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

And it’s a very readable one too. It’s pretty astonishing. But I was surprised to discover that some C64 games allowed you to print either map frameworks before the game start, or even your game map as it went for some rare ones. It’s an aspect that never occured to me (we didn’t have many printers back then in Europe, and linking them to gaming? unthinkable!), and I thought it was so incredibly cool.
Still doesn’t beat Pen&Paper to memorize all this though.

Which is, like, 90% of the game.

Everything these days other than Etrian auto-maps in my experience, so grid or not has little impact. In the old days gridding was necessary to allow a player to map on graph paper, yes, but it’s (unfortunately?) pretty irrelevant at this point. Again, the mere fact that it can be toggled on and off in some of these games belies the idea that it’s some core element of the genre.

I… don’t even know how to respond to that. Suffice it to say our experiences playing these games are very different. To me the entire genre is combat and character stat development with a light sprinkling of puzzles on top. The type of combat and the depth of character options are the defining elements of a good game of this type.

I mean superfluous as in it doesn’t matter that it’s a party as opposed to one character. There’s no real positioning involved (I’m aware of the front line/back line division but consider it somewhat weak). The Quest, as Left_Empty keeps pointing out, is essentially the same game but with one character. I mean at the very beginning of Might & Magic III I was asked to choose which character would donate 50 gold to a thing, but the gold is reported to me only on a whole-party basis. “The party” is basically just one character except in Dark Heart of Ukruul where they appear individually and are individually moveable on the battle map.

Which games? I’m not familiar with this and it’s an interesting idea. How does it even work? I can see having one or the other, but switching between them seems way more of a challenge than the real-time/turn-based switch in Combat Mission, say.

Something I played recently… I want to say Might and Magic X. Frankly, I don’t see what the big deal is, with auto-mapping there’s no material difference between the two movement styles. IIRC I turned it off and left it off because I didn’t see the point.

No, you can’t switch off grid movement in M&MX. But I think you can in Bard’s Tale 4.

Well, this is because you don’t see the division as being between real-time and turn-based, but for me it is pretty fundamental.

There we go. Thank you, I knew it was something I’d played relatively recently, though I do think I’ve seen that option pop up in other cases as well.

As far as movement of enemy groups? In a lot of these games you don’t even see enemies on the map, so I’m not sure I do understand that distinction. In a game like Etrian where you’ve got FOE’s, sure, but even there you could just do “they move when you move” regardless of movement type.

Movement of the party.

Well, I can’t argue with you, I definitely don’t see a meaningful division between movement types there. I mean, I see how you can call grid based movement “turn based” but if nothing else is moving, what does it matter?

The battles take place in turns, too, though? I don’t really understand what you are getting at. I’ll be clear about the distinction I’m drawing: to me there is a very clear line of demarcation between games that take place in discrete turns and games that take place in real-time. Games like Grimrock take place on a grid, but the real-time combat dance to me seems to have more in common with, like, Graven than it does with Wizardry. Mostly those games where the party moves in turns don’t feature “on map” enemies, right? Do any of them? You get told there’s going to be a fight, then there’s more or less a separate screen where you take turns beating on each other, picking from options. I’m calling that fundamental to the genre. The real-time stuff is a different beast as far as I’m concerned.

Narrator: Kolbex was right.

I do think it’s funny that some people are like “ummmm, excuse me, games with one character aren’t blobbers” when arcade shoot-em-ups are now called roguelikes, but whatevsssss happy friday

The battles are turn based either way, though, so I don’t understand what the movement style has to do with this.

Totally agree, and I also agree with your analysis of Grimrock.

OK, I completely agree with all of that and fear we may have been talking past each other. I’m saying all of that can be true regardless of whether the movement is grid based or not.

The point of the genre is having exploration happen as if you have a single character, and combat being party-based but without any positioning, so it’s focused on combatant stat interplay, and geography is not a part of the equation. This is what distinguishes this style of games. I’d argue something like Final Fantasy X is still essentially a blobber while Grimrock isn’t. Grimrock is about fighting in a specific area, using corners and flanking, it’s a different idea of combat.

