Review of Microprose's "Darklands" by Ken Fishkin GAME TOPIC "Darklands" is Microprose's long-delayed entry into the Fantasy role-playing genre, that of "Ultima", "Wizardry", "Might & Magic", and others. This game has excited a lot of passionate comment on the Internet, half the respondents hating it and half loving it. I fall squarely in the middle, and will try to cheer and jeer with equal frequency. COPY PROTECTION Virtually none. Very very infrequent manual lookup. DOCUMENTATION The usual excellent Microprose manual. HARDWARE Requires an immense amount of disk space (16 MB, I think), and an immense amount of memory (you _must_ have EMM). Mouse and VGA required. I ran it on a 386SX, 16Mhz, and had no complaints on speed. INTRODUCTION/OVERVIEW On the most general level, "Darklands" is a fairly typical role-playing game. You form a party of adventurers, which wander around a kingdom, killing bad things and helping good things, until a final ultimate quest is resolved. Where "Darklands" is most different from others of this ilk is that it is firmly grounded in a historical situation - that of 15th century Germany, with the single exception that the superstitions of the time are taken as _true_ - there really are witches, Saints really do grant favors to the pious, and so forth. This means far more than simply specifying a set of place names. Microprose has taken this "grounding" and made it apply to all areas of the game. The arms and armor are those of 15th century Germany. Religion and clerical activity work as they did in 15th century Germany. Rather than use wizardry, we have alchemy, of the 15th century flavor. Your quests are all keyed to the milieu as well. Personally, I felt that this was a great decision. Rather than inventing yet another fantasy world, populated by yet another set of Tolkien-named personalities, with yet another invented history, with yet another set of random artifacts, we have everything plausibly grounded in a historical setting. There are those who find this "mundane" or "unexciting" - I am not one of them, but you may be. STARTING UP In order to start your quest, you need a party of adventurers. There may be between 1 and 4 adventurers in the party, although there is really no reason not to have 4. Your character starts at 15 years of age, where you decide on their ranking in 6 attributes (strength, endurance, agility, perception, intelligence, and charisma). In addition to their attributes, they have a rating in roughly 25 skills: their skill at using an edged weapon, at making an alchemical potion, of being stealthy, and so forth. Your character is then "developed" in a very nice "Traveler" sort of way. You guide your character through 5 year "chunks" of their life. At each chunk, you pick a profession for that character to follow for the next 5 years. The profession will marginally affect attributes, and greatly affect skills. I found it generally worked well to develop fighters up to age 30, and "specialists" (clerics, alchemists) up to age 40 or so. Attributes are permanent, skills are not - your fighters weapons skills, for example, will go up dramatically through the course of the game as s/he kills lots and lots of foes. Once your character has been "developed", you can add it to the party, picking between 1 of 4 appearances (colors can be varied within an appearance), and a heraldic symbol. Your character will be given arms/armor appropriate to their last profession. WARNING: There is a significant bug here. Clerics/alchemists will be given _no_ armor. Even if you sell off all their other possessions to (barely) buy some mediocre starting armor, their survival is very chancy at the start. I believe this is a bug, not a feature, as the game comes with a "sample" set of 4 "standard" adventurers, and the clerics/alchemists in that set are heavily armored. CHARACTER CLASSES Darklands does not have character "classes" (fighter, wizard, cleric) per se. As mentioned above, there are roughly 25 skills, and a number of professions. Different career paths emphasize different skills, but there is nothing preventing a soldier from praying to his patron saint, or a priest from picking a lock - it's simply a matter of time spent developing that particular skill. Of course, some career paths make it very difficult to develop some skills (a "thief" will have a hard time developing much religious virtue!), but you can work on it if you want to. Generally speaking, through, the _professions_ do fall into "groups" or, dare I say it, "classes". They are (1) fighter, (2) thief, (3) cleric, and (4) alchemist. FIGHTER Of most import to the doughty young fighter is the game's treatment of arms and armor. There are 8 different types of armor, the lightest being "padded" and the heaviest being "plate". The heavier the armor, the more protection it affords. Note that there is a "price" to be paid for protection - weight. You don't always want plate for everybody (in my party, only 1 member had plate mail). There's a great variety of arms: swords, pikes, staffs, bows, crossbows, war hammers, and so forth. There are 6 different skills for arms: skill with edged weapons, for example, will not help you use a crossbow. Weapons differ in three ways: their weight, their damage, and their armor penetration potential. A halberd, for example, does "fearsome" damage, but will not penetrate plate mail. A "great hammer", on the other hand, does less damage than a sword, but will batter its way through any armor. THIEF A thief is really just a fighter, who happens to have put a lot of work into the "stealth" and "streetwise" attributes, and has a high "perception" skill. The only real thiefly activity is picking of locks, which requires a high "artifice" skill. This is usually better left to the alchemist, as alchemical professions