Quest for glory clones

[Barbarian]

I'm playing through the full series right now (currently on part II, playing the remake). I had played I and IV a few years back and had loved them already.

Don't want the joyride to end and I am aware there are several great clones made by indie devs, so I would like pointers on which are the best to seek out first. I'm studying german and will be playing parts III and IV in that language, so if said games have translations available it is also a plus for me.

Also, on a sidenote: I'm playing a thief with added magical skills(hybrid of sorts). Is it worthwhile to switch classes on III or IV? I notice there is very little thieving stuff in the second game so far, might even restart the game and switch my character's class to fighter or mage when importing. Should I seek to become a paladin as well? I wonder if the extra content is worthwhile.

 

[Sceptic]

Heroine Quest and Quest for Infamy are the best (only?) QFG-likes out there. Both are great. HQ is free, QFI is worth the price. I don't think I can say which one's better, as I like both. Unfortunately very few people tried to emulate what made QFG so great.

I like my QFG playthroughs pure so I always recommend against class-mixing. TBH I'm surprised you missed the thievery in QFG2, there's a TON of it, it's probably the class that gets the most stuff extra to do in the game. Anyway the thing with mixing classes is that eventually one of the classes will override the other and you'll miss some class-specific content. I really think the best way to experience QFG is to run through the series 3 times: once as a wizard, once as a thief, and once as a fighter that switches to paladin in 2. You could also do a full fighter run, but the pure fighter doesn't really get any unique content in 4 and 5, and the only special thing they get in 3 is becoming a paladin if you didn't in 2 (and it's very little extra compared to doing 3 as a paladin). Though being a pure fighter does allow you to be a dick in many of the situations where the paladin can't so it can still be fun.

 

[Barbarian]

I'm early in the game, that might be it.

Is there enough thief exclusive content to justify a pure series playthrough? I'm aware that in the first game you could get all the thief stuff with a fighter or mage, I almost started over midway because of that and some good olf metagaming desire. Thing is I really don't intend to replay the whole series 3 times, so I want to get the most content. I assume I should become a paladin for that, but I'm aware that mages get quite a bit of exclusive stuff.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I played through the entire series as a Thief back in the day. As you mentioned the content is shared pretty equally in the first game, but due to a glitch in the original QFG2 a Thief could enter the Mage test and become a certified Wizard, but couldn't get the Fighter-exclusive content. What's more, transferring a Thief from QFG2 to QFG3 after doing so will make the game think your character is a Mage. (QFG4 allows you to pick the class of your transferred character in case something went wrong.)

QFG2 and QFG3 are pretty light on Thief-content. There are a handful of houses of rob in QFG2, but only one at the most in QFG3. Instead vital scenes play out differentely depending in your class, like the final showdowns and such.

QFG4 is a blast to play as a Thief, especially once you sneak into the castle.

Without spoiling anything, there is worthwhile Thief content in QFG5.

 

[CryptRat]

I stopped my recent play through the series in the middle of QfG4 because the game crashed more and more as I advanced through the game to the point that it was unplayable.
I'm using Windows 7 and playing the GoG version of the game (didn't touch the dosbox config file). Last time I checked the GoG threads related with the game only mentioned bugs on precise emplacement which anyway should be fixed in the version they're delivering.
Any idea?

 

[Sceptic]

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/Patches-Updates-Games/QuestForGloryUpdates.html
Grab the patch by NewRisingSun (I think GOG version is the CD version). Watch all your problems melt away.
I'd install his patch every time if it's available for a Sierra game, they're really quite amazing and absolutely required to play QFG3-4 without pulling your hair out due to the NUMEROUS bugs and crashes in the original releases (even after official patches).
This isn't a GOG or new PC problem BTW, the game was notoriously unplayable in its initial release.

 

[CryptRat]

It looks like even this patch was already included in the GoG version.
Thanks anyway.

 

[Sceptic]

Damn. I thought NRS's patch fixed all problems. Can you tell me what kind of error you get when it crashes? Do the crashes always happen in specific spots or at random? Try to lower DOSBox cycles to <10k and see if the game is still playable, this fixes problems with a lot of other games.

 

[CryptRat]

I'm very thankful for your help.
Don't bother too much though', nobody mentions these kind of crashes in the GoG forums so it may be some kind of weird bug and I'll just install the game on another PC someday and it'll probably work fine.

That said I can try to describe what happens.

Do the crashes always happen in specific spots or at random?

It's complicated, it's often reproducible but it's nothing really specific.

For example I'm almost sure that at a moment I couldn't talk with the characters in the tavern without the game crashing, even after reloading my savegame, but I did other things and then later I could talk to them again.

What I just did (swiitched to 5000 cycles, the games stays nearly playable) to get the error messages :
- loaded my last savegame, tried to open my character sheet -> crash
- did it again several times, always crashed
- I was in the village, I entered the castle and roammed a little, tried to rest -> crash (I did that to know if I would get the same error message)

I loaded a previous an old savegame and managed to open my character sheet. I'm pretty sure that I could play for several sessions with some very occasional crashes at first, but then these crashes would become more and more frequent again.

Here are the messages :

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Just a suggestion based on how I bypassed this error back in the day, but try exiting the game, going into the setup program and choose your sound settings so that they're either set for PC Speaker or none at all.

See what that does for you.

I had to do this to complete a couple of sections of the game (some parts of the dungeon, the swamp) and I could re-enable audio after I was done with them.

 

[CryptRat]

Thanks. You mean directly the Windows settings, right? In that case it does not seem to work, but whatever I'm trying it's possible that my savegames are corrupted and that some of the solutions would work if I started a new game.

 

[Blackthorne]

Sceptic already mentioned it, but I'm the developer of Quest for Infamy. I'm a big QFG fan, and QFI started out as our spin on what it'd be like to play QFG as an asshole. The protagonist in QFI is more morally gray than a bad guy. I had a lot of fun making it, and there's definite nods to QFG and other Sierra Games we grew up playing. It's on Steam, GoG, and Itch.io currently.


Bt

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I forgot to mention that I was playing the MS-DOS version of QFG4. :/

 

[V_K]

It looks like even this patch was already included in the GoG version.

GoG sometimes does a poor job of including patches (case in poin - NWN, which has to be patched manually), so maybe try installing it after all.

I'm playing through the full series right now (currently on part II, playing the remake). I had played I and IV a few years back and had loved them already.

Don't want the joyride to end and I am aware there are several great clones made by indie devs, so I would like pointers on which are the best to seek out first. I'm studying german and will be playing parts III and IV in that language, so if said games have translations available it is also a plus for me.

If you're feeling masochistic, you could try Arcatera (getting a copy and getting it to run on modern system is probably an adventure in itself). It has some very cool ideas, but is a sort of a "flawed gem", with about 80% flaws and 20% gem.
Other than that and HQ/QFI, Legacy: Realm of Terror is a terrific RPG/Adventure hybrid, but in a very different style.