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jesawyer · 7 years

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Balance in Single-Player CRPGs

Someone on twitter asked me this question and I think it’s worth answering in a longer form than twitter allows. I’ve already answered this question in brief and in video form at various points, but I think it’s important to address here:

Something that bothered me from PoE was the constant updating to classes and races to balance them. Did you guys worry about this>

In Baldur's Gate I or II or even the Icewind Dale series? I mean really who cares if one class is OP or Race or Hybrid class? >>

You guys are making a single-player RPG not an MMO or game with a online multiplayer component.

Variants of this question are common in single-player CRPG circles. The implication is that balance is important in an MMO/multiplayer environment but it is not important (or so much less important that it doesn’t merit addressing in patches) in a single-player CRPG.

I would like to repudiate this in two general ways: 1) I will argue that overall balance is important and valuable for players in single-player CRPGs 2) I will argue that individual CRPG players and CRPG communities overall do not present consistent objections to tuning and this undermines the general complaint. It is not the responsibility of individuals or communities to be consistent in their feedback, but it is the job of the designer to design, which means considering the needs of the audience by listening to and interpreting feedback on a broader scale.

Yes, Balance is Important in Single-Player CRPGs

I think it’s easy enough to make the first point through reductio ad absurdum: why not give AD&D fighters 1d4 hit points per level, a worse THAC0 than wizards, and worse saving throws than any other class? Obviously it’s because playing them would feel terrible. Why don’t we give all of the enemies attacks that do 1-3 damage, a quarter of the hit points of the PCs, and rock-bottom defenses? Because playing through that would feel boring for anyone who had the slightest interest in combat content and systems.

Some may say, “Hey, no one is arguing that balance isn’t important at all,” but in fact that is what many people directly say or suggest. Maybe they don’t really mean it (which I will get to later), but that is often what comes up. If we can agree that some degree of balance is important, then there’s no point in suggesting anything to the contrary and we’re really just debating to what degree is balance important and worth a) design consideration pre-launch and b) patching.

In my view, balance in a single-player CRPG is important to the extent that it allows players making different character and gear choices to be viable through the content of the game. It is always important to remember that system design (including class, race, ability/spell, and item design) is one part of the equation. Content makes up the other big part (setting aside UI/UX for purposes of this discussion).

When our area and system designers build encounters, they have to be built around an understanding of party capabilities: their overall statistics, their available gear, their consumable items, and their various abilities. In a traditional D&D-style CRPG, this spectrum of possibility gets wider and wider the higher the levels get and the more gear becomes available to the player. The less balanced individual choices are from level to level and item to item, the more difficult it is for area designers to design content that works for a spectrum of choices.

It Was Actually a Problem in the Infinity Engine Games

One of the questions was, “Did you guys worry about this in... even the Icewind Dale series?” Well, no. I certainly didn’t worry about it in the original Icewind Dale. I assumed everyone who picked up the game was as conversant as me in AD&D 2nd Ed/Forgotten Realms rules and lore, had played hundreds of hours of it in tabletop with similarly aggressive psychogamers, and had weathered fair but diabolically brutal DMs whose scenarios demanded quick thinking and ruthless min-maxing tactics.

You might not believe the number of Black Isle QA testers (and developers) who yelled or cried in anger, virtually or in person, about how difficult some of the IWD scenarios were. One in particular was the Idol/priest fight in Lower Dorn’s Deep. I had a tester hootin’ and hollerin’ about how it was “impossible”, how he had tried to beat it for two hours and couldn’t make any progress. It was a scenario that I and my office mate (Kihan Pak) both beat on the first try.

On Heart of Winter, Burial Isle practically split QA in half. One half thought it was a cakewalk. The others acted like they were being forced to dive into a swimming pool full of razor blades.

The dividing factor was system mastery. AD&D 2nd Edition (and 3E) are systems with a boatload of trap choices, inherently bad builds, garbage spells/feats, and generally inferior options. They’re not presented as inferior options to the player. They’re presented as options... that turn out to be implicitly awful even in the best circumstances. To the next part of the question, “I mean really who cares if one class is OP or Race or Hybrid class?” The answer is, “The person being brutalized by content designed for the OP classes/races because they picked the ‘bad’ option.”

