Hello gamers, As many of you might remember several months ago I began designing a gamebook style roll playing game called Legends of Etherea. When I originally drafted the plans for the game it was to be a text based gamebook adventure system very much in the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons using similar rules, classes, races, etc. While the game's story and map isn't yet complete it was going to have various towns, cities, forests, and dungeons to explore. However, over the past couple of months I am growing concerned that this style of game isn't something that would do well financially. Especially, since the release of Entombed. Basically, what I am aiming at is over the last few years graphical roll playing games like Final Fantasy and Xenogears have become hugely successful titles all but making the old text based interactive fiction systems that I personally like seam like a joke to most mainstream gamers. Now, I'm beginning to see the same thing happening more or less to the accessible games market as well. It is like why bother playing text based roguelike games like Nethack or ADOM when you can start up Entombed and wander around a dungeon doing basically the same thing complete with Sapi support, sounds, and music. I can't help but feel that Entombed has just raised the expectations of any new and future roll playing games to new heights. Its like who would pay $35 for a text only roll playing game when you can purchase Entombed for $40 which comes complete with sounds, music, Sapi support, etc. It makes the idea of writing and selling text only roll playing games seam laughable. So I can't help but feel like the time for text based games of any kind have just gone the way of the dinosaur. Earlier tonight when I was going through my e-mail there was a post from Michael on the Heroes of Ardania thread. He asked if the game came complete with sounds and music. That really got me thinking about my own project. It seams that justabout everyone now expects sounds, music, and if the player is sighted, killer graphics, to make a game worth their time. Otherwise the game is considered to be inferior to the games with graphics and sounds. So the question is how many of you still actually like text based games like me, and how many would be willing to pay for such a game? understand I'm not necessarily against games like Entombed, I could create something like that, of course, but I also have a good idea how financially and emotionally exhausting such a title would be to me personally. It would take ten times longer and be ten times harder to create just because I'd have to purchase more sound packs, license music, program all the extra code for sound, speech, menus, whatever. So I don't know that I'm up for anything that complicated at the moment, but I could do it if it were more financially successful. So I'd like to hear your thoughts. What do you expect, like, etc in a roll playing game for the computer?
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