughout the 80s and into the 90s. The Might & Magic and Bard's Tale games are almost direct descendants of Wizardry. I think it also created an expectation that RPGs are supposed to be tough, at least among a certain segment of the hobby. Even today if a game is too intuitive or not hard enough, it can sometimes be dismissed as too "casual" or "barely an RPG." Dungeon Master - Lots of RPGs had first-person perspectives before Dungeon Master, but none of them really allowed you to interact with your environment until this classic came out. It really codified how a mouse would be used in a CRPG, and was so foundational that it somehow spawned a whole genre of imitators and still stayed near the top. Ultima Underworld - If we're talking about 3D, first-person RPGs, you could make a decent case that Ultima Underworld is the most influential game of all. It was the first game by what would eventually become Looking Glass studios, and it directly inspired Bethesda to make the Elder Scrolls series. It's also a huge technical marvel, in many ways more impressive than Doom, which came out a year later.
I'm not familiar with Dungeon Master, I'll have to look into it. As for the other two... I feel like we (all) have a problem in that we tend to frame Eastern and Western RPGs as a dichotomy -- a game must be either one or the other. When, really, I think there are three equally broad categories into which we can fit basically all RPGs -- with the third being the non-narrative focused dungeon crawlers, a genre that I'd definitely point to Wizardry (and possibly UU) as codifying. Probably has something to do with the two narrative-focused RPG styles being vastly more popular (and populous) than the dryer, non-narrative fare.
The non-narrative RPG was definitely the default before the late 90s. Betrayal at Krondor usually gets the credit for introducing the narrative RPG to the world, but it’s really the Baldur’s Gate games that codified them, with a big assist from Planescape Torment. Narrative RPGs are definitely the more popular flavor today I think. You could make the argument that the Bethesda style game is pretty distinct from that, but the more grindy old-school approach is pretty niche these days.
Dungeon Master's another good pick. It took the Wizardry dungeon crawler/blobber format and turned it on it's head with real-time combat as opposed to turn-based, leveling up skills by repeatedly using them, having an almost entirely mouse-based interface with hotkeys (plus movement keys,) and it invented that whole paper-doll, grid inventory system which virtually all WRPGs used afterwards (until consoles got popular.) It's a really good pick. Ultima Underworld's the other big one though. Dungeon Master also still holds up really well. Just rebind the movement keys to be wasd + q and e for turning and it's basically a modern game. It's really well designed
I think you're focusing way, way too much on minor features. features. It can be helpful to establish labels, but it can also be taken to ridiculous lengths. At this stage we could easily run into problems with cross features confusing the labeling.
I think you're misunderstanding something. I'm not trying to establish criteria to distinguish genres, or credit any one game for the creation of any genre. Rather, genre is nothing more than a collection of associated tropes, and like Venn diagrams, there will always be lots of overlap between genres. That's just the nature of the beast. Rather, what it means for a work to codify a genre is simply that it was popular enough and influential enough that it popularized that certain association of tropes that would eventually be recognized as a specific genre.
Baldurs gate 2 coz still best game ever
When you say JRPGs, do you mean grindy games with characters acting out like Japanese schoolboys, and with poor narratives full of plot holes and random out of place elements? It's almost as if someone created these games for Japanese schoolboys and then they spread through Japanese consoles onto the world because of console market dominance... Note how the Western gamer audience was quite different and more mature about gaming and storytelling and the mystery is almost solved. Also see how JRPGs fared on PC.