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Spells Legal Stuff Credits Introduction This is an in-depth guide to of Betrayal at Krondor. This guide deals with the aspect of spells. This guide deals with the aspect of spells.
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Please help us forget fundraising and get back to Abandonia. Betrayal at Krondor is a fantasy adventure/role-playing game that takes place in the Midkemia world of the books by Raymond E. In fact, Feist was the leading director in the creation of the game. It came out with an amazing story, which will pull you deeper and deeper into the game as you progress.When you start, you will see that Gorath, the elf-like Moredhel, and one of the leading persons in the game's story have been attacked by an assassin. Accompanied by Owyn (young scholar magician) and Locklear (noble warrior escorting Gorath), you will have to journey to the royal city of Krondor.On your way you have to fight with the assassins who are constantly trying to kill you, and you meet different kinds of people, either on the roads or in the houses at the villages or towns. You can also explore the large world of the game. In the first chapter, there's no real need to go too far off the main goal - but you do have the freedom to go almost anywhere you want to.There are many side-quests available, many of which continue from chapter to chapter.
Often they can be solved only in the following chapters.The abilities of the characters are not very impressive at the beginning, but as the game progresses, they become better with every action you perform. For example, successful hits or defensive actions in the battle will increase melee accuracy, crossbow accuracy, defense ability, strength and health points. Successfully picking locks will increase the lockpick ability, but even an unsuccessful attempt will increase it, albeit more slowly.As the game continues, the story becomes larger and deeper with every chapter.
It involves many aspects of the original books, such as the dreaded Valheru, the evil dragon riders who can be compared to the Atlanteans, the thieves' guild and the Upright Man who is the guild's leader. You'll even have the famous Jimmy the Hand, called James, joining you in some chapters. Which brings me to the next point of the game - you won't always be having the same party members along the way. They come and go as the story directs them to other tasks.
However, you can meet them again in later chapters, still carrying all their equipment.The combat system is fairly easy to understand, but it involves strategy at times. You can, for example, cast a spell that blinds the dangerous opponent's mage and attack the warriors in the meantime, while summoning creatures that will aid you in the next battle round.The music in the game is really good, fitting the situations perfectly. Even the sounds are nicely done, although there aren't that many of them.The weakest point of the game is the outdoor graphics, which look a little primitive and not very detailed.
But that doesn't matter much, as the rest of the game is quite fun, so you'll quickly get used to them and even think they're quite good after a while.All in all, this game really deserves its evaluation as the 'Best Fantasy Role-Playing & Adventure Game of 1993' so be sure to try it out!
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the. These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. The paradigm shift this entailed was such that for many players these games ceased to be games at all in the zero-sum sense. When a group came together to play Squad Leader or, there hung over the plebeian kitchen or basement in which they played a shared vision of the beaches of Normandy or the dungeons of Greyhawk. The games became vehicles for exploring the vagaries of history or the limits of the imagination — vehicles, in other words, for living out shared stories.In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that some of the stories generated in this way would make their way out of the gaming sessions which had spawned them and find a home in more traditional, linear forms of media. And, indeed, just such things were happening by the 1980s, as the first novels born from games arrived.Needless to say, basing your book on a game you’ve played isn’t much of a path to literary respectability.
But for a certain kind of plot-focused genre novel — the kind focusing strictly on what people do rather than why they do it — prototyping the whole thing as a game makes a degree of sense. It can keep you honest by forcing your story to conform to a simulated reality that transcends the mere expediency of what might be cool and exciting to write into the next scene.
By pushing against authorial fiat and the deus ex machina, it can give the whole work an internal coherency — an honesty, one might even say — that’s too often missing from novels of this stripe.The most widely publicized early example of the phenomenon was undoubtedly the one which involved a humble insurance salesman named Tom Clancy, who came out of nowhere with a techno-thriller novel called The Hunt for Red October in 1984. FeistBut one of their number named Raymond E. Feist had bigger ambitions. He wrote a novel based on some of the group’s exploits in Midkemia. Calling it simply Magician, he got it published through Doubleday in 1982 as the first volume of The Riftwar Saga. It sold very well, and he’s been writing Midkemia novels ever since.Unlike the later cases of Tom Clancy and Dragonlance, Magician wasn’t widely publicized or advertised as being the product of a game.
