Betrayal at Krondor
filfre.net
filfre.net
I remember getting a demo of BaK on one of those demo disks that came with PC gaming magazines. I was blown away by the immersive open-world 3D gameplay. The battle and equipment systems were innovative and well designed.
Our local library didn't have the Riftwar books that inspired the game, but it did have the Serpantwar saga that followed them. I'd eventually figure out how to acquire books on my own and catch up with all the books that Feist published, and I hung on until the end of the cycle, even though the books plummeted in quality on the back half.
I also played Return to Krondor, with much excitement. It was a fun game and better produced, but much more linear than the original.
Thinking about this reminds me of a time in my life when things were a bit more magical. Information was accessible, but not too much so, and being a kid with a meager allowance meant I had to have some hustle to follow the cultural threads that intrigued me.
It will probably surprise first-time players with its depth and breadth and non-terrible UI (which you might expect in an early 90s game).
Save early and often, there are no autosaves.
https://www.filfre.net/2018/12/star-control-ii/
Although I love Maher's "Digital Antiquarian", I feel his opinion on SC2 is a tad unfair.
He basically criticizes the game for having a living, evolving game world where you can lose simply by taking too long. That's one of the things that originally blew my mind about SC2 back in 1992: it truly feels like a universe that's not artificially made for the player. You're just one ship trying to understand great forces that are in motion on their own, and will eventually crush you.
SC2 is honest in this regard, giving you motivation to push the plot and enough time to explore the side quests.
I finally have my answer. As a kid, I really enjoyed this game, but never understood why I would always get stuck partway through, with seemingly impossible paths. Having played many point-and-click games as well as much civilization, I assumed there was some puzzle I was missing (I was pretty sure I had explored all the tactical ones). Turned out I needed to _restart the game and ignore the objectives_
It definitely lends the work this “internal coherency” that is mentioned in the article. Feels much more real.
And being in a solid tabletop group has been great for my life. Not only do you maintain friendships, but you take part in a shared story. It’s great, and I’d definitely recommend it to HNers who have never tried it before. If someone ever asks you, don’t turn it down - it’ll be worth it.
I have enjoyed tabletop games immensely, both as a player and a DM. That said, I wouldn't feel comfortable making the above claim -- I've also had horrible experiences, including one session with a group I never returned to where the DM kept having the only female player's character get raped. Like, three times in one session. It was weird. Other times a DM can try to railroad players way too hard and turn the thing into a short novel that gets read aloud with minimal player interaction, or an overly placating DM can let one inexperienced player run the game off the rails entirely by playing a sociopathic cannibal who impulsively eats key NPCs without natural repurcussions kicking in. I'm not trying to be a downer, but if somebody has a bad first experience roleplaying they should be aware that not all sessions are created equal; I've had all of the above horrible experiences as well as many magical nights of collaborative storytelling, puzzle solving, and tactical decisions with friends. It's a social thing, you need the right mix of people to make it work, and the kind of game that one person enjoys might be horrible for another person (Robin's Laws covers this last point well and has good tips for finding the right mixture of elements for a specific social group, IMO).
That might come across as faint praise, which it is a bit, but like a few novel series of the time, it was a toy box of fantasy fun. Most of the readers of novels like this were never going to wade through all the source material, but here all the basic concepts were in compendium form. They certainly had a niche to fill.
I read magician first and after that trying to read Lotr was going from a carnival ride to a cathedral, long slow and overly rich.
The dizzying heights of individual expansion that pug/tomas got to over the series has died with the 80s and thanos I guess. That scene in the colosseum raining fire raindrops still sits vividly in my mind, why the greatest hits from magician have never been made into a more expressive media is obvious financially but nags at me nonetheless.
Ah the memories. That was indeed an awesome scene. You also reminded me of some other scenes in that book:
- Macros defending Elvandar all on his own - Macros confronting Tomas after the battle and Tomas realizing how powerful Macros was - Pug Tomas and Macros watching the creation of the universe at "A darkness at Sethanon"
On one hand I'd like to see them turned into movies/series but at the same time I think I prefer not to "spoil" the world and the characters that I have built in my mind.
That being said -- it does feel like it was going to get some pretty stiff competition - with the $$ amazon are throwing at LoTR and WoT, alongside Witcher, GOT Prequels, etc.
It might be refreshing to see some more escapist pastiches that aren't quite as heavily driven by urgent questions like "what might it look like if historical atrocities were attractively filmed?" or "what if the real purpose of new technology is to find nasty new ways of torturing people?"
Of course, if the novel were based on my average game, the first half of it would be Gorath wandering around the middle of nowhere sharpening a pile of swords with hundreds of whetstones for a month.
I heard the author wrote the series based on DnD games he played. I imagine he'd have to in order to keep everything coherent across all the races, histories, religions, tribes, wars, etc. That said, while the setting is fascinating, the writing seems to me to be at times a bit of a slog.
Definitely an interesting way to write. It was the first I'd heard of it.
I think Patrick Rothfuss is a similar situation?
The problem with makes books (and films) out of games is that novel and games have different aims, and creators skilled at one are not necessarily good at the other medium. The typical game (tabletop or computer) is heavily action based. There are exceptions, but typically the plot (where the characters make impactful choices) is front loaded, happening during the introduction or even just before the game starts.
How many computer games have the player show up just after a big event and learn about it through recordings or notes of NPCs who are no longer there? The player joins the plot at the point where the only thing left to do is kill a bunch of things - basically the third act of a typical film.
The Malazan books were recommended to by an author but, like you, I found the ideas much better than the writing, but the author did improve noticeably in the second book.
https://sheep.horse/2013/9/book_review_-_deadhouse_gates.htm...
I recently reread Magician, and it was just as good as I remembered it.
One of the few fantasy games that kept me glued to the PC monitor for logn stretches of time.
My Rogue character I developed lived in Carse and had his main residence which I designed in detail there
Oh and the cd soundtrack.
It was also cool that they were in moredhel language, so once you lose Gorath from the party, you have to rely on spells to decipher their runes. Or just brute force them as is.