Video Game - Morrowind (2002)

Overview

For those that enjoyed my nostalgia filled love-letter to Daggerfall last year here is the lowdown on the sequel.  The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

The third installment in The Elder Scrolls saga takes place far to the east in the hostile land of the Dunmer (or dark elves as we ignorant outlanders call them).  Having been left unsatisfied with the largely random worlds presented in Arena and Daggerfall the developers at Bethesda decided to focus their efforts a much smaller landscape where everything was planned from settlements to wandering bandits.

Plot Summary

The third era of Tamriel is drawing to a close.  After the events of Daggerfall the Emperor Uriel Septim focuses his attention on the dunmer and once again sends a lone champion to act out his will.  This time however his chosen hero is but a lowly prisoner whom is taken by sea to the east.  To Morrowind.

In this land of political and religious strife, ancient grudges and racial prejudice our hero must rise above the odds to end a menace that began centuries ago.  The hero will encounter conspiracies, traitors, zealots, daedric lords and even living gods during their quest to save Morrowind and ultimately the whole of Tamriel.


Gameplay

Morrowind was the first game in the Elder Scroll series to use a full 3D graphics engine (the gamebyro engine).  The game is played very much like it's predecessor except that the skills have been both cut down and organised (into the combat/magic/stealth categories we know in Oblivion and Skyrim).

Morrowind is the first game in the Elder Scrolls series to use the WASD type controls and also introduced new windowed menus and a new magic system.  It was also the first (and so far the only) main Elder Scrolls title to remove the fast travel option from the game, leaving the player to either hike across the land or pay for transportation.

As with Daggerfall your skills and attacks are checked using a die roll type system unlike Oblivion or Skyrim where you automatically succeed at everything and your skill just makes you succeed "better" than you would without it.

Morrowind often comes under fire for it's combat system.  I can understand why players of the later titles may find it frustrating but as a long term RPG fan (tabletop and computer) this is perfectly natural to me.  Due to limitations in game animations a "miss" is not executed ideally.  In reality that would represent your opponent dodging, rolling with the blow or deflecting your weapon using armour.

What I will say is this.  In later titles a low weapon skill equals low damage.  You can hack at an enemy 50 times with a blade, spray blood everywhere and they are not even phased.  I find this just as unrealistic as the idea that you may have misjudged a blow or simply got unlucky and scored nothing but a flesh wound.

Built into the random roll when you swing your weapon are many factors that you don't see.  What is your opponents agility and what defensive skills to they possess?  How good is their armour and do they have any defensive buffs?  All this is done while you press and hold your attack button.  To be abrupt I'd say this level of RPG mechanic doesn't interest the casual gamer.  Morrowind is a genuine role-playing game from a time when RPG in the description actually meant something.

Combat aside, one of Morrowind's greatest replay assets it the comprehensive and potentially game breaking magic available to the player.  As with anything in this game you have to work at it.  There are magic items in the game that can give you a massive edge.  Even better you can quest out and make your own.  This becomes an adventure that you the player have set upon yourself.  That is the mark of a truly non-linear RPG.


Graphics and SFX

An aspect that seems to come up now is how dated and old Morrowind is.  Being a fan of Daggerfall this is no problem for me.  I can understand how the angular and low res imagery may be a little off putting but I'd hardly call it a deterrent.  A few gamers out there need to toughen up!

 The town of Balmora in the vanilla game

If you really can't dig 2002 3D graphics then another strength of Morrowind comes into play which is the vast cult following that it continues to hold.  These are all very clued up gamers and modders that have worked on this game for years.  There are HD texture replacers, graphics overhauls, updated sounds and all sorts out there to make the game look a little less dated.

The town of Balmora with overhauled graphics

Conclusion

I won't say Morrowind is perfect.  There are many flaws in the game that you will discover as you play.  There are also many strengths.  A truly fleshed out world of strife and hypocrisy was given to us in Morrowind.  An alien and hostile land of swamps, ash wastes, mushroom towers and bizarre creatures awaits you in this game.  For all it's HD prowess I've always found Skyrim to look rather dull and bleak in comparison.

Anyway borrow your friend's nostalgia goggles or install some texture mods and give Morrowind a go.  Don't be discouraged if you fail at first.  This was the last Bethesda game that actually made you work for your victory.

I give Morrowind a solid 8/10 for the story immersion and creativity if nothing else.