The broader that spectrum of choices is for players, the more difficult it is to design content that will be at a similar level of challenge for those players given any given combination of choices within that spectrum. And to restate what I wrote before, the balance is mostly important to the extent that viability, i.e., the ability to get through the content, is supported. BG, BG2, IWD, and IWD2 often failed that test. Once viability is addressed, I’m not particularly concerned about balance.

Tuning Down High-Powered Outliers

The exceptions are abilities and items that are so incredibly powerful across the board that it’s almost impossible to make any content challenging with them in play. If we design content to be challenging with those abilities/items in mind, any players who lack those abilities and items will effectively be crit path blocked. Their game has either ended or become so incredibly difficult that it’s no longer enjoyable. And if we don’t design content with the overpowered abilities and items in mind, any player who coincidentally or intentionally uses those items effectively no longer has any challenge going through the game. It becomes an unlabeled Easy difficulty slider rendering all other options/choices irrelevant.

In those cases, I advocate reducing the power of the abilities/items so players don’t trip over “Hey I guess I win” options and our testers can still use them in playthroughs and give meaningful feedback. There is one salient example I can think of: sniper rifles in Fallout: New Vegas. In Fallout 3, Bethesda had given sniper rifles a x5 crit rate modifier. Keep in mind that any attack from stealth (e.g. shooting an unaware target with a sniper rifle from long range) is automatically a crit. The x5 multiplier made even standard/close range combat shots have an incredibly high chance of critting. I didn’t notice that sniper rifles had that multiplier and it didn’t come up in testing prior to release. In release, players noticed it quickly and sniper rifles became the de facto way to handle most encounters. Why use a 12.7mm SMG or hunting pistol when any shot from a sniper rifle was likely to crit and do 90+ damage?

In one of the first patches, I reduced the crit rate multiplier to x2. There was initially a lot of complaining about it, as there always is when anything is tuned down, no matter how overpowered, but the sniper rifle retained its role and continues to be used in that role. It’s a sniper rifle. It’s good at sniping. It doesn’t need to be great at close range.

Inconsistent Player Feedback

There is one trend about player feedback regarding tuning that’s hard to argue against: communities generally complain about tuning anything down but applaud (or at least do not complain about) tuning things up. I can tune up 10 things in a patch and detune one thing and will hear far more feedback about the one thing that was detuned, no matter how marginal or necessary that detuning was. If there’s negative feedback about tuning something up, it’s usually because players feel it needs to be tuned up more.

In Patch 3.03 for Pillars of Eternity, Matt Sheets and I tuned up seven rogue abilities, five barbarian abilities, and a variety of other spells and abilities. Players generally seemed to like this, though some wished the rogue abilities had been tuned up more.

In Patch 3.04, the soulbound dagger The Unlabored Blade had a bug fixed where its 10% Firebug proc was never firing. Two weeks later, Patch 3.05 reduced the 10% proc to 3%. This was a change I had requested for 3.04 but it had been overlooked. I requested the change because daggers have a fast attack rate and that dagger has a +20% attack rate enchantment.

Which set of changes do you think I heard more feedback about? If you guessed the marginal drop in proc rate on the soulbound item that had only worked properly for two weeks, you’d be right. The rogue and barbarian changes affect far more players and more significantly, but “loss” (even if imagined for most players) weighs more heavily.

Despite having a reputation for only detuning, I tuned many more abilities and items up in PoE patches (and in F:NV patches, as well as the JSawyer mod) than down. Players remember the losses more than the gains, but both are a necessary part of the tuning process.

I could abstain from tuning, but I don’t think most players would benefit from that. Players remember early Diablo 3 tuning as particularly bad, but the game at launch (especially the economy and itemization) was poorly balanced, as Travis Day elaborated on in his 2017 GDC talk. In the long term, Diablo 3′s economy and itemization today are much better than they were at launch and I believe most players benefit from and appreciate that. Even if you effectively never played D3 as a multiplayer game, you still benefit from that.

I don’t expect players or communities to be consistent in their feedback, but as the director and, in many cases, the lone system designer, I have to make decisions on more than just the volume of feedback on any particular topic. Changes that make bad options better are almost universally good. Changes that make overpowered options worse are often still a good idea if I believe more players will benefit from the change. I didn’t hesitate to reduce the Petrified damage bonus from x4 to x2 in Pillars of Eternity because that affliction was far and away the best way to deal with difficult encounters, either through the Gaze of the Adragan spell or trap.

