Well, you've got more than enough to make multiple posts worth of replies to, but let's start with this.
I've certainly glad to see such an interest in the game even when the fervor is high. I'll give some history, but I'm sure my memory is hazy in many places and nostalgia and fiction may intermix. But I do know that everything was done organically and on the whim. If the idea seemed to work, we shoe horned it in.
I again disagree here. Where you see influence from D&D, I see influence from several major computer games which predate A&A. Doom, obviously and indisputably for the engine and perhaps more, among them, probably Heretic and Hexen as well, and possibly, though much less likely, Strife. But that's just for starters.
The answer comes mostly in the form of the timeline (A&A was started October of 1994, released end of 1996). Yes, our biggest influence was D&D. Advanced and 2nd edition D&D to be precise (there was no 3rd edition version then, it came out in 2000). All of us had been Dungeon Masters in our pass and knew the game inside and out.
That magic system, where do you suppose that came from? Runes used thusly are certainly not D&D. Another game, Arx Fatalis, uses a similar system later on, but it got them from what I strongly suspect is the exact same place A&A got the rune system and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian_Abyss
It's a huge classic and I'm fairly certain more than just the rune system was heavily influenced by it.
We had two sources. Newly popular at the time was Magic the Gathering. MtG has 5 casting runes. Our second sources was ... the keyboard's numpad. The idea of casting spells using the numpad drew us quickly. We envisioned players being 'mages of the numpad' casting several spells in rapid succession, so we worked up 9 runes representing different base concepts. Michael and Janus did that the most, so I'm not sure if they had strong influences or not. Ultima Underworld was probably on our radar, but I can't say if it was a direct influence or not (it was not for me).
The UI, for instance, is in large part identical. The food system bears a strong resemblance.
Identical? I will disagree, but for a simple reason -- at 320x200 there were not many different layouts that worked well (and we tried). And red for health, blue for potions was done a zillion ways usually leading to a potion or orb. At one point, we even had a bookshelf at the bottom and beating heart. It worked, but was blah.
Then we have the colorswapped items of increasing power by material. A&A isn't the first game to do that, and I suspect the system was most influenced by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls:_Arena
Again, as tricks go, 256 colors and 4 Megs of memory didn't give you many options. We needed a way to have multiple creatures and the colorization technique was used. Our first target for colorization was one of our first creatures -- the Gargoyle (aka Biff). But the colorization was only so so. We did have good luck colorizing gray items and that made weapon quickly changed. We then looked at our palette and found we had about 6 or colors. This lead to us trying to find names for our fancy new color weapon and armors. Red was easy -- pyranium and did or resisted fire. Dark/black - Obisian. Greenish? Mithril? etc. Of course, we drew on D&D tropes. Mithril and Adamantine came directly from there -- renaming if we thought there was a copyright issue (or a typo).
Both these games are major classics as first-person 3D RPGs go, and I can't imagine how you don't see the potential depth of influence unless you've somehow never played them. Even Daggerfall, which came out not too long before A&A was released, probably had some influence.
Daggerfall came out before we released but was one of the most buggy releases of all time. I actually found the game annoying -- all that open space and no direction! (Yeah, I know, we've come a long way.) In short, we were too far along to let Daggerfall be an influence.
Other influences are more murky (though a lot of 2D RPGs of the time do some things very similarly to how AA does - in turn making it hard to finger specific ones among the crowd.) Of course, ultimately, only the authors can say exactly what they were influenced by, but really, my impression is strongly that D&D's influence is mostly just through its own influence on the titles above, which then took the concepts and molded them to fit computers better and otherwise innovated on them.
Yep. I should also point out that the number of games people had access to back then (well the mainstream ones) was much more limited/selective.
And as far as the Rust Monster... correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think they ever had ranged attacks. I see fairly little resemblance between a Rust Monster and a Sorcerer of the Star - that they threaten equipment is about it. Likewise, Paladins of A&A have little in common with classic D&D paladins - no lay on hands, no detect evil, just the basic concept of being a hybrid cleric which has been revised so aggressively by computer RPGs. D&D generally hasn't even had an Archer main class, and the closest thing, Rangers, have a lot to them that A&A seemingly makes no effort to copy. D&D generally did not do regen anywhere near how A&A does, and hp are clearly not rolled anything like D&D hitdice.