Video Game - Legend Of Grimrock (2012)

Overview

Legend Of Grimrock is a classic style dungeon-crawler by Finnish developers Almost Human.  The template is almost identical to great grandfather Dungeon Master (1987) but with modern graphics and smoother gameplay.  It's platform is the PC & Mac (as with most RPGs of this type) but in May 2015 was adapted for the iPad.

The game is a couple of years old now and there is also a sequel which I will be trying and reviewing at some point. With a recent re-release for iOS and the fact that time does not exist in the dungeon (for those of you who read my first ever post) I thought it was time to take another look at this game.

Plot Summary

One fateful day four prisoners are taken to dreaded Mount Grimrock to be cast into the dark depths where they will either die or emerge as free people.  They awake in a prison cell with nothing to aid them except their own will to survive.

As the prisoners delve deeper into the mountain they fight monsters, scavenge for whatever food they can find and uncover clues left to them by those that tried and failed before them.  But something else is alive in Grimrock... something that comes to them in their dreams and is trying to guide them.

Gameplay

Like Dungeon Master this game uses a grid-based movement with real-time combat.  The same feelings of isolation and impending dread have been put into this game.  Grimrock improves over the games that inspired it by using WASD to move your party around and a slightly better inventory system.  Your character sheet & inventory pop up at the side, meaning you can access items more easily during a battle.

Also present in Grimrock is the inclusion of skills and some flexibility in your character development.  You can choose to specialise in different weapons and armour depending on your class.  Dungeon Master did use a behind the scenes skill system but Grimrock really makes it part of your gameplay.  The choices you make determine what items you can equip and which spells you can cast with your wizard.

Grimrock gives you an auto-map that develops as you explore, which is very handy and helps you not to get yourself lost.  However for the die-hard dungeon delver there is Old-School mode which removes the feature, leaving you to get out the graph paper and put the work in yourself like we had to in the 1980s.

Graphics & SFX

Obviously comparing a 2012 game to those that came out in the late 80s is going to be unfair so from an impartial point of view I'd say all round good textures and dynamic lighting effects.  The creature animations are very slick and give genuine menace as spiders scuttle about you and ogres charge you.

The creature sounds are simple but work extremely well.  One big difference Grimrock has brought to this old genre is the inclusion of ambiance, giving the game genuine menace and atmosphere. The opening theme of the game is also brilliant and dramatic.

Yes there are better games out there if you want pure graphics but I have never come across a game so professionally put together from an indie developer before.

Conclusion

An awesome game with a fresh look at the classic RPG genre.  All those hours of battling monsters, fumbling through runes and navigating grid-based traps nearly 30 years ago have been distilled, refined and unleashed once more into the dark dungeons of Grimrock.

Upon release I'm giving this game 9/10.

Buy it online through the developers or you can get it via Steam and GOG services.

Video Game - Warhammer Quest (2013)

Overview

In 2012 it was announced that Rodeo Games would be developing an iOS version of the popular Games Workshop dungeon crawler.  Some previews appeared on YouTube and the excitement started to build, quickly followed by some sadness as PC and Android users realised they would be left out.  In 2014 the game was finally released to Steam but very overpriced and suddenly riddled with annoying flaws which I will go into later.

In case you didn't know, Warhammer Quest is more-or-less considered the king of tabletop dungeon crawling.  It has already warranted plenty of mentions on this site and I haven't even reviewed it yet!  This review is specifically for the video game version but comparisons will be made here and there.

Plot Summary

In the gloomy setting of the Warhammer world, adventurers wander the wilds in search of fame and fortune.  Hiring themselves as mercenaries or simply by exploring these warriors delve into dark dungeons to slay monsters and retrieve treasures.


Gameplay

Keeping faithful to the original game the iOS version takes place in turns, with each hero moving and attacking, followed by the monsters.  Also taken directly from the boardgame is the Winds Of Magic roll at the start of each turn, which determines how much power the wizard can focus and if anything happens to interrupt that process (such as monsters or a chance encounter).

Your party of four adventurers will delve into many dungeons across the land and due to the rather nifty random quest generator you can theoretically delve for infinity gaining treasure and experience as you go.

Playing this is very much like playing a boardgame, the warriors and creatures are even like scale fantasy miniatures.  So far so good.  Sadly that's where the flattery ends.

Warhammer Quest like any game of this age is riddled with in-app purchases to be made.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not as mad about this as many other gamers are.  The original tabletop game came with only four heroes and one set of monsters.  You had to fork out some cash if you wanted specialist characters or creature & quest expansions.  That is fair enough. 

