As a writer and fan of the litrpg genre, there are games that got me to where I am now. As a list, these are the ones that were essential along my path to litrpg! Dragon Warrior (NES) This was the first rpg I played that introduced me to grinding to level my character, fight harder mobs, and get mad loot! Though there were other rpgs the next one captured my imagination and introduced rpg storytelling to me at a level that I didn't know possible. Final Fantasy VII No other game had such an impact on me as ffvii. I'm not sure any other ever will. I was a teenager and torn between two girls with materia socketed into my sword... Brah! Nexus -Kingdom of the Winds First mmo that was in the 2d style of Ultima Online. From the 90s and still going strong. Mandatory role playing and no out of character. Necessary grouping to kill mobs and grow. Unique gear that was limited in the world so you could be one of a few to walk around with a cool sword. From that point on, all other rpgs have just added fuel to the fire. What and put you? How did you get here?
Fable, Legacy of Kain, Dungeons and Dragons all on the xbox and then WoW. I beat Fable and LoK. I enjoy D&D with my son every now and then and I've played WoW to level 35 with a druid but thats the extent of my gaming really. I love the concept of leveling up, I just don't have the time to game. I get all that out in one session of larp per month, a few conversation and this forum and writing.
For PC Master of Magic, Master of Orion Console Shadowhearts and Final Fantasy vii Paper and Pencil Dungeons and Dragons, Cyberpunk 2020, Champions, Rolemaster I'm really an old skool paper and pencil gamer who discovered computer games.
Hi! What a great thread... For me, it started with adventure/puzzle games on PC - Myst and Riven. I also have such fond memories of single player RPGs like Dragon Age Origins; Fallout 3; Skyrim (of course!) and more recently, the Witcher 3. I have probably sunk 100+ hours into each title. I tend to play less MMO's, but the ones I have spent quite a bit of time in are Guild Wars 2; Path of Exile; Star Wars: The Old Republic. I think the experience of playing each of these games has influenced my litrpg writing. I see common threads in the strong emphasis on exploration, character conflict, problem solving, epic fantasy settings, ... ect. How wonderful that we can become better at our craft through gaming
Anything and everything Old World of Darkness. World of Warcraft I practically lived and breathed the two above for over a decade. WoD more so than WoW. Those are the two big ones, though I've certainly enjoyed other RPGs over the years. I think the first console game that got me hooked on RPGs was Final Fantasy II (though I did play Dragon Warrior on the NES and FF1). Neverwinter Nights (and NWN2) deserve honorable mentions, and I've been playing Summoners War for the last few years.
For me, it's all about Final Fantasy VI (originally released as Final Fantasy III in the US). I still consider this the best video game of all time. It pushed the graphics and sound capabilities of the SNES to the absolute limit, and is just so completely engaging that I still, 25 years after it came out, have to stop myself from playing it again because I know I won't be able to get anything else done until I finish it. From a game design perspective, it also sits right in my sweet spot. Each playable character has a unique battle mechanic with its own rules and quirks, which gives you a lot to learn as a player, but avoids the massive, totally open-ended skill/feat trees of later games, which always give me analysis paralysis. The combat rules are just complicated enough that you have to pay attention, but not so much that an eager ten-year-old can't grasp them immediately and have fun. I also play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. These days it's either 5e or B/X, but I grew up on 2e.
Damn I feel like a little kid with all of these classics being thrown around. My first game that got me interested in RPG's was Oblivion. That game is also what converted me from the Xbox to PC as I owned it on both platforms, but the game wasn't nearly as good on console without mod support. I started playing Pathfinders in university a few years ago, and most recently Divinity II has driven me to seek out other RPG stories. Eden's Gate and The Land was all it took to convert me to a LitRPG faithful. The lack of Great War material is what decided to make me attempt writing. As a programmer I was always taught that if you can't find something then make it yourself. I think I'll be leaning towards more of the GameLit side of the spectrum though that was being discussed in the Level Up thread. I want to look at what happens when technology in a fantasy world encroaches on the power of magic. Why spend years training mages for your army when you can just give them a rifle and send them to the front line after a week of training. Why spend half your life questing for various ancient swords and epic armor when odds are you'll be blown up by a shell fired from artillery you can't even see. At least that is the consensus being reached by the npc nations in the game world. Because of that even weaker players are more powerful relative to the common npc soldier.
