#i sometimes need to remind myself that the bands lore is not just some random story

[nemotakeit]

the circulating theory that clancy might be/become a bishop is so intriguing to me because that's literally the 'you've become the very thing you swore to destroy' / 'you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain' trope and i'm a sucker for dark fictional content about heroes who lose themselves along the way to justice - idk if that's a path tyler would choose for his story to go down, though

[holdingforgeneralhugs]

Hi there! I am in Florida, and at this very moment, trying to dissociate from hurricane Ian that is beginning to hit my town. 😬 So I figured I'd distract myself by asking for ships. If you see this elsewhere too, I just...don't like talking about myself very much so I'm writing this once.

She/her, INFP, Hufflepuff. 5'2, generally pale, curvy, but not overweight (yet, lol), blonde hair (but it's currently The Little Mermaid bright red, lol), blue-green eyes. I love my hair and my eyes and this is the only thing you'll ever hear me say I like about my appearance.

My favorite thing about myself is my sense of humor. And to a lesser extent, my sarcasm. I never really feel I have much to offer people, especially in difficult times, but I can make my friends laugh when they are crying. And a few weeks ago one of my good friends said to me that every time she goes home after spending time with me, her husbsnd says she is always in such a happy mood. And that was just like...the nicest thing anyone could say to me. 💜 I am an introvert until I am comfortable with someone and then I can be loud and frequently silly. Years of customer service in my past made me decent at bullshitting small talk, but ugh, it drains my batteries. I will get along with anyone who isn't an asshole, but I do not get close to most people easily. I don't like conflict, so I can get passive aggressive with people I'm close to if I have any issues over something. Trying very hard to change that, as I know it's not a great look.

Other random shit about me: I have anxiety, but (I think) I've learned to hide it well in public most of the time? My brain is just a fucking mess, but I will joke about it all day! 🙃 I love all animals. I'd cuddle an alligator if it wouldn't eat me. I've got cats, dogs, rats and a bunny. I've wanted a horse my whole life. My favorite author is Neil Gaiman. I love going to the beach and swimming in the ocean. I love museums and history and learning about lore/fairytales/monsters/cryptids. I love Marvel movies/comics, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I occasionally do conventions and cosplay, though I'm not very good at the cosplay bc I cannot sew. Lol. I've been Rose and Amy from Doctor Who and Kate Bishop (Hawkeye). It's really fun! I wish I were better at it. Love bowling and mini golf. Sadly, none of my friends do.

I love music and going to shows used to be my thing! Like I've seen over 100 bands and concerts. I don't have the time/money/energy to do it anymore, but those were absolutely the best years of my life. I've traveled to other states and across the country for a couple of bands (The Matches and Motion City Soundtrack) and made some of the best friends just waiting in lines. I have one tattoo and it's a crow with a blue button eye that the singer of my favorite band drew for me.

I'm gonna shut up now. Lol. Sorry I got carried away. I'm REALLY trying to distract myself from thinking about this hurricane rn. Thanks in advance if you made it through the rambling and decide to do anything with it. 😁💜

Firstly, I hope you and your family are doing OK since the hurricane and that it didn't cause too much damage! Secondly I'm so sorry this has taken me so long to get to, I've been all over the place lately between graduating and starting my new job🙈

I ship you with Johnny Martin

He's obsessed with your red hair, like he thinks it's the coolest thing ever and it looks so good on you.

You're alike in the sense that you both need to be comfortable with someone before you feel like you can really be yourself.

Of course you two seemed to click right away. You both made a few sarcastic teasing comments and it was like you'd been friends for years.

He's always quick to remind you of your worth, and how you always seem to brighten people's lives without even trying

He totally get that sometimes you just need time to yourself to recharge, and he's always happy to just sit quietly with you or leave you do your own thing in your own space. You'll come find him when you're ready.

No matter what you say, he thinks your cosplays are great and he's always super encouraging.

He's ridiculously competitive, and loves nothing more than trying to beat you at mini golf. He scoffs and acts annoyed when you beat him, but really he just loves seeing you smile.

He definitely intends to start taking you to concerts again, cause he knows you loved going to them.

Hope you like it x

[zydrateacademy]

Review: Destiny 2

It took me a while to compile enough thoughts for a proper review, and to find time to actually begin writing because I’ve been far too busy actually playing it. This will come with a minor disclaimer or two. First, I haven’t played the first game. It was on console and I’ve been on PC for a long time. Secondly, I may mention a lot of other game comparisons and there’s a reason for that. This game feels like it borrows some of the best parts of other games and stitched them together to make something great. I can’t really comment on the game’s previous story, but I hear from most players that there wasn’t much of one. Somehow I feel that this is hyperbole on their part because you can’t really have a game without a story. Even team shooters like Overwatch shoehorn some lore within their dialog or various external material. All the same, I’ve gathered that a giant alien ball gave a large portion of the Earth population immortality topped with magical powers. Not exaggerating, I have literally heard the word “magic” be used in what seems to be a Sci Fi adventure. The game proper starts off with a full on assault from an enemy faction that only had a tertiary presence in the first game. They win pretty swiftly and kick you off a tower. Your guardian loses their “light” powers and must traverse the first forty-five minutes or so of the game without the ability to resurrect. Of course that is of limited value as checkpoints are still a thing so feel free to die if you don’t quite have a handle on the gunplay.

