Minutiae

Darklands is the best Computer Role Playing Game (CRPG from here on out) I have ever hated.  Sounds odd, but press on. 

The game takes place in medieval Germany and is a loosely structured game.  There are quests that come up and the option is always open to explore them.  But mostly it is a collection of randomly generated quests the characters are offered.  The goal of the party is to gain fame and fortune.  There is no back story to your party, it is simply manufactured and thrown together. 

Character Building

This is often my favorite part of a game, be it on the computer or pen and paper.  It is almost the initial basis if I like or hate a particular game.  Darklands does a very slick job of letting the player build a character.  First off a player chooses what sort of background characters are from.  This gives a base for skills and statistics and is the start of what profession they can choose.

There are a number of career paths that offer varying increases to skills and points to spend freely.  Characters can be built along a linear path or made into generalists.  The base party is four characters, with NPC’s joining to help with quests.  The party composition generally includes party members focused on combat, religion, artifice (picking locks, disarming traps), healing and alchemy.  Typically each character will have two of these things they are good at. 

Characters in Darklands can be swapped out during game play, which is good as combat is quite deadly.  So as characters get old or do not work out, they can be swapped in for new characters.  Given the historical aspect and gritty nature of the game characters do get old or take some time to recover from wounds.  Starting with an experienced character is tempting but skills progress at a reasonable pace.  Assuming nobody dies (which is permanent) a character can progress in skills faster than the passive improvements in the character building phase.  Also some quests will attack an NPC to the party, which can be helpful especially if the quest has no time limit.

There are a number of character editors for Darklands that allow a player to tweak the party members.  I went for a more heroic approach and customized my party to have been experienced adventurers (younger, better equipped, some money but not godlike).  Like any editor too much buffing can be a bad thing and the game looses its challenging aspects.

Game Play

Quests and encounters in Darklands are very tough.  Usually any foe you face is going to be daunting, especially if characters are by the book.  Sometimes a foe you encountered can be talked out of attacking you, or paid off.  It pays to have non-combat skills well developed. 

The somewhat random quest generation in Darklands is very spiffy and gives a good excuse to travel about the region.  It also makes every game just a little bit different.  The problem is sometimes it is very inconvenient (though all quests are optional).  Some are local (kill the demon on the bridge), some are not (get the chalice in the caves outside of Heidelberg).  Some quests take time, even if your party can afford horses, but can be passed on.  Many quests are local, some have very vague direction, others have very specific.  Part of the problem solving is by exploration (i.e. there is a robber baron somewhere to the north of Munich harrying caravans, deal with him).  Some of the quests have a deadline, others don’t. 

The open ended design of Darklands is interesting and different, but a lack of plot also makes game play repetitive.  There are some interesting things to do, but mostly it is about fighting and fetching.  More structure in the plot of the game would have taken away nothing from having open ended gaming as an option.  Also many people ask for the same item, so having several irons in the fire is not a bad thing.  The goal is fame not loyalty to a guild or city, no real harm in taking the path of least resistance!

A party’s objective in Darklands is to gain fame.  Fame varies from an overall rating to a local one.  Spending time in one city will garner local fame, which is usually greater than the groups overall fame.  This is also tied into the mechanics of the quests.  Some people and organizations will only deal with well known people.  This is a nice feature in Darklands. 

Related to this is the fact that Darklands tracks what the party does as well.  They can become outlaws or loose the favor of god depending on their actions.  The former can be severely limiting on game play as to get in and out of cities will require subterfuge.  For example there are renegade priests who will ask for “donations.”  The party can give the extorting priest some money, talk him out of it or fight it out.  Fighting it out can be dangerous as combat is dangerous, but if the party is short on funds and not charismatic enough they are not left with much choice.  So the party fights it out and wins.  The priest is still a priest and the characters loose faith as a consequence.  Conversely the party comes upon a village and quickly determines it is inhabited by demon worshipping pagans (sorry all you political correct alternative lifestyle types, all pagans I ran across in the game were the demon worshipping kind).  They confront the mayor and are forced to fight it out.  If successful and they also destroy the alter in which the demon is summoned, they gain faith.  Of course fighting demon worshipping pagans and witches has a price; the dark powers will seek out the character in the forms of the wild hunt.

Saints also come into play and give a deeper religious feel, in theory.  After spending numerous hours playing Darklands I have never had the chance to call upon their aid.  They are something of a third wheel in the confines of the game.  A neat idea that isn’t implemented very well or I just never figured it out… Luckily saints only seem to add to character skills and statistics and don’t seem to have much of a direct effect on the game.

Magic is done through alchemy, but most of the standard fantasy fare (healing, boosting, blowing things up).  Ingredients are collected and formulas are learned.  Potions require the alchemy skill, so one character has to be the “magic” type.  Gathering formulae and ingredients are a nice touch to the game play.  Other than combat and artifice (picking locks and the like), this skill is critical.  Healing takes days and weeks, something your party may not have the luxury to do.  Staying too long on a noble’s lands or in a town can lead to undesired circumstances.

Nuts and Bolts

Darklands was a high concept game that was simply ahead of its times.  It was gritty, deadly and initially fun.  But the high concepts of Darklands were mired not the quality of the game play, but rather lacking the interfacing and self documentation found in games that came out five to ten years later. 

From a software perspective the map interface is good for 1992, but it is not sophisticated for what the Darklands is trying to accomplish.  The map is detailed, but not customizable, nor is there a log to track quests.  There is a lot of book keeping involved with Darklands.  Had this game been released 5-6 years later it would have benefited from this standard feature in contemporary CRPG’s.  It would have been nice to have a travelogue or mark places on the map of interest.  So if you get the urge to play Darklands break out the pen and paper.

A great option in Darklands is the fact that it uses a mouse for playing the game.  For the most part this worked out well.  Not as slick as later games, but a very good example early mouse interfaces in a CRPG.

The city graphics are nice background pictures with options that can be clicked on or type in (like “M” to go to the “Market”).  Sometimes it is tough to move around in a city, as you don’t see where you are going and that the game does not track quests very well.  The simplicity of this interface is quite nice and saves a lot of time as you don’t have to walk your party everywhere.  Also there are random encounters in the city, so those safe secure walls can be misleading.

Combat graphics are a primitive isometric type, but each character and creature is distinct and animated.  The resolution is low (to be expected) so there is some adjustment to the views if the characters get split up.  Even by today’s standards it is functional and clean, though with all the bells and whistles available now it would be an interesting extrapolation to see it produced as a modern title.

If you look on eBay or the web there are folks selling legitimate copies for about 15 to 20 US dollars.  I bought my copy with the excellent and attractive documentation (required, as it is the copy protection) when the game first came out.  My copy was parsed out onto numerous 3.5’ floppies.  Microprose did release it on CDR, which makes the install and archiving much less cumbersome. 

There are also an impressive number of utilities for Darklands on the net (www.darklands.net for one site) that help with quests, character building, mapping, etc.  Many of these are things that should have been in the game. It is neat to see so many homebrewed utilities for a game.  Also there were a number pf patches for Darklands, which can be found on the fan sites too.

Synopsis

Darklands was a game I loved and loathed.  It was ahead of its time both in ambition and design.  It was a vastly different game than any that had come out before.  Many of its problems (detailed graphics and quests in particular) would have been resolved with being developed a few years later.  It is too bad the development teams never had a chance to add on or follow up to Darklands (like with a England based supplement or such), I think with some evolution this could have been a fantastic series had it ever gotten past this installment.