Birthright: Gorgon's Alliance, which very ambitious adaptation of the AD&D - Birthright setting by a studio under Sierra. It features both the whole part about ruling a kingdom (and the battle) and also you can take a party of character in adventures (which were made by using the Doom engine) and lots of guitar riffs in the soundtrack. A video about it might be really cool.
I was a bit disappointed you didn't mention Sword Coast Adventures. (No, not Legends, Adventures) It was a browser/cell phone based tie-in to the (still existing) Neverwinter f2p MMO where you sent your Neverwinter characters' NPC companion helpers on little dungeon crawls for in-game (for Neverwinter) loot and crafting materials. Several of the dungeons had branching/multiple paths you could take, with some high end dungeons even unlocking new companions for you if you took the right path. All the encounters were resolved by a dice roll mechanic, and all the dice corresponded roughly to ability stats in D&D, and further broken up by color, which associated them with various Forgotten Realms gods to determine how strongly they went with a certain archetype. This combined with your companions' classes/types determined what kind of dice they had, and the "quality" of your companions (the standard MMO "white (normal)-green (uncommon)-blue (rare)-purple (epic)" hierarchy) determined how big those dice were (d6s, d8s, etc). Basically, each encounter (be it a monster, a trap, a puzzle, whatever) had a certain score for certain dice types you had to hit, and you rolled your party's (made of up to 4 of your character's NPC companions from Neverwinter) dice to see if you could beat the required score. If you beat the score, the party cleared the encounter and moved on, if you failed you had to either make another attempt, or find a different path through. If the character in the encounter failed to beat the required score, they were considered "wounded" and taken out of rotation. Once all 4 party members were wounded, your party was forced to abandon the dungeon, leaving behind all the loot they'd already found, and you were locked out of using those companions again until they'd finished a "recovery" cooldown. It was actually a pretty fun and engaging little minigame to play when you were waiting on crafting cooldowns in Neverwinter, or when you were out of the house and needed a distraction on your phone while you were waiting for appointments or something. Unfortunately, it was taken down in 2016ish, and seems to have dropped completely off everyone's radar. My guess is it was taken down, partially, due to name similarity with the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (which came out right around the same time, IIRC), but I could be mistaken about that. Sorry for the long comment.
Only other game I've ever seen with "Pay per hour" was All Points Bulletin. A GTA Online attempt before GTA Online existed. It died a couple months in and took the developer with it. 'Nuff said...
I think if anything, they'd shoot for something like 100 hour monthly caps, then a person would have to pay extra for additional time that month. CAAApitalism in this modern day 'n age, amirite?
Wow! Thanks so much for the shoutout! Forgotten World is (as far as I'm aware) online, I just think the player base is a bit small. It's definitely the best way to play NWN today, though!
Fun fact about the Neverwinter Nights MMO. Fans of the game created their own dictionary of the Drow language -- the game had a lot of story elements dealing with the dark elves, so fans took the few bits from novels and extrapolated. Some of what they made ended up in later books and even an entire supplement about the Drow and the Underdark.
Yeap, sadly the fully linguistic system from it is only available in temple of Lloth via the wayback. If you ever get into online drow RP, to this day, people will reference that language and its linguistics despite most modern WOTC products completely hacking it apart and reducing a (decent conlang) to just some lexicon.
@@thehellyousay Not quite, the industry was much smaller and often the people on somewhere like Temple of Lloth were really close to that inner circle. I.E. people who were players (or DMs) with the people who wrote sourcebooks and such. (Or them themselves doing worldbuilding without NDA) This was REALLY common at the time in the D&D circles. While TSR was a 'big player' it was far from the corporations of tabletop gaming even 10 years into the future. You can see remnants of this if you ever participated in the candlekeep forums in the 00s, as most of the developers would just chat, brainstorm, etc. (you can still see this in the RuneQuest and glorantha forums today)
I love how the kitty helps ground just how much a episode like this is a full on project with lots of editing. The cutie bamfing all over the place in between cuts X3
Commenting on an almost year old video because this unlocked a memory that I had absolutely forgotten. Tiny Adventures was awesome and now I’m sad it’s gone.
WotC licensing department has had several gaffs. They got the license to make ttrpg of Star Wars and Star Trek. The two sci-fi properties respective license holders quickly called WotC once this became clear and told them to pick one. Obviously they went with Star Wars. Its just stunning no one in licensing thought this might be a problem or asked.
There is an early version of the client side of Dark Sun Online out there still. :) It is out there in CD form. The version is the "Pre-World Map" version before there was a world map between destinations. Before that you had to count your screens to get places as many looked too much alike! I only played for 6 months back in the 90s, but I really enjoyed it. A friend and I in the game set up a little assassin business where you could pay us to go after people, but that came to an end when the best PVPer on the server Nocturnal put a bounty on himself. Probably bodied us dozens of times and we never killed him once! Unheard of today is one of the options in Tyr's arena - you could PVP, but you also had the option of True Death PVP. A warning came up for it, but whoever died in those matches resulted in their character being deleted. I remember how friendly Vorpalex and Alex the GMs were. Roleplay events were also fun and you had some very dedicated people attending them in game.
