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Decline J_C fails his Codex check...again - Betrayal at Krondor is the best RPG ever, but I'm not feeling it

abnaxus

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Feist was a big fan of the Krondor games. He even mentioned that sorceress chick from Return to Krondor in one of his books.
 

Norfleet

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Makes sense to me. The human brain is generally absolutely shit at remembering specific pieces of information, but very good at remembering locations and navigation. If you can turn accessing information into the thing you're good at, you'll be able to effectively utilize more information.
 

Xorazm

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That's because it's not true.

More:



It sold well, but I'm quite sure it was not the best-selling game in Sierra's history, even at the time of its release. It was one of Dynamix's best-selling titles - ie, the developer, not the publisher.



That's not really how it went down. Sierra held the rights for enough time to make a sequel, but they provided insufficient funding for it - around one third of BaK's. Hallford refused to work on a poorly budgeted slam dunk sequel and moved on with his career. Eventually, Antara got made. We don't know what budget it had ended up having. I don't think there was ever any "bungling" of the IP rights, in the sense that they wanted to keep the IP but lost it by accident. As far as I can tell, they just didn't care about it, so they let it slip away.

Source: http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=8953

You're right - I mixed up the developer and publisher. Now that I think about, I also can't recall where I heard about tension between Hallford and Feist other than scuttlebutt on some forum or other, so it might well have been nothing more than that.
 

Baxander

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I have tried, and tried, and tried to like this game.

I have read the books, couldn't like those either.

So many people sing the praises of BoK, but I just cannot for the life of me get into it. It felt painfully slow, I hated the realistic looking portraits which looked extremely goofy to me, and just the general gameplay bored me to tears. I am going to give it an honest go again in the future, I feel guilty for *not* liking it, but I figure that will be my final attempt. Maybe now I will have a different perspective.
 

Sceptic

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Divinity: Original Sin
Apparently Inf tagged me (thanks, had missed the thread) but it links me to a post where I am not tagged. WTF.

Anyway, some random comments/bashing of J_C who is a pussy.

BaK didn't sell particularly well out of the gate, and it wasn't until the game was issued on CD-ROM, adding such flash as an enhanced orchestral score and a few splashes of voice acting that the game really took off (I imagine there's some primitive 1993 version of RPGCodex out there somewhere in which the faithful were ranting about how BaK sold out by tarting itself up with this coat of paint). The game went on to be the best selling game in its publisher's history, but as a result of its late start they bungled the rights to the intellectual property and another company you never heard of snapped up the rights.
BaK started selling well much earlier than the CD, hence why they made the CD in the first place. It got RAVE reviews in just about every magazine worth mentioning at the time (CGW's was particularly good - forgot who reviewed it though) and word of mouth spread VERY fast. CD version didn't have any orchestral score - it was the usual MIDI score recorded off a Roland module (a Sound Canvas from what I can tell) for those who didn't have one (ie most people). And as Inf said, the deal with the IP wasn't bungling, it was a conscious decision made by Sierra, and a very stupid one. Neal's and Feist's account on this particular point match perfectly. That's when Feist decided to go take the IP elsewhere for RtK (and that turned out to be one hell of a complicated story, made even more ironic since the game ended up being published by Sierra anyway through companies going down under and being bought and whatnot).

But the story doesn't end there. In yet another peculiar development - unique, to my knowledge, in the history of gaming - a video game based on a famous author's work eventually led to a novelization by that very author. And it yet another peculiar twist ...it sucked. Big time.
Neal is the better writer, that's why :P

This led to a bit of friction between the guy who wrote the game, Neal Hallford, and Raymond E. Feist, the author of the novels and creator of the universe. Hallford got annoyed that a lot of people presumed that the still-to-this-day-fantastic writing in the game was done by Raymond E. Feist. Feist, for his part, eventually got annoyed that a lot of people who read his book proclaimed Hallford's writing to be superior.
I'm not sure about the 2nd one. But as for the 1st I can't blame Neal for having people blindly give credit for his hard work to someone who was barely involved in the writing itself (and Feist readily admits he wasn't; he even pointed once to all of the things in the game that should have never made it there, the most obvious being Nalar's Rib, when you consider what Nalar actually is)

