The Realms of Arkania Thread

[Jim Cojones]

Seeing how for many locals Realms of Arkania trilogy is a must play, I have downloaded Star Trail not long after joining this nice community full of peaceful, humble internauts. Since then, I have tried to play it at least three times. I found many its aspects to be very interesting - detailed character system, simulation aspect, travel system, random stuff that can happen in towns... However, I was never been able to play it for long - every time I was getting bored with combat.

This is strange for two reasons. First, I can bear with bad combat in many RPGs. Second, I remember its combat system was praised many times here. I thought I may be wrong and I was missing something that actually makes this aspect of the game great.

So I've checked what exactly did the Codexers find good about it. It was a bit of work because there's quite a lot of threads about both RoA and the best combat systems around. Unfortunately, even in the old discussions there wasn't much substance. Whenever somebody asks for an example of good turn-based combat, the game is mentioned. Sometimes it gets response like "not really, the game is fun but not because of combat. Similarly, in threads dedicated to RoA there are voices for and against games combat system.

But I don't think there was ever a serious discussions about it. Nobody seemed to be interested in telling why he likes/doesn't like it, using any arguments.

Here's what I found troubling:

- it is painfully slow - even a battle with two fucking beetles takes at least five minutes and more difficult encounters are much longer. I think the main reasons for this are;

• - amount of hit points seems to be a bit to high so it takes a couple of turns to kill a decent opponent even if you surround him with 4 people,
  - animations are way to slow - it's actually the biggest problem. I wish there was an option to tun animations off,

- there is not enough feedback - you can't check which enemy is more dangerous, who is hurt badly and who's almost in perfect condition, you don't know if the enemy is still under affected by a spell, you don't know who will be moving next an why (it sometimes happens one character moves twice in row, why?), attack effects are shown only for a brief time so sometimes you won't realise what happened, especially if you don't memorise colours characteristic for each level of success/failure, hell, you don't even know if the sword you use is good, or is it a total crap,

- the spell system is horrible for a newcomer;

• - I can live without ingame spell descriptions, even though it is annoying, but lack of any description in the manual sucks, the only way to find which ones are useful is try them in action,
  - there are many spells with fancy names which makes it difficult to guess what is their effect or remember that after you cast them,
  - there is no spells graduation. This mean that you can level up any possible spell and use most of them right from the beginning. I'd rather like to be introduced to new spells with time so it would be easier to learn their use,

- lightning spell breaks the combat. Really. After using this spell no encounter offered any difficulty.

It's not like there's nothing good about it. I liked the way game deal with armor - they add damage resistance but lower your attack and parry abilities. The penalties for fighting multiple opponents make sense. Combined with the fact you can't cast spell/shoot an arrow if something (or someone) is between you and enemy it results in a system where clever positioning really matters.

Nut that's not enough to redeem it in my eyes. So I have a question to you. Did I missed something. Do you like RoA combat? If so, what makes it great?

 

[Zomg]

You probably don't like the combat because it's terrible and the encounter design is terrible; just guessing here. Anyone that praised it is subhuman and you can safely disregard their stupid opinions forever.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

I enjoyed it somewhat, but that doesn't mean it's good. While at it's core it's a pretty average turn-based tactical system, it is, indeed, a slow (especially on Dosbox for some reason), badly designed mess, with invulnerable, heavily armored warriors, unwinnable "duels" (parrying), a ton of useless spells and a number of ridiculously overpowered ones (you could say that's a problem with the implementation of the PnP system though). For me personally, that's bad but tolerable. The thing that really makes it "terrible" though is the atrocious interface with clunky mouse support.

Luckily, with a sufficiently buff party, you can just go for auto resolution for 90% of the encounters (which are filler anyway). Probably the reason why I don't hate it.

 

[Fowyr]

amount of hit points seems to be a bit to high so it takes a couple of turns to kill a decent opponent even if you surround him with 4 people

use poison

- animations are way to slow - it's actually the biggest problem.
I wish there was an option to tun animations off

yes

the spell system is horrible for a newcomer;

I have very good character creation guide/walkthrough for BoD, but it Russian.

- there are many spells with fancy names which makes it difficult to guess what is their effect or remember that after you cast them,

This was fun

- there is no spells graduation. This mean that you can level up any possible spell and use most of them right from the beginning. I'd rather like to be introduced to new spells with time so it would be easier to learn their use

Play Blade of Destiny. Star Trail game for middle level characters.

Nut that's not enough to redeem it in my eyes. So I have a question to you. Did I missed something. Do you like RoA combat?