I played the crap out of Dark Sun Online as a teenager, and remember clearly when it went down. I have held onto my disk for it ever since, just in case. Honestly the darksun single player games are great, but the online game was ruined by hackers/pvp. I swear I am not still salty about them 25 years later.
Concerning your Patreon, I mean, on the one hand it WOULD mean newer/better equipment and theoretically better videos, but on the other hand..... ugh, _I don't even want to _*_imagine_* a world where you would get, like, a WIRELESS mic that your cat couldn't play with and interrupt your videos with, lol. At any rate, great video! I mean, your vids are always great, but this topic is fascinating - I love lost and cancelled games. I sub to places like PtoP Online because of that, and frequented sites like Unseen64; they're just interesting, even if the stories are sometimes depressing. Great work giving these all a great overview!
2:00 Yeah, hourly pricing was the standard for online services at the time. Unlimited access didn't start becoming common until well into the 90s. Although that certainly did create market challenges. Adventure company Sierra, for example, nearly bankrupted themselves trying to launch a dialup multiplayer gaming service due to the high costs vs the difficulty of finding customers. (And that's not to mention how people were often also paying per-minute telephone line charges, unless they were lucky enough to live in a major city with a local hub for the service. Which just drove the user costs up further.)
You left out the Intellivision D&D and D&D: Treasures of Tarmin. You *technically* can still play them... *if* you happen to have a working Intellivision and a 40-year-old cartridge of a game that wasn't widely sold in the first place.
Hearing that you're going to going to take on Dark Sun... I'm so happy. I'm so looking forward to it. I love how it works like little storylets that connect to hub worlds so each storylet can do it's own bonkers thing before you come back to the main storyline.
Dark Sun and Krynn were both settings that don't conform to strict Dumgeons and Dumpster-fires. That's what made them better than Greyhawk. They also shows many people how that they could create their own settings, something companies like NotC will send the Pinkertons to your house over.
I found your channel with like 400 subs from a reddit post. It's so cool to see you now with 20k subs. One of the few channels where I enjoy watching every video that drops.
I actually really liked Heroes of Neverwinter. I liked that whole era tbh. The Neverwinter Campaign Setting is one of the best d&d books ever published, and the cross-promo that went on with it was fantastic.
I was born too late to experience Crimson Sands. Shattered Lands and Ravager were the titles that got me into DnD in the first place, can't wait to see your reviews, despite knowing the games were turbojank for having bugs, and I don't just mean the thri-kreen.
Buddy of mine is working on ReAOL/P3OL, a backward compatible AOL emulation that can run on a potato, and getting Neverwinter Nights up and running is one of the first objectives.
Looking forward to your Dark Sun videos. I have much nostalgia for those two games, but when I went back to them via GOG, they really don't stand up to modern sensibilities. Now I will get to re-enjoy them vicariously through you, without having to struggle through them!
I had a kinda different opinion. I played SL last year, with no prior experience of Goldbox and only kniwing 2e because of Baldur Gate and i had a lot of fun. 0 nostalgia involved. There are definitevely some oddities due to age, but much less compared even to games that came out after it. I'd take SL UI over, say, Fallout 1 UI every time of the day. The controls were completely different than what i was accustomed to, but they wheren't bad or making things hard. And the game has a surprising repsect for your time relative to it's age. The worst i can say about it is that it's kinda short and there isn't quite as much C&C as some more modern games after you get out of the Arena(but the Arena itself is amazing for that). Like, i was playing Fucking WotR at the same time and sometimes i ended up thinking "i'd rather play Shattered Land". The game aged as gracefully as a PC game from the early 90s reasonably can.
For some reason, Tiny Adventures reminded me of a not-D&D text adventure game that's still up - Sryth! It's really good and can be played in little chunks or left in a background tab as you do other things, though it's not real time based apart from a few daily things. Still, really fun game and somehow still up and running. Thanks for the inadvertent reminder!
@@comradestannis If you like text adventures? Absolutely. There's a TON of content and I find it all quite well written. I would definitely consider using a starter guide to get you going in the world - it's not necessary, but there's some, well, you know, tabletop-esque not immediately apparent things that can make your life easier to begin. Absolutely fun though!
That version of Neverwinter Nights must have had some godawful marketing too, cuz I was around even back in the hourly AOL days and I never heard of it until just now.
I probably still got the book on gdrive, we should make a rom hack and I know a beef up for a max ram magic dosbox, works great on fallout and I bet people would like my invisible button layout probably even more than there own, I do great fallout buttons on phone.
I actually really enjoyed Tiny Adventures. I was so sad to see it go. It was literally the only reason I joined Facebook. I had refused to do it for a long time... and then gave in just to play that game. It came out at the time that the 4th edition of the tabletop was coming out.
I was surprised there was no mention of dnd on the PLATO Network, in 1975, which is notable among other things for being the first video game RPG with bosses But I was even more surprised when I looked into it and that game apparently managed to survive to the modern era despite allegedly being deleted off the server multiple times from what I recall So... Huh
uh..... Dark sun is NOT "D&D's take on Conan the Barbarians style fantasy", it's D&D's take on Mad Max with spells and elves. As an FYI, Conan the Barbarian inspired the literal Barbarian class in the 1E Unearthed Arcana (which was sourced from Dragon Magazine #63).