Correct, Rust Monsters don't shoot. Sure. Right. But we were making an arcade game more in line with Doom, so we were looking for the more arcady feel.
Acid was Janus' brain child. I had misgiving about it, but was out voted. Why? It felt like something you would encounter in D&D. It made us laugh (that laugh you get when you're a DM and the player rolls a 1). We've had years since to refine our game play mechanics and debate the pros and cons of losing items. But back then, it was arcade. We were still influenced more by pumping quarters into machines than MMO's were you spend years on a single character. Everything was temporary.
The coinage system may have come from D&D, but it may very well have done so indirectly, as the 5-coin thing has no basis in D&D that I'm aware of. Could you perhaps cite a specific edition or set of editions of D&D you believe A&A was most influenced by, and the mechanics you believe influenced? This is no gold box game, nor is it anywhere near as close to D&D as classic, fully-D&D-influenced games such as Neverwinter Nights, are.
Advanced/2nd edition D&D. It had copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum. We just changed the ratios (and nobody liked electrum). Base 10 makes math easy.
I see far more resemblance between A&A and UUW1+2/TES1+2 than between A&A and any D&D edition or even strongly D&D-based CRPG.
You could say Pool of Radiance and the gold box games had some influence, but only because they were D&D.
Because A&A is fundamentally based on the Doom engine's map format and even seems to have began life as a Doom TC (see: texture naming,) we can guess development started no sooner than around 1994, which places both UUW1+2 as firmly predating it and TES1 coming out early in its development if not before. TES2 only predates the release by about a year, but it does still firmly predate it.
Doom was cool. I was asked if I could create the same engine without paying the $250,000 that licensing it would cost. I was able to do that, BUT I we didn't want to make tools when there were already existing tools. We found DeeP. It did what we needed and did the subsector calculations already (saving me time from doing it and getting it right). We, yes, stole the file format and ran with it. Because the editor was a bit limited, we at first used the same texture names, but replaced it with our own. I created another tool called MEdit (short of, yes, Map Edit) that did the customizations we needed (some object placement, textures, .LIT generation, etc.). It was a fairly crappy DOS tool, but worked (yes, we placed all textures without seeing them).
That said, I will certainly agree there's no apparent influence from Diablo, which didn't even come out until about the same time. Diablo is a major source of that hotkeyed potion-guzzling slaughterfest loot pinata gameplay you mentioned, and it's quite a different beastie in general, not even being first-person, and taking CRPGs in an entirely different direction from where the UUWs and early TES games did. There are multiple brands of CRPG, and Diablo is definitely not a good point of comparison here, it's practically a different genre despite being a CRPG. One could say it's far more of an ACRPG-lite. It's no A&A, it's no UUW, and it's no nethack either.
Nope. Diablo was hinted at (remember seeing pictures in PC Gamer), but it came out after A&A released (right on the heels). Diablo was a thrill to play, but it worked so differently. Sidetrack: I still argue with people that I think Diablo I was a more enjoyable game than Diablo II. Why? When you go up in levels in Diablo I, you feel more powerful. I've gotten so tired of games today where you level and get the next +0.1% on your power over a continuous sliding scale of boring. I would rather play a game with 10 character levels than 100 and where each level gives you something that feels like a super power. But games like that only take 20 hours to play, not 2000. When A&A players talk about reaching level 30, I always think, "Why bother? The game is done. All powers (for that class) was yours at level 20." Anywho, End Sidetrack.
Which, honestly, Nethack actually probably has some similarity to elements of A&A you like, though I'm unsure if there's actually any influence there. Nethack is practically its own genre (Roguelike,) as well. One thing is certain: Nethack likes to punish players hard and at relative random if they don't immediately adapt to new information, and many people won't touch it for exactly that reason.
