Best blobbers and/or 2d RPGs available right now on PC (no roguelikes/lites or puzzlers please!)

I was curious about this, wondering what other kinds of shooters there might have been before the first person kind that it needed to be differentiated from, and went looking for the origin of the term. There is not a lot out there, most writers focusing on the origin of the genre itself. I did find this, which is interesting if inconclusive: Origins of the “first-person shooter” generic tag | Kinephanos

I would personally substitute “Adventures” for RPGs because I think it’s more accurate (although of course the word “adventure” in regards to computer games now has its own baggage), but otherwise, yeah, that seems good. GBFPAs. Guhbifpuhs.

The grid is definitely one of the most important aspects of the genre, if not the most. Heck I’d fit gladly Tower of Babel into an extended listing in the genre of those games.

Disagree completely, the grid is purely optional. The most important distinguishers are that it’s first person and party based.

We not talkingv about the same games then.

This is the baggage of course to which I was referring. Also “trappings” is exactly how I’d define those things you mentioned, and in most RPGs, of course, little to no “role-playing” occurs. Adventuring is what parties of, well, adventurers did in the actual role-playing games of yore which these games were originally aping, and it seems like a good fit for what your characters in these computer games do. I’m advocating going back to brass tacks with these terms, which is of course pissing in the wind, but that’s half to three quarters of what we do here, so.

Literally the whole reason for the term “blobber” is that your party is a “blob” behind the screen instead of being distinct objects.

Thanks for the tip–I’m following that group now.

Which shows how inappropriate it is, because not only can you play those games as a single character if you so choose, but some of them don’t even let you be more than one. Or worse: some very heretical ones even represent them on screen during battles!
Don’t mind me, I’ll go back to playing Metro 2033, my favourite Nis (Nausea Inducing Shooter).

I once gave a blobber to a gridder at a college party for a crisp twenty dollar bill.

He was pretty happy buying my copy of Wizardy 6 since the local Electronics Botique was sold out.

To quote you, we’re not talking about the same games then.

I’ve never seen the term “blobber” applied to a game where you can only play one character. That would make no sense.

Well The Quest was mentionned repeatedly on this thread! (but then, the original poster was mentionning Castlevania games)

Yeah, I feel like the Quest has to be included in this genre, and maybe there are one or two others that are single character? Which ones are not grid-based? That seems like a much more fundamental difference to me.

Wizardry 8 and the 3D Might & Magic games really departs from the formula of those games in my opinion (Well, from what I’ve seen, the 3D Might&Magic games are probably Magic Carpet-like shmups in disguise!).

How? Aside from movement not being grid-based they’re essentially the same. Again, they’re all first person RPG’s with a party. Isn’t that far more core to the actual gameplay experience than the presence or absence of a grid? Heck, a number of modern entries in the genre let you toggle grid movement on and off, so how essential can it be?

Hell, if you want to make a division, make it between the real time ones (which might as well be dancing sims) and the turn based ones.

The huge difference is that the non grid based games don’t feature the very essential mapping, and I have yet to find one that hasn’t tuned down puzzles by several level of magnitude.
As far as real time or not, it mostly only affects the combat, I think? And sometimes very superficially. The only games I can recall where I think real time movement was a primary necessity were Dungeon Master and Grimrock; most of the others I played were fine just mashing spells and attack buttons, an aspect which I didn’t like because I don’t enjoy click fests.

I actually don’t think so. The first person viewport doesn’t differentiate it from, say, an FPS, and the party is a rather superfluous abstraction, a holdover from D&D where it did matter because the different characters were played by different people. I think this genre really has more in common with roguelikes (absent, mostly, random generation, which is a pretty big defining feature of roguelikes!), another genre of grid-based dungeon-crawling adventure, than it does with RPGs. The real-time first person ones, particularly absent a grid, seem more like shooters to me than they do like their predecessors.

By the way I’m not disputing the term blobber, since I think nobody gets it. You can have it!
I’m just saying grid-based first person RPG should be called grid-based first person RPG, as suggested above.

Oh I didn’t think of the link with roguelikes - which is like an automapping minigame of sort. Cool stuff.

I fired up Dark Heart of Uukrul on my phone and was surprised to discover that it automaps!