At some point during the Kickstarter craze, some people tracked Hallford down and asked if there was any way we could get a remake of BaK. His answer, which makes sense given the above, was that the intellectual property existed in a hellish netherworld, and that in any case it would require Feist's approval, which given the history seemed unlikely.
That's not the problem. The problem is that even Feist has trouble getting this IP back. Feist had intended to wrap up the Krondor series of books with 2 more books dealing with the Crawler and with Sidi. This never happened because, due to the absolutely bizarre way the rights worked, he could only write novelizations of the material already present in the games (and the interquel he managed to pull off through even more bizarre loopholes) but not for anything that followed up from them reusing the game-only characters. For Neal to be able to get his hand on the IP, when he never owned any of it in the first place....

it aged horribly
Things don't age horribly. People do.

1) Movement in the world is basicly works like a blobber, you move by taking steps. But it is just so tiresome to press the arrow keys repeatedly just to move forward, or turn. I know you can keep it pressed, but in that case you are moving too fast and have a big chance to run into an ambush, or miss something. So you have to smash the arrow buttons.
Increase setting for step distance. Keep pressing when going through previously covered ground.

2) There is no journal. You know what? Some people will say it that this is great, it is so immersive that you have to make your own journal, you take notes and stuff. NO, faggot! It is not fun, it wasn't fun back in the 80s, 90s, and it is not fun now. I don't want to constantly put the game down, write something, then pick the game up. I even had an excel sheet opened, it was like work. And oh boy, this game has a lot to write. No handholding here, you are bombarded with information, names, cities, items (which is not bad if yo have a journal). And you can't be sure that what you have just heared is a quest, or just some chit-chat which has nothing to do with anything. But just in case you have to write it down. Also, everything is discribed so vaguely. I don't want to be spoonfed with these things, but at least give me a fucking journal which lists the things I need to do.
You suck.

3) Combat is sorta OK, but it is very basic. Mages and archers are basicly useless, because they can't cast or shoot if there is an enemy on the adjacent grid. And since there are only 2 other guys in your party, you can rarely shield them from the enemies, who will attack you. Also, the character and skill system is not transparent at all.
Combat is one of the best party turn based systems we've ever had, I can think of less than half a dozen better systems, and half of those came out later. Character system is completely transparent, IDK what you're on about.

As I said, the game aged horribly, and in the worst way possible. Not in graphics and music, which are still nice to look at and hear, but just the way the game handles and presents information to you.
Again there is no such thing as games (or books or movies or music or anything) that ages badly. Control scheme sucked even back then, and in the CGW review this was the only element they actually heavily slammed. And rightly so. But to claim that the whole game is unplayable? And the way information is presented is just fine, you just suck.

I know I'm getting old, because I don't have the time and the patience to work with this game.
If you want a no-gameplay game a la Broken Age and cannot stand the thought of actually having to think about the information you are given and what of it could be important, tht's not a problem with the game, it's you.

Harsh, but true.
 

Xorazm

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I have tried, and tried, and tried to like this game.

I have read the books, couldn't like those either.

So many people sing the praises of BoK, but I just cannot for the life of me get into it. It felt painfully slow, I hated the realistic looking portraits which looked extremely goofy to me, and just the general gameplay bored me to tears.

