Why am I talking about a game that came out in 2002? Especially, in a field that is obsessed with the future and has yet to find a way to make its past relevant in any meaningful way? I’m talking about it because one of its sequels recently was released (Skyrim) and before I played that I wanted to, finally, play through this.
Also, D is playing Skyrim right now…
Anyway, Morrowind. Morrowind is the third in Bethesda’s long lived Elder Scrolls series (17 years?!) of open-ended, free roaming, near sandbox level, role playing games. Elder Scroll games are known for their large, rich worlds, extensive backstory, and the player’s ability to freely wander the world, exploring, dungeoneering, smithing, leatherworking, potion making, etc… In general, players can ignore the story line entirely and still have hours of stuff to do!
This is about as good as Morrowind can look, but for 2002 that's damn impressive!
I’m a half a dozen hours into the game and I haven’t really touched the main story line. I’ve been too busy working my way up the ladder in the Mage and Thieves Guilds. I think the story has something to do with an ancestor-god of the Dark Elves who inhabit the island the game takes places on. The Dark Elves are divided into houses, one of which was evil and destroyed a long time ago, but is now somehow coming back. I’m pretty sure that is what is happening. Like I said, I’ve been distracted by other things. What I have been noticing is that Morrowind is an incredibly ugly looking game. I know, I know this game is almost 10 years old and PC power back then was only a shadow of what it is now but, Super Mario Brothers for the NES had a richer color palette than Morrowind. Everything in this game is a shade of brown or gray. The dull color palette is only part of the problem, all the character models in this game are hideous as well. Take a look at this Nix hound:
Ack! it's hideous!
Why is it green, and scaly, and have three weird teeth? I don’t even know how this thing would eat if it was real? Everything looks like this too? Weird boxy, brown, bugs, and strange walking toadstools, and poorly assembled human dolls with off putting faces. It’s as if the artists were trying to offend the players sense of aesthetics… You don’t want to kill things because they’re evil, or attacking you, you want to kill them because their existence is an affront to good taste!
Orcs are supposed to be ugly, I know. But, Egad!
Playing Morrowind has helped me to recognize how spoiled modern gaming is. Oblivion and Skyrim would never let the player get lost or have to figure out where to go on their own. Both of those games have extensive, detailed maps and a quest tracker that always points you in the direction of the quest you’re working on. Morrowind has detailed map and parts of it are even labelled. But quest tracking? Nope. You’ve got a journal that keeps track of your conversations, which is vital, because to get from one place to the next or to find some of the out of the way spots NPCs direct you to you’re going to have to follow their directions. Their often vague and general directions… Flipping between the journal screen, map screen, and main screen will eventually get you there, most of the time. But, I’ve found myself wandering off numerous times, unsure of where I was and where I needed to go. There’s still a dungeon out there I can’t find despite having directions to it…
All in all I’m having fun with the game and I can see why it was such a big deal when it came out. I am looking forward to playing Skyrim though when I’m done.
Okay, let’s stop here and review a basic adventurer’s tool kit, shall we? Before an adventurer even starts adventuring he has several skills and abilities that you’ll want to get the hang of before you rush out there and get eaten by a cheetaur:
These right here will give you basic commands and information about the game
These are probably your most important tools. With these an adventurer can remember with perfect clarity his current state and then return to it if s/he ever needs to. Why is this important? Well because dummy if that saurus I mentioned gets ahold of you this is your only chance to not end up dino poop!
An adventurer can also slow and speed up time to some degree as well as control how acute his hearing is
These are the most basic of skills a hero can use, that third one being especially important!
Lastly, we have your sack of goods, your ability to see just how great a hero you are, your innate ability to tell what time it is, and some other useul tasks. Please be aware that you will not be able to pass this correspondence course and become a licensed adventurer without knowing this material backwards and forwards pupils! Okay, let’s resume (quoted text are typed commands):
ask otto
With his introduction to the town of Spielburg and its Sheriff over the hero explored the rest of the town:
look building
Being a magic user himself our hero went right inside:
Shows what she knows!
ask about goods
Investigating Town
ask about scrolls
Well, that was nice of her to tell us! Let’s buy one of those scrolls, but which one is the most useful? Or rather which one is the cheapest? How much money did the hero start off with anyway?
If I recall correctly there are 10 silvers to a gold, Garcon picked up the open spell:
After reading the scroll arcane images and symbols were seared into the hero’s mind and the scroll crumbled.
Seeing as he was now too poor for anything else the hero continued searching Spielberg, his next stop? The Adventurers’ Guild:
Now class do you know what the Hero of Spielberg did first? Of course you do! It’s what all adventurer’s do everytime they enter a new guild!
read book
Let’s hope one day all of you have such nice penmanship… The hero took in all the sights the Guild Hall offered:
Next time? Garcon explores the rest of Spielburg and ventures out into the surrounding wilderness!
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)
Last month I wrote about Fantasy Flight’s new game set in the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, Elder Sign. If you want to understand what I’m going to be talking about today I recommend you read the linked post first. At the end of last week the company released a trimmed down version of the game for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices called Elder Sign: Omens. Since I enjoy playing the real-world version so much I thought I’d give its virtual twin a try as well. Omens is mostly a trimmed down version of Elder Signs, the only Ancient One you battle against is Azathoth, who when it is summoned immediately ends the game (I imagine this was done to remove the added complication of fighting the Ancient One,) Ally cards are removed from the game, and the random effects that occur as the game progresses (clock strikes midnight) are unknown to the player(s) and there appear to be more negative effects (monsters appear or doom track advances) than not (edit: checking the game’s website over confirms that suspicion and informs me that monsters have been made more difficult too.) Oh, and players are limited to just four investigators and game play is restricted to passing the device around between players.
This game would look better on a larger device
The nicest thing about turning board games into video games is that all the rules are automated and you can be sure you’re playing the game correctly (Fantasy Flight is notorious for having large, poorly organized, vague rule books. Players live for the FAQs to these games!) They’ve done a good job with Omens in making everything clear and understandable to the player without cluttering up the screen. Tap a location, character, enemy, clock, any item, etc. and a screen pops up explaining what this piece means, does, etc. There are tutorial videos as well to guide players through the game as well. Music, sound effects, and simple animations have also been incorporated into the game.
All in all it’s a pretty good little game. It might get a little boring after awhile always having to deal with Azathoth. One of the coolest moments in Arkham Horror or Elder Sign is failing to keep the Ancient One from manifesting and then having to confront it. Yes, you usually die when this happens but the rare occasions when you defeat them are etched in my mind as some of my greatest gaming moments, ever. That and not being able to play with other people through asynchronous wireless are the game’s biggest problems.