The campaign is stated to be around six hours long and that’s fairly accurate. It felt incredibly short and it was surprising to learn about this sun-destroying device that the Red Legion created. Funny enough, that’s actually the halfway point and the exact moment where the story becomes less interesting. Before that, you hop between planets to “get the band back together”, essentially. You collect the various class leaders across the system, each with their own unique problems that you solve and get back together to help lead the push against the guys who took everyone’s light. After that, it’s a generic doomsday device that you must disable, and the campaign missions themselves feel a bit padded at times. You’re often assigned to disable something, only for it to not work so you must go destroy something else two more times before the thing actually works. The old school trope of “You cannot thwart stage one” is in full effect here folks, and you’ll likely predict what will happen to the big bad Ghaul himself long before you actually see it. Weak story aside, the gunplay is some of the best feeling in a first person shooter I’ve had in a while. At first glance the game looks and feels like a less irritating version of Borderlands, a franchise of which I love anyway like a slowly improving problem child. Enemies have large health bars and every hit you land, magical floating numbers pop up signifying your damage. Ultimately these numbers mean very little because max level players can play with level three’s and nobody can really one-shot anything except for the basics. There’s some strange autobalancing coding going on in the background, but it still manages to make sure that anyone can play with their friends regardless of people’s gear level. This includes the fact that max level players will constantly get tokens and can break down lesser gear for yet another type of turn-in token. There’s always a reason to do things and I find that it’s a great mechanic. 

The story is mostly just an excuse to get you to maximum level and have access to the tower. After that, the full game unlocks to you which is common MMO fare. It lets you dip your toes in some player-versus-player but after you beat the campaign, every planet and game mode will have a set of challenges and milestones for you to work towards and continually get your item level up, also known as a “Gearscore” if you’re a veteran of WoW. Ultimately this is where the game shines and where I typically have the most fun, because it essentially becomes a first person sandbox. No, there’s not really an open world and there’s not much to explore unless you’re hunting for Lost Sectors, secret sections of the map that typically have yield chests with better loot that will only unlock when you defeat the local miniboss. They’re a lot of fun. Each planet has this sort of “hub” area that you’ll find a few other players running around in. I figure they’re instanced with a likely player cap because I’ve never seen more than a few at a time. At most I think I saw about seven other people joining in on a public event with me, one of my favorite features of the game. Public Events are not a new concept in recent gaming history. The earliest comparison I can personally think of is Rift (2011), but I think they started dipping into MMO’s a year or so before that. It’s as it sounds, in hub areas these events will trigger down from a five minute timer to allow other people gather and prepare and it will spawn a moderately difficult boss or objective based event. They’re typically too difficult for me to solo but I’m sure other, better players can manage. By completing optional objectives you can help upgrade every event to “heroic”, which yields a lot more experience and a bit more loot. You might have to research or simply take cues from other players and see what you have to do, but if you see people shooting at that ship circling the area or slamming on this random device in the middle of the firefight - That’s probably why. Those side challenges I mentioned can be a bit fickle sometimes. Sometimes they’ll require you to kill enemies with a certain weapon or a certain way that doesn’t necessarily to cater to my playstyle. One in PvP once wanted me to make a few kills with a subclass I never used and thus had no upgrade points put into. I never got that challenges because, as per the game’s meta, there’s certain gun types or subclasses people just don’t use in certain modes. For example, nobody ever really uses the Hunter’s “Nightstalker” subclass in PvP because it’s a sort of crowd control that’s useful against several clustered enemies. In PvP that almost never happens and it would be too easy for actual players to escape the little orb that the Hunter created. 

There’s also a multitude of gun types, all with their varying clip sizes, fire rates, and range capabilities that are more useful in one mode than the other, so this typically encourages you to keep a certain ‘collection’ of things depending on what you’re playing. So far I’ve only talked about challenges and public events. I’ve found it hard to talk about what and first because there’s a lot to the game to chew through between the various updates the game will inevitably have. Of this writing, the game’s first expansion has already been announced for the fifth of December which will likely bring a whole new set of milestones, strikes, missions and most importantly, loot. I’ll try to get through some of the fun stuff you can get a hold of at the endgame which mercifully doesn’t take long to get to. Strikes are basically just dungeons from other fantasy based MMO’s. There’s not a lot to say about them, they’re ten to twenty minute encounters with a variety of bosses and mechanics you need to figure out. My least favorite so far is this Fallen boss who will constantly disappear after just a few hits and spawn these electrified robots that will limit your movement and now allow you to jump at all (and there’s a LOT of jumping in this game). They’ll also constantly damage you because of course they will. It reminds me of a survival game to be honest.