I've played many RPGs in my time on this Earth, but if I had to strictly answer the OP's question then the game that truly sent me here is this one since this was the root of that 10-year-old proto-litRPG story I keep mentioning (which I might as well just switch out with "Astral Falls" since that's the purest adaptation of it thus far). It's not the first RPG I played nor is it the best nor is it the first one to which I created my own story, but the aesthetic and plot are directly why I got into litRPG in the first place. I just find the concept of a Challenge Anneka-style game enticing, though I feel that it would probably be best served by social credit/AR gamelit. If I had to go indirect and point to games that simply sent me down this path but didn't necessarily kick off my interest in the genre, where else should I even bother to start but the grandaddy of modern open world action RPGs? I can't tell you how many hours I've sunk into this 30-year-old game in my life. It's never fully obsessed me, but I've played it enough that you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Completely by accident without the internet or Nintendo Power, I figured out how to skip to the second quest, how to bring up the secret save screen, how to keep the mook count low in any particular room, and how to one-shot Gohma. All this because my dad found an old NES in our attic. Outside of RPGs, the game that I keep coming back to as an inspiration for how to create things is none other than: And its two prequels/expansions. How many times have I said "I'm a child of Grand Theft Auto" on the forums? To be blunt, I like the GTA series (especially the III-era trilogy) precisely because it's like an action RPG without the stats, and I think this drove a lot of my thinking when playing other games. During the time I did play World of Warcraft (a vanilla edition, mind you), I didn't much get invested in it because of the need to level up. That's not to say I didn't like the game or the setting— GTA just molded my preference where I'd rather be able to do whatever I can do, equip whatever I need to equip, from the start. If I had Knights of the Old Republic on PC (if publishing turns out well and I make decent money, I'll get a new computer and catch up on old games), the first thing I'd do is get a mod that allows me to start out at level 20 so I can allocate my attribute and skill points accordingly. Hell, when I discovered it existed, I played through Skyrim extensively just to get the Oghma Infinium so I could max my level out and skip all the grinding. Coincidentally, that's when I started really getting into the game. TL;DR, the one thing I don't like about RPGs is the main thing that defines them— the grind. GTA didn't have any grinding up until San Andreas (where it still wasn't really that important); the only things that were locked were different sections of the map and even that changed for GTA 5. Grinding works better in litRPG, ironically, because it is a good representation of growth. I suppose the main reason why I didn't get tired of grinding in The World Ends With You is because I was already playing the game extensively for a time so I just grinded naturally trying to unlock everything. In MMOs, I've learned, it usually works the other way around. You have to reach the endgame to see everything the game has to offer. Personally, that's more my style, and it's a good reason why I'll probably find an MMO that I really friggin' enjoy at some point. Otherwise, when you discover everything the game has to offer just to reach the endgame max-level, it kind of feels a bit like a let down unless the game has a ton of replayability or a new-game plus mode. Another game that pushed me towards litRPG was the one whose concept was what I'd been craving to see:
This is something I would read! I've done a little work on a black powder/Age of Fighting Sail RPG setting for D&D, but WWI-era tech would also make for a great setting.
I love FF7, though in retrospect I feel like it set a precedent in terms of killing off love interests, and we see Square Enix riding on the coat tails of that game to this day. Now they feel like just killing of love interests is what develops characters. Sure, it's certainly part of it. But you can do it without killing them off too. I realize I'm one to talk, decapitating princess, but for me FF7 had a whole other meaning attached.
Used to really love a few of the old MMOs, but in recent years I've mostly been a bigger fan of the Survival Genre. It's not just relegated to my long term playing of Wurm, that I've been at for about eight years or so, but other types of survival games too. Played Ark back in the day but one of my greatest loves was the orignal ARMA II DayZ, back before there was a standalone, etc. These days, I've mostly been shackled to my classwork, and haven't had as much time to play MMOs as I'd like, but I still play Wurm off and on and I tried out the orignal version of Everquest in an effort to understand the game that has had such a drastic impact on LitRPG. I found I really enjoyed the difficult start offered by the orignal experience on the Project 1999 servers that were mostly designed to give the orignal feel of the game, as it felt much more like what I enjoy in survial game in early levels than I thought possible. I've always been sort of a lone wolf, doing my own thing in survival games and it shows in my writing too. In Wurm, I'd pretty much work out on the frontier of the PvP server on my own for days, repairing greifed roads, fixing raid damage to our kingdom's ward deeds, and playing a cat an mouse game with stronger enemy kingdom players who were always on the lookout for me. In DayZ I was pretty much a lurker that would stalk other players in the wilderness, picking off larger groups. In Ark I tended to be that guy who would live hidden in the jungle until I had the resources to build out in the open. Even in Life is Feudal, I liked being a lancer for my clan because it let me roam far and wide as light calvery and do my own thing, except when the clan needed me in large battles or as a skirmisher to keep away the local nuisance players. To me crafting, base design and reshaping a world or exploring it is just as value able as trying to amass any sort of wealth, etc. From what I've gathered so far from reading works inspired by WoW players, or other more traditional MMO gamers I've met I do have a bit of an odd perspective on the genre to be sure.