I Will Tune Again

Just to make this clear, while there will always be a point where I stop tuning a particular game, I’m never going to stop using patches as an opportunity to balance items, abilities, classes, encounters, enemies, etc. I’ve been house-ruling and tuning games since I noticed trap options and OP garbage in 2nd Edition AD&D in middle school. I re-wrote 5th Edition Ars Magica’s certamen system because it’s a cool idea that’s really uninteresting in play. I re-wrote Pathfinder/3.X’s armor system because, as many players have noted, it doesn’t actually provide many interesting options.

If I think players will benefit from adjusting the rules or the content and there’s an opportunity to make those changes, I’m going to do it. I certainly don’t expect players to like all of the changes I make, but if you object to the idea of post-launch balancing, you should probably never play any of the games I direct. I’m always going to tune them, if possible.

Thanks for reading.

Portrait by Jason Seow.

#game design #pillars of eternity #fallout #fallout new vegas #fallout 3 #icewind dale #baldurs gate

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robdwebster · 5 years

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Stuff of the year, 2018

"Mum, look! He's shitting out the thing again!"

Game of the year:

Two Point Hospital

Celeste

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

I dragged my feet on a lot of cool games this year. I didn't play Smash Bros. until the last week of the year, and got round to Celeste on NYD 2019! Smash is an unremarkable triumph - it is exactly the game I expected, but it's so good and there's so much of it that it was easily the best Switch game this year. Celeste is more interesting; brutal, but kind to the player, with a cracking soundtrack and some magical design. It gains a lot of points for being about something - that punishing difficulty makes you feel like you’re really climbing a mountain, and the frank way it discusses mental health is really phenomenal.

But Two Point Hospital - man! Like Sonic Mania last year, Two Point Hospital is a spiritual sequel to one of my favourite childhood games. Unlike Sonic Mania, it's not perfectly realised. I'm still not a big fan of the art-style, and there were some genuine balance / difficulty issues at launch affecting things like queue length and patient AI. That said, this game has had a ludicrous half life. I love the challenge, I love the mechanics, I love that it's easy to pick up but tricky to master. I love its tone, I love its sense of humour, and some 140 hours in I still don't feel like I'm done enjoying it. Just wonderful.

Other games I liked: Bomb Chicken, Donut County, Fallout 76, Graveyard Keeper, Jackbox Party Pack 5, Nintendo Labo, Pokémon Let's Go!

Album of the year:

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Gorillaz - The Now Now

Muse - Simulation Theory

Gesu no Kiwami Otome - Suki nara Towanai

Hey! A year where I loved more than three albums!

It's nice to have a new band in the top three; I'd never heard of Gesu no Kiwami Otome before this year, but their new album is great. It's even nicer that Muse's long-awaited new album is actually good! I pre-ordered it reluctantly, fully expecting it to be mediocre, but Simulation Theory is a dorky, retro joy. Best of all is that Gorillaz have released two albums-of-the-year in a row! The Now Now was a chilled out treat, the perfect record for a lazy summer evening. Or a winter evening. Or whenever, really. Just play it. It’s grand.

Other albums I liked: A Perfect Circle - Eat the Elephant, Kero Kero Bonito - Time 'n' Place, Polkadot Stingray - Ichidaiji

TV of the year:

James Acaster: Repertoire

Orange is the New Black

Aggretsuko

This year has been ridiculous for brilliant television, and there is so much that it's killing me not to include. Last year's winner Taskmaster aired one of its best ever series, but a more uneven run at the start of the year plus stiff competition kept it out of the top three. King of Bots is Chinese Robot Wars, it is berserk, and it has an even more berserk spin-off show - both of which I’ve omitted!

But, three shows that nailed it. Aggretsuko, with its charming characters and acerbic office satire. Orange is the New Black, which has no business being in such rude health after six seasons. James Acaster's four (four!) interlinked stand-up specials. Hard-earned!