generally give a lot of "artifice" points. CLERIC Clerics have no limitations on their armor or their weapons - the medieval restriction against Clerics employing edged weapons was not incorporated in "Darklands". Religious intervention is handled by recourse to one of a body of Saints. These Saints are all, so far as I know, historical - they range from the famous (Mathew, Luke, Jude) to the not-so-famous (Derfel, Gerlac). There are a _lot_ of saints, each with their own specialty. There are saints that heal, saints that help you curry royal favor, that help you walk across water, that help you resist fire, that banish satanic foes, etc., etc. - nearly every activity in the game has a saint available. Each character has a "divine favor". This goes down when you appeal to a saint, and goes up when you pray, go to mass, or confess. You cannot appeal to saints willy-nilly - you have to carefully ration your divine favor. This also makes it advantageous to spread your Saints across party members - 4 people can pray 4 times more often than one. In addition to "divine favor" there is a skill known as "virtue". Basically, the higher your virtue, the less divine favor you use to appeal to a saint. In addition, each saint is "rated" with a minimum divine favor - more powerful saints can only be appealed to by more holy supplicants. Your character starts with knowledge of a few saints. Knowledge of additional saints is obtained in the course of the game - each town has a monastery, where 4 saints are "known". The monks may allow you to study one of their saints, if you make a successful Request (more on Requests below). I thought this entire section of the game was very well done. ALCHEMIST There are no "wizards" in Darklands. Probably the closest analogue is the "alchemist". Just as "Darklands" assumes that superstitions of the 15th century were true, so too it assumes that the claims for alchemy were justified. One can create alchemical potions which give strength, which heal, which protect against fire, which explode like hand grenades, and so forth. In order to make a potion, you have to know the "recipe". Your character starts with knowledge of a few recipes. Knowledge of additional recipes is obtained in the course of the game - each town has an alchemist, where 4 recipes are "known". The alchemist may allow you to buy one of his recipes, if you make a successful Request. You can also request to swap recipes, instead of buying it outright. This has the advantage of not costing anything, but had the disadvantage that in earlier versions of the game the alchemist randomly decided who would receive the recipe. This was hugely irritating. In the latest version, the party leader always receives the recipe. This is only moderately irritating, as your alchemist usually makes a pretty poor Requester (poor charisma, you see). Once you have the recipe, you need to have the ingredients. There are roughly 25 ingredients, of differing rarity/cost. These are obtained by dealing with the pharmacist/foreign traders in a town. Once you have the recipe and the ingredients, you are lacking only one thing: the "philosophers stone". The higher the quality of your stone, the better quality your created potions. Generally speaking, larger cities sell higher quality stones. Once you have the recipe and the ingredients and the stone, you can finally make some potions. Different potions require different levels of expertise - the most difficult ones may require a prayer to the applicable saint to make their manufacture feasible. This part of the game works better than I have made it sound - I found it worked very well, and was quite enjoyable. I found an optimal party consisted of one cleric, one alchemist, one fighter with high charisma (the leader), and one with high perception, but your mileage may vary. STARTING OUT Great, now you've created your party. What do you _do_ with it? Avid reader of this review, you've gone to the monastery and learned about a new saint, and maybe even gone to an alchemist and learned a new recipe. Now what? Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, "Darklands" does not have a single linear plot. Over time, different "quests" will be spawned. Different personages will ask you go to various places and perform various favors for them. The rewards for these quests are usually financial, but often serve to improve your party's fame as well. The bad news is, you only get quests once you have some amount of fame. Since you need quests to get fame, and you need fame to get quests, you seem to be in rather a bind! Thankfully, there are two ways around this, First, each town is chock-full of an infinite supply of bandits. By killing them, you can not only improve your combat skills (and earn some money), but get some local fame (you have a different 'fame' in each city, in addition to your 'overall' fame). Do this for a while, and eventually you will have much better luck Requesting a quest. Second, if you are lucky, you may know a Saint who will help you with a Request. REQUESTS I've described several places in the game where you make a Request - for knowledge of a new Saint, knowledge of a new Recipe, and the granting of a quest. Your odds of having a request granted are a function of your local fame, your party leaders charisma, and your party leaders skill at "Speak Common". Calls to saints can greatly affect any/all of these qualities. The bottom line is - make sure that your party leader can "meet and greet" well, or you will have a hard time getting any requests granted. FIGHTING OK, so you've decided to start cranking up your local fame by killing some bandits. You wander through town at night, meet some bandits, and away you go. Combat is done using an "over-the-shoulder" 3-D perspective display. Party members