It's a pleasant surprise to see such an in-depth write up of something that was extremely influential on me. That was at the sort of young age where things could blow my mind without me being at all cognizant of the rich real-life backstoies that produced them.
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.
I played this gem when I was a kid, and I love Betrayal at Krondor dearly. Having not read the backstory before playing the game, it was kinda confusing at times, but game quality was awesome, especially compared to games bound to rectangle grids (wizardry, lands of lore, eye of the beholder series). It also did well for my English: the language was very rich with sprawling vocabulary. 10/10, the only games from the 90s that match my love for BaK are Star Control 2, Monkey Island and Full Throttle.
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.
Curiously, he criticizes BAK for this reason: the game tells you "go go go" but then encourages you to look in every nook and cranny. I've been playing Skyrim and quite enjoy how it doesn't rush you and instead encourages you to explore.
SC2 is honest in this regard, giving you motivation to push the plot and enough time to explore the side quests.
I loved that about SC2. Its so long ago though that I don’t remember if I learned about the constraint from a FAQ or on my own. But given how mad people were about a similar constraint in Fallout, I can’t recall the last time a big adventure game had a world-ending condition dependent on the passage of time.
The difference with Fallout 1 constraint is that in SC2 you feel the galaxy to be alive and breathing, with multiple events happen and influence each other. While in Fallout you just have a timer. The world in Fallout 1 & 2 feels very static, where nothing happens without your direct intervention.
Yes, that was one of the best things that I loved about StarControl2. Of course, I have lost ony first playthrough, and desperately watched the Galaxy burn.
> This is precisely the problem which the player of Betrayal at Krondor can all too easily run into. Not only does the game allow you to ignore the urgent call of its plot, but it actually forces you to do so in order to be successful. If you take the impetus of the story seriously and rush to fulfill your tasks in the early chapters, you won’t build up your characters sufficiently to survive the later ones.
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_
Star Control II had some similar issues with unclear priorities. The game doesn't have a strict "time limit," per se, but the invasion happens whether you're ready or not, so if you spend too much time trying to gather materials and prepare (which you are encouraged to do) without progressing the story far enough to get the right gear, you'll suddenly find yourself unable to go more than a few miles off-world before being attacked by alien ships that incinerate your own in a matter of seconds.
I did the opposite. I looted and leveled for fun but didn't read the storyline and got powerful but stuck. Played a lot but never beat it. My friend got pissed at me for not reading the storyline! Fun times.
I have read books where the authors have actually “played” the character behind the scenes, taking dice rolls to decide critical events and rolling with them, no matter how catastrophic.
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.
The author of the web serial Worm did this for a particularly brutal encounter in Arc 8, rolling die for pretty much every character (there were at least 40 involved), even rolling for the main character. Those that failed straight up died. It really added a sense of scale, legitimate risk and downright bleakness to the encounter.
> 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).
I loved Feist's books as a early teen. Never got around to playing BaK, but I've been surprised to see few people talk about Magician for how popular it supposedly was. That book was formative for me and I can't get it out my brain to this day.
Magician was super popular at the time, but having already read Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, Moorcock and a few others I found it more of a join the dots exercise spotting where he pinched pretty much everything from. It was like reading a whistle stop tour of fantasy fiction from the 60s and 70s. I did read some of the later novels. The sequel where Midkemia was invaded by a blatant clone of the Empire of the Petal Throne from Tékumel was fun.
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.
Yeah I guess that's what Feist was talking about when he said he was successful because he broke the rules. It makes sense that the work was a mashup of previous works, it seemed clear that outside of his set pieces things really got bogged down.
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.
> 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.
There's a lot to be said for these fun pastiches - Eddings, Feist, the Shannara series, and Dragonlance. Not particularly well written, but actually fun and pretty light. The ones that haven't made it to TV (all but Shannara) would make perfectly enjoyable effects-driven TV series a la The Expanse.
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?"
I don't think a year has ever passed since this was released without me doing a playthrough at least once. This article really shows why - it's about the story, so it's not so different than having a favourite movie you watch every year.
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.
The "honesty" factor is the key for me. Every event in a novel is under the control of the creator but that isn't so for role-playing games. It adds true significance to everything and makes gaming sessions truly engaging to watch. I've seen groups make it through months of hardship only to have a particularly bad dice roll or stupid choice kill them all and plunge the world into darkness. That kind of actual risk based on the cleverness of real people has a flavor that cannot be replicated in any traditional fiction medium.
Anyone read the Malazan series? I'm in the midst of it and the world building is incredible.
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've read more than one book that is obviously the author's role-playing campaign written down. Sometimes this can make for an interesting story but more often it leads to action-packed but dull novels.
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.
Oh what an amazing game. I vaguely remember, playing all night once, until I started to hallucinate in the early hours of the morning, and decided to put myself to bed. To be honest I'm not sure whether I ever finished it.
I recently reread Magician, and it was just as good as I remembered it.
I'd never heard of this game when it was released, but had played some of its contemporaries like the Ultima series. When this article came out, I started watching a Let's Play. I'm finding it to be quite enjoyable and I can see how easily I would've been interested in it. I'm still in Chapter 1 but right away I can see how the characters are much more developed than other games I'd played. Glad to get a late chance at it rather than none at all.
My young teenage self really, really loved this game. I was totally oblivious to the shortcomings described in the article (digitized characters, 'disconnect' between main story and character building, etc.). Instead, I just played and played, seeking new chests for new riddles (simultaneously curious and fearful of not being able to solve it), new combats, new artifacts.
One of the few fantasy games that kept me glued to the PC monitor for logn stretches of time.
Although I did read some of Riftwar, I was completely unaware of the transliterary aspects of the game when it came out. I do remember being impressed by the game though; it was ambitious and well executed and I think one of the classics from that era that deserve to be remembered.
I bought Betrayal at Krondor (the book) when it first came out. The author's foreword talks about the game in a fair bit of detail and also contains the "you couldn't afford me" quote mentioned in the article, along with backstory.
Read most of Feists books back in the 90s. Picked up the PC version of the game. Always seemed to crash on me, one of the drawbacks of OTA updates that was missing from the CD-ROM era. Now Daggerfall...that was my jam.
Betrayal at Krondor was my first computer RPG. I didn't knew English well and I was just stumbling around with dialogs, but the mechanics were obvious and well designed and it was fun anyway.
Yes, I spent ages figuring out some of the puzzles (DARKNESS, anyone?).
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.
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.