If it helps, here's what I liked about it.
  • Just about everything in the story, down to the item descriptions, are written with a consistent style that unfolds very much like a novel.
  • Subverting many RPG traditions (particularly for the time), you're not given a sword and pointed in the direction of some evil wizard cackling away in his black tower. The plot moves in multiple directions with multiple fakeouts, and the primary villain isn't even revealed until over half the game is finished.
  • The universe feels hard-bitten and real, in contrast to the cartoonish high fantasy that most RPGs fall into, without quite falling into George RR Martin "rape everything" grimdark.
  • You're confronted with well-designed traps and riddles that have logical solutions (no random lever throwing and button hunts). Don't like puzzles? You can skip the riddle-chests and before long you get a spell that just lets you tank through all the traps.
  • One of the first and still best examples of a free-roaming open world, decorated with individually written bits of color throughout.
  • You don't get the best sword in the game by grinding up, you get it by deciphering a series of clues littered throughout the narrative.
  • Many of the chapters introduce brand new gameplay challenges. One of them requires you to poke around through the countryside and unravel a mystery, a quest that can be solved multiple different ways depending on who you've spoken to. Another gives you a limited set of rations and requires you to locate a mysterious device hidden somewhere in a massive forest. One side-quest in particular is solved by getting your character drunk.
I wish there was a way to make all these ugly, slow old games faster and more beautiful, but other than fiddling with DOSbox cycles and trying to reconfigure the keys I don't know of a better way to do it. The character portraits were goofy even at the time and the characters float around the battlefield rather than walk. You grow attached to one character only to find yourself confronted with a brand new one. Stat-crunchers who like to build their own parties from scratch won't be thrilled. Also, be prepared for characters to act like you already know the background to Feist's universe - the war between Midkemia and Kesh, the role of the Great Ones, why everyone thinks Pug is the shit, etc.

It takes some easing into, largely because there's just not a whole lot else like it. But if you let yourself wander around and explore the world a bit, get immersed in the backstory and the universe it presents, read the dialogs and the item descriptions and the lore, it'll make a bit more sense why people love it the way they do.

There wasn't really anything like it then and there hasn't really been anything like it since.
 

Xorazm

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BaK started selling well much earlier than the CD, hence why they made the CD in the first place.

You guys are making me doubt my sanity. I feel sure I've read a lot of these things in various places over the years but I just can't remember anymore where I picked them up from, and some of these memories are perhaps over a decade old. Wikipedia at least agree with me on this point though:

>>"Sales of the original 3½" floppy disk release were slow, but the game became a hit when it was re-released on CD-ROM."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_at_Krondor

Also, I could have _sworn_ I read an interview with Hallford where he said something to the effect of "Dynamix didn't realize they had a hit on their hands until it was too late" but the best I can come up with is a less-than-authoritative TV tropes link:

>>Sierra's management treated the game as just a marketing cash-in, and broke up the team that make it before they realized that they had a hit on their hands. As a result, while they later attempted to make several followups, none of them were able to compare to the original.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/BetrayalAtKrondor

Still it certainly seems odd to me that a company would have enough interest in producing a sequel to a hit game but not have enough interest to ensure that it retained the intellectual property rights. The fact that another company produced the direct sequel and Sierra had to settle for producing the "spiritual sequel" would suggest that, at least at some point over the years, somebody said "Oh shit, we shouldn't have done that."

If you're right, and you all do seem to know a good bit about this, I wonder if the belief that Sierra fucked up isn't just people looking at an admittedly confusing situation and just assuming whatever made the most sense.
 
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Mustawd

Guest
I don't think that was the case.

Anyway, Neal was a BRO and it's a shame he doesn't post anymore.


Maybe you're right. For some reason I remember him coming on and making a couple of posts defending himself from troll posts, and it just ended up making him look bitter. Dunno might be wrong.
 

J_C

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Things don't age horribly. People do.
Umm, OK?
Increase setting for step distance. Keep pressing when going through previously covered ground.
I mentioned this a billion times. I know what step distance does. But when exploring, you cannot keep the forward button pressed, because you walk too fast and might miss something or go into an ambust. Yo have to mash the navigation keys relatively slowly. Yes, you can keep it pressed after you explored the area, but the first exporation is very slow.

Combat is one of the best party turn based systems we've ever had,
What? The best? It is decent. Melee combat has no options basicly (swing and thrust). It is not bad, but not the best that's for sure.
Character system is completely transparent, IDK what you're on about.
Ok, then tell me that how does emphasizing skills work? I know that the skills you emphasize go up faster, but what is the formula for that? How does casting works? Spell efficiency only based on casting accuracy or what? How is defence calculated? I like to know these things in a turn based RPG.