There’s the Crucible, Destiny’s name for PvP combat. It’s run of the mill PvP with your usual zone controls, team deathmatch and even a mode that’s reminiscent of Call of Duty’s “kill confirmed” mode where you only get points by picking up a sigil from a fallen enemy; Or else let their allies pick them up and get denied the score. I enjoy it and I can sometimes get rewards from it even by losing. I’m currently working on an exotic weapon quest where you have to dismantle rare or better scout rifles, which the crucible rewarded me with one just for losing. So hey, progress! There’s also something called “Nightfalls”, which remind me of “Heroic dungeons” from World of Warcraft, but are actually more comparable to Starcraft 2′s mutator mode in their Co-Op. Every week it changes, typically with some kind of timer mechanic to make sure your team is at their most optimal. On our first week, in addition to the timer, all of our skills recharges what seemed to be five times faster. So the mutations are not always there to hurt us. Naturally it gives much better loot than their more basic versions and can be incredibly intense. Myself and two buddies from my gaming community managed to kill the boss of one with a mere four seconds left on the timer. Our first ever Nightfall, to boot. I alluded earlier to the fact that there’s tokens you get from a variety of activities. This mostly gives incentive for high level players to continue playing, as you can turn these tokens in to a variety of faction leaders for engrams (a fancy word for “loot boxes”) that typically level with you so they’re usually good to grind out.

And yes, there is a grind here to a certain degree. There’s a sort of soft cap to gear levels, I found it a crawl to get past the 260-265 hump but then slingshot past it on the game’s second week with a new rollout of milestones that wanted me to play several crucible games, complete five challenges out in the world, and a few other things. Each of them gave me 269′s and 271′s and helped me gear up a bit. At a certain point it becomes advantageous to roll multiple characters so you can do all of this more than once, padding the gameplay and turning it into a grind. There is a bit of fatigue once you hit that soft cap I will admit but it’s typically relieved by playing with friends. This goes with any multiplayer game, true enough. As mentioned I can continue playing missions with newer players, hunt for public events, or toss my scrub ass into the unforgiving ring of failure that is Crucible and I’ll always get something for my trouble. There’s never not anything to do. All this time I’ve actually forgotten to talk about how really damn pretty the game is, to boot. Most of my settings are on maximum with the sole exception of my textures, which have to be medium as to not stress my unfortunately low about of VRAM. I’ve had people smarter than me try to explain why exceeding it matters but regardless, the game is still one of the best looking things in my entire library.

There’s a lot of chatter about microtransactions in the industry lately. Yes, they are present here in the form of “Bright” engrams, which can be acquired in two ways. Obviously you can buy “Silver” which acts as a separate currency for Bright engrams. The other way is, as a level 20 you will get one per ‘level up’ as you continue to play. The flow of such is pretty slow and I typically only get one or two a day (If I’m actively playing my main Hunter) as opposed to dropping ten dollars and getting five immediately. They typically contain cosmetics, some more practical than others like faster speederbikes that will help you traverse stretches of land on planets with a bit more ease. They’re the primary source of the shinier “shaders”, or armor dyes. You can get shaders out of basic chests and other loot boxes but shaders do have “rarity” like any gear does and I don’t think I’ve gotten some of the better looking ones through more basic means. Still, the microtransaction craze does speak to a seedier part of the industry and I will admit the “It’s just cosmetic!” argument doesn’t quite hold up, but I’ll leave that for the individual to decide. I’ve already purchased some silver twice now, but that’s my prerogative. I’ll just say that the game never, not once, beats me over the head with “BUY SOME OF THIS AND YOUR LIFE WILL BE MORE COMPLETE”. They better not, after I spent the full hundred dollars to begin with. In conclusion, the game feels like the most refined collection of a dozen games I could name, like the world’s cleanest zombie. Borderlands, The Division, World of Warcraft, Rift. The gameplay constantly reminds me of other games but is the absolute best version of all of them. The gunplay will keep me coming back as I do occasionally itch for an ironsight shooter but all the current ones I have are boring or have dead communities with long matchmaking. A large portion of my gaming community is playing so I can typically play at my own pace, or get others to join me if I feel like I want my objectives to go a little quicker than usual. There’s plenty to do and it’s all up to me to figure out what I want to prioritize when I log in. For a game with this much in it, it can only improve with more content.

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 348: Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

              Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

Germany

Released in Germany as Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge

attic Entertainment Software (developer); Fantasy Productions (German publisher); Sir-Tech (U.S. Publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS, 1993 for Amiga

Date Started: 13 November 2019

               Where Britain and France mostly created their own styles of RPGs, and largely failed at it, German developers found more success analyzing and modifying the mechanics of the most popular U.S. releases. In the few years after Germany’s RPG industry really got started in 1988, we saw games inspired by Ultima (Nippon, Die Dunkle Dimension), The Bard’s Tale (Legend of Faerghail, Antares, Spirit of Adventure), Alternate Reality (Fate: Gates of Dawn), Dungeon Master (Dungeons of Avalon), and Demon’s Winter (Sandor). Each of these games introduced its own innovations, to be sure; there are plenty of times, as in Fate and any of the Bard’s Tale-inspired games, when the German adaptation exceeded the original.            