The paper Dungeons and Dragons had me hooked from the start, but the original Fallout is still one of those games that blew me away at the time and seemed so much more than the other PC games available then. Kind of like an "Elder Gamer's" version of the LitRPG character slipping into that full-immersion VR game for the first time. Had that feeling again after finally figuring out a boot disk that would let my system play Wing Commander III ("Full motion video where I can make choices that affect the storyline between awesome dogfights in space?! And starring Mark Hamill?! The gaming future is here!").
Zelda. the first and second ones. It was something new and different. A game that said here you go, this is the world. Go and explore it. You will fail unless you can see the patterns and keep trying till you get it right. Also remember, there will be a test later in the form of a dungeon or boss you can't get it until you have the right item which is.... somewhere. I got told off for being late to god knows how many meals because of that game. The later zeldas however were too liner so I lost interest. Final fantasy 9 My favorite final fantasy game. Got the re-mastered edition last year when it hit steam and it's just as good as I remembered. The level of detail in it blew my mind, also it was one of those rare games that had 3d models that actually looked good! most of the ones up until the mid 2000's were too ugly to play and that included FF7... the graphics turned me off that game. Baldur's gate I & II plus all the expansions. As a teen I picked the first one from the bargain bin for $2.5. Which is funny because I spent easily 20 times as much later tracking down the second game. This one is first and probably only pure D & D game I've ever played. To teen me the characters weren't just sprites but real, they interacted with you and each other meaning I had to go out of my way to make sure the group doesn't end up murdering each other. The quests were intricate and layered with choices along the way that affected the out come. You had complete freedom regarding what quest you wanted to take up and how to go about it. No board or wise man to hand it out, you got it by interacting with the world itself. Every item, every sword, every piece of armour had it's stats AND weight. No bottomless, weightless bag of holding here, you need to consider what you want and what you don't and if you were strong enough to lodge it around (how much weight you can carry was directly related to your strength) God I was pale that summer, I still hold fond memories of the game and have the six disc game folder somewhere. The game took a generic world and made it personal. I read somewhere that it was full of 90's cheese when it came to dialogue but you know what, whoever made it cared and it showed, I'll take cheesy over soulless, cynical cash grab any day. Sorry went on a rant there.I have a soft spot for that game in particular. (GO FOR THE EYES BOO!)
OMG Grandia! now that brings back memories. I rage quitted it a few times because I forgot what happens to the little girl and I had invested a lot in her by that point XD cute game but time wasting mechanics... Anyone here played thousand arms?
It sounds vaguely familiar. I might be confusing Wild Arms with Thousand Arms. Also I'm starting to become increasingly glad I never invested in anything by Bethesda. There is Goodreads reviewers, ... then there is Bethesda. I have my own views on why Essays shouldn't be ingrained in people's heads as being a punishment, as it conveys the idea that essay writing can't be fun: I love writing critical articles. But the fact that Bethesda acting like the moral authority: that takes the cake.
@LWFlouisa All major companies are soulless money printing machines that only care about the bottom dollar, the only reason this one or that stands out is because the games aren't good enough for people to over look that fact.... at the moment. It's best not to put too much stock into that kind of thing, EA went through this a few years back and their still here. It might be nostalgia talking but I rarely play any best sellers nowadays, mostly just small indie games that are more passion projects then anything else. All the big names... blend into this nondescript beige sea (used to be brown sea up until three years ago) Again probably nostalgia speaking but older games tried harder to stand out so you got everything regardless of what your preference was with companies trying to play to their own strengths and putting out what they were good at, now it's just herd mentality. for a few years every game that came out was survival game ala fall out. Now every game coming out is a battle royal ala fortnite... it's like they don't want to stand out.
I wonder if some of that will trickle into LitRPGs? I mean guess any "in group" is going to have that somewhat. I'm going against my nature though with this new wip: it isn't just a LitRPG, but a LitRPG about LitRPGs. And also elements of critical essay about the gaming industry in general. Essay, not to be confused with Bethesda's endeavors to act like 5th grade in some degraded third world country. And yes I'm publicly stating my feelings, as I personally don't care if I ever don't find work there.
@LWFlouisa Good luck, thing with Bethesda is that they lied. Nothing pisses costumers more then being lied to. You can be angry about a game, you can rage about it, others will jump in to white knight and muddle the waters BUT a company lies and it'll unit the entire population against them. That thing with the Youtuber swag just added fuel to the forest fire. One thing I noticed about the gaming community is that they're more reserved now. Nobody pre-orders anymore even if the company adds bonuses and even with good games people are careful with their critic, they're just too jaded. What's wrong with goodread reviewers? I often use that site before getting an Audibook. I find them more honest about the meh and crappy stuff then the ones on audible and amazon.