It was seen instead as merely the latest entry in an exploding branch of genre fiction: lengthy high-fantasy series inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien, often to the point of one-to-one correspondences between characters and plot events, but written in a manner more immediately accessible to the average Middle American reader, with more action, more narrative thrust, less elevated diction, and markedly less digressive songs and poetry. Dragonlance, of course, is an example of the same breed.I must admit that I’ve personally read only the first book of Feist’s series, and not even to completion at that. This sort of derivative high fantasy doesn’t do much for me as a rule, so I’m not the best person to judge Feist’s output under any circumstances. Anything positive I do say about it runs the risk of damning with faint praise.To wit: my wife and I used the book as our light bedtime reading, and we made it about two-thirds of the way through before terminal ennui set in and we decided we’d had enough. If that seems like less than a ringing endorsement, know that it’s farther than I generally get with most fantasy novels, including ones with considerably more literary credibility.
I thus feel comfortable in saying that at least the early Raymond E. Feist novels are well-crafted examples of their breed, if you happen to like that sort of thing. (I do understand from others that the quality of his work, and particularly of his plotting, began to decline after his first handful of Midkemia novels. Perhaps because he was no longer basing them on his gaming experiences?)The world of Midkemia is most interesting for our purposes, however, for the computer game it spawned. Yes, a series of novels based on a game got turned back into a very different sort of game.
And then, just for good measure, that game got turned into another novel. It’s a crazy old transmedia world.The more direct origin of Betrayal at Krondor, the game in question, can be traced back to June of 1991 and a chance meeting between John Cutter and Jeff Tunnell at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show. Both names may be familiar to regular readers of these histories. John CutterCutter had spent several years with, helping to craft many of their, which blended strong narrative elements with play styles that were unorthodox in story-heavy computer games at the time. In late 1990, with Cinemaware in the process of, he and several colleagues had jumped ship to New World Computing, best known for their Might & Magic series of CRPGs. But he was trapped in a purely administrative role there, without the freedom to create which he had enjoyed at Cinemaware, and was already feeling dissatisfied by the time he met Tunnell at that Summer CES.
Jeff TunnellTunnell, for his part, was the founder of the studio known as Dynamix, now a. They were best known for their 3D graphics technology and the line of vehicular simulators it enabled, but they had fingers in several other pies as well, from to a burgeoning interest in.Recognizing talent when he saw it, Tunnell asked Cutter to leave Southern California, the home of the erstwhile Cinemaware and the current New World, and come to Eugene, Oregon, the home of Dynamix.
Not only would he be able to have a creative role there once again, Tunnell promised, but he would be allowed to make whatever game he wanted to. Cutter jumped at the chance.Once in Eugene, however, he struggled to identify just the right project. His first instinct was to make a point-and-click adventure game in the Sierra mold, but Tunnell, having made three of them in the last couple of years to less than satisfying effect, was feeling burned out on the genre and its limitations, and gently steered him away from it. (Absolute creative freedom, Cutter was learning, is seldom really absolute.)At last, Tunnell came to Cutter with an idea of his own.
He’d been reading a very popular series of fantasy novels by this fellow named Raymond E. Feist, and he thought they’d make a fine CRPG. Dynamix had never dabbled in the genre before, but when had that ever stopped them from trying something new?
He suggested that Cutter give the first few of the books a read. If it turned out that he liked them as well and agreed that they’d make a good game, well, perhaps he should ring Feist up and have a chat about just that possibility.Glad to finally have a clear sense of direction, Cutter did the one thing and then did the other. Feist was very busy, but was himself a long-time computer gamer, having sat down in front of his first Apple II some twelve or thirteen years before.
He liked the idea of seeing Midkemia come to life on a computer screen. Although he didn’t have much time for working personally on such a project, he told his agent to make the deal happen if at all possible.
So, a contract was signed that gave Dynamix the right to make Midkemia games until January 1, 1995, with Feist given the right of final approval or rejection of each title prior to its release. By one account at least, it was the most expensive literary license yet granted to a game developer, a sign of Feist’s ongoing popularity among readers of fantasy literature.Another, slightly less welcome sign of same followed immediately after: upon being asked whether he was interested in authoring the game himself, Feist said that his time was money, so he’d need to be paid something beyond the terms of the licensing agreement itself — and, he noted flatly, “you couldn’t afford me.” This posed a dilemma. Cutter believed himself to be a better designer of game systems than a writer, and thus certainly wasn’t going to take on the job personally. Casting about for a likely candidate, his thoughts turned to one Neal Hallford, an enthusiastic young fellow with a way with words whom he’d befriended back at New World Computing. Neal HallfordA fresh-out-of-university Hallford had joined New World in the role of writer some months before Cutter himself had arrived. His first assignment there had been to make sense of the poorly translated English text of, a project New World had chosen to outsource to a Japanese developer, with underwhelming results all the way around.