Starting out in Arkania. The screen is nearly identical to Might and Magic III, although none of the gameplay is.

            Realms of Arkania strikes me as the apex of this process of adaptation, drawing not from just one source (like most of the German titles) or two sources (as Faerghail did with both The Bard’s Tale and Phantasie) but rather at least four. Building on the engine previously used in Spirit of Adventure (1991), attic has combined the basic exploration of The Bard’s Tale with the main screen arrangement of Might and Magic III, the inventory interface of Dungeon Master (or perhaps, more directly, Eye of the Beholder), and a combat system inspired by the Gold Box while looking more graphically advanced.          

The inventory interface recalls SSI’s Eye of the Beholder.

          Arkania is a licensed adaptation of the best-selling German tabletop RPG Das Schwarze Auge (“The Dark Eye,” although I always have to remind myself that it’s not “The Dark Age”). It started as a relatively obvious adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons (the developer, Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit, had first tried to get a license to publish D&D in German), but it got more innovative as the editions moved forward. In particular, I find that the inclusion of “negative traits” (introduced in the third edition) creates more memorable characters.

Arkania followed the by-now common 1990s tradition of telling one backstory in the game manual and another one–complementary but usually not identical–in the animated opening scenes. The opening is set in Thorwal, an ancient free settlement “populated with indomitable warriors and seafarers, rich in treasures from innumerable forays.” Thorwal is surrounded by plains in which orc tribes roam freely and occasionally semi-organize into a threatening confederacy. This is currently the case, with a “great chief” gathering orcs on the steppes, planning “the utter conquest of Thorwal.”           

Evocative graphics introduce the setting.

         Somehow this threat is going to involve a certain captain named Hetman Hyggelik who lived a couple centuries ago. He made a fortune pillaging the “hated slave trader towns of the south.” After a particularly successful expedition, he had a magic sword forged in the Cyclops Islands, then took it with him into the orcish lands, where he and his band were slaughtered. I suspect that his sword is the titular Blade of Destiny, and that it will be needed to fend off the invasion.            

If it was just left sticking out of a dirt mound, someone’s probably taken it by now.

          Either way, very little background is given regarding the party. Your group of six simply arrives in Thorwal seeking fortune and glory.              

Character creation offers some good graphics for each of the classes.

          Character creation is complex enough to tie in knots even an experienced CRPG player. There are 12 classes, which the system calls “archetypes”: jester, hunter, warrior, rogue, Thorwalian, dwarf, warlock, druid, magician, green elf, ice elf, and sylvan elf. (Female versions have slightly different names in the manual, even when spectacularly unnecessary, as in “she-jester,” “she-rogue,” “dwarvess,” and “magicienne.”) Among them are five different magic systems. There are seven positive attributes (courage, wisdom, charisma, dexterity, agility, intuition) rolled on a scale of 8 to 13, seven negative attributes (superstition, acrophobia, claustrophobia, avarice, necrophobia, curiosity, and violent temper) rolled on a scale of 2 to 7.            

Allocating numbers to attributes as they’re rolled.

           There are 52 skills, arranged into seven categories: combat, body, social, lore, craftsmanship, nature, and intuition. I have been jaded by a long string of Paragon games into suspecting that a lot of them will turn out to be useless. My money is on “Dance” and “Carouse,” but I’m also suspicious of “Self Control,” “Streetwise,” “Human Nature,” and “Tactics.” “Ancient Tongues” sounds like a skill that will come in handy exactly once, but on that one occasion it will be pivotal.             

Selecting skills to increase during character creation.

             When creating a character, you can choose the class you want, but if you do, you only get the minimum attributes necessary for that class. The other method, which generally results in higher attributes, is to let the game roll the numbers and you allocate them to the attributes as they arrive. You could get unlucky and end up with worse than minimum statistics, but you can always start over. One positive of the character creation process is that you can take its steps in any order. You can wait until you see what kind of character you have before assigning name and sex, or you can start with those answers and then take whatever you roll.        After spending far too long studying the materials, I went with:              

Female Thorwalian

Male dwarf

Male druid

Female green elf

Female magicienne

Male ice elf

              My analysis was that if Realms is like similar fantasy games, spells will be more important than physical skills, and this configuration gives me the most spell options. I lack only the warlock/witch. I thought they had the smallest selection of spells, many of them sounding more like solutions to puzzles than typical RPG magic (“Witch’s Eye,” “Heal Animal,” “Camouflage,” “Fire’s Bane”). It may turn out that I’ll miss the position for just this reason.               

Choosing my green elf’s starting spell skills.

            My primary angst is over the first two characters. I felt that for role-playing reasons, I ought to have a Thorwalian given the setting. I felt that the second character would need to be more of a rogue, but I didn’t want to leave the party too weak in physical combat, as a rogue would be, and dwarves seem a bit like warrior/rogues. I’m happy to take recommendations, though, since I haven’t gone very far into the game.           

The city of Thorwal.