Yeah

If so, what makes it great?

Kukris

 

[SerratedBiz]

- animations are way to slow - it's actually the biggest problem.
I wish there was an option to tun animations off

yes

Yes there is or yes I wish so too?

The slow combat was also the reason I found myself dropping RoA. It was a major letdown after the excitement I felt after reading the manual.

 

[Fowyr]

Yes there is or yes I wish so too?

yes I wish so too. Luckily, autocombat relieves some tedious combats.

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS FAG PROTOCOL IS SHIT QUIT DEEFNENDFING THAT POPALMOLE CRAP

 

[Fowyr]

BROS FAG PROTOCOL IS SHIT QUIT DEEFNENDFING THAT POPALMOLE CRAP

SORRY BRO YOU TOTALLY MISS A THREAD

 

[mondblut]

ROA combat is generally bad. It does have some nice features rarely touched by other contemporary games (such as: heavy emphasis on parrying making ganging up on one guy mandatory; breaking weapons; poisons; and ever seen a party member with a high "fear of the dead" stat run away from a combat with skeletons fucking it up for everybody?), but aged pretty badly. It is certainly not among the aspects that make the trilogy a classic.

Fortunately, there are not one but two types of automatic combat resolution, and heavily customizable at that, so I suggest to stick with it once your party is reasonably strong, except for occasional very special harder encounters.

As for animations, when I was running the trilogy on a 200mhz pentium pro some 10 years ago, they were blazing fast, basically only held in check by the attack sounds. If you use dosbox, maybe it emulates slower speed.

 

[kmonster]

If you have a manual without spell descriptions you can find them elsewhere. Look at http://www.lemonamiga.com/, search for blade of destiny (the predecessor which uses the same spells) and look into the manual there for example.

Combat isn't really that great, so I recommend creating characters with powerful combat stats to speed it up. Get everyone's strength up to the maximum so you can do far more more damage per hit. If everyone has high AC you should be quite invulnerable, so you can use the automatic combat option quite safely if you want, but I always fought manually.

Combat difficulty is balanced for roleplaying, for getting through without reloading. There are better spells than lightning.

 

[yaster]

So, I am not the only one who dropped ball after trying RoA? I tried Blade of Destiny though and it has its very own share of additional problems.

- casting/archery only in straight line (unlike ST afaik). It worked out in gorky17 but here it's just clunky and fucks positioning, also limiting early spell casting.
- badly made isometric view (I know - wtf, huh?). In dungeon area south walls covers the game area (as in space when you can move) and there is no highlight for npc, you just can't what is fuckin' happening
- i don't know about ST but in BoD AI is just of simplest possible sort. Very determinable. It moves to closest enemy and whacks him till dead. Also when gang raping it is also possible to determine who will be attacked by enemy - afaik it's the first who made hit.
- Also interface is just very, very clunky. And slow.

And I just hated what you already said - slow ass animation (coupled with festival of misses, well it maybe just me and my whimsy party, didn't sticked long enough to know for sure) and bad feedback (very laconic and badly - too fast, easy to miss - presented).

Combat was unfortunately just a part of a problem. Indistinguishable houses (even those which provide main quest) with bring us to need of clicking on every single one of them or using walkthrough, sucks. What a exercise in tedium. Also being able, right from the start, to gather big amount of money through action in taverns didn't made me too positive about whole game.

Shame really, character creation was really sweet. But that was the only thing I found decent through my very short playthrough.

I assume that RoA main strength lies in something I didn't tasted - over map traveling. Having that in mind and claims that combat sucks - what is good, strong point of Shadow over Riva?

Also, I don't know how much is that worth, but after trying to determine If I do something wrong I watched some let's play and saw that people used very straightforward character scheme: maxing both positive - with should be good - and negative (except for superstition) stats - with I hoped is very, very bad. This killed any urge to continue BoD. I really hoped that fighter with 8 in claustrophobia are just useless fucks in dungeons and mountains, cliffs and bridges over ledges makes the same with acrophobia infested folks. So how much is it true? What's actual optimal build?

If you have a manual without spell descriptions you can find them elsewhere. Look at http://www.lemonamiga.com/, search for blade of destiny (the predecessor which uses the same spells) and look into the manual there for example.

Spell descriptions can only be found in Shadow over Riva manual. I've no idea how people played this game just after release. Tring out spells on your own doesn't seem to be reliable with given feedback. Even with spell description I had little understanding what happened after casting spell. Sucks.

 

[PorkaMorka]

One of the recent times when ROA had a long thread here, the resident ROA expert (name starts with J, Modron avatar, likely deviant) suggested that to properly enjoy the game required rerolling enough to get really, really good stats.