Other shows I liked: Bojack Horseman, Derren Brown: The Jump, Disenchantment, Hilda, Inside No. 9, King of Bots, Taskmaster, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Horne Section Television Programme, The Mash Report, This is Fighting Robots, Who is America

Film of the year:

The Shape of Water

Isle of Dogs

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

I'm usually a bit sniffy about Oscar nominees - I always expect them to be worthy snorefests about how tragic life is. Maybe my tastes are changing, maybe I misjudged them - or maybe this year just happened to be a belter, but last year's Best Picture nominees were superb! I watched four out of the nine, and am gutted to have missed two more. Two of them were released this year in the UK, and are therefore eligible for this blog: The Shape of Water, which is beautiful, romantic, and turns the cold war into a romantic fantasy without sanding off its rough edges, and the morally grey but socially conscious Three Billboards.

Meanwhile, Isle of Dogs wasn’t nominated for any awards, but it was about some nice dogs, so that’s still good for second place.

Other films I liked: Mary and the Witch's Flower, Ready Player One

Podcasts of the year:

FiveThirtyEight Politics

Reply All

Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonalds?

Temptation is to try and make these lists different every year, but when Reply All and FiveThirtyEight keep nailing it, what else can you do? Reply All did have a slightly more muted year, mostly due to behind-the-scenes stuff, but earns its placement with The Snapchat Thief alone.

The sole newcomer in this list is Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonalds, an investigative journalism programme (or IJP) that isn't afraid to ask the big questions. Mainly, whatever happened to pizza at McDonalds?

Other podcasts I liked: Adam Buxton Podcast, All Killa No Filla, Everything is Alive, Hello Internet, Kermode & Mayo Film Review, Lovett or Leave It, My Dad Wrote a Porno, Oh No! Ross and Carrie, Off Menu, Pod Save America, Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, Secret Dinosaur Cult, So You Think You're Smart, The Horne Section Podcast

Gig of the year:

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Gein's Family Giftshop, vol. III

I only went to a couple of gigs this year - all of which were good, but I wanted to give Gein's Family Giftshop a special mention.

GFG were already my favourite live comedy act - they perform as a three-person sketch group, a sublime blend of the crude, the audacious and nihilistic. They are fucking phenomenal; I've linked to one of their YouTube sketches above but it's only a tenth as good as the live show.

Anyway, when they played in Bristol, their third member had tonsillitis. Rather than cancel the show, Kath and Ed performed the whole show on their own, and stormed it! Live shows are always best when they feel spontaneous - the danger of knowing anything could go wrong (and to an extent already had!) adds an electricity to a room. Watching it all go right is even better! I laughed so much - one of those events where you just had to be there, and I'm so chuffed that I was.

Stuff of yesteryear:

Gesu no Kiwami Otome - Odorenai nara, Gesu ni Natte Shimae yo (album)

Arrival (film)

Nier: Automata (video game)

My annual category for “stuff that wasn’t released this year but I enjoyed checking out.” Nier: Automata was the right kind of ludicrous - full of batshit ideas. Arrival was a more low-key brand of batshit, but still incredibly inventive and oddly optimistic - one of those films where you emerge from the cinema and the world feels a little bit different.

But only one of these moved me to blog. Click here to read me very excitedly discovering Gesu no Kiwami Otome, back in May. The listed EP is the best, but you can’t go wrong anywhere.

Other parties I enjoyed arriving late to:

Games: Bayonetta 2, Cities: Skylines, DmC: Devil May Cry, Dishonored 2, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, Overcooked, Superhot

Books: Everybody Lies, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Humans, The Signal and the Noise

Films: Ex Machina, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Kubo and the Two Strings

Bands: Polkadot Stingray

Single of the year:

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Gorillaz - Tranz

Muse - Pressure

Gesu no Kiwami Otome - Onna wa Kawaru

I don’t really like this category because there’s a lot of crossover with album of the year, but it’s a pretext to post the Pressure music video, so... shrug!

It also means I can give Dream Theater and The Constellations honourable mentions even though they didn’t release full albums this year. Well done Dream Theater and The Constellations. I liked your nice songs.

Other songs I liked: Dream Theater - Untethered Angel, Kero Kero Bonito - Make Believe, Kero Kero Bonito - Dreams of Oneonta

DLC of the year:

Octo Expansion

Bigfoot

Sonic Mania Plus

Considering it's been my favourite home console franchise since the day it was released, I have given Splatoon short shrift in end-of-year roundups, picking Fallout 4 as my number one game in 2015 and Sonic Mania in 2017.

I don't regret either of those picks, but I'm delighted that Splatoon finally gets to run away with a number one placing this year. The Octo Expansion is incredible value for money, a more-is-more single player campaign with playable octolings at the end - the team nailed it. Phenomenal stuff.