When I got to play Age of Reckoning 2 years ago from start to finish with full servers... I believe all online product can be brought back with enough folks coming back.
WOTC are not losing many thing but just throwing them away i hope some one can rise to replace and we can have the old D&D back in some spiritual successer form.
There are a lot of jungles and frozen regions in Conan universe. Dark Sun would be like Dune full of adapted D&D races full, trees and flowers (if compared to Dune). There are no adapted D&D races, trees or flowers in Dune.
I know this isnt a D&D game but one game I really sorely missed when it was lost to the Facebook eventual obsolete gameplay systems was Dragon Age for Facebook. that game was awesome :( The Dark Sun game I heard the outrage when it went away from buddies, neve got a chance to play it myself
tiny adventures definitely benefited from the financial crisis of the time in the way online services like vtts grew during the pandemic. i was a lapsed player, permanently laid off when no one was hiring. that game was the first time facebook caught MY interest rather than my just being there to help friends fight dragons, and i'd had never discovered it had i not been bored off my ass. i tried desperately to recreate the way the game worked on index cards from memory after it disappeared. alas, adhd.
I get the feeling we will see more lost games here soon. Theres a scene in cowboy bebop were they go back to earth and everyone there is just scrapping all the old stuff including electronics and building crazy stuff. Well this always gave me the idea that one day old games and servers would be brought back with a much cheaper option and secretive fan bases. A simple example Halo3. How many hackers i beat in a straight up gun fight with nothing but cover foot work and a grenade. Now all i got is fortnite and apex and the hackers there are FAR worse then they were in halo3. Not to mention the game type makes finding hackers much harder. Or at least finding evidence.
I played NWN 1 on AOL, I never seen a game like this in multiplayer. I remember not even understanding that there were other people on there. I still remember saying "YOUR HUMAN?!?!" when I saw what I thought an NPC say "Dude, it's north!"
I seem to recall playing a version of Tiny Adventures on my ipod, no facebook involved. it was strictly a one player affair, no asking friends for anything.
The one time the Japanese got a D&D licenses? You mean the three (technically 4 times) times a Japanese company got D&D licensing. What am I talking about exactly? Well...Capcom successfully got the rights to make not just one amazing D&D arcade game but two. The first was Dungeons & Dragons: The Tower of Doom and the second Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. As both games released separately from each other in the arcades Capcom was given two licenses. However, that's not the end of it. You see, Sega successfully secured the rights to feature both games on the Japanese Saturn (third). Finally, the fourth license happened when Capcom released these two incredible games on XBLA for the Xbox 360. Fun Fact: Both D&D arcade games can be played on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X. Here is the real question...if these games can be downloaded and played on new hardware (legally) does Capcom still hold the rights to make great D&D games? If so I demand more!
"TEN? What's that?" Well, son, in the mid to late 90s, if you weren't dialing up a friend's PC, you needed a third party service to arrange multiplayer matchmaking. There was TEN, WON, MPlayer, and GameSpy.
Fun fact about the gold box games, a group of absolute legends went out and got their hands on all of the official modules released for D&D at the time that the goldbox games were being sold and used the engine to set up every one of the modules to be playable in the goldbox engine. They are super fun if you like the goldbox games.
Ahh, a fresh Willy Vid to get me through my work day, always a treat. On the NWN topic... We didn't complain about the hourly charge for Neverwinter Nights back in the day for two reasons: one of those is that AOL and other online services were charging for their base service *by the minute* until they went to that flat rate in 1996 so the hourly charge seemed tame in comparison.
There were predecessors to MMORPGs although they were primitive in comparison. Bulletin board systems had multiplayer door games. There were also MUDs, multi-user dungeons, some of which were based on tabletop rulesets. Nothing officially licensed as far as I can remember.
Wow, I'd completely forgotten Tiny Adventures. Funny. I don't remember much about it aside from having played it, finding it OK, and being frustrated about not being able to customize your character initially.
The Dark Sun games are fun, and the world was really neat. The second game was a buggy mess, but the first one was solid. It's a shame DSO can't get running. Thanks for the vid! I look forward to your DS reviews.
Speaking of Stormfront Studios - they did a few D&D games, including a rather interesting D&D RTS/Kingdom Builder called Stronghold as well as 2004's Demon Stone.
I know you mainly cover TTRPG related video games, so there are some I would recommend as they are mostly obscure and if you can find a copy and play it it will be nice. The Realms of Arkania trilogy, Drakensang: The Dark Eye and Drakensang: The River of Time. All of the games are based on the most popular TTRPG in Germany The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge). I've personally played only Drakensang: The River of Time some years ago as it was the newest one (I've heard that it has problems running on Windows 10/11 though) but for me it was up there with Newerwinter Knights 2 in terms of gameplay and less buggy and more polished overall to boot.