What is not fair is the inclusion of content obviously meant for the purchased characters littering the vanilla game.  By this I mean horribly overpowered undead roaming the halls of what was supposed to be a goblin dungeon and treasure rewards that are unusable by the standard characters.  Talking of treasure, the quest rewards seem to have got a little lighter since Rodeo slapped you with in-app gold purchasing too.

While we are having a pop at the game I would also like to mention that to the disappointment of many gamers there was absolutely no effort to tailor the Steam version of the game to a PC interface.  As the game is much more expensive on PC you really would have expected that.

Graphics and SFX

The visuals of the game are perfectly acceptable for a tablet game.  On a large PC screen they are a bit basic.  What I said about the gameplay applied to the graphics too - no effort has been made to make bring the resolution or detail up for the PC version.  Again this seems very lazy of the developers considering the difference in price.

One thing I do enjoy with this game is the beautiful pop-up book video clip when you enter a town.  Little snippets of effort like this show that the original intention of the developers surely was to make a great game.

The sounds aren't really much to get exited about.  They do their job but that's about it.  The music however is quite impressive and dramatic.  The game's opening theme is distinctly epic.  The town and wilderness music is mysterious and atmospheric.  The dungeon music picks up when monsters appear and so forth.  I can't complain about that.


Conclusion

This game certainly had the potential to be fantastic.  If they had stuck to the original line-up of monsters and offered a few in-app expansions simply to enhance an already exiting game that would have just fine.  But sadly I am disgusted with just how greedy they became with this game.  Buying gold?  What kind RPG makes you buy your own gold?  A broken one!

It may be a semi-faithful recreation of a classic but due to the incredible cheek of the pricing and micro-transactions I'm giving this game a mere 4/10.  It could have been so much more...

Video Game - Daggerfall (1996)

Overview

With all the excitement attached to both Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls Online I thought I would post a review of the game that introduced me to the world of Tamriel.

Daggerfall was released in 1996 by Bethesda as a follow-up to their 1994 game Arena.  Instead of attempting to continue in the entire continent, the game takes place in the Iliac Bay, the coastal regions of High Rock and Hammerfell.  This makes the game slightly more focused than Arena with more emphasis on the politics and powers controlling the region.

Plot Summary

The City Of Daggerfall is under a curse, haunted by the spirit of the late King Lysandus and his army of ghosts.  No one can walk the city by night for fear of the curse.  The kingdoms are warring and betraying each other in their bids for power while the savage orcs and sinister necromancers prepare forces of their own.

Eager to keep his hold on the Iliac Bay, Emperor Uriel Septim VII secretly sends a champion on a course for Daggerfall to investigate why King Lysandus' haunts his former kingdom.  However, as the ship nears Daggerfall a supernatural storm leaves the hero shipwrecked and stranded in a coastal cave.  With only basic equipment and beginner's luck you must escape and fulfill your role as the Emperor's champion...

Gameplay

Daggerfall is an early first-person RPG which uses a rather basic 3D engine similar to Doom or Duke Nukem.  The controls more-or-less default to the type used in Arena which are awkward and clumsy.  However unlike Arena you can customise almost every function.  Players of the later Elder Scrolls games will find they are able to achieve a layout similar to Morrowind or Oblivion.

So with your newly configured controls you can escape the first dungeon and set out in the world.  As with later Elder Scrolls titles, this is open ended.  You can pick up quests in towns or guildhalls, which often result in you delving into a dungeon and completing an objective inside.  When you first start, there will be no dungeons on the map apart from crypts.  You find dungeons by taking quests, looting maps during your adventures or sometimes you get a location as a quest reward.

There are literally thousands of locations in the game, from tiny hamlets and way shrines to huge walled cities.  Sadly there is a lot of repetition and random content.  The guild quests are totally random and generic.  On the other hand you can take work forever, unlike later games where rising in the ranks basically means you stop getting quests.

An important part of the game is of course the dungeons.  In Daggerfall they are big.  Really big.  Many players complain about this as you frequently cannot find the quest location and you may never find your way back to the surface again.  It can be frustrating but it also makes the dungeon a truly daunting environment.  Unlike the later games when a dungeon meant two or three caves linked together, Daggerfall has dungeons akin to your old D&D maps.  There are still websites that offer help with Daggerfall and they give a few hints on dungeon crawling for this very reason.

The combat system is very much like a tabletop RPG would be.  Your stats and skills give you a semi-random chance to hit something.  The enemy has an automatic dodge roll.  The same system was later used in Morrowind and is often disliked by people who play Oblivion or Skyrim.  Personally I prefer this system for the RPG experience.  I will go more into this when I review Morrowind.