Yes. Nethack was a strong influence. Specifically, the whole identify items come from the Roguelikes. If we could have figured out how to make scrolls with scrambled text names in a network world, we would have done it. We liked the mystery of not knowing and experimenting with potions to figure them out. It is a certain risk/reward. That's why there was a potion of fire and a potion of poison to hurt you.
I would take issue with the room-by-room assessment statement relative to Q4, because quite simply, virtually every room is a bad deal if you can't largely nullify the acid by being immune or not taking any hits, because the entire first 2+ maps are chock-full of Sorcerers of the Star in virtually every single room, often in multiples and situations where they are extra hard to avoid. Yes, there's one good but not exactly essential rune there, and it's completely worthless if you're not a Priest caster; you can't even sell it to recoup costs. The armor's largely trash, with the best leather coming before it, the best chain not showing up until 5-6, and the best plate being in 7 with 6 also having a very good set. Weapons, also underwhelming as I recall. And other items... well, this is exactly where that silly amulet of nourishment that's useless by the time you get it is, for example. Even if it were swapped for the strength amulet, I would still consider the loot quality of dubious value compared to the risk losing what you already hopefully have.
If I said our simple minds clearly said, "Well, don't get hit (often)," that is generally our answer. But I'll go back to my original answer. We thought very little about long time ownership of items. So you loss that item? Okay, go get another one! There were plenty of cool items to play with.
Exp? The best exp is generally beating on something with a weapon it's immune to. Monster generators are small fry, even compared to just slaughterfest-running quests you can handle quickly. You don't get any extra exp for kills in A&A as I recall, the exp is entirely based on how much damage you're doing. Whacking all the easy enemies in Q1 at rapid pace (especially, if you're already one-shotting them, with a weapon that hits very hard in one hit, such as a longsword or axe) is probably more exp and money from all the stuff you pick up along the way than trying to farm a monster generator later on. This interestingly somewhat balances out against daggers probably giving you less exp due to less roundoff, but making it easier to survive due to action-breaking monsters more.
Janus did his best to make the XP based on damage system work. There were some clear cases where it didn't quite work that we never went back to fix. The reason we did it this way was we wanted something that worked in multiplayer scenario. We hated the idea of "he who kills the critter gets the XP" and also hated the "Share equally among X players", so we went with a system where the XP was directly associated to damage. And, on the surface, it looked like it worked well. It was what led to weapon speed and few other tweaks.
And as for gold, yeah, basically the same problem. There were some other weird cases where we were directed to use everything that was built and find a place for all the items (kind of "You better use it! We paid for it!" reverse logic). And balancing the game was a constant job of Janus.
I'm quite curious what Lysle and anyone else from the original devteam might have to say about influence and intent in A&A. I've always wondered if the script system is influenced by Hexen ACS, because there's a very strong similarity, which helped me reverse-engineer it before source was out.
Script system was totally my own. I know it sounds hard to believe it wasn't from Hexen, but when I was in college, for fun, I would write various language parser programs for languages of my own design. I knew the amount of work to make something like that for A&A, but didn't want to spend the time on it making a full language, so I made the simplest one I could make -- and one that worked in a semi-multitasking way. I wrote a little compiler (available here:
https://github.com/ExiguusEntertainment/AAScriptCompiler ) that pumped out a very simple byte code. In our original designs, maps were to be downloaded from the server, so I needed it to be as small as possible. Honestly, even today, I have not even looked at what Hexen did for their scripting system. Well, no, I think I scanned over it once and said, "oh, I see the parallels," but didn't look deeper at the byte code.
Does that help?
Oh, and to respond to peewee's comments about "risk/reward, skipping rooms, etc." Yes, very much so. Why? Unlike many games today, we wanted a game where only certain areas could be done by certain classes. And each class could get rewards in different ways.
In some ways, the game went over budget and over time because we were stuck with a problem of how to get all these different classes to be effective on different maps and make each class that a player choose to be effective. Granted, some classes suffered, so we focused on our favorites.
