Hottentot
03-27-13, 01:17 PM
Right. Time to finally get this off from my to-do list, in which it has been hanging around ever since I wrote the review about King of the Dragon Pass (www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=198091 (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=198091)) and mentioned this game there. It's no indie and it's not even particularly little known, but it's old and it's something I don't think everyone around here knows. So esteemed Subsim folks, I present you: Darklands!
In Medieval Germany, the witch burns YOU!
I described King of Dragon Pass with an oxymoron ”realistic fantasy” and because I have about as much imagination as an average shrimp, I'm going to recycle it here. The bottomline is that Darklands is realistic. Ask any medieval peasant and he will tell you that the world is exactly like it's depicted in the game. Alchemists making obscure potions from rare ingredients? Of course! Witches and demons making pacts? Everyday stuff, isn't it. Saints making miracles happen? If you're not seeing it, you're just not praying hard enough!
Darklands takes place in medieval Germany as the contemporaries saw it. Usually, at least. There are some more traditional fantasy elements which you probably won't find from the folklore, but the basic concept works like that. The game throws you in that world with a very simple objective: become famous! There is technically a plot (and a pretty complicated one too), but you will only find out about it later in the game and no one forces you to follow it. The open world and open ended gameplay lets you choose your own goals.
The game is almost entirely text based, but it's one of those old games that makes up in details what it lacks in graphics. Let's take the character creation, for example. You control a party of four. In the beginning you create them by first choosing their background (ranging from noble to peasant) and then their career path (which can be pretty much anything from thief to a monk or a knight.) Each time you pick up a new occupation, you gain new skills with which the character starts. But he / she also becomes older and therefore will have increasing penalties. Therefore your character can be a 20 year old recruit who ran off from the army, or a venerated bishop in his 70s. And speaking of skills: some of your first decisions will be deciding how much Latin and/or common your character knows, whether he/she can read and write, knows religion or has any idea of city customs. If you are used to the games where you put a few points in various weapon skills, then forget about it: here we are talking about actual skills.
And the skills matter. As the game is text based, you will get events and possible ways of solving them based on your skills. If you don't have anyone speaking Latin in your party well enough, those snobbish academics will laugh you out of their university. If you get lost in the first junction of the city, you will get ambushed more than you'd perhaps like. The characters you create start feeling like real and meaningful character when even that fat monk who can't fight his way out of a wet paperbag can suddenly become the most important member in the party. And it hurts all the more when you find out that any death of character is permanent: sorry, God works in mysterious ways and his list of miracles doesn't include resurrection.
Adventurers are gonna adventure
Your quest for glory and many many pretzels starts in randomly chosen town, in a tavern. From there on you are free to choose what you want to do. If the city is a big one, then just exploring it for a while might be a good idea. Big cities tend to have famous churches or universities where you might get some new, useful knowledge like alchemy recipes or learn about new saints. You might also want to make money by offering your skills in various professions. Or perhaps just blow up the tavern in a failed alchemical experiment and, uh, quietly relocate to the next town before the guards find out it was you.
While you have lots of choices, basically the game is about quests. Everyone in Germany wants you to do something, provided that you are famous enough for them to think that you can do what they want. There are various quests, but at some point you will find out that you are doing the same stuff over and over again. There is, for instance, always a robber baron nearby and someone wants to get rid of him. After taking out a few it feels as if the whole German nobility is corrupt and you have exterminated half of it. On the other hand, quests often do not follow the traditional ”go there, kill stuff” formula. Let's say you are tasked to killing a dragon, which is a huge feat by any standards. First you'll have to find it. Following the trail of burned down villages is probably a good start. Then you'll have to locate its lair. Then you'll have to somehow get in there. And only after that you can even attempt to kill it. And most likely die trying.
The quests, while interesting on their own despite of the repetitiveness, are just a clever way of hauling your lazy butts out of the tavern and into the wide world waiting for you. While the 1992 depiction of medieval Germany is not exactly shiny and anti-aliased, the game does offer a lot of real estate to explore. Unfortunately you will mostly be travelling around it just to get from one place to another or to accomplish a quest, though. There are events along the way and of course the ever present random encounters, but this isn't an Elder Scrolls where you go to a cave just to find out what's in there. Still, the sense of danger and travelling is present and you are free to stop in any town or hamlet on your way to the destination, most likely to get badly sidetracked into doing something completely else. In that sense the open world works: while it does not offer much in sense of exploring for the sake of exploration, it offers enough events and hotspots to have your adventures branch out like a tree's roots and at some point forget what you were doing before you got again lured into hunting some ancient relic for some shady merchant. In short, it still feels like playing a band of adventurers out for opportunity and fame.