After that truly thankless task, he’d worked for a while on before playing a pivotal role on, an ambitious science-fiction CRPG that had tried to do just a little bit too much for its own good. He was just finishing that project when his old friend John Cutter called.Like Cutter before him, Hallford found Dynamix’s offer difficult to refuse. Eugene struck him as idyllic by contrast with the crowded, smoggy streets of Los Angeles; meanwhile Dynamix’s offices enjoyed the well-deserved reputation of being just about the most stylish and comfortable in the entire industry, vastly outdistancing even the parent company of Sierra in that respect. Certainly they compared favorably with the chaotic jumble of tightly packed cubicles that was the domain of New World. Thus on Halloween Day, 1991, Hallford shook hands with his old colleagues there for the last time and hopped into his Geo Metro for the drive north.Upon Hallford’s arrival in Eugene, Cutter pulled him into his office and kept him there for a week, while the two hashed out exactly what game they wanted to make and wrote the outline of a script.
Hallford still remembers that week of frenzied creativity as “one of the best weeks of my life.” These two friends, different in talents and personality but unified in their vision for the game, would do the vast majority of the creative heavy lifting that would go into it. Broadly stated, Cutter would be the systems guy while Hallford would be the story guy, yet their visions would prove so simpatico that they’d seldom disagree on much of anything at all.Jeff Tunnell had initially fallen in love with a Midkemia novel called Silverthorn, and the original plan he’d pitched to Cutter had been to make the game a fairly straightforward adaptation of that book’s plot. But such a thing is inherently problematic, for reasons I’ve had ample cause to discuss in. Players who buy the game because they read and liked the novel — who are, after all, the whole reason for making a licensed game at all from a business perspective — won’t be excited about stepping through a plot they already know. At the same time, it’s all too easy from the design side to make a game where victory hinges on taking all of the same idiosyncratic, possibly irrational actions as the protagonists of the novel. And so you end up with a game that bores one group of players to tears, even as it frustrates another group who don’t happen to know what Character A needs to do in Situation B in order to replicate the novel’s story.The biggest appeal of the Midkemia novels, Hallford believed, was indeed the world itself, with its detailed culture and geography and its cast of dozens of well-established characters.
It would be better, he thought, to set a brand new story there, one that would let Feist’s many fans meet up with old friends in familiar locales, but that wouldn’t force them to step by rote through a plot they already knew. During the crash course on Midkemia which he’d given himself in the few weeks before starting at Dynamix — like Cutter, he’d come to Feist fandom cold — Hallford had identified a twenty-year “hole” in the chronology where he and Cutter could set a new story: just after A Darkness at Sethanon, the concluding volume in the original Riftwar Cycle that had started the ball rolling. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Feist was willing to entrust this young, unproven writer with creating something really new in his world. Betrayal at Krondor was off and running.Hallford may have come to Midkemia late, but his dogged determination to capture the world exactly as it existed in the novels would come to a large degree to define the project. He calls himself a “born fanboy” by nature.
Thus, even though he wasn’t quite of Feist’s hardcore fandom, he had enormous empathy for them. He points back to an experience from his youth: when, as a dedicated Star Trek fan, he started to read the paperback novels based on the television series which Pocket Books published in the 1980s. I read them as well, and can remember that some of them were surprisingly good as novels, at least according to my adolescent sensibilities, while also managing to capture the spirit of the series I saw on television. Others, however not so much. Hallford points to one disillusioning book in particular, which constantly referred to phasers as “ray guns.” It inculcated in him a sense that any writer who works in a beloved universe owes it to the fans of said universe — even if he’s not really one of them — to be as true to it as is humanly possible.So, Hallford wrote Betrayal at Krondor with Feist’s fans constantly in mind. He immersed himself in Feist’s works to the point of that he was almost able to become the novelist. The prose he crafted, vivid and effective within its domain, really is virtually indistinguishable from that of its inspiration, whose own involvement was limited to an early in-person meeting and regular phone conversations thereafter.