Control scheme sucked even back then, and in the CGW review this was the only element they actually heavily slammed. And rightly so.
Finally a thing we agree on.
But to claim that the whole game is unplayable? And the way information is presented is just fine, you just suck.
I didn't say that the whole game sucks because of it. But a cumbersome control scheme weights heavily on a game's enjoyment factor.
 

SausageInYourFace

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
Edit: J_C, one thing you may want to do to make movement a bit better is switch the controls from the arrows to WASD movement, its pretty easy to do in DosBox.




I tried that but It didn'T work. I'm new to dosbox, so I might mess something up.

I have no clue about dosbox either but the mapping was pretty easy, how did it not work? You probably just forgot to remove the old binding first before you implemented the new one.
 

NotAGolfer

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I mentioned this a billion times. I know what step distance does. But when exploring, you cannot keep the forward button pressed, because you walk too fast and might miss something or go into an ambust. Yo have to mash the navigation keys relatively slowly. Yes, you can keep it pressed after you explored the area, but the first exporation is very slow.
You keep repeating this but it simply isn't true.
Reduce the step size to medium and you can keep the forward button pressed. Only problem is that you can't change directions while moving, which is indeed cumbersome. But that's where the roads and the follow road command come into play.
Then again even if you are a completionist like me you don't even have to look behind every corner because there's a spell called "Eyes of Ishap" you can either buy or find in a chest very early in the game. As soon as you got it you can find every piece of treasure in your immediate surroundings. Just bookmark the game, cast the spell and reload the bookmark save. A bit cheaty, sure, but the alternative would be to change the graphic detail settings to very low or something so that all these view obstructing trees don't show up which is just retarded.
 

Xorazm

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You keep repeating this but it simply isn't true.
Then again even if you are a completionist like me you don't even have to look behind every corner because there's a spell called "Eyes of Ishap" you can either buy or find in a chest very early in the game. As soon as you got it you can find every piece of treasure in your immediate surroundings.

When Chapter 3 starts you get an item that allows you to see every hidden item in the vicinity at no mana cost. You can basically comb the whole country digging stuff up (although there may be stuff that disappears after Chapters 1 and 2, I can't recall).
 

SCO

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There is no reason to dig through the whole country, don't sperg.
yes i dug every grave :negative:
 

J_C

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There is no reason to dig through the whole country, don't sperg.
yes i dug every grave :negative:

Me too. :negative: Because what if there is a Super broadsword +10 hidden in one of them.

Anyhoo, I've started the game for the 3rd time, this time not rushing at all, playing with patience, so despite the faults I've mentioned (which are still there)), I've started to have fun with the game.
 

Trojan_generic

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I am also one of those who started this game, got to Krondor and gave up. Probably for the simple reason that I felt that I had better games to play.

The combat screenshots of this game always make me think of baseball games from the eighties.
 

flushfire

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I am a filthy pirate and BaK is the first game I bought a genuine copy of. It's just that good. Also the soundtrack is truly memorable.
 
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BaK is a very good game, Xorazm did an excellent job at summarizing many of the major aspects but also the some of the tiny design details which make it so appealing.
I think it becomes weaker in the second half though. The story loses steam after the big twist and doesn't turn out to be quite as multilayered, complex and intriguing as the first half of the game might suggest. Also, the later chapters' linearity hurt the game quite a bit, BaK shines when it lets you explore the world at your leisure.

Anyway, playing the game recently, making my own notes, made me realize how much of a negative impact quest journals have had on CRPG design. Long before quest compasses and other modern conveniences made it unnecessary for us to listen to directions given by NPCs, navigate the environment and look out for landmarks, journals "liberated" us from the need to filter, process and analyse information gathered in the gameworld. Everything is handled to you on a silver plate, whereas in BaK and other games with no (or very basic) journal function half the fun and fascination comes from the fact that "you can't be sure that what you have just heared is a quest, or just some chit-chat which has nothing to do with anything" (JC's complaint) and have to actually think and make the right connections.

I was thinking about how modern RPGs could bring back this kind of experience without inflicting the inconvenience of having to physically write down stuff on the player. I think an interesting solution could be a journal that would record every bit of information gathered in the gameworld, without "interpreting" it (assigning it automatically to a quest, explaining to the player what to make of it, showing what is important and what is useless/fluff etc.). Give it good search/filter/sorting functionality and let the player sort things out on his own.
 