At the time he made it seem mandatory (like maybe the game would be too hard if you didn't) but at the very end of the thread it turned out he recommended going for the super high stats so you could just breeze through the combat and enjoy the other aspects of the game, survival and exploration I guess.

I've never played it for long, since it seemed a lot less fun than the Gold Box games (and strangely, much more confusing in the first person mode), so I can't judge it fairly, but that is kind of disappointing if the combat really is bad, since they copied it from a popular P&P system. That would discredit my grand theory that the way for CRPG combat to avoid sucking is slavish copying of P&P systems.

 

[Andhaira]

RoA combat ROCKS! It takes long yes, but thats part of the fun. Its turnbased, what do you expect. Also, there is an option for automatic comabt, that displays a cool fighting animation. Use that when a combat becomes boring.

 

[Sergiu64]

I have very good character creation guide/walkthrough for BoD, but it Russian.

I can read Russian, where can I find your guide? Maybe I'll give these series another try.

 

[hrose]

Did the time pass differently 20 years ago? Or we just got much better? (no we didn't, old games are still way HARDER)

These days I'm looking at very old RPGs (<1995) and this review caught my eye: http://amr.abime.net/review_1377

It's an Amiga review of the first Arkania, and right at the center you can read: Over 400 hours of gameplay are promised.

Holy crap! Well, even if one counts the exaggerations OVER 400 hours is a bold claim. But it's also something that I find very often in these reviews. For example I read a review of Ambermoon where it was stated that it would take at least three months to complete, and only as long you were already familiar with the prequel.

This is almost a standard, with games claimed to last for more than a hundred hours. Yet nowadays even large games are replayed as a 40 hours affair at best. Take Might & Magic World of Xeen that in old reviews is considered the biggest RPG ever, while these days you can find reviews that give it between 30 and 200 hours.

Some people I've asked about Ambermoon give me an estimation of 30-40 hours on average. The 400 hours of Arkania are reduced to something like 20 in most other places I've checked.

Time surely IS subjective

 

[buzz]

A guy who knows what he is doing can finish Castlevania in half an hour. It took me hours and hours to do it as a kid.
You also need to consider that RPGs generally have high replay value.

 

[Mother Russia]

BG2 was an exception, in that it could take 250-300 hours to complete. And that's without the expansion pack.

 

[hrose]

And the 400 hours aren't even misquoted, I found it right in the ad: http://hol.abime.net/137/miscshot

 

[Gord]

I guess each period has their own silly superlatives to go by.

Might also be somewhat related to walkthroughs being less common at the time.
Nowadays if you get stuck at some riddle you might just look it up on some online guide. In the early 90s this wasn't just so easy.

 

[Morkar Left]

Sure, you could spent 400 hours in RoA1.
Theoretically it is possible to "cartograph" everything by listing to every rumour, mapping every square, analyse where you can make the best prices and earn money by trading items that way or search for shops with obscure equipment (even if completely unnecessary because you can easily use "exploits" for cheap cash and the exotic weapons aren'T worth looking for).

In other words; if you are very slow, enjoy larping and you have at least some asperger tendencies. And no other game to play instead.

 

[CorpseZeb]

Nah. On the real, one floppy Amiga 500, 400 hours is granted... Arkania is near unplayable without a harddrive.

 

[Morkar Left]

Somehow I didn't find it annoying back in the day. I guess I was really used to it, never had a second drive or hd.

 

[Gord]

No to forget that point near the end where you have to wait for the orcs to appear to challenge their leader.
If you insist of doing something else but waiting all the time, you might reach 400 hours...

 

[CorpseZeb]

I survived Monkey Island 2 "on the floppy", but for the some reason, I hadn't the same patience for RoA. Anyway, do they count "floppy factor" the game length equation, I wonder... (probably not, but...).

 

[Morkar Left]

Another thing for Germans was probably just the exitement to encounter all the shops etc. that were mentioned in the pnp sourcebooks in the game. DSA was always very detailed with maps and locale descriptions. The programmers could just look into a sourcebook for every location mentioned and look up names, qualities and prices from a sourcebook. That made the players feel "at home" when running around in RoA. Personally it was very exciting for me just to visit Daspota and encounter all the locations straight taken from the pnp game. Or some specific locations from the Orkland etc. It made the games feel bigger and less empty than they actually were.


Monkey Island 2? I played Indy 4 on disks and thought it was a bit annoying but still playable and enjoyable. I think it had around 10 disks or something.