         Gameplay begins at the Temple of Travia in Thorwal. In Arkania, it is at temples rather than inns where you can manage your party members. Thorwal is a 16 x 32 map with ocean to the south and west and rivers and ponds taking up some of the inner space. The buildings create irregular patterns in a way that goes back to the original Bard’s Tale. Also adapted from that game is a tradition by which nearly every square of building can be entered, although many are houses occupied by offended Thorwalians who immediately tell you to leave. Sometimes, the residents give you a hint. Sometimes, the houses are locked and you have the option to break in.            

This manual conditioned me to expect something else when I encountered a “Thorwalian.”

          There are numerous taverns, inns, inn/tavern combinations, armories, banks, supply shops, temples, and healers. (I bought some standard items like torches and rope at the supply shop.) These seem redundant, but each has its own unique name, and I suspect there will later be quests that require me to visit a particular location. I enjoy some of the location names, including the taverns “Drunken Emperor,” “Boisterous Welsher,” and “Red Morrow.” There’s also a temple called the “Temple of Tsa,” which in the game’s all-caps font makes it sound like it was founded by the one person who respects American airport security. The temples are all named after the names of their gods, which also seem to be the names of the setting’s months.         

I don’t know how well I’m going to sleep tonight.

               The taverns are quite odd. When you enter, you have options to order drinks or talk, but whatever you choose, events have a way of unfolding on their own. For instance, if you order drinks, you’ll probably end up with a clue anyway, but if you choose to just start talking, some bartender will say, “Aren’t you going to order anything?” Anyway, the “leave tavern” option seems to disappear a lot, so you get trapped in a loop of ordering round after round until your party members get drunk. (I guess this is governed by the “Carouse” statistic.) Also, if you have any talent in music, dancing, or acrobatics, you have options to engage in those activities for the amusement of the patrons, and thus have a little money thrown your way.            

I don’t want to know what kind of dancing Bramble was doing.

          There are no combats on the game map, which distinguishes Arkania from most of its predecessors, including Spirit of Adventure. There are occasional random encounters in the street, such as traveling merchants, beggars who ask for a ducat, and a weird repeating encounter where a “small fellow” dances around a “table containing a mass of floral arrangements” and then falls down dead.             

A random event. No, that is totally not “OK.”

             There are a number of unique buildings and oddities among the doorways on the map. These include:             

Three estates with multiple entrances, all blocked by guards who refuse entry. Two are called “otttaskins” and are owned by groups named the Stormriders and the Windrunners. I don’t know what “ottaskin” means; a Google search suggests the game may have invented it.

            Can you just tell me what it is?

            A large monolith at the end of the street that seems to have no entrance.

A post office called the “Beilunk Riders.” It was closed.

Two “embassies,” one from the “Central Empire,” one from the “New Empire,” both closed.

A couple of closed towers.

            Maybe this will become important later.

          A shipbuilder’s where you can have your own ship made for way more money than I have.

An academy of magic where you can purchase potions and get artifacts identified.

                  I thought this harbor scene was particularly well-drawn.

           There are four exits from the city, oddly placed. Only one is at an obvious point at the end of a road at the edge of the map. Two others are found in the harbor and a fourth in a random building in the northwest. Each exit seems to take you to a different option for moving forward on the overland map.               

Each exit takes you to the outdoor map, but to different destinations on it.

            As I mentioned, some of the random denizens offer a bit of intelligence when you open their doors. Everyone seems to be talking about the gathering orcs, and it’s rumored that they’ve sacked a city called Phexcaer, but we also heard a little about other people and locations in the town.

Unfortunately, Arkania seems to have dropped Spirit of Adventure‘s keyword-based dialogue for more traditional dialogue options, some of which are either poorly translated or deliberately nonsensical.            

Dialogue options allow us to insult the innkeeper for no reason.

             During one visit to a tavern, a guard entered to announce that Hetman Tronde Torbensson, ruler of the city, is looking for heroes to take on a dangerous quest. We found our way to the Hetman’s house at the west edge of town. There, Torbensson reiterated the danger posed by the orcs, united under a single chief, amassing in the Upper Bodir Valley.             

The party learns of the main quest.

             Noting that orcs are a superstitious lot, Torbensson suggested that their federation might collapse if a hero showed up wielding Hetman Hygellik’s lost sword, called Grimring. “It is said that the sword put the fear of the gods into the orcs and their shamans or whatever they call their religious leaders,” the Hetman recounted.

The sword is probably buried in Hygellik’s tomb, and the Hetman suggested we start by visiting Hygellik’s last surviving descendant, Isleif Olgardsson, in the city of Felsteyn. He gave us a writ allowing us to take a certain number of weapons from the city’s armory. I always like it when a game has an answer to the common and obvious objection of forcing characters to fund their own adventures when the fate of the world is at stake.             

The Hetman lays on the main quest. I love how my characters can say they have “just one question” when I have no idea what the question is.

            There is one dungeon–the lower levels of an old fortress–accessible from Thorwal. The captain of the guard (or something like that) asked us to investigate the lower levels because someone keeps stealing supplies stored on the upper levels.

              It took me a while to figure out how to light a torch. You can’t just “use” the torch, nor can you use the tinder box. You have to pick up the torch, then right click on the tinder box and “use” it. This is annoyingly undocumented. 

