When a trio of goblins are rushing at you with swords drawn, you get a real sense of impending danger that most RPGs can’t convey. The combat is fairly rote for first person dungeon crawlers (just attack, attack, attack), but the motion captured animations give the enemies a unique sense of momentum and threat. Ever spell represents a level of personal investment on the player’s part. The spells in Stonekeep are much more modular and dynamic, meaning players could tailor them to specific battles or situations, and they also represented a hard won reward for exploration and discovery. The ability to customize spells and alter their properties according to the player’s whims or needs is an evolutionary step beyond the standard magic systems in other RPGs of that era, which largely leaned into the Dungeons and Dragons template of pre-defined spells with very specific, limited effects. While at its core it’s a fairly traditional first-person dungeon crawler, it does feel more modernized, and introduces elements like a magic system that requires you to collect runes and engrave them onto wands to cast spells. It uses games like Eye of the Beholder as a template, being utilizing real-time combat, though with full screen visuals and (relatively) smooth scrolling movement animations. It is a little simplistic in that regard – there’s no character customization in the beginning, and technically only one playable character, though NPC companions do join from time to time.īut its ambition isn’t limited to graphics, its entire design stretched the confines of standard RPGs of that era in some very novel ways. At this time, the Wizardy and Might and Magic series were falling out of favor with all but the most devoted gamers, and Stonekeep tries to distill the classic elements into a package that would take advantage of the CD-ROM and wow them visually, without becoming too complicated. It takes risks in ways games today rarely do, spending tremendous amounts of money to create lavish motion captured graphics and FMV only to completely scrap huge portions of them for something new (and also untested). The game itself reflects the spirit of that time as well, when many of the systems and mechanics we take for granted in games today were first being introduced and refined.
The pace at which hardware was iterating and improving meant that it was often a struggle for developers to keep, a pitfall that Stonekeep was hamstrung by, stretching an initial development timeline of nine months to over five years. It was a time of remarkable ambition matched by the breakneck speed of technological developments. Stonekeep is in many ways a perfect encapsulation of the PC gaming scene of the mid-90s.
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