Person of the year:

I did this last year, right? But everyone’s been so terrible this year!

Who did I choose last year? Rilakkuma? Fine - keep the crown, RK. No public figure has been better than a lazy cartoon bear. It’s yours indefinitely, until the world gets good again.

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Genre Hopping: Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)

Delivering Our Report

We offer our report to Finnegan, and he asks us various questions about the case. The simple point and click nature makes this quite obvious, there are only so many potential answers to each question, and it should be obvious which is the most appropriate answer each time. After he is satisfied with our progress so far, he gives us half the reward money (100 gold pieces), and tells us to continue to Britain. He also asks if we need the Password to leave the city, which of course we do. This requires us to look up information from the manual in order to pass some basic copy protection questions. Nowadays with the GOG.com version, the answers are handily collated into a single list to make it easy to get past.

Answering these questions correctly gets us the password: “Blackbird”. This allows us to raise the portcullis that prevent our exit from Trinsic, and means we can head out into the wider world. From here, you are actually able to travel almost anywhere on the map (although some areas are locked, or require a ship or other means of travel). The game very much wants you to travel north, to Britain, and really that’s the best option at this point. So far, we have completed one quest, and killed precisely zero humans or monsters.

I haven’t talked about the combat system, the equipment, or experience and levelling up. For large parts of the game, this is how it continues, although there is plenty of combat once you find yourself in the wilderness or perhaps exploring one of the many dungeons. The towns and other settlements are much more designed around you talking to the various inhabitants, finding out about their problems, and occasionally being able to solve them.

The key aspects of an adventure gaming are here, solving puzzles and problems through investigation, conversation and item management. This sort of RPG feels very much of a similar type to Quest For Glory, with the relative safety of the towns and villages giving you opportunity to talk to the residents and help with their problems, while the combat in the wilderness and dungeons is often more of a side quest than any particular focus.

For someone that grew up with Sierra adventure games amongst others, Quest for Glory was my introduction to RPGs. From there, the Ultima games seemed much more suited to my interests than the likes of Wizardry or Might and Magic. Of course many RPGs and other genres would expand their gameplay mechanics in similar ways, as seen in the likes of System Shock, Fallout and so on.

Perhaps in the future, when we reach the appropriate years, such interesting crossovers of genre could be written about. Let me know in the comments if you have a particular favourite!

Written by Andy Panthro

We talk often about what makes something an “Adventure Game”, much like any genre this one was very loosely codified but I’m sure most of us would know one when they see one. Certainly we have already covered games that stray in some ways from accepted adventure gaming norms, most notably the Quest for Glory series which uses the classic Sierra graphical adventure gaming engine to deliver a fantastic RPG series.

The Ultima series was one of the earliest commercial RPG series, and one of the most popular through the 1980s and 90s. As Origin Systems developed this and other series, they were always wanting to be at the forefront of new technology and game design. The increased graphical fidelity of the Ultima series allowed them to increase the amount of unique characters, items, interactive elements and mechanics. The peak for this was surely Ultima 7, in which you can bake bread from flour and water, weave cloth from wool, and in the expansion pack even craft your own sword.

What the game also allowed, which to an extent was already present in Ultima 6, was a point and click interface that can be used to move and manipulate items in the world. Items could be hidden beneath other items, such as a key beneath a plant pot, objects could be stored inside other objects. A huge number of unique characters each having their own dialogue and in many cases their own homes, with appropriate items to be found within.

This meant that quest design could be so very much more varied. In older RPGs, you may expect to be fighting monsters and finding quest items at the bottom of a dungeon. Ultima 7 on the other hand contains so many quests that would not be out of place in any popular adventure game of the time. To fully explain how, let’s take a look at what could be considered the prologue of Ultima 7.

Trouble in Trinsic

The opening cinematic is a curious one, for those that don’t already know, the main character of the Ultima series is a human from Earth, summoned to provide assistance to the land of Britannia (formerly Sosaria in earlier games). This summoning is often done by key characters and friends from the land of Britannia in their time of need. The opening of Ultima 7 on the other hand, has your character mocked and taunted by a mysterious Guardian, and a strange red moongate in the circle of stones behind your house. Knowing that Britannia must be in trouble, you walk through the moongate to find yourself in the city of Trinsic.