I believe it was Dark Sun Shattered Lands where I was attempting a 100% world exploration that I found Larry, Darryl and his other brother Darryl, awesome Newhart reference... I think there was a Dr. Who reference as well but not 100% sure. Spelljammer was fun as well but kind of glitchy. Cheers :)
"Stormfront Software - Do not google that" - I'm curious as to why, but I've learned from my time on the internet, that if someone tells you to not google something, you actually shouldn't. So... Maybe one day I'll learn what it was about :P
I played both Tiny Adventures and Heroes of Neverwinter back then. They were all right, but I think I'd moved on from each before they went down so I missed the drama around their vanishing. I'd second the virtual dice game Sword Coast Adventures that was a temporary tie-in with the Neverwinter MMO. It's also worth noting that even though it's still live, a lot of the Neverwinter MMO is also lost to time, as the current build of the game deleted not just systems but entire zones in the process of performing a stat squish and trying to make it better for onboarding new meat- I mean, new players. If I recall they deleted the entire floating sky pirate island and one of the two corrupted canyon zones. They also got rid of the entirety of the player-made content, which...was SUBSTANTIAL.
Which is so ludicrous because it's all about fighting against the bs reigning over the world and it's various societies, or at least carving out some alternative to it. Gods *_forbid_* we be aware of problems and want to solve them, and fight against brutal ruthless injustices. At the same time WotC has hired devs on the cheap and undercut their own staff for so long that there's absolutely no way they wouldn't ruin it. They had so much to play with and so little "problematic" to work around with Spelljammer and still dropped that ball in just gobsmackingly braindead ways. So there's absolutely zero chance they could do it well even if they didn't see the setting as "problematic"
Stormfront is tge name of a highly racist online forum created by a genuine neo-nazi back in the 1990s its a hub of a untold amount of bigotry and hatred so I would stay away from it as much as you can with all your might.
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If I missed any other Lost D&D games, tip me off here, and I may make a part 2!
Not exactly a lost D&D game but you can no longer buy Sword Coast Legends. Would be cool to have a video on it.
Birthright: Gorgon's Alliance, which very ambitious adaptation of the AD&D - Birthright setting by a studio under Sierra. It features both the whole part about ruling a kingdom (and the battle) and also you can take a party of character in adventures (which were made by using the Doom engine) and lots of guitar riffs in the soundtrack. A video about it might be really cool.
I was a bit disappointed you didn't mention Sword Coast Adventures. (No, not Legends, Adventures)
It was a browser/cell phone based tie-in to the (still existing) Neverwinter f2p MMO where you sent your Neverwinter characters' NPC companion helpers on little dungeon crawls for in-game (for Neverwinter) loot and crafting materials. Several of the dungeons had branching/multiple paths you could take, with some high end dungeons even unlocking new companions for you if you took the right path. All the encounters were resolved by a dice roll mechanic, and all the dice corresponded roughly to ability stats in D&D, and further broken up by color, which associated them with various Forgotten Realms gods to determine how strongly they went with a certain archetype. This combined with your companions' classes/types determined what kind of dice they had, and the "quality" of your companions (the standard MMO "white (normal)-green (uncommon)-blue (rare)-purple (epic)" hierarchy) determined how big those dice were (d6s, d8s, etc).
Basically, each encounter (be it a monster, a trap, a puzzle, whatever) had a certain score for certain dice types you had to hit, and you rolled your party's (made of up to 4 of your character's NPC companions from Neverwinter) dice to see if you could beat the required score. If you beat the score, the party cleared the encounter and moved on, if you failed you had to either make another attempt, or find a different path through. If the character in the encounter failed to beat the required score, they were considered "wounded" and taken out of rotation. Once all 4 party members were wounded, your party was forced to abandon the dungeon, leaving behind all the loot they'd already found, and you were locked out of using those companions again until they'd finished a "recovery" cooldown.
It was actually a pretty fun and engaging little minigame to play when you were waiting on crafting cooldowns in Neverwinter, or when you were out of the house and needed a distraction on your phone while you were waiting for appointments or something. Unfortunately, it was taken down in 2016ish, and seems to have dropped completely off everyone's radar.
My guess is it was taken down, partially, due to name similarity with the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (which came out right around the same time, IIRC), but I could be mistaken about that. Sorry for the long comment.
Ruins of Mythic Draino... err, I mean Ruins of Myth Drannor. The most cursed, buggy D&D 3.5 game to briefly exist.
Sword Coast Legends. Its gone. Unless you have it downloaded from bak then, its a P.T. of D&D
If EA could get away with a pay per hour model, you know for a goddamn fact they would do it 🤣
Love the video brother ❤
THEY'LL CALL IT RETRO
@@WilliamSRD True enough.
Only other game I've ever seen with "Pay per hour" was All Points Bulletin. A GTA Online attempt before GTA Online existed.
It died a couple months in and took the developer with it. 'Nuff said...
I think if anything, they'd shoot for something like 100 hour monthly caps, then a person would have to pay extra for additional time that month. CAAApitalism in this modern day 'n age, amirite?
Don't give them ideas 💡
WoTC will have to monetize it.
Wow! Thanks so much for the shoutout!
Forgotten World is (as far as I'm aware) online, I just think the player base is a bit small. It's definitely the best way to play NWN today, though!
Can't even find it though.
Thanks for your amazing and thorough research into the Neverwinter Remakes!
Keep up the excellent work, your video was fantastic!
Guess I'll subscribe to your channel...
Fun fact about the Neverwinter Nights MMO. Fans of the game created their own dictionary of the Drow language -- the game had a lot of story elements dealing with the dark elves, so fans took the few bits from novels and extrapolated. Some of what they made ended up in later books and even an entire supplement about the Drow and the Underdark.