At some point in your glorious quests you will end up in combat. While it's often possible to solve the problems without weapons, or at the very least improve your odds, the combat is inevitable part of any game like this. It's made even more so, since your characters don't gain magic skill points which you can distribute: they improve at what they do. Swing a sword and you will be better at swinging swords in the future. Skills can be gained otherwise too (and it would be pretty difficult to improve, say, alchemy in combat), but fighting enemies is still a major part in it. It's also vital for gaining local reputation by fighting cutthroat thugs in towns, since without any reputation most prospective employers will just laugh you out of their offices.
The combat isn't exactly great. In the beginning you give each character an order. They will then try to accomplish the task in real time, unless you pause and give them a new one. The most basic, most used and most effective order is ”go beat that guy until he doesn't move anymore after which you can do the same to the rest”. There isn't often much strategy involved, unless you have some potions or ranged weapons with you. While the game is old, it's still a shame that it gives so much detail to so many things, yet fails to make one of the most fundamental parts of the gameplay even remotely interesting.
Will adventure for beer
Darklands is what many games these days try to be and still can't achieve the same. It's an incredibly detailed and open ended game where you carve out your own path into the fame and glory. It's simple, yet there is something magical in it that makes it good even when it's over 20 years old by now.
Unfortunately it's also and old game with old game's limitations, and the limitation number one is that it leaves a lot for your own initiative and imagination. It's not an achievement game and not one for powergamers. But like a few other titles I have written these rants about, it's a game that can suck you into doing just something and only later starting to think that it was actually fairly basic and repetitive stuff. It's a game which doesn't necessarily give you much satisfaction as a technical product, but with its open ended nature and wide possibilities provides you with opportunity to enjoy what you like the best. Here's the canvass and the tools: you make the painting.
Once again, like in the case of Miasmata, if you are looking for an action packed movie, then you'll be disappointed. But if adventure for adventure's sake is your thing, then I heartily recommend Darklands. So all you would-be heroes out there, write in your mind a nice little background story for your group and off you go to write your name in the legends. :)
Screenshots again at GOG's site (http://www.gog.com/gamecard/darklands). I tried taking my own, but Fraps wouldn't co-operate for some reason. There is also a great video review for another perspective in Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxLgFbNPB9s) which I recommend watching.
In Medieval Germany, the witch burns YOU!
I described King of Dragon Pass with an oxymoron ”realistic fantasy” and because I have about as much imagination as an average shrimp, I'm going to recycle it here. The bottomline is that Darklands is realistic. Ask any medieval peasant and he will tell you that the world is exactly like it's depicted in the game. Alchemists making obscure potions from rare ingredients? Of course! Witches and demons making pacts? Everyday stuff, isn't it. Saints making miracles happen? If you're not seeing it, you're just not praying hard enough!
Darklands takes place in medieval Germany as the contemporaries saw it. Usually, at least. There are some more traditional fantasy elements which you probably won't find from the folklore, but the basic concept works like that. The game throws you in that world with a very simple objective: become famous! There is technically a plot (and a pretty complicated one too), but you will only find out about it later in the game and no one forces you to follow it. The open world and open ended gameplay lets you choose your own goals.
The game is almost entirely text based, but it's one of those old games that makes up in details what it lacks in graphics. Let's take the character creation, for example. You control a party of four. In the beginning you create them by first choosing their background (ranging from noble to peasant) and then their career path (which can be pretty much anything from thief to a monk or a knight.) Each time you pick up a new occupation, you gain new skills with which the character starts. But he / she also becomes older and therefore will have increasing penalties. Therefore your character can be a 20 year old recruit who ran off from the army, or a venerated bishop in his 70s. And speaking of skills: some of your first decisions will be deciding how much Latin and/or common your character knows, whether he/she can read and write, knows religion or has any idea of city customs. If you are used to the games where you put a few points in various weapon skills, then forget about it: here we are talking about actual skills.
And the skills matter. As the game is text based, you will get events and possible ways of solving them based on your skills. If you don't have anyone speaking Latin in your party well enough, those snobbish academics will laugh you out of their university. If you get lost in the first junction of the city, you will get ambushed more than you'd perhaps like. The characters you create start feeling like real and meaningful character when even that fat monk who can't fight his way out of a wet paperbag can suddenly become the most important member in the party. And it hurts all the more when you find out that any death of character is permanent: sorry, God works in mysterious ways and his list of miracles doesn't include resurrection.
