Mechanical Marvels — Quest for Glory
I’m always interested to see people try out-of-the box new things, so I thought I’d start a series on games that try out bold mechanical ideas. The first one, I’m excited to say, is the Quest for Glory series! The goal of these games is to combine Role Playing Games elements — by which I mean, random success based on character proficiencies — with Point&Click style binary puzzle mechanics.
These are games that, despite how many hours I’ve logged onto narrative games, I’d only heard of recently. The games were released thus:
• Hero’s Quest: So you want to be a Hero (Quest for Glory I) — 1989
• Quest For Glory II: Trial by Fire — 1990
• Quest For Glory III: Wages of War — 1992
• Quest For Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness — 1993
• Quest For Glory V: Dragon Fire — 1998
I chose this series to do first because, as an EGA graphics fan — and a fan of Point&Clicks in general — , I have a great appreciation for the games made late in the lifecycle of the display standard, and because I’ve often heard it heralded as one of the best Point&Click series.
Since these articles are going to be about how games innovate in their mechanics, I’m mainly going to be comparing this series to what came before it, and how they evolved from each other, however there’s always something to learn when comparing old games to newer ones as well.
Hero’s Quest: So you want to be a Hero (Quest for Glory I)
The game immediately let’s you know it’s not messing around with the RPG element side of things. Upon starting the game, one is prompted to pick between a Fighter, Magic User, and Thief class. Each stat is largely geared towards a single class, though Fighter and Thief have more overlap.
Many of its contemporaries have strictly lock-and-key type interactions: the player’s progression is dependent wholly on their success, and they will progress if and only if they produce the right answer to the right problem. There is only very rarely a way to progress without succeeding, or without a single specific solution.
Immediately, Quest for Glory has promised something different: two players choosing different classes will have to approach problems with different abilities, and players with a diverse set of skills will then have multiple angles of attack.
But I think there’s more to it than that. I believe Quest for Glory is more replayable than similar games with multiple solutions.
Replayability: Obvious Hooks, Unobvious changes
The replayability is most significant between the Magic and non-Magic paths, so that’s the example I’ll be using. What the above image doesn’t show is that the mage has an entirely separate list of spells. As a fighter or thief, the player is left wondering, “I know the Magic User can solve these puzzles too, but how?”. This doesn’t stop the player from figuring this out when playing a mage, it’s just that the game only lets one do certain things when one knows magic. At first this might seem artificial, but it’s not always apparent that there’s a magical interaction as a fighter.
Quest for Glory opens the imagination of future games by closing doors behind you as you pick a character. By making this clear fork early on that the player has to choose from, it doesn’t leave the player “stuck” thinking about how the game could have been played differently: it’s simply apparent. Furthermore, it implies to the player that they should put their trust in the game that there could be any number of differences; it’s up to them to discover the difference. It makes the same kind of promise inherent in the text parser, and many other good designs. The feeling that there’s more out there is so important. While replayability isn’t as much of a goal these days with games being more and more viewed as consumable, engaging curiosity like this is paramount.
Innovation: Success & Failure, Practice & Resources
As earlier, success is not simply a matter of having the right answer to the right question: many tasks are based on your stats, plus a random modifier. When met with non-lethal failure, the player’s options are:
1) Try again, if they have the resources.
2) Attempt something else.
While this is innovative compared to other puzzle games, there are a few issues that make it fall flat of more modern design:
First, success is still almost totally binary. Players either succeed at their task or fail. The penalty of failure is almost always either nothing, or death, which in a Point&Click mostly just means reloading. There are objectives the player can finish the game without accomplishing, but the act of failing itself has little or no narrative consequence.
Actions do cost resources: any action testing a stat consumes stamina, and magic spells consume mana. These cost time or money to replenish, and money can be earned with time, combat, or solving puzzles.
However, time isn’t really a true resource in the game as much as it is for the player in real life. There is only one instance where a task has to be done in an in-game day. I would have liked a very stat-heavy, number crunching game to have more significant resources, which is something that gets addressed a bit more in following games.
Except for combat, spending resources is not immediately visible. Transactions don’t show the effect on your bank account, you have to bring up a menu and do the math. Actions have a cost in stamina and mana, but you can’t see those costs except by keeping track before and after an action.
Tests are Opaque. There’s really nothing telling the player how difficult something is or how close they were to succeeding, they simply succeed or fail. This can make success feel very random, and make failures feel like an impassable brick wall: pointless to try and pass through.
Grind. Due to the opaque binary success and the RPG element nature of the game, the player has to perform the same action over and over again to reach a point with a chance of success. A lot of the time this means inputing a command over and over again until stamina runs out, recovering stamina, then doing it all again. There is no option to spend more stamina for a greater effect, and there is no real opportunity cost for grinding instead of doing something else since stamina recovery isn’t difficult. There is one exception to all this, which is a game that can be played for money:
Other Innovation: Dialogue
This is brief, but there’s a mechanic used once in the game that I’ve possibly never seen since, and I think it’s worth exploring because it gives more weight to dialogue.
Almost inevitably in narrative games, the player is presented with a choice of conversation options, and when one is pursued, the state of the conversation remains unchanged. The non-player character might as well be tied up under a heat lamp because the player is able to interrogate to their heart’s content. To some extent, it removes decision making from gameplay, feels a bit unrealistic, and becomes a bit of a chore to ask everyone everything.
The Baron of Spielburg, however, does not have time for the player’s shenanigans. When granted an audience with the Baron, the conversation topics matter: losing his interest three times will end the conversation, and indeed any chance of interrogating the Baron ever again, and some of those questions are worth points. This means players really do have to choose their words carefully!
