My biggest issue is that the game starts with one group of people it wants me to emphasize with, only to end the story with an entirely different group of people I don't give a fuck about

Some of that we can see in the results of the dungeon crawler jam, and I'm always happy when some of those entries bloom into fully realized games

Most of those games were made for kids with a lot of time and not much else to do, they certainly didn't think of people with families and work trying to squeeze in the time for their magnum opus 😅

MHO what Ultima (especially 4 and 5) captures is that specific kind of portal fantasy, a guy from our world gets whisked away to a fantasy world and the sense of wonder that goes with that. The world feels alive, exploration is cool and its just fun to go around (U1-3 have that, but are more rough).

That's why I can easily replay Wizardry to this day but many Ultima-likes leave me cold. That said, the Goldbox games are pretty good for char progression and dungeons

If you try to design a game to truly accommodate both perspectives, you likely end up with a hybrid that will satisfy neither audience (either those who prefer top-down or those who prefer 1st person)

I think the viewing angle of a game is an integral part of each game, adding a 3d view to a top-down game or a top-down view to a 1st person perspective game is mostly a gimmick that very few people will ever really use, and most just play the game it was designed to be played in

Easy explanation, when I play a 1st person dungeon crawler, I don't want to have the possibility to switch to top-down view, as that would utterly destroy my suspension of disbelief

The other two are Guns of Fury and Zexion

THEY ADDED NEW GARBAGE reblog to save a life

Day 3:
- Discovered that the citizens of Geraldtown (where you start) have all disappeared. Presumably I spent too much time faffing around and the forces of the evil wizard Mantor slaughtered them. The manual hinted that the state of the world would evolve as time progressed...