Yeap, sadly the fully linguistic system from it is only available in temple of Lloth via the wayback. If you ever get into online drow RP, to this day, people will reference that language and its linguistics despite most modern WOTC products completely hacking it apart and reducing a (decent conlang) to just some lexicon.
Ah yes. Lolthites. Known far and wide for heroics....
Ahh, theft of creative content, eh? Interesting. Verrrrry interessstinnng ...
*sinks back into the bathtub*
@@thehellyousay Not quite, the industry was much smaller and often the people on somewhere like Temple of Lloth were really close to that inner circle. I.E. people who were players (or DMs) with the people who wrote sourcebooks and such. (Or them themselves doing worldbuilding without NDA)
This was REALLY common at the time in the D&D circles. While TSR was a 'big player' it was far from the corporations of tabletop gaming even 10 years into the future.
You can see remnants of this if you ever participated in the candlekeep forums in the 00s, as most of the developers would just chat, brainstorm, etc. (you can still see this in the RuneQuest and glorantha forums today)
@@thehellyousay- ah yes, taking the remnants of ideas not fully formed and making something new from them is "theft"
Interesting 🙄
From Software doing a Tomb of Horrors game isn't anything I have ever thought about but now I NEED IT.
I love how the kitty helps ground just how much a episode like this is a full on project with lots of editing. The cutie bamfing all over the place in between cuts X3
Love it.
What editing? Everyone knows cats can teleport at will
Darksun and the SSI games for it are still by far one of the best D&D seetings and it is criminal that they have been so under utilized.
The best D&D settings were all created by GMs for their own use.
@@kevinsullivan3448 That would include Greyhawk, Blackmoor/Mystara, Eberron, and Forgotten Realms.
Commenting on an almost year old video because this unlocked a memory that I had absolutely forgotten. Tiny Adventures was awesome and now I’m sad it’s gone.
Expected to hear about Sword Coast Legends or Warriors of Waterdeep, turns out there are so many those didn't even make the cut!
This is an excellent cat video. The guy making background noise gives it a different feel.
Thanks so much for shouting out Fandraxx! He's such a great RUclipsr and deserves so much more attention.
Guess I'll subscribe to Fandraxx...
WotC licensing department has had several gaffs. They got the license to make ttrpg of Star Wars and Star Trek. The two sci-fi properties respective license holders quickly called WotC once this became clear and told them to pick one. Obviously they went with Star Wars. Its just stunning no one in licensing thought this might be a problem or asked.
Back in 1996 my biggest AOL bill was $600 one month and averaged $350-$400
There is an early version of the client side of Dark Sun Online out there still. :) It is out there in CD form. The version is the "Pre-World Map" version before there was a world map between destinations. Before that you had to count your screens to get places as many looked too much alike!
I only played for 6 months back in the 90s, but I really enjoyed it. A friend and I in the game set up a little assassin business where you could pay us to go after people, but that came to an end when the best PVPer on the server Nocturnal put a bounty on himself. Probably bodied us dozens of times and we never killed him once!
Unheard of today is one of the options in Tyr's arena - you could PVP, but you also had the option of True Death PVP. A warning came up for it, but whoever died in those matches resulted in their character being deleted.
I remember how friendly Vorpalex and Alex the GMs were. Roleplay events were also fun and you had some very dedicated people attending them in game.
I played the crap out of Dark Sun Online as a teenager, and remember clearly when it went down. I have held onto my disk for it ever since, just in case. Honestly the darksun single player games are great, but the online game was ruined by hackers/pvp. I swear I am not still salty about them 25 years later.
Concerning your Patreon, I mean, on the one hand it WOULD mean newer/better equipment and theoretically better videos, but on the other hand..... ugh, _I don't even want to _*_imagine_* a world where you would get, like, a WIRELESS mic that your cat couldn't play with and interrupt your videos with, lol.
At any rate, great video! I mean, your vids are always great, but this topic is fascinating - I love lost and cancelled games. I sub to places like PtoP Online because of that, and frequented sites like Unseen64; they're just interesting, even if the stories are sometimes depressing. Great work giving these all a great overview!
Comes for the information, stays for the kitty!
same here lol
I'm just disappointed there wasn't more kitty content. That's the real hard hitting stuff, after all.
Same lol
Replayed for the kitty.
Me when i go to a stripclub….
2:00 Yeah, hourly pricing was the standard for online services at the time. Unlimited access didn't start becoming common until well into the 90s. Although that certainly did create market challenges. Adventure company Sierra, for example, nearly bankrupted themselves trying to launch a dialup multiplayer gaming service due to the high costs vs the difficulty of finding customers.
(And that's not to mention how people were often also paying per-minute telephone line charges, unless they were lucky enough to live in a major city with a local hub for the service. Which just drove the user costs up further.)
You left out the Intellivision D&D and D&D: Treasures of Tarmin. You *technically* can still play them... *if* you happen to have a working Intellivision and a 40-year-old cartridge of a game that wasn't widely sold in the first place.
Hearing that you're going to going to take on Dark Sun... I'm so happy. I'm so looking forward to it. I love how it works like little storylets that connect to hub worlds so each storylet can do it's own bonkers thing before you come back to the main storyline.