Grid movement is not really important for the genre, I think. Just like perspective switch. Wizardry would be the same game if it had a top-down view and Final Fantasy style battle presentation.

Dark Heart of Uukrul had automaps - that you could annotate - back at release (I played it on the Apple IIc). It was pretty unusual for the time, both the auto maps and the annotation. I think there was a limit of 25 notes or something. But it was very cool given that the area between two sanctuaries was not, strictly speaking, a “level” but a full area (that could have multiple “dungeon levels”). I loved that.

Blobber is a dumb name but there’s some silliness in the discussion here. Wizardry is not like Might & Magic III, or Dungeon Master, or Ultima. Sometimes there’s a need for those distinctions (and sometimes it doesn’t matter). People bring up stuff like The Quest because it looks similar and they aren’t sure if someone would care about it or not but it never hurts to discuss options. Naming things is hard. Quite a few people are using it, and life goes on.

I am going to go out on a limb and say the Wizardry: Five Ordeals folks have no license to use the Wizardry name. Dumbasses.

citation needed

You’re wrong, but it seems you have made up your mind.

Soon we’ll enter the realm of blobber-like or blobber-lite. :)

There are already a couple of deblobbers on Steam :O

I, too, am interested in the reasoning here!

-_-

I don’t know if you’ve played M&M 3, but it’s use of monsters on the map, moving along with the player a step-based fashion (when you move, they move), makes for a completely different gameplay experience. You can’t shoot arrows/spells at enemies that are “far away” in Wizardry. There’s no such thing as “enemies that are far away” in Wizardry, except in a very abstract sense, “in combat”. There’s no “in combat versus not in combat” in the Might & Magic series starting with III. There is also no two-step (a la Dungeon Master).

It’s different and its own thing, sitting between Dungeon Master and Wizardry on some sort of hypothetical RPG family tree. I know of only one set of games that ever copied the specific style (an older indie series known as Yendorian Tales).


Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is not a bad game but it’s also not that good. It has a lot of weird, even unwieldy mechanics. You make your characters (called puppets, whatever) and pick several crucial things like (1) stance (mostly a bad idea to fiddle with, it turns out, but you can’t know up front) (2) stat growth, which is at least clear (and unlock different options in game, there’s a “soul transfer” system where you can rebirth characters) (3) lucky number (no idea) and (4) name which turns out has a massive impact on starting luck but you won’t know that either, and luck is sort of important. Maybe.

But while each class gets a bundle of skills it can learn (at random? I am not clear; you start with two and pick one additional at creation, I occasionally get a new one on level up but haven’t noticed a pattern) you then have to slot characters into Covenants. Most Covenants grant actual usable abilities (and sometimes passive stat boosts). Sort of. You find covenants as dropped items/treasure/rewards and sometimes you’ll get versions of the same covenant that have different abilities (or stronger versions of the abilities the offer). Covenants have slots that dictate how many people can be in them and also whether they can be in the front or back row. Some abilities specifically only target vanguard/rearguard, to boot (healing abilities and buffs I’ve seen this on a good bit). And then there are formations which only recently popped up.

All of this, when combined with all the non traditional names (e.g. “fog” as a damage type/resistance type, classes like something Something Theater Performer Person) makes for an experience that leans more into janky than interesting. It also lacks accoutrements/has some UI issues; There’s a half-assed auto battle and you have to hold down buttons to make combat go more quickly.

There’s “field powers” where you can do things like break walls but this is also governed somewhat strangely. It costs reinforcement, which is 100-[your combined coven costs] on every dungeon trip. I’ve never run out but I have had to cut excursions short a few times (this was before I got the town portal, so this was mildly annoying). You can bank xp from encounters to build up a multiplier but this is also slightly janky (you have to press different buttons after combat to cash out/keep banking and there’s a confirmation when you cash out that’s annoying). The leveling is slightly underwhelming. According to what little information I’ve found online, some of the stats are dubious (and it’s not obvious) and you don’t get active abilities/new spells to use from leveling so far. There’s not even cursor memory that I’ve seen.

Frequently the game’s story progress requires me to run out and find random resources. Sometimes this is “go find the event things that popped up in the dungeons”, but sometimes its just “go find X # of this resource”, which is bland and kind of lame.