Yet the latter became more rather than less frequent as the project wore on; Feist found his enthusiasm for the game increasing in tandem with his surprise at how earnestly Hallford tried to capture his novels and the extent to which he was managing to succeed with only the most limited coaching. The fan verdict would prove even more telling. To this day, many of them believe that it was Feist himself who scripted Betrayal at Krondor.But Betrayal of Krondor is notable for more than Neal Hallford’s dedicated fan service.
It’s filled to bursting with genuinely original ideas, many of which flew in the face of contemporary fashions in games. Not all of the ideas work — some of them rather pull against one another — but the game’s boldness makes it a bracing study in design.Following the lead of GUI advocates working with other sorts of software, game designers in the early 1990s were increasingly embracing the gospel of the “mode-less” interface: a single master screen on which everything takes place, as opposed to different displays and interfaces for different play states. (For an excellent example of how a mode-less interface could be implemented in the context of a CRPG, see Origin Systems’s.) Cutter and Hallford, however, pitched this gospel straight into the trash can without a second thought.
Betrayal at Krondor has a separate mode for everything.The closest thing it has to a “home” screen must be the first-person exploration view, which uses 3D graphics technology poached from Dynamix’s flight simulators. But then, you can and probably often will move around from an overhead map view as well.
When interesting encounters happen, the screen is given over to text with clickable menus, or to storybook-style illustrated dialog scenes. When you get in a fight, that’s also displayed on a screen of its own; combat is a turn-based affair played on a grid that ends up vaguely resembling the games by Interplay. (Thankfully, it’s also tactically interesting and satisfying.) And then when you come upon a locked chest, you’re dumped into yet another new mode, where you have to work out a word puzzle in order to open it, because why not? All of these modes are accompanied by different styles of graphics: 3D graphics on the main exploration screen, a no-frills Rogue-like display for the overhead movement view, pixel art with the story scenes, digitized real-world actors with the dialog scenes, the sprite-based isometric view that accompanies combat, etc. A puzzle chest. The answer to this one, for the record, is “die.” Later riddles get much more complicated, but the mechanics of the puzzles ingeniously prevent them from ever becoming completely insoluble.
Many a player has had a significant other who couldn’t care less about the rest of the game, but loves these puzzle chestsThis mishmash of approaches can make the game feel like a throwback to the 1980s, when genres and their established sets of best practices were not yet set in stone, and when many games that may strike us as rather odd mashups today were being produced. We can certainly see John Cutter’s roots in Cinemaware here; that company made a career out of ignoring the rules of ludic genre in favor of whatever systems best conveyed the fictional genre they were attempting to capture. By all rights, Betrayal at Krondor ought not to work, as so many of Cinemaware’s games tended not quite to work. All of these different modes and play styles — the puzzle chests in particular seem beamed in from a different game entirely — ought to add up to a hopelessly confusing muddle.
Somehow, though, it does work; Betrayal at Krondor actually isn’t terribly hard to come to grips with initially, and navigating its many modes soon becomes second nature.One reason for this is doubtless also the reason for much else that’s good about the game: its unusually extended testing period. When development was reaching what everyone thought to be its final stages, Dynamix sent the game to outside testers for what was expected to be a three-month evaluation period. Even this much usability testing would have been more than most studios were doing at this time. But the project, as so many game-development projects tend to do, ran way longer than expected, and three months turned into nine months of constant player feedback.
While our universe isn’t entirely bereft of games that seem to have sprung into being fully-formed, by far the most good games attain that status only gradually, through repeated iterations of testing and feedback. Betrayal at Krondor came by its goodness in exactly this hard, honest way. Unlike a dismaying number of games from its time, this game feels like one that’s actually been played — played extensively — before it got released. The niggling problems that dog even many good games from the early 1990s (such as the infuriating inventory management and rudderless combat of Ultima VII) are almost completely absent here. Instead the game is full of thoughtful little touches to head off annoyance, the sort of touches that can only come from real player feedback.The final verdict on its mishmash of graphical approaches, on the other hand, must be less positive.