Dark Sun is *another* problematic name...
Dark Sun and Krynn were both settings that don't conform to strict Dumgeons and Dumpster-fires. That's what made them better than Greyhawk. They also shows many people how that they could create their own settings, something companies like NotC will send the Pinkertons to your house over.
@@kevinsullivan3448D&D has one setting now: Elves & Spiders.
@@kevinsullivan3448I should rebuild the setting for GURPS...
More co-hosting with cat please.
YES!
I came to watch a video about D&D video games that are now relegated to bygone times.
I stayed for the cat.
@@richardkenan2891 same
Ngl dude could speak about anything so long as Daisy is on screen 😂
It being an interesting topic is just the cherry on top!
Nice, looking forward to those Dark Sun reviews!
I found your channel with like 400 subs from a reddit post. It's so cool to see you now with 20k subs. One of the few channels where I enjoy watching every video that drops.
I remember! You've been here since the beginning! Thank you for all the support!
I actually really liked Heroes of Neverwinter. I liked that whole era tbh. The Neverwinter Campaign Setting is one of the best d&d books ever published, and the cross-promo that went on with it was fantastic.
I was born too late to experience Crimson Sands. Shattered Lands and Ravager were the titles that got me into DnD in the first place, can't wait to see your reviews, despite knowing the games were turbojank for having bugs, and I don't just mean the thri-kreen.
Buddy of mine is working on ReAOL/P3OL, a backward compatible AOL emulation that can run on a potato, and getting Neverwinter Nights up and running is one of the first objectives.
Looking forward to your Dark Sun videos. I have much nostalgia for those two games, but when I went back to them via GOG, they really don't stand up to modern sensibilities. Now I will get to re-enjoy them vicariously through you, without having to struggle through them!
I had a kinda different opinion. I played SL last year, with no prior experience of Goldbox and only kniwing 2e because of Baldur Gate and i had a lot of fun. 0 nostalgia involved.
There are definitevely some oddities due to age, but much less compared even to games that came out after it. I'd take SL UI over, say, Fallout 1 UI every time of the day. The controls were completely different than what i was accustomed to, but they wheren't bad or making things hard. And the game has a surprising repsect for your time relative to it's age. The worst i can say about it is that it's kinda short and there isn't quite as much C&C as some more modern games after you get out of the Arena(but the Arena itself is amazing for that).
Like, i was playing Fucking WotR at the same time and sometimes i ended up thinking "i'd rather play Shattered Land".
The game aged as gracefully as a PC game from the early 90s reasonably can.
Excuse me, can we drop the talking hooman servant and focus on his boss? That would be nice, thanks.
Also, gib pats to Daisy.
Ironically, Bandai Namco's and Hasbro's online stores were created and maintained by the same company, Scalefast.
For some reason, Tiny Adventures reminded me of a not-D&D text adventure game that's still up - Sryth! It's really good and can be played in little chunks or left in a background tab as you do other things, though it's not real time based apart from a few daily things. Still, really fun game and somehow still up and running. Thanks for the inadvertent reminder!
Sryth? Would you recommend it?
@@comradestannis If you like text adventures? Absolutely. There's a TON of content and I find it all quite well written. I would definitely consider using a starter guide to get you going in the world - it's not necessary, but there's some, well, you know, tabletop-esque not immediately apparent things that can make your life easier to begin. Absolutely fun though!
@@vivaldi_is_dreaming Oho, text adventures. Sounds nice.
Good grief, Sryth is _still going?!_ I can't even remember the last time I thought about that game. Guess I've got something to look into later.
@@omittedforclarity What is Sryth?
The quality of your vids is getting so good that I get genuinely hyped up when I see a new upload from you on my feed.
Good video, Unlocked a deep nostalgia of playing og neverwinter nights as a freshman in hs, very informative, but, subbed for the cat
Tiny Adventures was the reason I joined Facebook in the first place.
Thanks for the entertaining videos, William. I listen to them when I do chores. Helps make sweeping my home enjoyable. 😀
That version of Neverwinter Nights must have had some godawful marketing too, cuz I was around even back in the hourly AOL days and I never heard of it until just now.
DarkSun Shattered Lands and Wake of the Ravager were in my top 3 DnD games ever. Such a great games.
I probably still got the book on gdrive, we should make a rom hack and I know a beef up for a max ram magic dosbox, works great on fallout and I bet people would like my invisible button layout probably even more than there own, I do great fallout buttons on phone.
I actually really enjoyed Tiny Adventures. I was so sad to see it go. It was literally the only reason I joined Facebook. I had refused to do it for a long time... and then gave in just to play that game. It came out at the time that the 4th edition of the tabletop was coming out.
I was surprised there was no mention of dnd on the PLATO Network, in 1975, which is notable among other things for being the first video game RPG with bosses
But I was even more surprised when I looked into it and that game apparently managed to survive to the modern era despite allegedly being deleted off the server multiple times from what I recall
So... Huh
uh..... Dark sun is NOT "D&D's take on Conan the Barbarians style fantasy", it's D&D's take on Mad Max with spells and elves.
As an FYI, Conan the Barbarian inspired the literal Barbarian class in the 1E Unearthed Arcana (which was sourced from Dragon Magazine #63).
