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[FuzzySlippers]

That description is quite a mouthful but there's no short hand for describing this style of rpg. Back when Grimrock 1 came out Jeff Vogel posted an article saying the Eye of the Beholder / Dungeon Master style of rpg died because the design just didn't have much room to grow even though it was extremely popular back in the day. So rather than Grimrock being the start of a DM/EOB renaissance it was just a bit of retro fun that would play out and leave the style fallow for another dozen years.

I've seen Grimrock players complain about the grid movement, real time combat, and the square dancing or whatever you want to call the combat dodging. I think the key problem though is that the step movement and emphasis on dodging is exactly what makes DM / EoB / Grimrock an action rpg and distinctive from Wizardry or other traditional crawlers. 

So the question is: what's the way to do real time first person party combat that doesn't resemble Grimrock? Obviously if its a single character you can go the route of TES, Ultima Underworld, etc but if you want to keep the player controlling a party and you don't want the game to be turn based I think the design would demand a very creative solution.

My own rpg doesn't even try by just making a turn based system play out in real time ala old Final Fantasy or Baldur's Gate but it's a design problem I've been pondering.

[starsrift]

What exactly do you mean, "that doesn't resemble Grimrock"? Freeing from the grid? Like Wizardry? With a grid, but a different UI layout?
Albion by Blue Byte uses turn-based 2d combat but 3d exploration, as does Betrayal at Krondor.

[FuzzySlippers]

All the ones you mentioned are more traditional turn based crpgs. I'm referring to real time first person action rpgs like Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Black Crypt, and most recently Grimrock. In Betrayal at Krondor the players skill in dodging cannot impact their character's performance as the dice rolls determine a hit. While in Grimrock / DM / etc the player can dance around dodging using the movement keys in addition to whatever the stats determine.

What makes the Grimrock & etc games somewhat unique compared to most other first person action rpgs like UU, System Shock, Arx Fatalis, King's Field, etc is that you are controlling a party rather than a single character. So I was curious if people had other ideas on how to do a party based action rpg in a manner different than how Grimrock & etc are designed.

The first person action rpg genre was extremely popular in the pre-Doom era and I think its interesting that it pretty much completely disappeared. So I've been thinking how the design could have evolved rather than go extinct.

[valrus]

I think the first-person view, whole-party control, and grid movement go together, as a sort of local optimum:

• The first-person view makes the whole-party control less awkward; since you don't see your party you're not as frequently confronted with the idea that your party all moves together and doesn't do reasonable things like flanking, etc.
• The grid gets rid of the clarity problem of first-person POV, which is that you can't see your party members (where they are, how far they are from things, whether they're in line-of-sight of monsters, etc.).  On a grid, you know where everyone is, 'cuz you're all in the same square.  It also, I think, makes the party sticking together less awkward; I can accept that it's a game on a grid, and sure, we're all on the same big square.

If I could see the companions, or if it weren't on a grid, I think it would be harder to suspend my disbelief.

As for evolving it, I think it did evolve.  One of the reasons for this kind of game was that rendering people well is a lot harder than rendering a dungeon well.  Once devs got the skills and resources to actually show you your companions, they pulled the camera back a bit, let you see everyone, and let you move them independently and jump between them (KotOR and its descendants, FFXII, things like that).  These are reasonable evolutions, I think; not doing so would have been weird.  (Like being able to see your companions, but everyone moves in lockstep.)

But anyway, it's neat to think of other ways things might have gone.  Here are a few throwaway ideas:

• One of the reasons I think it would be a little odd to do this in a free-movement 1st person game would be that I'd always be wondering where my companions are.  Do they take up the exact same point I'm in?  Are they off to the side?  If so, do they rotate when I rotate?  How do they not catch on doorframes?  BUT, I didn't have these kinds of immersion-breaking thoughts in Paper Sorceror, because if I remember correctly your companions are just summons or something.  They don't really exist.  If there was a 1st person whole-party RPG where only one person is "real", then it sort of makes sense why you don't see them, why they can only move exactly as you do, etc.
• Same thing if they're real, but don't move like the POV character does.  If my companions are small and fly -- drone robots, or cute flying fluffy anime animals or something -- then I can just imagine they're sort of hovering or swirling around me.
• If everyone's in a vehicle of some sort -- say, we're a bunch of gnomes driving a golem mech -- then it makes sense why we're sticking together.  Maybe we can each attack/heal/etc. separately, but when we move it's together.  Or maybe we're a bunch of elves in a car, on a roadtrip, hanging out the windows to shoot arrows and cast spells.  ("Fear and Loathing in Lothlorien"?)  Maybe we're exploring an alien planet, and we all have our own stations but we need to stay inside the exploratory vehicle to breathe.
• If we pull the camera back, but still move everyone together, it'd be good to have a reason everyone sticks together.  Maybe the party's fighting style is very cooperative, with lots of combos that require proximity and close formations.  This would be really interesting to watch, especially if it's the sort of acrobatic cooperative fighting like in (say) kung-fu movies.
• It's not twitch real-time, but something like SUPERHOT would make a really interesting non-turn-based RPG.  Everything takes time to happen, but time only passes when one of your characters is moving.