Betrayal at Krondor wasn’t a notably attractive game even by the standards of its day, and time has done it no favors; the project desperately needed a strong art director able to impose a unified aesthetic vision. The parts of it that have aged the worst by far are those employing digitized actors, who look almost unbelievably ludicrous, cutting violently against any sense of Tolkienesque grandeur Hallford’s prose might be straining to evoke. Most store-bought Halloween costumes look higher rent than this bunch of survivors of an explosion at the Loony Tunes prop department. John Cutter acknowledges the problems:We digitized a lot of the actors, and we assumed they were going to be so pixelated that the makeup and costumes didn’t have to look that great. They just kind of had to be close.
But by the time we launched the game the technology had improved yeah. You could see the elastic bands on the fake beards. It was pretty bad.
I wasn’t crazy about a lot of the graphics in the game.Tellingly, the use of digitized actors was the one place where Betrayal at Krondor didn’t blaze its own trail, bowing instead to contemporary trends.For all of Betrayal at Krondor‘s welcome willingness just to try lots of stuff, its approach to story remains its most memorable and interesting quality of all. This aspect of the game was so front and center in the mind of John Cutter that, when he wrote a brief few paragraphs of “Designer Notes” for the manual, it came to occupy more than half the space:We decided the game should be an interactive story. Characters would be multidimensional and capable of stirring the player’s emotions. The story would be carefully plotted with lots of surprises, a good mix of humor and pathos, and abundant amounts of mystery and foreshadowing to keep the player intrigued.Balancing play against plot is the most confounding job any game designer can face on a fantasy role-playing game. In Betrayal at Krondor, we have integrated our plot so that it provides ample gaming opportunities, while also giving the player a sense of time, place, and purpose. This is achieved by making an onscreen map available to the player at all times, and by creating short-term goals — the nine chapters in the game — which give us a unique opportunity to tell a progressive story that still gives the player plenty of freedom to explore and adventure without being confined to a scripted plot.In thus “balancing play against plot,” Cutter and Hallford were attempting to square a circle that had been bedeviling game designers for a long time. All of the things that mark a rich story — characters with agendas of their own; big reveals and shocking turns; the classic narrative structure of rising action, climax, and denouement; dramatic confrontations with expressive dialog — cut against the player’s freedom to go wherever and do whatever she wants.
As a designer, says the conventional wisdom, you can’t have it all: you must rather stake out your spot on a continuum where at one end the player does little more than click her way through a railroaded plot line, and at the other she does absolutely anything she wants, but does it in a world bereft of any larger meaning or purpose. Adventure games tend to lean toward the set-piece-storytelling end of the continuum, CRPGs toward open-ended interactivity.Even CRPGs from around the time of Betrayal at Krondor which are written expansively and well, such as Ultima VII, generally send you wandering through other people’s stories rather than your own. Each city you explore in that game is full of little story stubs revolving around the inhabitants thereof rather than yourself; your role is merely to nudge these dramas of others along to some sort of resolution before you disappear again.
Your larger agenda, meanwhile, boils down to the usual real or metaphorical collecting of pieces to assemble the big whatsit at the end — a series of actions which can be done in any order precisely because they’re so simplistic in terms of plot. You’re in the world, but never really feel yourself to be of it.Cutter and Hallford, however, refused to accept the conventional wisdom embodied by even so markedly innovative a CRPG as Ultima VII. They were determined to deliver the best of both worlds — an adventure-game-like plot and CRPG-like freedom — in the same game. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t quite work as a whole.
Nevertheless, the attempt is well worth discussing.Betrayal at Krondor positively trumpets its intentions via the metaphors which its user interface employs. Once again ignoring all of the fashions of its time, which emphasized the definitively non-textual aesthetic of the interactive movie, this game presents itself as an interactive book with an enthusiasm worthy of the 1980s heyday of. The overriding look of the game, to the extent it has one amidst all its clashing graphical styles, is of an illuminated manuscript, ink on yellowing parchment. The story is told in a literary past tense, save points become “bookmarks,” and, as Cutter himself noted in the extract above, the whole experience is divided into nine neat “chapters.”The game is relentless about describing every single event using full sentences worthy of one of Feist’s novels. Sometimes the end result can verge on the ridiculous.
For example, every single time you search the body of an opponent you’ve just killed — something you’ll be doing an awful lot of, what with this being a CRPG and all — you’re greeted with a verbose missive:Owyn looked for supplies. Feeling like a vulture, he turned the body this way and that as he searched for anything that might be of value to them on their journey. All in all, he supposed that if he were the dead man, it wouldn’t matter to him any longer what happened to his belongings.