One thing to note is the game is sadly very glitchy.  Depending on which version you have it can be very hard to complete the main storyline due to crashes and corrupted saves.  There are plenty of bug fixes on the internet though.

Graphics and SFX

Sadly this is probably the reason why many people will never play Daggerfall.  The basic 3D engine uses fairly repetitive textures and flat bitmap sprites for enemies, NPCs and scenery.  Even back in 1996 the graphics were fairly low resolution.  The game has always been sold on depth and vastness rather than it's graphics.

The in game sounds are okay if not a little generic.  Many of them will be familiar as they seem to be from a public domain source and are used in many games.  Some of the creatures sound rather creepy though, such as the snarling vampire and screaming skeleton (which gets annoying quickly).

One rather interesting fact is that Daggerfall actually contained nudity (okay so it was blurry 16-bit nudity) and was originally going to have some adult content.  None of the other Elder Scrolls games have attempted this so blatantly.


Conclusion

Old and clunky but still very playable.  Daggerfall has an air of hidden politics and a genuine sense of vastness to it.  The game can be genuinely challenging and you are not lead by the hand at all.

With the bugs, glitches and low res graphics (even for it's day) I'll give it a 8/10.

Video Game - Dungeon Master (1987)

Overview

I'm starting this blog with the big daddy, the game that started it all... Dungeon Master!

Released in 1987 this grid-based RPG became the biggest selling product of all time for the Atari ST.  It was also released on the Commodore Amiga, PC and a few other platforms over the years.

Without Dungeon Master there would have been no standard set for later RPG titles like the Might & Magic series or the popular Elder Scrolls saga.  I would also say that this game is the main reason I love this genre even after all these years.

Plot Summary

An ancient and powerful wizard named Greylord has begun a magical experiment which will quite literally tear him apart!  Within the bowels of his massive dungeon his personality has been split into the lawful Lord Order and the demented Lord Chaos... and his apprentice must save the day!

You must revive four of the lands greatest fallen heroes and set off into the depths of Greylord's dungeon which is now filled with Lord Chaos' ghastly minions and deadly traps.  If you survive long enough you must find Lord Chaos and turn him back into the man he once was...


Gameplay

Dungeon Master uses a very early but rather effective method of 3D gameplay.  To this day there are still games that quite deliberately emulate this style.  Sadly there was no WASD interface back in the day.  You either moved by point-and-click or the arrow keys.  Most fanatics used a combination of both!

Dungeon Master was certainly the first RPG that took place in real-time.  Previous fantasy titles had been turn-based, allowing you to get your potions & spells ready at your own pace.  Dungeon Master took that security blanket and fed it to a dragon!  You'd be fumbling through spells while mummies bashed your heads in.  You'd be running down corridors praying for a door to hide behind.  This game really did make you panic.  Even in Skyrim the game conveniently pauses while you rummage through your backpack but with Dungeon Master you could suddenly find out you've been fire-balled by the annoying monk dude.

On top of all that you actually had to find food and water.  If you didn't find chests full of food or kill something edible you'd start running out of stamina... and then health!  Not many games dared to do this afterwards.  Eating seems to be some kind of optional extra nowadays.

What really made Dungeon Master special was the unique and innovative magic system!  Your chosen spellcaster had to make up the spell from a series of runes that created different effects.  As you explored the dungeon you would find scrolls which explained the meaning of the runes and how to use them effectively.

Graphics and SFX

Being released in 1987 the graphics will obviously look very dated to modern gamers.  But at the time the full 16-Bit visuals were incredible!  No other game had dared to literally put you in a dungeon and let horrible things attack you face-to-face like this before!

Also it got dark if you had no torches or spells handy!  It was an early method of lighting which was used very well to aid the atmosphere of the game.

The sounds were rather basic but they did their job.  The mummies would scream, the beasties would grunt, the sword swingers would swoosh.  To this day I always regard the rattle of the dungeon doors in this game as the definitive portcullis noise.

Conclusion

Anyone who claims to be a true RPG fan should play through this game at some point.  You can get it free online.  Later gamers may find it hard to get into due to the dated graphics and interface but I'd advise you to stick with it.  By the time you're a few levels in you really won't care anymore!

If you get Dungeon Master on download feel free to share your own experiences with the game.  It may have aged a lot (and some of us are guilty of donning our nostalgia goggles) but seriously folks, without this game we may not have got the RPG titles of today.

Upon the 1987 release I certainly would have given this game a full 10/10.