Mysterious Ancient Domain
Thomas Biskup, 1994
Windows, MS-DOS, Amiga, Mac 和 Linux
Original author: RP, Translator: Shimakaze
I was lucky enough to have a home computer in the early 1980s. It was also through playing word adventure games and roguelike[1] games that I learned how to read and type on the computer. The difficulty and complexity of the early roguelikes made them regulars in my life for decades to come. Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM) is one of the games that means the most to me. The first version of ADOM came out in 1994. The game didn't stop updating until 2002. But a decade later, in 2012, after a successful crowdfunding, development resumed.
When I first played Mystic Ancient Lands, I felt that the game lacked a connection between roguelike games and word adventure games. Text-based adventure games (the early Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure are the most classic examples) will give you the feeling of exploring a real scene: stories with hidden puzzles and rooms full of enough puzzle clues both hint at a living world outside the house.
Rogue, the originator of the roguelike style of games, intends to solve specific problems in an interactive way. Once you figure out the answer to the puzzle, you won't be motivated to play it again (except for a sense of comfort in a favorite movie or novel).
Mysterious Ancient Realm contains 9 upgradeable stats and 40 trainable skills. It also has a corrosive system that can cause random mutations, such as cheeks or acidic blood.
Thomas Biskup launched a crowdfunding campaign for the "rebirth" of ADOM on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo in 2012. Raised $90,000 for game development.
To solve this problem, roguelike games try to focus on process generation techniques: the task of building the world is broken down into algorithms that allow players to face a new map every time they start from scratch. However, in order to create a perfect "eternal" game, most of the work of generating maps is done by the ruthless process generation algorithms.
[2] Mysterious AncientLands was very different from other roguelike games from the start: before the player could start playing, they were invited to "start a postcard adventure"—an option in the main menu listed the home address of the game's developer, Thomas Biskup, and asked the player who liked the game to send him a postcard. It's a very compelling way of communicating in game design, setting up a bridge to communicate with players in cold programs.
During the creation of your character, there are 12 races and over 20 classes to choose from. Of course, some combinations are more powerful, but the game allows you to choose any combination you want. Similar to the game Rogue, the choices you make during the character creation process will have a significant impact on how the game is conducted.
Once you've created your character, the game generates an article describing your character's upbringing, containing significant events related to your chosen race and class. It's a fantastic way to flesh out the character's backstory, and some later roguelikes games copied this game mechanics and carried it forward.
After that, it was the mysterious ancient field that made me fall in love with it. The game doesn't throw you into an unfathomable dungeon according to the design of the orthodox roguelike game: The Mysterious Ancient Realm takes you straight to the Drakalor Chain in Ancardia and explores a corner of the world full of caves, towns and dungeons.
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1 Translator's Note: Roguelikes games, i.e. rogue-like games. It is a subcategory of RPGs (Role-Playing Games). He is a general term for games developed that mimic the gameplay style of the dungeon exploration game Rogue.
2 Translator's Note: This quest can be found in the manual option in the main menu of the game.
Mysterious Ancient Lands was inspired by several roguelike games: most notably NetHack, with visuals derived from Angband, and wild areas designed from Omega. Wasteland, a commercial RPG game (which is still the best computer RPG game ever played with ALL DUE), is a major benchmark for open narratives, while the tabletop game Warhammer provides inspiration for corruption and chaos.
Thomas Bishop,
Author of "Mysterious Ancient Lands"
The design of Mysterious Ancient Lands' fixed world map was inspired by a game called Omega (1988), which sets it apart from other roguelike games.
Although dungeons are procedurally generated, the Overworld in Mysterious Ancient Realms is fixed. Terinyo, the novice village in the game, is always at the same point on the map as the dungeon. Ancadia is a place of chaotic environment, where there are many tasks to be performed and there are also many people to communicate with. There are a few types of missions: some require adventurers to kill monsters somewhere, and some are epic, world-changing journeys to stop (or join) chaos that threatens all of Ancadia's creatures. But among those that please me are a few mundane tasks, such as rescuing a cute puppy at the bottom of a dungeon.
Mysterious Ancient Realms is considered an important work in roguelikes games, but what does this mean for those who have never been exposed to this genre in decades? At the time of writing, Biskup delivered on his promise to develop a game with a color graphics version and release it on steam. He added the necessary tutorial mode and a range of difficulty options to make ADOM one of the easiest traditional roguelike games on the market to play.
Although the procedurally generated parts are already very complex for many traditional roguelike games, there will still be some handmade parts. But such artificially created content usually focuses only on small puzzles and is disconnected from the big map.