I’m a little confused about your mention of Japanese CRPGs. My (probably wrong?) understanding is that Japanese CRPGs of this era were, generally, all knock-offs of the Wizardry series. The story-based games you refer to in this article were primarily on game consoles, and not on PCs either in Japan or the US.Usually I’ve seen the distinction given as: CRPGs = western-style “world simulation” RPGs primarily on computers, JRPGs = Japanese-style “story-first” RPGs primarily on game consoles.Anyway a little more explanation in that paragraph might clarify the meaning. My take on early JRPG’s was that the game play was dominated by constant random-encounter combat. You would be exploring the wilderness, or even trying to get to a particular known place, and every 3rd or 4th step, you would get another encounter.It was fun for a while, but eventually got tedious. However, those encounters were also essential because you needed the level improvements from them to have any chance against the final bosses.There were lots of positive elements to JRPG’s – lots of equipment choices (with better equipment showing up in stores in hard-to-reach later areas of the game), some interesting stories told bit-by-bit, well-designed “dungeons” (even in SF titles), lovely graphics by standards of the time, and so on.
First post, so I gotta say you are the only writer online I genuinely look forward to reading. Thanks so much.One thing that struck me when I played this as a young buck was the death of a central character at a certain point in the game. I played alot of crpgs but had never had that happen before. It really felt like a loss from the story side of things and the gameplay perspective (the character was really good for the role they played in the combat portion)It really felt like losing someone you relied on, and I had to reconfigure my approach to combat afterwards.
I understand that it might have resulted in a fail state for others, but in my experience it conveyed a sense of limping toward the finish line after losing a good friend. I can’t quite put it into words, but it’s one of these “gaming moments” that just resonates for me, so much so that I put this game up there with Planescape or Ultima 7 as something that I would suggest to fellow nerds. I get that they had alot of systems that seemed incongruous but that one narrative hook, or whatever it is called, really brought the entire game into focus and instilled a deep melancholy throughout the rest of the game. It also conveyed a sense of “stakes” that are often referred to in games but not built on. It really affected me then, and I’m a bit surprised it didn’t get a nod from you.Anyways, I think it’s worth mentioning! Written in a manner more immediately accessible to the average Middle American reader, with more action, more narrative thrust, less elevated diction, and markedly less digressive songs and poetryHoom, hom, not to be, you know, That Fan!, but while I won’t quibble with the first three, if you think the songs and poetry are digressive, then I feel you are missing something.
Thanks for the corrections!I didn’t mean “digressive” as a criticism. I actually reread The Lord of the Rings from start to finish fairly recently for the first time in at least 25 years. I did so somewhat grudgingly — “I’m forced to reference this thing over and over in my writing, so I suppose I need to refresh myself on it” — and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.
The digressive bits were often the best ones, given that I knew how the story was going to end. It was enough to make me reevaluate Tolkien somewhat.
He’ll never be one of my absolute favorite writers, but he certainly moved up a notch or two in my estimation. (Although all of the self-consciously epic diction in the first part of Return of the King in particular still bores me)To your other point: that was an anecdote that turned up in a couple of places. I included it because I thought it was amusing. It’s no secret that most people playing monster-killing CRPGs in the 1990s were males, while women, to the extent they were playing computer games at all, tended to lean toward more casual styles. The anecdote was meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
But I can see that it perhaps doesn’t strike quite the right note. It can be fixed easily enough by excising one word. Indeed, I’m one of those terribly boring folk who will argue that if you know the novel already, then you can actually read just the poems and nothing else and get a pretty good impression of the narrative flow(I would also note that the prose style deliberately shifting to mirror the culture that the story space is currently occupying is one of the things that sets Tolkien apart from most genre writers. But it’s true that the Gondor sections can be a bit pompous as a result – although personally I tend to find the overtly Beowulf-y form of Rohan to be more annoying.)As to BaK itself – it wasn’t until Deus Ex that I found another game that felt as though everytime I replayed it, I could find entirely new subplots that I hadn’t seen on previous runs. And, like DX, it was engaging enough that I was willing to replay it, which wasn’t true of most RPGs (and certainly not of point-and-clickers, even if they too often had some mild branching elements.). Yes, while I’d never call Tolkien a Modernist (much less a Postmodernist), The Lords of the Rings becomes downright meta-textual at times in Book 3 and 5. I can respect what the author is doing, but I’m not sure it does much for the reader.