When I got to play Age of Reckoning 2 years ago from start to finish with full servers... I believe all online product can be brought back with enough folks coming back.
Dark Sun seems especially interesting, I don't really care if it's "problematic." I know Wizards wont touch it though because of that.
I'd also like to see ya do a review of spelljammer pirates of realmspace
WOTC are not losing many thing but just throwing them away i hope some one can rise to replace and we can have the old D&D back in some spiritual successer form.
Final Fantasy 14 has a similar feature where you can send your assistants out on adventures.
There are a lot of jungles and frozen regions in Conan universe. Dark Sun would be like Dune full of adapted D&D races full, trees and flowers (if compared to Dune). There are no adapted D&D races, trees or flowers in Dune.
I know this isnt a D&D game but one game I really sorely missed when it was lost to the Facebook eventual obsolete gameplay systems was Dragon Age for Facebook. that game was awesome :(
The Dark Sun game I heard the outrage when it went away from buddies, neve got a chance to play it myself
tiny adventures definitely benefited from the financial crisis of the time in the way online services like vtts grew during the pandemic. i was a lapsed player, permanently laid off when no one was hiring. that game was the first time facebook caught MY interest rather than my just being there to help friends fight dragons, and i'd had never discovered it had i not been bored off my ass. i tried desperately to recreate the way the game worked on index cards from memory after it disappeared. alas, adhd.
"I'm gonna be covering the next two games" FUCK YES!
Tanya ventures also lets you create your own little adventure and your friends and you could run it.
I get the feeling we will see more lost games here soon.
Theres a scene in cowboy bebop were they go back to earth and everyone there is just scrapping all the old stuff including electronics and building crazy stuff. Well this always gave me the idea that one day old games and servers would be brought back with a much cheaper option and secretive fan bases. A simple example Halo3. How many hackers i beat in a straight up gun fight with nothing but cover foot work and a grenade. Now all i got is fortnite and apex and the hackers there are FAR worse then they were in halo3. Not to mention the game type makes finding hackers much harder. Or at least finding evidence.
Dare I say Halo 3 is a more skillful game than Fortnite?
I played NWN 1 on AOL, I never seen a game like this in multiplayer. I remember not even understanding that there were other people on there. I still remember saying "YOUR HUMAN?!?!" when I saw what I thought an NPC say "Dude, it's north!"
Great video, but Daisy the cat earned my 'like.'
Yeah, Dark Sun! Looking forward to it. 🥰
Tiny adventure seems like a very fun game, it is awful that we cannot play it anymore!
I seem to recall playing a version of Tiny Adventures on my ipod, no facebook involved. it was strictly a one player affair, no asking friends for anything.
The one time the Japanese got a D&D licenses? You mean the three (technically 4 times) times a Japanese company got D&D licensing. What am I talking about exactly?
Well...Capcom successfully got the rights to make not just one amazing D&D arcade game but two. The first was Dungeons & Dragons: The Tower of Doom and the second Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. As both games released separately from each other in the arcades Capcom was given two licenses. However, that's not the end of it. You see, Sega successfully secured the rights to feature both games on the Japanese Saturn (third). Finally, the fourth license happened when Capcom released these two incredible games on XBLA for the Xbox 360. Fun Fact: Both D&D arcade games can be played on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X. Here is the real question...if these games can be downloaded and played on new hardware (legally) does Capcom still hold the rights to make great D&D games? If so I demand more!
There should be a manga and an anime
"TEN? What's that?"
Well, son, in the mid to late 90s, if you weren't dialing up a friend's PC, you needed a third party service to arrange multiplayer matchmaking. There was TEN, WON, MPlayer, and GameSpy.
LOL! I had a cat that loved to sit on my shoulders, too! Actually, two cats. Loved to see that.
Fuck yeah, i cannot wait for some Darksun content. It's such a brilliant setting, and I'm curious to see what you'll be covering from it.
Fun fact about the gold box games, a group of absolute legends went out and got their hands on all of the official modules released for D&D at the time that the goldbox games were being sold and used the engine to set up every one of the modules to be playable in the goldbox engine. They are super fun if you like the goldbox games.
Ahh, a fresh Willy Vid to get me through my work day, always a treat. On the NWN topic... We didn't complain about the hourly charge for Neverwinter Nights back in the day for two reasons: one of those is that AOL and other online services were charging for their base service *by the minute* until they went to that flat rate in 1996 so the hourly charge seemed tame in comparison.
when the cat requires pats you provide pats. thats the rules.
I remember Heroes of Neverwinter, it had some nice user made dungeons. Can't believe that was over a decade ago now.
Tiny Adventures was so much fun.. I was so pissed when they removed the game
oof
There were predecessors to MMORPGs although they were primitive in comparison. Bulletin board systems had multiplayer door games. There were also MUDs, multi-user dungeons, some of which were based on tabletop rulesets. Nothing officially licensed as far as I can remember.
I see your familiar (the cat) decided to join the process as well!
D&D ceased to Exist when it was purchased by NotC. Everything produced after 2E is not Dungeons & Dragons, it is Dumb & Dumber.
Wow, I'd completely forgotten Tiny Adventures. Funny. I don't remember much about it aside from having played it, finding it OK, and being frustrated about not being able to customize your character initially.