[starsrift]

What makes the Grimrock & etc games somewhat unique compared to most other first person action rpgs like UU, System Shock, Arx Fatalis, King's Field, etc is that you are controlling a party rather than a single character. So I was curious if people had other ideas on how to do a party based action rpg in a manner different than how Grimrock & etc are designed.

Like, not first person? 3rd person ones are pretty common. Steam Marines and Dungeon of the Endless both immediately come to mind. Again, the Wizardry series (and spinoff Wizards & Warriors) are pretty decent demonstrations of how to use a party with the first person perspective, and both free the player from the 'grid'.

You're not explaining very well what it is that you want done differently, or rather that you would like to change about Grimrock style.

The inherent problem with a party is that you have an issue of complexity - more things for the player to worry about. Turn-based (or real-time but based on turns, like Wizardry et al) allows the player to try to get a hold on the complexity. If you wanted to do something very action-style (fast as Doom or a similar shooter), I would recommend having no more than one or -possibly- two active abilities for each character, and a lot of interesting passives, or possibly toggle-able 'modes' of what each active ability does.

[FuzzySlippers]

• If everyone's in a vehicle of some sort -- say, we're a bunch of gnomes driving a golem mech -- then it makes sense why we're sticking together.  Maybe we can each attack/heal/etc. separately, but when we move it's together.  Or maybe we're a bunch of elves in a car, on a roadtrip, hanging out the windows to shoot arrows and cast spells.  ("Fear and Loathing in Lothlorien"?) 
  

This is an amazing idea.

I think you ran down the problems pretty well and some potential solutions which I suppose inevitably rely on coming up with a narrative reason for sticking with the stilted gameplay mechanics. Even Dungeon Master had a fiction reasoning for mind controlling 4 people and having them march together. I think you are right that you gotta stick with the grid in real time.

I suppose the "not real" party control is probably the best avenue to explore in this sort of game. I had a rough prototype of an idea a while back of slamming together some MTG mechanics where you were a caster summoning ghosts in front of you as your party

but it was turn based. A real time version could incorporate some action elements and might make a good candidate for an action blobber.

[valrus]

Hmm, that ghost idea has another real benefit, which is that you can potentially "place" them somewhere (say, behind an enemy) without having to worry about intervening objects, about how they actually get there, etc. 

Bit of a joke idea: First person free movement, and you can place your ghosts anywhere around you, but they stay put relative to your POV.  So they move whenever the POV does, and if they collide with anything they go poof and disappear.  So you can have a potentially impressive array of "turrets" that move with you, so long as you can keep them from colliding with everything in sight.

Another idea: Grid-based first person action, but once engaged in combat you can't move freely (so no square-dancing).  You can summon ghosts, and they do their characteristic attack automatically and periodically.  They're weak and don't hit very hard, but they're not hard to re-summon either.  Your actions during combat:

• Rotate 90 degrees
• Summon a ghost to one of the three squares adjacent to the square you're facing (usually the one the enemy would be in).  If you turn away the ghosts remain and can keep fighting, but you don't control ghosts you're not facing.
• Attack
• Defend/dodge, or cause a ghost to dodge.  (Maybe the same key as a summon; it just phases them out of existence for a moment.)
• Teleport to a space containing a ghost, dispelling the ghost in the process.

All actions except turning and dodging take a bit of time to charge; turning and dodging are immediate but cancel any charging action.  Enemy attacks charge, too.  An enemy chooses from several patterns of attack unique to that enemy, such that you can predict who might need to dodge, etc.

