![]() There are elements that we see no where else, including the ability to establish a camp for storage of excess gold and food, or the way that instead of inquiring about the cost of everything in a shop, you can tell the shopkeeper how much you want to spend, and he'll make suggestions. In Moria, we have a lot of firsts: first to require food and water first to allow dual-wielding first to assign offensive and defensive ratings to weapons first to segregate arcane and priestly magic first to deal with secret doors by having players walk through a blank wall and first in which groups of adventurers could team up and fight monsters together (in teams of up to 10). If any of these characteristics feels a bit odd to those used to the D&D paradigm, they are completely overshadowed by the game's innovations. All items are called "weapons," even armor. "Vitality" replaces hit points and magic points. There is otherwise no experience or leveling. Each exists on a scale of 0-100 rather than 3-18, and they actually increase with use-a mechanic that until now I thought appeared for the first time in Eamon. There are four attributes, but they're not quite like anything derived from D&D: cunning, piety, valor, and wizardry. The game really does feel like something written by someone who had heard about D&D through the filter of another game. Instead, they were inspired by the stories that the authors of The Game of Dungeons told of their development woes and decided to see what they could do with the same concept. According to author Kevet Duncombe (in a 2007 interview with Matt Barton), neither he nor co-author Jim Battin were even aware of the existence of D&D when they began programming Moria, nor had Duncombe read The Lord of the Rings. If Moria wasn't quite the first computer role-playing game, it was nonetheless unique in that it wasn't based on Dungeons & Dragons. You can see his active spells, equipment, and supplies on the left and his skills on the right. Chester has encountered a witch on Level 1 of the "Caves" dungeon. ![]() (Though we have to be careful, as the game underwent continuous development until 1984 it's not possible now to know what the first version looked like.)Ī late game screen shot. Well, we need not feel too bad for the latter, because they clearly adapted much of their game from Moria. We recently had a discussion about the extent to which the developers of Wizardry had borrowed from Oubliette. ![]() In contrast to the other games being developed concurrently in 1975, which were both top-down, iconographic affairs that would inspire the DND/ Telengard line, Moria is a first-person game in which the players navigate a series of wireframe mazes (shown in a tiny window) to slay enemies and collect treasure. ![]()
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