The Dark Sun games are fun, and the world was really neat. The second game was a buggy mess, but the first one was solid. It's a shame DSO can't get running. Thanks for the vid! I look forward to your DS reviews.
Awesome vid. Love the cat. Have a look at some D&D boardgames!
I'm glad I found this channel this video was really entertaining.
I worked at POGO for 10 years! Never knew about that game. What a trip.
AOL Neverwinter Nights was awesome. I don't recall having to pay but maybe I am just forgetting.
I've played Heroes of Neverwinter, pretty fun actually. I managed to amass enough people on my friends list to have a pretty badass party, loved it.
0:30 Ross from the Accursed Farms channel has gone on quite a few fantastic rants regarding this issue.
Great video and good luck reviewing dark sun´s games!
Speaking of Stormfront Studios - they did a few D&D games, including a rather interesting D&D RTS/Kingdom Builder called Stronghold as well as 2004's Demon Stone.
Quivering with anticipation at the thought of some Dark Sun reviews! 😎
Omg! I completely forgot about Tiny Adventures!
Dopamine kick lets goooooooooo! jokes aside i didnt know Dark sun was a mmo before its stand alone
I very much wanted to play Crimson Sands, but it had recently shut down when I finally discovered it. Imagine my gamer rage.
another banger and even with a sassy cat!
I know you mainly cover TTRPG related video games, so there are some I would recommend as they are mostly obscure and if you can find a copy and play it it will be nice. The Realms of Arkania trilogy, Drakensang: The Dark Eye and Drakensang: The River of Time. All of the games are based on the most popular TTRPG in Germany The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge). I've personally played only Drakensang: The River of Time some years ago as it was the newest one (I've heard that it has problems running on Windows 10/11 though) but for me it was up there with Newerwinter Knights 2 in terms of gameplay and less buggy and more polished overall to boot.
I believe it was Dark Sun Shattered Lands where I was attempting a 100% world exploration that I found Larry, Darryl and his other brother Darryl, awesome Newhart reference... I think there was a Dr. Who reference as well but not 100% sure. Spelljammer was fun as well but kind of glitchy. Cheers :)
Aww yea. I was logged into DarkSun Online on one of several max level alts when it went down forever. Would love the chance to walk through it again.
Nice Video! It's well presented, and you have a pleasant voice!
Hell yeah lets get some Darksun videos!
"Stormfront Software - Do not google that"
- I'm curious as to why, but I've learned from my time on the internet, that if someone tells you to not google something, you actually shouldn't. So... Maybe one day I'll learn what it was about :P
Stormfront is also the name of a nutbasket of nutty Internut Nutzis.
can't wait for the Dark Sun videos!
I'd love you to go over Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes. as well as D&D Tactics, oh and Sword Coast Legends! There is a lot of games out there
I played both Tiny Adventures and Heroes of Neverwinter back then. They were all right, but I think I'd moved on from each before they went down so I missed the drama around their vanishing. I'd second the virtual dice game Sword Coast Adventures that was a temporary tie-in with the Neverwinter MMO.
It's also worth noting that even though it's still live, a lot of the Neverwinter MMO is also lost to time, as the current build of the game deleted not just systems but entire zones in the process of performing a stat squish and trying to make it better for onboarding new meat- I mean, new players. If I recall they deleted the entire floating sky pirate island and one of the two corrupted canyon zones. They also got rid of the entirety of the player-made content, which...was SUBSTANTIAL.
Tiny adventures was awesome, I played that on FB and the Vikings one on myspace, vikings was something in between tiny adventures and mafia wars.
If Dark Sun would have just turned it up to eleven, they would have been fine and we would still be playing it today.
Came for the commentary, stayed for the kitty.
I love the dark sun setting. I would love to see more things making use of it. But Wotc finds it "problematic" as the kids say nowadays.
That's kind of why I love it. All those problems.
'Problematic' that a 'fantasy' world not conform to modernity.
Which is so ludicrous because it's all about fighting against the bs reigning over the world and it's various societies, or at least carving out some alternative to it. Gods *_forbid_* we be aware of problems and want to solve them, and fight against brutal ruthless injustices.
At the same time WotC has hired devs on the cheap and undercut their own staff for so long that there's absolutely no way they wouldn't ruin it. They had so much to play with and so little "problematic" to work around with Spelljammer and still dropped that ball in just gobsmackingly braindead ways. So there's absolutely zero chance they could do it well even if they didn't see the setting as "problematic"
I really loved the artwork also!
Frankly we should consider that a blessing.
Maybe the real lost D&D games were the friends we made along the way.
Dark Sun isn't defunct. It lives on in our hearts.
Dude, keep the cat, im over here roflmao at it batting your arm
I played Neverwinter Nights on AOL but I don't remember it costing extra money other than the AOL subscription.
"Do not google that!"
I googled it, I don't know what I'm supposed to be seeing..
Stormfront = Nazis
You don’t know what “stormfront” is?
Oh, my sweet summer child.
It's a neo-nazi online forum and community.
Stormfront is tge name of a highly racist online forum created by a genuine neo-nazi back in the 1990s its a hub of a untold amount of bigotry and hatred so I would stay away from it as much as you can with all your might.