Way back at PAX East I got to talking with some people over dinner Saturday and one of the topics that came up was my Dragon Age II Lineage post I did the year before and the research that went into it. I described what I did and that I ended up making a chart. In looking through my collection of business cards from that weekend I believe it was Scott Macmillan that asked to see that chart if he could. Well, I found it recently after the recent home renovation in a pile of papers and roleplaying books. It’s rough and there is research behind all the arrows though I can only remember about half of it now. Of course, it is nowhere near complete. The purpose of the chart was to find the lineage of just Dragon Age II anything else in there is extra. Plus, I was running out of space. Also, please excuse my chicken scratch. Click on the images for full view.
Update: This has gotten some discussion on twitter. More than anything else I’ve written recently. This is one response from Patrick Holleman in picture form. And Stephen Winson spent all day to go to the trouble of making the chart much more readable and expanded a number of the empty portions on the left and right sides. Again, click to see the whole thing. You can download the PDF here.
Update 2: Apparently, he wasn’t done and still isn’t. I’m not going to post the updated version, which has gone far beyond RPGs into every corner of the video game space, because it’s a long process to get the image that will soon be out of date as Stephen Winson continues to work on the chart. Here’s the latest one.
Update 3: He’s still updating it and it is almost at a singularity all the criss crossing. Last night he started on the Adventure games, something I happen to know a bit of history about and saw a glaring error, or rather an unclear one with Grim Fandango pointing to Monkey Island. It was supposed to be the new Telltale series, but it wasn’t clear. So, I did some quick referencing of back catalogs and put together a quick and dirty chart which is mostly the history of Sierra and LucasArts. The very early stuff I’m a little iffy on, mainly because I wasn’t born yet, but the rest is pretty solid. Also, the names are super long so less overall titles ended up on the chart than my RPG one and there is a list at the top of games I couldn’t figure out where they would go.
Click on it to see the larger version. Also, here is the full updated chart with my new notes added in.
Tags: Adventure, cRPG, History, RPG
This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2012 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Recent Posts, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
The RPGCodex, the most noble of forums, has deigned to give its informed opinion on your attempt at videogame phylogenetics: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rpg-lineage-chart.74635/
Yeah, fuck you too. If you believe that too harsh, check the definitions of words before you use them.
I looked through the thread and amazed at the lack of reading comprehension among the posters. It wasn’t supposed to be comprehensive or definitive or whatever I got accused of, it was a visual outline for a post I was writing. The further away it got from the main thread, the less I gave a shit. As for Stephen’s chart, he’s doing it to pass the time. He would love you to debate individual things with him as it is still a work in progress.
But honestly, I don’t see any valuable discussion in that thread, but I will answer the few of the valid points brought up.
Might and Magic – I made multiple copies because they got super crowded, would smudge and I’d have to reorgnize them. I can only assume I made a mistake with the line. I have no idea why it’s pointing from DnD and not Wizardry.
Panescape: Torment – It was developed at the same time as Baldur’s Gate II, which spent it’s early development time in upgrading the engine to a new standard. Panescape used this new engine and managed to release first because it didn’t have to spend the man hours on it.
Arena – Comes from Wizardry because lead developer said so in an interview among other games.
Finally, since when did “know a bit about” mean “full and comprehensive knowledge and understanding on a topic?” To answer your question, I ran out of fucking space on the page if you didn’t notice. I said it was down and dirty, about 10-15 minutes of time, also I blatantly admitted that I knew only really knew Sierra and LucasArts. Not really a big gocha.