Here you are in the game proper, and you see two people in conversation, something awful has happened. Your arrival is a surprise, and yet you have managed to appear right next to an old friend. Iolo the bard is a companion that has followed you through several adventures, and amongst the information he tells you is that it has been 200 Britannian years since you were last here, and that last night there was a terrible murder in the stables.

This begins an entire section that is used as both an introduction to the world and mechanics of the game, and as a tutorial and copy protection (more on that later). What is very important in this opening section, and was both surprising and fascinating in 1992 as it is today, is that this introduction involves absolutely no combat at all. You instead are tasked by the Mayor of Trinsic to investigate the murder of Christopher the blacksmith. Whereas other games of this era and later would have you fight a basement full of rats, or throw you into the wilderness to face random combat encounters, Ultima 7 was confident enough to try something quite different. Indeed even in the previous entry in this series, the first actions you took upon starting a new game were to fight a combat encounter.

What is more, the game engine is able to show you the entire grisly, ritualistic murder scene without having to have a text box explaining what has happened. You can see poor Christopher’s body, the blood, the candles, and even the bloody footprints of his attacker leaving the scene of the crime. Your job as Avatar of Virtue here in Britannia is to embody the virtue system, to save the land from peril, but in this game more than any previous, this task also involves solving the myriad and often serious problems that face the people of Britannia.

As with any good adventure game of this period, it’s often a good idea to have a notebook handy. There are many things you’ll want to make a log of, and there are so many little side quests and locations to keep track of. As you play, you’ll find yourself often crossing back and forth across the world and occasionally revisiting areas. For this first quest, I took note of the graphic and disturbing murder scene. In the centre of the stables lies a mutilated body of a man, besides which are four candles, a bucket of blood, and a key. Clicking and dragging the key on top of the Avatar puts it in his inventory. You can also move some of the other items, douse the candles and this provides me with an opportunity to discuss the rather interesting inventory system.

In early Ultima games, there were very few items, mostly either quest items, weapons, armour, and spell reagents. These might be displayed graphically in the world as simple tiles, but became merely a text list once you had them in your inventory or were browsing a shop. From Ultima 6, items were graphically represented both in the world and in the different character’s inventories. Ultima 7 continues this but with a greater graphical fidelity. Items in the world have different graphical sizes, but also have an assigned size and weight value. Containers have limits as to what size of items and how many items can fit within them. The positives for this are that it creates a much more immersive world, full of items you can pick up and interact with. Clicking and dragging to move items, double clicking to use items. It does also present some limitations, not least that your inventory can become very cluttered and it can be very easy to lose track of where items are (you must be especially careful with quest items). There are also some game-breaking bugs where items can disappear.

For the most part, this is an enjoyable and relatively intuitive system, rather than having to remember keyboard shortcuts. To open your backpack you can double-click on your character, then double click on your backpack (the keyboard shortcut to open your character sheet is “I”, pressing “I” multiple times will open the character sheets of each of your companions in succession). You can click and drag the key into your pack, along with any other items that you think might be useful. Double-clicking on a corpse opens a little coffin-shaped box with any items found within. Searching the rest of the stables will lead you to discover the body of a wingless gargoyle, impaled by a hay fork to the wall of his small room at the back of the stables. The gargoyle seems to have been murdered because of unfortunately being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bloody footsteps lead out the back of the stables and then stop. The only way out is over a small set of steps over the fence, towards the eastern exit of this walled city.

Becoming the Detective

The next step is to talk to anyone and everyone that you can. The stables are run by a man named Petre, who lets us know that Christopher was the town blacksmith and he made shoes for the horses. The gargoyle’s name was Inamo, and he worked at the stables and lived in the back room. Since the murderer (or murderers!) seemed to escape to the east, it is worthwhile speaking with the guard at the east gate. The guard, Johnson, tells us that last night Gilberto was on guard, and he was found this morning lying wounded at his post. If you return to the Mayor at this point, he can give you an idea of where next to search. He first asks if you have searched the stables, and upon revealing that you found a key, he suggests asking Christopher’s son about it. He also recommends visiting Gilberto, who is recovering from a serious head injury at the local healer, as well as generally just asking every person in town about the murder.