The goal of combat becomes to pull off sequences of summons, attacks, dodges, and jumps that minimize your exposure to enemy attacks while maximizing their exposure to yours.  With the right strategy and timing, you can potentially take out a bunch of enemies without taking any damage yourself, by dodging at the right moment, teleporting to the right position, etc.

This could potentially be done with a quite simple control scheme (even a controller; at any one point there are exactly four squares that you can control, in a diamond shape).

[Golds]

You could do something like OG Ghost Recon, where you control one character at a time and the rest move around with AI agency, but you could swap between them and maybe have some meta control over them from a map view.

Honestly, it'd be kind of cool to have a multi-character / multiclass FPS where flicking through the scrollwheel switched your character perspective instead of switching guns, thought it might get a little disorienting. But I'm imagining a flow like -- move, perform whatever attack or action you want, switch to next character while the first performs his action and recharges stamina, repeat.

[FuzzySlippers]

The goal of combat becomes to pull off sequences of summons, attacks, dodges, and jumps that minimize your exposure to enemy attacks while maximizing their exposure to yours.  With the right strategy and timing, you can potentially take out a bunch of enemies without taking any damage yourself, by dodging at the right moment, teleporting to the right position, etc.

This could potentially be done with a quite simple control scheme (even a controller; at any one point there are exactly four squares that you can control, in a diamond shape).

That's another interesting idea. I could see that working kinda like a fluid first person tower defense game (or something reminiscent of TF2 engineers). I'm also getting shades of Road Not Taken if you make the enemy actions only happen while you are doing something (so you can ponder each move but as you move so does the rest of the world). So the aim would be to work out a puzzle like solution to enemy patterns.

You could do something like OG Ghost Recon, where you control one character at a time and the rest move around with AI agency, but you could swap between them and maybe have some meta control over them from a map view.

There was an old crawler called Hired Guns that worked like that and even supported multiplayer.

That'd make a good basis for a horror game actually. The player drags around a party and the gameplay emphasizes puzzle solving but the solutions generally require characters in different locations so you have to zip around between the characters moving them into position (Maniac Mansion style I guess).

Within a horror setting it would be amusing that the player would naturally want to bunch their characters together for protection (and to avoid the horror cliche of people wandering off alone) but then the gameplay would keep pushing players to string out their characters throughout the level to advance. Combine that with characters occasionally panicking and running away, the perspective coming from the cameras everyone is carrying so some vhs artifacting fu, and the whole thing has a nice horror movie flair.

The main impediment for us would just be the volume of 3d artwork that would be required. Just like classic games one thing that attracted us to the old dungeon crawler format was hiding the party behind the camera and representing them with 2d art. Then we could focus our 3d love on enemies and the environment. Once we have characters moving around we need rigged models, smooth animations, AI etc for all of them.

Not sure how you could get players anymore to accept 2d art within a 3d world otherwise. Of course if you abandon first person it'd probably work as an isometric game with 2d art but you lose the immersive quality.

[PappaWayne]

You could do something like OG Ghost Recon, where you control one character at a time and the rest move around with AI agency, but you could swap between them and maybe have some meta control over them from a map view.

Honestly, it'd be kind of cool to have a multi-character / multiclass FPS where flicking through the scrollwheel switched your character perspective instead of switching guns, thought it might get a little disorienting. But I'm imagining a flow like -- move, perform whatever attack or action you want, switch to next character while the first performs his action and recharges stamina, repeat.

The old tactical combat mode from dragon age origins comes to mind here. You tell the ai what sort of things to prioritise in combat (x character should heal the party if health = y%, z character to draw aggro if v character is under attack etc), but still allow for switching between characters with the push of a button. Mini map and perhaps edge of screen arrows to keep track of the party.

Would be fun but likely be a nightmare to code

[valrus]

Speaking of "vehicular action blobbers", I just ran across a weird old one called Eco Phantoms and figured I'd share:





http://www.old-games.com/download/5224/eco-phantoms
http://gamesdbase.com/game/atari-st/eco-phantoms.aspx

You're in a stolen alien spaceship, traveling a post-invasion Earth that looks to be almost entirely made of convenient chasms.  It looks like you can look around the spaceship, too; there appear to be crew and robots behind you.

Untapped blobber idea: basically just do a spaceship Legend of Grimrock, but allow six degrees of freedom in a 3 dimensional grid.  And don't provide a map