are roughly 1/2" high. Combat is real-time, with pauses for orders. You can give your party members orders - "walk to here", "attack that guy", "throw a potion there", and so forth. When you are in "orders" mode, the combat is frozen. When you end "orders" mode, the combat proceeds in real-time, until you enter "orders" mode again. If you do not give a character an order, s/he will do something on their own. I found that they almost always did something quite reasonable - you don't need to panic if you haven't assigned orders to all. Just as your characters will fight quite reasonably without your help, so does the enemy. I was impressed with the AI for the enemy combat decisions - they may not have always done the smartest possible thing, but they always did something plausible. This entire part of the game works very well. Good thing, because you spend a lot of time in it! ROAMING THE COUNTRYSIDE OK, you've killed a bunch of bandits, and have gotten too big for the burg you started in. You decide to walk on over to the next town. Traveling is done by showing a section of the map of Germany. Your party is represented by a little figure of a walking man. Point to a location on the map, and you will see the little man walk there. This is almost identical to the way this is done in "Sword of the Samurai", for those of you who own that. As you wander around the countryside, you may have more encounters. Sooner or later, you will make it to the next city. THE NEXT CITY Cities are fairly "static" - they offer more or less the same set of facilities in each. Rather like "Pirates", but with more options. You may visit the church, visit the merchants, visit the local inn, visit the alchemist, and so forth. ROLLING ALONG Once you've acquired a little bit of fame, and quests start rolling in, you will enter the second phase of the game. In this phase, you will fulfill various quests, visit various cities, learn more about saints and alchemy, and generally have a gay old time killing lots of bad guys. Eventually, you will stumble across the "true quest" of the game. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that Witches are bad, demons are worse, and the Devil is the worst! SOUND The sound effects are limited, but good - swords clink and clank, guns produce a nice throaty "boom", and so forth. The introductory music was very disappointing - it's a thoroughly generic "danger and foreboding" piece of atmospheric music, that reminds me more than anything else of their introductory music from "Silent Service II", A WWII Sub simulation! I wish they would have exploited the medieval angle more here, with some medieval music. The music that plays during the game is forgettable at best, and quickly becomes very annoying. Again, I wish they would have used something more apropos to the period - something sounding like a lute, for example. The end-game has a sizeable hunk of spoken speech - remember to turn "Music" on before entering the end-game. GRAPHICS There are two "families" of graphics in the game - static paintings shown in interaction, and the fluid combat display. The static paintings are quite nice (the painting of the charging boar is my personal favorite). I think they missed an opportunity here, though - I would have liked to have seen paintings in the style of the day. Paintings in the form of a Durer woodcut, or a 15th century tapestry, would have been very nice and lent some nice flavor. The combat display, from a purely graphical point of view, is very well done. The battlefield is shown from an "over-the-shoulder" point of view, with smooth and realistic animation. Characters walk around, swing their swords, lob their potions, and so forth. The enemy critters are very well-drawn. My personal favorite was the "Wild Hunter". SUMMARY "Darklands" has a lot of sizzle, and a lot of steak. My only real problem with the game is that one can _only_ eat steak. What do I mean by this strange analogy? The game has invested a huge amount of effort in the "wrapper" - the setting in Medieval Germany, the clerical system, the alchemical system, the quest system, and so forth. But within all this vast machinery, within this rich environment, there is really only one thing your party ever does: "Go to and kill " Now, there are a lot of places to go, and a lot of things to kill, but I found this very limiting. One cannot create a party of nuns who focus only on pursuing divine knowledge, a party of alchemists who focus only on alchemical R&D, a party of thieves who play "Robin Hood" across Medieval Germany. There are very few puzzles, no _qualitatively_ different paths for your party to pursue. In the Microprose game "Pirates", for example, a much earlier game with a much simpler focus, you could attain fame in several _orthogonal_ ways. You could focus on looting ships, or on finding buried treasure, or on currying official favor, or on all three. I really wish they would have followed this model more in "Darklands". Instead, your party simply travels the length and breadth of Germany, killing a great variety of enemies in a great variety of places in a great variety of ways. In addition to its other flaws, this approach greatly reduces the replay value of the game. A new party will simply embark upon a different set of "hits" - nothing qualitatively different from what your earlier party did. In sum, "Darklands" left me with a strange feeling. I think the game _system_ is terrific, but the game _play_ loses its appeal over time. As the game wound on towards the "ultimate showdown", I found myself becoming less interested, rather than more. If you want a very well-done hack-and-slash, then "Darklands" is the game for you. If you want a game that emphasizes problem-solving, puzzles, or character development, then it definitely is not.