This Let’s Play originally appeared on Gamespite.net’s forum, The Return of Talking Time (all questions asked are rhetorical because they were asked, and answered by forum users)
About Quest for Glory: So You Want to be a Hero?
Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero (later re-released as Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero because of trademark issues involving the HeroQuest boardgame) is an adventure game/role-playing game hybrid, designed by Lori Ann Cole and published by Sierra On-line. It is the first game in the Quest for Glory series. Hero’s Quest I has been credited for being a genre-inventing game, as no other game before it had tried to mix graphical adventure gaming with role-playing-like elements such as statistic building (strength, intelligence, health) that would actually have an impact on the ability to accomplish certain parts of the game. (Beyond Zork had done the same for text adventures two years earlier.)
In the valley barony of Spielburg, the evil ogress Baba Yaga has cursed the land, and the baron who tried to drive her off. His children have disappeared, while the land is ravaged by monsters and brigands. The Valley of Spielburg is in need of a Hero able to solve these problems.
The game follows the Hero (Devon Aidendale in the novelized Authorized strategy guide[1]), who in the game is a customized adventurer whose name and class is chosen by player, on his journey into the land; he must help people and become a proclaimed Hero.
The adventurer battles monsters, solves side quests (such as finding lost items and spell ingredients) and helps fantasy creatures such as a dryad, a hermit and a colorful collection of furry creatures called Meeps. Fulfilling quests will grant him experience and money, which he may use to buy equipment and potions. The game is open ended, which means the player can explore all the game at once and solve the quests in what order seems convenient to them. During the quest, the character also meets recurring series characters such as the wizard Erasmus and his familiar Fenrus (or perhaps the other way around[2]), and first hears tales of the benevolent faery Erana.
While the game can be completed without solving the secondary quests, in the optimal ending, which nets the player the maximum score and serves as canon for the remainder of the series, the player frees the baronet from a powerful curse and thwarts the plans of the witch Baba Yaga. Finally, the adventurer frees the baron’s daughter, Elsa von Spielburg, from the curse which had transformed her into the brigand leader. By doing so, the adventurer fulfills a prophecy, restores Spielburg Valley to prosperity, and is awarded the title of Hero.
After this, the Hero, along with the merchant Abdulla Doo and the innkeepers Shameen and Shema, leaves on a magic carpet for Shapeir, the homeland of the three, setting the plan for the sequel, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire.
The game was the first by Sierra that (according to RPG customs) allowed the selection of a character out of three classes: Fighter, Magic User, and Thief. What class the hero assigns to a character largely determines how they can solve puzzles and what quests they will run into. However, the distinction between classes was not an absolute one; players could add skills to a character and allow them to complete quests related to other classes in this game and others in the series.
Quest for Glory introduced a realism rarely found in RPGs and other adventure games even today. Day, night and the passage of time was a factor; the setting and scenery was different during day and night. The main character had to eat on a regular basis, he would become tired from running and fighting which required rest and sleep. Skills were not obtained by gaining levels through combat, but rather increased distinctly through the regular course of your adventuring. The more the player used magic, the more the Hero’s Magic ability would increase (followed by Intelligence); likewise the more the player engaged in battle, training, or even cleaning the baron’s stables, the more the Hero’s Strength, Vitality and Agility would increase.
Like some other games by Sierra, a VGA version using Sierra’s “point and click” SCI1.1 interpreter was released in 1992. As a result of some limitations of this version, many die-hard fans of Quest for Glory resent the VGA rendition due to the lack of movement that was prevalent in the original, which used the text-parser–based SCI0. While the original game was based on dialogues and asking questions in order to obtain some background information, in the new interface the dialogues had a tree structure: a menu of question topics. By asking certain questions (e.g. “Ask about Potion”), the player will get new questions to ask (e.g. “Healing potion, Stamina potion, Dispel potion”). The backgrounds and characters were hand drawn and scanned, while the monster fights and character portraits were made using clay models and stop motion animation. Unlike other games, running out of stamina points here can kill the hero outright instead of starting to do health damage.
Famous Adventurer’s Correspondence School: Adventuring 101, Quest for Glory
Welcome, Welcome to the first course in the Famous Adventurer’s Correspondence School! In Adventuring 101 we’re going to cover the basic aspects of adventuring using one of our more successful graduates adventures in the town of Spielburg as template to covers such essential adventuring concepts as: monster fighting, outdoorsmanship, wilderness survival, and interacting with NPCs!
But first I have a couple of questions for the class:
1. Do you prefer the class to be taught in fancy new HD or do you prefer the use of original source materials?
Original:
HD:
My preference is for the original but I am, if anything, respectful of my student’s wished
Second, there is some degree of dispute by adventuring experts just how the Spielburg hero saved the town, multiple contradicting sources exist on the subject. While I will make reference to all three of the major texts trough out the course which would the class prefer as our primary text?
Will we use the Fighter, Wizard, or Thief text?
(Talking Time choose to be a magic using thief, as you’ll see... )
Chapter 1: An introduction to adventuring and Spielburg
First class watch this short introductory video on the class and all the people who worked hard to make Adventuring a reality for you and thousands of others:
For the curious these are the different starting statistics for the three different classes.
Fighter:
Magic User:
Thief:
Brand new adventurers get 50 points to distribute (5 points at a time) amongst the various skills. The hero of Spielberg was a magic using thief and had studied extra hard in order to get magic (I sunk our hero’s points into magic, stealth, lockpick, luck, intelligence and of course magic) Don’t worry about not sinking points into a skill we can raise it at any point in the game by practicing it. Except for skills you have a zero in.
Oh? What was that? What was the hero of Spielberg’s name? Uh, the stories aren’t too clear on that but our oldest and most trusted sources say his name was:
Yup, his name was Garcon Perseii Jackson Danar Seepgood (this way almost everyone is happy, right? Right?) (Talking Time couldn’t decide on a name so I used all of them)
Okay, okay now open your textbooks to page 1 we’ll start with the heroes entry into Spielberg:
Next time, we explore the town of Spielburg and take the first steps on our path to being a hero!
(If you can’t wait you can always head over to the forums and read ahead)