             Coming across a chest.

          Anyway, the first dungeon level had a couple of combats and one chest. I’ll write more about combats in the future, but for now suffice to say that it blends several systems. The screen uses the axonometric 45-degree rotation that feature heavily in British adventure games (Knightlore, Cadaver) and RPGs (HeroQuest, Legend) of the period. Characters move on discrete floor tiles, and action is turn-based, with the player selecting both movement and attack options from a menu. There’s an auto-combat option called “Computer Fight” that puts your players under computer control, with or without magic. Overall, it plays a lot like the Gold Box games, and a “Guard” command (the player stands still until an enemy comes in range, then gets a free attack) particularly points to a Gold Box origin.

           The combat interface.

          I would finally note that the game has a decent automap, with walls, corridors, and doors clearly annotated by color. This helps make up for the fact that it’s hard to see some doors when they’re to the party’s side rather than directly in front of you.

          The automap alerts me to a couple of doors that I missed on my first loop.

          Realms of Arkania is a thick game, meaning it has a lot of little elements that I may forget to talk about if they don’t play a big role in my experience. When starting, it offers basic and advanced modes of gameplay; the primary difference seems to be that the computer controls your skill and spell leveling (and character creation) in basic mode. I’ve been playing on “advanced.” Money is in gold ducats, silver crowns, and copper bits at a 1:10:10 ratio. At temples, you can donate and pray for miracles. There’s a food and drink system by which you “feed” characters by picking up items and clicking on their mouths. You can split the team into two or more groups. An adventurer’s log keeps track of major plot points. When camping, you assign various characters to guard duty for the hours of the day. Wounds, sickness, and poison can be treated with skills as well as spells. Armor and weapons degrade and must occasionally be repaired. You can pocket-pick shopkeepers. If I never mention any of these elements again, it means they weren’t really important.

I thought Spirit of Adventure had a lot of promise, so I’m going to remain optimistic about Realms even though the first few hours have covered a lot of well-trod ground.

Time so far: 5 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-348-realms-of-arkania-blade-of-destiny-2/

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 348: Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

              Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

Germany

Released in Germany as Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge

attic Entertainment Software (developer); Fantasy Productions (German publisher); Sir-Tech (U.S. Publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS, 1993 for Amiga

Date Started: 13 November 2019

               Where Britain and France mostly created their own styles of RPGs, and largely failed at it, German developers found more success analyzing and modifying the mechanics of the most popular U.S. releases. In the few years after Germany’s RPG industry really got started in 1988, we saw games inspired by Ultima (Nippon, Die Dunkle Dimension), The Bard’s Tale (Legend of Faerghail, Antares, Spirit of Adventure), Alternate Reality (Fate: Gates of Dawn), Dungeon Master (Dungeons of Avalon), and Demon’s Winter (Sandor). Each of these games introduced its own innovations, to be sure; there are plenty of times, as in Fate and any of the Bard’s Tale-inspired games, when the German adaptation exceeded the original.            

Starting out in Arkania. The screen is nearly identical to Might and Magic III, although none of the gameplay is.

            Realms of Arkania strikes me as the apex of this process of adaptation, drawing not from just one source (like most of the German titles) or two sources (as Faerghail did with both The Bard’s Tale and Phantasie) but rather at least four. Building on the engine previously used in Spirit of Adventure (1991), attic has combined the basic exploration of The Bard’s Tale with the main screen arrangement of Might and Magic III, the inventory interface of Dungeon Master (or perhaps, more directly, Eye of the Beholder), and a combat system inspired by the Gold Box while looking more graphically advanced.          

The inventory interface recalls SSI’s Eye of the Beholder.

          Arkania is a licensed adaptation of the best-selling German tabletop RPG Das Schwarze Auge (“The Dark Eye,” although I always have to remind myself that it’s not “The Dark Age”). It started as a relatively obvious adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons (the developer, Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit, had first tried to get a license to publish D&D in German), but it got more innovative as the editions moved forward. In particular, I find that the inclusion of “negative traits” (introduced in the third edition) creates more memorable characters.

Arkania followed the by-now common 1990s tradition of telling one backstory in the game manual and another one–complementary but usually not identical–in the animated opening scenes. The opening is set in Thorwal, an ancient free settlement “populated with indomitable warriors and seafarers, rich in treasures from innumerable forays.” Thorwal is surrounded by plains in which orc tribes roam freely and occasionally semi-organize into a threatening confederacy. This is currently the case, with a “great chief” gathering orcs on the steppes, planning “the utter conquest of Thorwal.”           

Evocative graphics introduce the setting.

         Somehow this threat is going to involve a certain captain named Hetman Hyggelik who lived a couple centuries ago. He made a fortune pillaging the “hated slave trader towns of the south.” After a particularly successful expedition, he had a magic sword forged in the Cyclops Islands, then took it with him into the orcish lands, where he and his band were slaughtered. I suspect that his sword is the titular Blade of Destiny, and that it will be needed to fend off the invasion.            

If it was just left sticking out of a dirt mound, someone’s probably taken it by now.