He also reveals another piece of information, this is not the first time he has seen such a strange murder. The last time was four years ago, in the capital city of Britain. This will have to be our next stop, once our tasks here are complete. A quick visit to the healer lets us find Gilberto, who fills in some more of the details. He was struck just before dawn, and noticed that the ship “The Crown Jewel” had left in the ten minutes or so that he was unconscious. It is possible the killers took this ship, which was scheduled to leave for Britain. Another reason to travel to the Capital! He has little other information for us, so we head a little further down the street to the south, to visit Christopher’s place of work. There is nothing to use the key on here, but the place itself has been ransacked, and the laughter of the Guardian rings through our ears.

The Mayor said that Christopher’s son, Spark, lived with him in the North-west of the city, so perhaps he will be able to inform us about the key. Spark is a young man, fourteen years old (although his picture makes him look much younger), and although he is initially suspicious, he does agree to help. It is from Spark that we learn his father had recently joined the Fellowship, a new organisation that is unfamiliar to us, but seems to have spread across Britannia in recent years. There were troubles though, as Christopher had been arguing with the leader of the local Fellowship branch. Spark also lets us know that the key may unlock his father’s chest, found upstairs in his house. He also tells us that he might have seen the killers, a wingless gargoyle and a man with a hook for a hand. Finally, the boy asks to join our party to hunt for his father’s murderers. Bringing a teenager on a dangerous mission is perhaps not the best idea, but as Justice is one of the Eight Virtues, I accept his request and he joins the party.

Upstairs I do find a locked chest, which is opened with the key found next to Christopher’s body, and inside are three things: 100 gold pieces, a fellowship medallion, and a note saying “Thou hast received payment, make the delivery tonight”. What Christopher had made for these mysterious men, and why they killed him after receiving it, we will have to find out! Next step, interrogate Klog, the Fellowship leader, and see if he can shed any light on this matter. Klog resides with his wife Ellen, at the Fellowship branch in the centre of town. The building is quite large, and inside is reminiscent of a church, with pews facing towards a podium, where presumably sermons are delivered.

Trust Thy Brother

Klog himself greets us as the Avatar, it seems that word has spread quickly of our arrival. After the usual pleasantries, I enquire if he knows anything about the murders, and the first thing he mentions is that he has an alibi. Not suspicious at all, of course. Furthermore, he also gives us a Fellowship saying: “Worthiness Precedes Reward”, and suggests that Christopher must have done something wrong to have been murdered. So far this is giving me both a low opinion of Klog, and also his organisation. I decide to quiz him on the items I have found so far, but he denies any knowledge of any of them, save the medallion. He does mention that the argument was to do with Christopher wanting to leave the fellowship, and he accuses Christopher of “verbally assaulting” him.

As the Fellowship is an entirely new organisation since we were last in Britannia, I take the opportunity to ask about it. He tells me that the Fellowship is an organisation promoting a philosophy of “sanguine cognition”, based around the “Triad of Inner Strength”. This triad being, “Strive for Unity”, “Trust Thy Brother” and “Worthiness Precedes Reward”. He then asks me if I’d like to join, to which I reply “no”. He responds “Perhaps thou canst become enlightened another time”. If you reply “yes”, he tells you to visit Batlin in Britain to take a test to see if you can become a member. All roads lead to Britain, it seems. Speaking to his wife gives no further information, the only thing she talks about at any length is the Fellowship, repeating word-for-word the same speech as her husband. It does not take a genius to figure out that there may be something rotten at the heart of this organisation, and indeed the original game manual is in part written by Batlin of Britain, leader of the Fellowship, who gives his biased view on Britannia and the previous adventures of The Avatar. It is definitely worth reading the manual if you decide to play this game!

Our final stop before returning to the Mayor is to check in with the shipwright, to see if he has any information about the ship “The Crown Jewel”. The man’s name is Gargan, and he confirms that “The Crown Jewel” sailed for Britain early this morning. He is also initially dismissive of our descriptions of the potential murderers, before remembering that he did see two such people just before sunrise, providing confirmation of what Spark had seen. With no further questions or leads at this time, the Mayor will want our report. You can of course speak to several other people in the town, many of whom have interesting things to say, but for the sake of brevity it’s best for us to move on.

Delivering Our Report

Perhaps in the future, when we reach the appropriate years, such interesting crossovers of genre could be written about. Let me know in the comments if you have a particular favourite!

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/genre-hopping-ultima-vii-the-black-gate-1992/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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