It creates a distancing effect and makes kind of boring scenes that ought to be incredibly exciting. I’m more down with the hobbits than the rest of the Fellowship, in other words.;)Speaking of which: reading the books as a young man, I was much more interested in the big scenes of battle, and thus preferred the non-Frodo arc. This time through, though, I found Frodo and Sam’s literal descent into Hell much more compelling, moving, and often horrifying. Tolkien’s Catholicism can really be felt here. And then there’s the way he shows Frodo to be scarred by his adventure when it’s all over something else few of his successors would even think to do, and something that emerges from the space spiritual wellspring, methinks.
I suspect Tolkien would be absolutely insulted at the very idea of even being considered a modernist. Let’s not forget he was THE expert on old and middle English in his days, wrote the canonical essay on Beowulf and generally had a certain old-fashioned identity even for his day. It’s why I at least am willing to overlook certain of the very problematic, ah, racial aspects of his worksand yes, the Catholicism also shines through (True story: He was the one who made CS Lewis so christian, though of course Lewis was an evangelical protestant). I can think of great R.P.G.s where you cannot win just by grindingDisgaea: The geo panels change the game by adding effects to areas of the battlefield that weaken or cripple your characters, overpower the enemies, clone them or make them invincible and turn a lot of battles into challenging puzzles.Superhero League of Hoboken: The endgame will be nearly impossible if you rush through the game and only level up your base characters, and you cannot go back to old areas and grind. You really need to micromanage skill distribution and leveling and limit your killing until more powerful guys are available.Mario versus Rabbids Kingdom Battle: The final battles are hard even if you level as much as possible, the movement and behavior of enemies force you to use strategy and tactics to avoid them, and there are stages which are annoying escort missions.Bloodnet: You are slowly turning into a vampire and will die if you do not drink enough blood or lose your soul if you drink too much blood.
Finish the game quickly, control your behavior or you are fucked.Half Minute Hero 1 and 2: Your main fear is not overpowered enemies, but time: You have half a minute to beat each quest. You can get more, but it get costly and you can sometimes get altenate endings by doing things at the right time. I disagree with each point, fairly wholeheartedly.1) The writing simply isn’t bland, even by (fantasy) novel standards.
Compared to other rpgs and computer games, it’s.very. colorful and detailed, and descriptive. I can’t fathom how you’d define it as bland.2) The pacing is excellent – unless you choose for it not to be by exploring every inch of the world. If you actually “role-play” with any sense of agency, it’s pacing is dead-on. Again, doesn’t seem like a fair assessment.3) Which puzzles are you talking about? Some of the lock-chest riddles are obscenely difficult (and rewarding). The battle-grid puzzles with cannons and staffs are for the most part simple, but often challenging.
And, most importantly, the actual side-quest/plot puzzles are fantastic. If you can be bothered to follow them, which is no criticism of the game.4) The combat is fun, technical, and fast-paced. (And can be very difficult).In sum, your review seems cursory at best, biased (for some reason), and in all honesty, sounds like it’s coming from someone who’s barely played the game, or never gave it a chance.P.S.- “the most overrated CRPG and one of the worst ones” – oh my. Hahaha, with detailed, no-context insights such as “it’s bland, and boring” you’ve clearly delved deeply into the game. Return’s to Krondor’s development is a little more complicated than Feist going back to Sierra.
7th Level purchased the rights to the franchise and started working on RtK. They then passed passed on work to Pyrotechnix to finish it up. 7th Level was having financial difficulties in late ’97 and sold the rights to Sierra who also bought Pyrotechnix at the same time. Mobygames says that they were a subsidiary of 7th Level, but I don’t know how accurate that is.This is briefly documented in the Oct. ’98 issue of CGW. I had originally tried posting this comment with a link to the issue, but it seems to not have gotten through the comment filter.
There’s one specific mechanical aspect that surprised me about BaK. In the course of the game you acquire an item that will allow you to instantly kill any enemy in a fight. It has a very limited number of times that it can be used, and the game gives you ample time to use it.But if you hold on to it to the very end of the game it will work on the final boss, the Big Bad, and the fight will be over before it really begins.Most games would through somehow take that item away, or have some reason why it would be ineffective on special enemies, but not BoK.