          Either way, very little background is given regarding the party. Your group of six simply arrives in Thorwal seeking fortune and glory.              

Character creation offers some good graphics for each of the classes.

          Character creation is complex enough to tie in knots even an experienced CRPG player. There are 12 classes, which the system calls “archetypes”: jester, hunter, warrior, rogue, Thorwalian, dwarf, warlock, druid, magician, green elf, ice elf, and sylvan elf. (Female versions have slightly different names in the manual, even when spectacularly unnecessary, as in “she-jester,” “she-rogue,” “dwarvess,” and “magicienne.”) Among them are five different magic systems. There are seven positive attributes (courage, wisdom, charisma, dexterity, agility, intuition) rolled on a scale of 8 to 13, seven negative attributes (superstition, acrophobia, claustrophobia, avarice, necrophobia, curiosity, and violent temper) rolled on a scale of 2 to 7.            

Allocating numbers to attributes as they’re rolled.

           There are 52 skills, arranged into seven categories: combat, body, social, lore, craftsmanship, nature, and intuition. I have been jaded by a long string of Paragon games into suspecting that a lot of them will turn out to be useless. My money is on “Dance” and “Carouse,” but I’m also suspicious of “Self Control,” “Streetwise,” “Human Nature,” and “Tactics.” “Ancient Tongues” sounds like a skill that will come in handy exactly once, but on that one occasion it will be pivotal.             

Selecting skills to increase during character creation.

             When creating a character, you can choose the class you want, but if you do, you only get the minimum attributes necessary for that class. The other method, which generally results in higher attributes, is to let the game roll the numbers and you allocate them to the attributes as they arrive. You could get unlucky and end up with worse than minimum statistics, but you can always start over. One positive of the character creation process is that you can take its steps in any order. You can wait until you see what kind of character you have before assigning name and sex, or you can start with those answers and then take whatever you roll.        After spending far too long studying the materials, I went with:              

Female Thorwalian

Male dwarf

Male druid

Female green elf

Female magicienne

Male ice elf

              My analysis was that if Realms is like similar fantasy games, spells will be more important than physical skills, and this configuration gives me the most spell options. I lack only the warlock/witch. I thought they had the smallest selection of spells, many of them sounding more like solutions to puzzles than typical RPG magic (“Witch’s Eye,” “Heal Animal,” “Camouflage,” “Fire’s Bane”). It may turn out that I’ll miss the position for just this reason.               

Choosing my green elf’s starting spell skills.

            My primary angst is over the first two characters. I felt that for role-playing reasons, I ought to have a Thorwalian given the setting. I felt that the second character would need to be more of a rogue, but I didn’t want to leave the party too weak in physical combat, as a rogue would be, and dwarves seem a bit like warrior/rogues. I’m happy to take recommendations, though, since I haven’t gone very far into the game.           

The city of Thorwal.

         Gameplay begins at the Temple of Travia in Thorwal. In Arkania, it is at temples rather than inns where you can manage your party members. Thorwal is a 16 x 32 map with ocean to the south and west and rivers and ponds taking up some of the inner space. The buildings create irregular patterns in a way that goes back to the original Bard’s Tale. Also adapted from that game is a tradition by which nearly every square of building can be entered, although many are houses occupied by offended Thorwalians who immediately tell you to leave. Sometimes, the residents give you a hint. Sometimes, the houses are locked and you have the option to break in.            

This manual conditioned me to expect something else when I encountered a “Thorwalian.”

          There are numerous taverns, inns, inn/tavern combinations, armories, banks, supply shops, temples, and healers. (I bought some standard items like torches and rope at the supply shop.) These seem redundant, but each has its own unique name, and I suspect there will later be quests that require me to visit a particular location. I enjoy some of the location names, including the taverns “Drunken Emperor,” “Boisterous Welsher,” and “Red Morrow.” There’s also a temple called the “Temple of Tsa,” which in the game’s all-caps font makes it sound like it was founded by the one person who respects American airport security. The temples are all named after the names of their gods, which also seem to be the names of the setting’s months.         

I don’t know how well I’m going to sleep tonight.

               The taverns are quite odd. When you enter, you have options to order drinks or talk, but whatever you choose, events have a way of unfolding on their own. For instance, if you order drinks, you’ll probably end up with a clue anyway, but if you choose to just start talking, some bartender will say, “Aren’t you going to order anything?” Anyway, the “leave tavern” option seems to disappear a lot, so you get trapped in a loop of ordering round after round until your party members get drunk. (I guess this is governed by the “Carouse” statistic.) Also, if you have any talent in music, dancing, or acrobatics, you have options to engage in those activities for the amusement of the patrons, and thus have a little money thrown your way.            

I don’t want to know what kind of dancing Bramble was doing.

          There are no combats on the game map, which distinguishes Arkania from most of its predecessors, including Spirit of Adventure. There are occasional random encounters in the street, such as traveling merchants, beggars who ask for a ducat, and a weird repeating encounter where a “small fellow” dances around a “table containing a mass of floral arrangements” and then falls down dead.             

A random event. No, that is totally not “OK.”