Adventurers are gonna adventure
Your quest for glory and many many pretzels starts in randomly chosen town, in a tavern. From there on you are free to choose what you want to do. If the city is a big one, then just exploring it for a while might be a good idea. Big cities tend to have famous churches or universities where you might get some new, useful knowledge like alchemy recipes or learn about new saints. You might also want to make money by offering your skills in various professions. Or perhaps just blow up the tavern in a failed alchemical experiment and, uh, quietly relocate to the next town before the guards find out it was you.
While you have lots of choices, basically the game is about quests. Everyone in Germany wants you to do something, provided that you are famous enough for them to think that you can do what they want. There are various quests, but at some point you will find out that you are doing the same stuff over and over again. There is, for instance, always a robber baron nearby and someone wants to get rid of him. After taking out a few it feels as if the whole German nobility is corrupt and you have exterminated half of it. On the other hand, quests often do not follow the traditional ”go there, kill stuff” formula. Let's say you are tasked to killing a dragon, which is a huge feat by any standards. First you'll have to find it. Following the trail of burned down villages is probably a good start. Then you'll have to locate its lair. Then you'll have to somehow get in there. And only after that you can even attempt to kill it. And most likely die trying.
The quests, while interesting on their own despite of the repetitiveness, are just a clever way of hauling your lazy butts out of the tavern and into the wide world waiting for you. While the 1992 depiction of medieval Germany is not exactly shiny and anti-aliased, the game does offer a lot of real estate to explore. Unfortunately you will mostly be travelling around it just to get from one place to another or to accomplish a quest, though. There are events along the way and of course the ever present random encounters, but this isn't an Elder Scrolls where you go to a cave just to find out what's in there. Still, the sense of danger and travelling is present and you are free to stop in any town or hamlet on your way to the destination, most likely to get badly sidetracked into doing something completely else. In that sense the open world works: while it does not offer much in sense of exploring for the sake of exploration, it offers enough events and hotspots to have your adventures branch out like a tree's roots and at some point forget what you were doing before you got again lured into hunting some ancient relic for some shady merchant. In short, it still feels like playing a band of adventurers out for opportunity and fame.
At some point in your glorious quests you will end up in combat. While it's often possible to solve the problems without weapons, or at the very least improve your odds, the combat is inevitable part of any game like this. It's made even more so, since your characters don't gain magic skill points which you can distribute: they improve at what they do. Swing a sword and you will be better at swinging swords in the future. Skills can be gained otherwise too (and it would be pretty difficult to improve, say, alchemy in combat), but fighting enemies is still a major part in it. It's also vital for gaining local reputation by fighting cutthroat thugs in towns, since without any reputation most prospective employers will just laugh you out of their offices.
The combat isn't exactly great. In the beginning you give each character an order. They will then try to accomplish the task in real time, unless you pause and give them a new one. The most basic, most used and most effective order is ”go beat that guy until he doesn't move anymore after which you can do the same to the rest”. There isn't often much strategy involved, unless you have some potions or ranged weapons with you. While the game is old, it's still a shame that it gives so much detail to so many things, yet fails to make one of the most fundamental parts of the gameplay even remotely interesting.
Will adventure for beer
Darklands is what many games these days try to be and still can't achieve the same. It's an incredibly detailed and open ended game where you carve out your own path into the fame and glory. It's simple, yet there is something magical in it that makes it good even when it's over 20 years old by now.
Unfortunately it's also and old game with old game's limitations, and the limitation number one is that it leaves a lot for your own initiative and imagination. It's not an achievement game and not one for powergamers. But like a few other titles I have written these rants about, it's a game that can suck you into doing just something and only later starting to think that it was actually fairly basic and repetitive stuff. It's a game which doesn't necessarily give you much satisfaction as a technical product, but with its open ended nature and wide possibilities provides you with opportunity to enjoy what you like the best. Here's the canvass and the tools: you make the painting.
Once again, like in the case of Miasmata, if you are looking for an action packed movie, then you'll be disappointed. But if adventure for adventure's sake is your thing, then I heartily recommend Darklands. So all you would-be heroes out there, write in your mind a nice little background story for your group and off you go to write your name in the legends. :)
Screenshots again at GOG's site (http://www.gog.com/gamecard/darklands). I tried taking my own, but Fraps wouldn't co-operate for some reason. There is also a great video review for another perspective in Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxLgFbNPB9s) which I recommend watching.