J_C

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Anyway, playing the game recently, making my own notes, made me realize how much of a negative impact quest journals have had on CRPG design. Long before quest compasses and other modern conveniences made it unnecessary for us to listen to directions given by NPCs, navigate the environment and look out for landmarks, journals "liberated" us from the need to filter, process and analyse information gathered in the gameworld. Everything is handled to you on a silver plate, whereas in BaK and other games with no (or very basic) journal function half the fun and fascination comes from the fact that "you can't be sure that what you have just heared is a quest, or just some chit-chat which has nothing to do with anything" (JC's complaint) and have to actually think and make the right connections.

I was thinking about how modern RPGs could bring back this kind of experience without inflicting the inconvenience of having to physically write down stuff on the player. I think an interesting solution could be a journal that would record every bit of information gathered in the gameworld, without "interpreting" it (assigning it automatically to a quest, explaining to the player what to make of it, showing what is important and what is useless/fluff etc.). Give it good search/filter/sorting functionality and let the player sort things out on his own.
Thing is, I don't want quest markers, I don't want spoon fed directions. I just want a list about the quests I encounter, or the interesting things I hear. X said that there is a problem in Z. X wants me to get Z. There is a rumor about Y. Nothing more than Might and Magic VI or Fallout 1 offered. So if I get back to the game after a week, i know what I should do.

Imagine this: you play with BaK. You hear that you have to find Frankley in Eegley (actual quest in Bak). So what do I do, I wrote a note in front of me, to find Frankley in Eegley.

Now if the game had a journal, the Find Frankley in Eegley note would be automatically added to your journal. You get the same result either way, you don't have to do any more brain work. You just lose time, and it adds unconvenience because you have to put down the game each time to write something up.
 
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That's basically what I said.
The second half of my post wasn't directed strictly at you anyway, more of a general thought about journals and RPG design. Thing is, you want your journal to keep track of "quests" and automatically assign relevant pieces of information to them. That's fine of course and isn't on the same level as a quest compass (I didn't want to imply that).

However, my point was that while playing BaK I remembered how much fun it is to keep track of quests by yourself, without the help of a journal, and the only inconvenience I'd like to see eliminated in my dream game is the tediousness of writing down stuff in a notebook. However, I don't want the journal to tell me which information is essential and which is not, something you don't agree with, at least I got the impression based on your original post ("I don't know what is relevant and what is only chit-chat").
 
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J_C

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That's basically what I said.
The second half of my post wasn't directed strictly at you anyway, more of a general thought about journals and RPG design. Thing is, you want your journal to keep track of "quests" and automatically assign relevant pieces of information to them. That's fine of course and isn't on the same level as a quest compass (I didn't want to imply that).

However, my point was that while playing BaK I remembered how much fun it is to keep track of quests by yourself, without the help of a journal, and the only inconvenience I'd like to see eliminated in my dream game is the tediousness of writing down stuff in a notebook. However, I don't want the journal to tell me which information is essential and which is not, something you don't agree with, at least I got the impression based on your original post ("I don't know what is relevant and what is only chit-chat").
Actually I would be OK with a system you suggested:
I think an interesting solution could be a journal that would record every bit of information gathered in the gameworld, without "interpreting" it (assigning it automatically to a quest, explaining to the player what to make of it, showing what is important and what is useless/fluff etc.). Give it good search/filter/sorting functionality and let the player sort things out on his own.
Or the other thing if they would only give the bare minimum, list me the quests and that's all, and it would be great if I could make map notes ingame, ala Baldur's Gate 2, so I could mark relevant information on the map.
 

J_C

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Need a little help here. One of my characters, Locklear constantly getting poisoned without any good reason. We are on the road, resting, he gets poisoned. I go to the temple, they heal him, but he gets poisoned when I try to rest to get his health back. I have no clue why is this happening.
 
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Check the inventory, his rations are poisoned. Pay attention to what you loot in the future.

I also had this problem :oops:
 

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