[Throughout this project, I will be handing over this space to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I hand over to my good friend Daisy, who previously wrote about Way of the Exploding Fist]
You’ve probably heard this one a few times but… I was a weird kid. And one of the ways I was weird was my relationship to RPGs. I spent a non negligible amount of my early teens reading rulebooks I’d never put in practice for a lack of friends geeky enough to roleplay with. Eye of the Beholder would probably have been great for a kid so invested in rules. Because it’s all about the rules.
The story wasn’t much more developed than in your average Super Mario game – 4 warriors are called to defeat an underground evil and eventually, if you play well and long enough, they do. That’s basically it. But oh, the rules!
The big selling point of Eye of the Beholder was its strict adhesion to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. Complex rules designed to calculate precisely the damage of each weapon, each spell, according to the many characteristics of any character or monster in the fight. This must have been an exciting promise for many AD&D players: the dice roll themselves, you don’t have to calculate anything by yourself. And no one can dispute the rules.
Now that I’m older and have actually played a few tabletop RPGs, this doesn’t sound like my idea of a fun game. And true, the experience of playing Eye of the Beholder for the first time in 2019 is drab. Long, labyrinth-like corridors, everything looking the same. No music. No map. Runes you click on to learn they are not recognized. Leaky pipes you can inspect only to learn they are just that.
Just as we saw with Speedball 2 that applying the rules of football to a video game may not be the best way to make an enjoyable football game, applying the rules of AD&D is set up to make your video game experience… tedious. Do I really need spend so much time on character creation? Is me knowing every characteristic of my four characters so necessary? Of course adult me says no but 12 year old me would have been so impressed by so much “realism”. There is no Speedball-like franchise dominating the video game market today, even though the concept of a foul makes little sense as a video game design mechanic. Games can be better, more creative, by taking inspiration from other fields. And there’s no reason not to enjoy taking on some of the glamour of real life FIFA teams or the Monster Manual.
Eye of the Beholder was basically a follow up to Dungeon Master, a very similar game that only suffered from not being officially AD&D. There is probably a lot of these games idea that live on in today’s games. First person view, inventory management, leveling up… It all was there already. But does any game today make you feel so much like you’re stuck in a dungeon for hours with no idea how to get out because it’s really been hours and you really have no clue? You followed the rules though.
[gifs taken from videos by The RPG Chick and JimPlaysGames]