             There are a number of unique buildings and oddities among the doorways on the map. These include:             

Three estates with multiple entrances, all blocked by guards who refuse entry. Two are called “otttaskins” and are owned by groups named the Stormriders and the Windrunners. I don’t know what “ottaskin” means; a Google search suggests the game may have invented it.

            Can you just tell me what it is?

            A large monolith at the end of the street that seems to have no entrance.

A post office called the “Beilunk Riders.” It was closed.

Two “embassies,” one from the “Central Empire,” one from the “New Empire,” both closed.

A couple of closed towers.

            Maybe this will become important later.

          A shipbuilder’s where you can have your own ship made for way more money than I have.

An academy of magic where you can purchase potions and get artifacts identified.

                  I thought this harbor scene was particularly well-drawn.

           There are four exits from the city, oddly placed. Only one is at an obvious point at the end of a road at the edge of the map. Two others are found in the harbor and a fourth in a random building in the northwest. Each exit seems to take you to a different option for moving forward on the overland map.               

Each exit takes you to the outdoor map, but to different destinations on it.

            As I mentioned, some of the random denizens offer a bit of intelligence when you open their doors. Everyone seems to be talking about the gathering orcs, and it’s rumored that they’ve sacked a city called Phexcaer, but we also heard a little about other people and locations in the town.

Unfortunately, Arkania seems to have dropped Spirit of Adventure‘s keyword-based dialogue for more traditional dialogue options, some of which are either poorly translated or deliberately nonsensical.            

Dialogue options allow us to insult the innkeeper for no reason.

             During one visit to a tavern, a guard entered to announce that Hetman Tronde Torbensson, ruler of the city, is looking for heroes to take on a dangerous quest. We found our way to the Hetman’s house at the west edge of town. There, Torbensson reiterated the danger posed by the orcs, united under a single chief, amassing in the Upper Bodir Valley.             

The party learns of the main quest.

             Noting that orcs are a superstitious lot, Torbensson suggested that their federation might collapse if a hero showed up wielding Hetman Hygellik’s lost sword, called Grimring. “It is said that the sword put the fear of the gods into the orcs and their shamans or whatever they call their religious leaders,” the Hetman recounted.

The sword is probably buried in Hygellik’s tomb, and the Hetman suggested we start by visiting Hygellik’s last surviving descendant, Isleif Olgardsson, in the city of Felsteyn. He gave us a writ allowing us to take a certain number of weapons from the city’s armory. I always like it when a game has an answer to the common and obvious objection of forcing characters to fund their own adventures when the fate of the world is at stake.             

The Hetman lays on the main quest. I love how my characters can say they have “just one question” when I have no idea what the question is.

            There is one dungeon–the lower levels of an old fortress–accessible from Thorwal. The captain of the guard (or something like that) asked us to investigate the lower levels because someone keeps stealing supplies stored on the upper levels.

              It took me a while to figure out how to light a torch. You can’t just “use” the torch, nor can you use the tinder box. You have to pick up the torch, then right click on the tinder box and “use” it. This is annoyingly undocumented. 

             Coming across a chest.

          Anyway, the first dungeon level had a couple of combats and one chest. I’ll write more about combats in the future, but for now suffice to say that it blends several systems. The screen uses the axonometric 45-degree rotation that feature heavily in British adventure games (Knightlore, Cadaver) and RPGs (HeroQuest, Legend) of the period. Characters move on discrete floor tiles, and action is turn-based, with the player selecting both movement and attack options from a menu. There’s an auto-combat option called “Computer Fight” that puts your players under computer control, with or without magic. Overall, it plays a lot like the Gold Box games, and a “Guard” command (the player stands still until an enemy comes in range, then gets a free attack) particularly points to a Gold Box origin.

           The combat interface.

          I would finally note that the game has a decent automap, with walls, corridors, and doors clearly annotated by color. This helps make up for the fact that it’s hard to see some doors when they’re to the party’s side rather than directly in front of you.

          The automap alerts me to a couple of doors that I missed on my first loop.

          Realms of Arkania is a thick game, meaning it has a lot of little elements that I may forget to talk about if they don’t play a big role in my experience. When starting, it offers basic and advanced modes of gameplay; the primary difference seems to be that the computer controls your skill and spell leveling (and character creation) in basic mode. I’ve been playing on “advanced.” Money is in gold ducats, silver crowns, and copper bits at a 1:10:10 ratio. At temples, you can donate and pray for miracles. There’s a food and drink system by which you “feed” characters by picking up items and clicking on their mouths. You can split the team into two or more groups. An adventurer’s log keeps track of major plot points. When camping, you assign various characters to guard duty for the hours of the day. Wounds, sickness, and poison can be treated with skills as well as spells. Armor and weapons degrade and must occasionally be repaired. You can pocket-pick shopkeepers. If I never mention any of these elements again, it means they weren’t really important.

I thought Spirit of Adventure had a lot of promise, so I’m going to remain optimistic about Realms even though the first few hours have covered a lot of well-trod ground.

Time so far: 5 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-348-realms-of-arkania-blade-of-destiny/