You have it, it’ll work. I am (or was) a Raymond Feist fan – I considered the Magician series to be one of the most readable and interesting fantasy series in the 1970’s/80’s.I only played an hour or two of Betrayal at Krondor, but I liked what I saw.
I have a quibble about the “word-lock” chests in that, who is writing the poetic clues? If I lock a chest, I probably don’t want to let every stranger know the key.That said, after months of trying to do visual puzzles with 3D gears and getting nowhere, Lori and I ended up adopting a similar approach for trap disarming in Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. We decided not to do it for lock-picking because it would slow the game down, but traps are less frequent.We don’t have poems for the locks, but they are themed. If you’re in the Sea Caves, many of the solution words relate to pirates. If you’re practicing on traps keyed by the rogue instructor, they tend to be based on words such as “thief” or “disarm”.
The game excuse for using words to disarm traps is that Shawn has a “trap tapper” device that is actually interpreting the trap mechanism in the form of a word.The actual mechanism is a hybrid of Hangman, Mastermind, and Krondor word locks. We also incorporated our RPG stat mechanics – High “Tool Use” skill eliminates some wrong letters from the selection dial. As you try a letter in a particular position in the word, you get feedback as to whether it’s in the right place, wrong position, or not in the word. A subtle hint is that letters disappear from the wheel as they’re used unless the letter appears more than once in the word.Spit topic Ref: ‘There’s a tacit agreement between game and player that the “urgent” sense of crisis in the air won’t actually evolve into anything until you decide to make it do so by hitting the next plot trigger.’That’s exactly how quests work in World of Warcraft. Occasionally it feels silly, but for the most part “urgent” quests add a sense of tension and excitement. In one recent quest, you’re told that an important prisoner is scheduled to be executed at dawn, and only you can rescue him. But if you spend weeks doing other things and finally get around to the quest, you’re just in time to save him.
Ludicrous, but pretty good story telling if you reinterpret it in your mind as, “He just got arrested” or such. I played BAK many years ago, it was one of the first CRPGs I played after Morrowind. At first, the graphics put me off, but the gameplay and interesting story hooked me enough to beat it. I seem to remember getting stuck the first time out, reading an FAQ, and restarting, being more mindful of doing everything I could find to make sure my characters were strong enough and making sure to save a certain item of instakill for the end, laughing as I used it to beat the big bad.In what may be a rare case, the game got me into the books.
After I beat the game, I went to the library and found Feist’s books, starting with Krondor: the Betrayal then going back to Magician and reading them in order.Feist wrote 30 books in the series, and it ended in 2013 with Magician’s End. Odd you don’t mention that in your article you wrote in 2019.The series did decline, and well, if you’re someone who gets attached to characters, like I do, I can’t recommend reading the whole series of all 30 books. Feist seems to delight in being rotten to the characters he writes about.
It wore me out to the point I stopped reading the series well before Magician’s End. But, the first few were very good, if you’re into fantasy stuff.
Something that instantly came to mind when I read the section mentioning Tunnels and Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan was that there’s a more direct link to the JRPG world there, given how that game passed through the hands of Japanese PC-98 developers before Hallford was subjected to it – and yet, it’s not really like a typical PC-98 RPG of the era either, exactly, since it has a kind of unique nonsense going for it by being a direct adaptation from English-language gamebooks. Unlike the Gold Box games which come to mind as the closest contemporaries, and which tended towards combat, Khazan presents a lot of choice events, all the time.Going into BaK, “how to do that game properly” would naturally land near the top of Hallford’s mind, and that in turn would result in the approach to scenario that has so much emphasis on written details for every event, overlaid on the systems concepts Cutter brought to the table.
The choices are dispensed with; BaK events are resolved not by choosing the right thing but with an automatic stat roll or inventory or quest flag check, which gives them a kind of inevitability.It should be noted that BaK is also relatively systems-light compared to the prevailing norms. While Ultima VII had gone even more streamlined in terms of character stats, it really complicated the world model with the world scale and inventory management; and if one looks at games like Darklands or the Realms of Arkania series, there’s a contrary trend towards heavier stat-oriented simulation that is rather intimidating; very few games since have tried to follow this path further(though Dwarf Fortress comes to mind as a success story).
BaK’s path manages to strike balances everywhere. There are stats and skills, but they’re functional to the scenario, and don’t lead towards elaborate character generation with red herring skillsets.