Now, the game doesn’t tell you this, and in a pretty Sierra fashion one makes this mistake and then has to reload. However it’s not clear how many questions the Baron needs to be asked, and one can’t lose the game by not asking him questions, so it’s possible their is a real time/score cost for the player here.
My Personal Experience
I had a blast playing this one. The late EGA art really captures my imagination.
The whole of Spielburg forest really feels immense.
The forest is largely composed of about 2 screens of 4-way forest and 2 screens of forest corners with random object placements for texture, and the re-use of graphics actually played into the forest’s ability to get me lost which made it feel even bigger. It felt like it started out as a dangerous impenetrable maze and ended as a home, and had enough interaction that I felt I’d never know what was around the next corner.
The town was neat enough; it really only held surprises for the players who were thieves. Interestingly while the town is significantly larger than, for example, the Jerusalem bazaar in Conquests of Camelot, it’s still able to deliver on a kind of small town feel with lots of empty space and residences for many characters.
While a lot of Point&Clicks have towns in their settings, many try to give the player the impression that there’s more out there that can’t be visited because it’s not relevant to the story. In Spielburg, I get the impression that we’re seeing the whole thing, so there’s no point in suspending my disbelief that more town exists.
My biggest hopes moving forward were that success would be less binary, tests would be more transparent, resources would matter more, and a better system would be found to improve the character than simply entering a command 20 times.
Quest For Glory II: Trial By Fire
Time for entry number two!
From a mechanical perspective not a whole lot has changed. The player performs basically the same kind of actions, tests are still done in the same manner and with the same obscurity, but there is one major difference:
Events in the game happen on a strict schedule. Shema dances on particular days at the inn, and Omar the poet speaks every 4 nights. There are 4 elementals to fight, but you only have 2 days for each of them. On day 17 you leave with the caravan to Rasier, assuming you haven’t let the city be destroyed.
What this all means is that your tests are now given narrative consequence! If there’s something you need to accomplish like improving a stat, earning enough money for that sweet item, or overcoming a challenging obstacle, it may come at the cost of a missable event. And the game (specifically Shameen) is pretty good at telling you what’s happening in advance. As in the first game, a lot of events aren’t required to beat the game which lets players make mistakes/be penalized in ways that won’t ruin their fun, and have reasons to go back and play again. Trial by Fire isn’t a game that’s asking the player to probe very deeply and put together clues about its timeline, and it takes itself as seriously here as it takes its self on the whole.
My Personal Experience
I found that there was a LOT of dead time in this game. Often a task would come up, like defeating an elemental, which took very little time but was assigned 3 days of in game time to deal with, while nothing else new happened in the city. A lot of these elementals didn’t require stat tests but were only item puzzles, which made me further question why there was so much time for them — it often wasn’t for grinding if the player was behind.
My understanding is that no analysis of the game is complete without talking about the streets of Shapier.
I thought the streets were a super interesting approach to copy protection! They were large and expansive, following a map from the manual to get around was interesting at first, and after buying the in-game map it really wasn’t a bother to get around again. It felt like a good way to make the city seem bigger than it actually was.
However, the depth of the city did seem to come at a cost of making the desert seem totally empty (yes, I know, deserts are known for this, but it’s a game about adventure and magic, darn it!). The forests of Spielburg have a 17ish areas of interest: that is, screens within the forest that aren’t just random encounters and/or that lead to larger areas. The desert has exactly 4. If the forest was a dangerous and exciting place where I could stumble upon anything, the desert made me question why I even left the city where all the interesting stuff seemed to be.
The whole ending sequence of the caravan to the corrupt city, the cave of wonders, and confronting Ad-Avis was fantastic: it hit so many different emotional notes in great ways, and was just a lot more content for an end game that I was not expecting. Bravo!
Quest for Glory III: Wages of War
This time our hero arrives at an Africa inspired locale and appears in VGA for the first time! *cough*
The game now uses Sierra’s icon-based interface which, while not unique to this game, does contain a spell inventory and a few special actions like sneaking or resting.
Politeness as a Mechanic
While this existed in Quest for Glory 2 when talking to Aziza, I talk about it here because honor, politeness, and social standing matter a lot more in Wages of War. The player has to talk with several heads of state who think very highly of themselves, and saying the wrong thing can get the player kicked out of the conversation and even lose points. It doesn’t seem to make the game losable or anything so good on them here, though it’s a little strange how fighter/paladin oriented it makes the game feel when there is a thief class too.
My Personal Experience
While probably my least favorite of the four I played, QFG3 did some new and interesting things.
One thing I’m finding about a lot of these games is that the “points” tracker makes a lot less sense than a normal game. Many problems have multiple solutions that all seem valid, yet one will score the most points. Additionally if the game classifies one as a fighter but the player solves a problem with magic, that ingenuity is penalized.
More Narrative Minigames, Random encounters, and Trips
The biggest difference in how tests are taken was how many games there are. While for much of the rest of the series the only game that increased stats was combat, QFG3 has a lot more: spear throwing is good for strength/throwing, playing Awari increases intelligence, the wrestling bridge increases Agility. This was at least more interesting than repeating the same input over and over again in previous games.
The world map became a lot more interesting again and had a lot of interesting random stuff that could happen. Planning and preparing for your excursions became a little more involved since the player would be out in the jungle for days at a time, but I think could have been expanded upon more. For example there’s little stopping the player from loading up on tons of food at the start of the game and never worrying about it again.
Oh, and some of the art was just magical.
The art stood out to me a lot in this game, it has some great uses of perspective, and creative and strange nature. Any screen deep in the jungle just made my jaw drop a bit!
Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness
This might have been my favorite one of the four. I’m a huge sucker for dark fantasy and occult tropes, and everything in this game from its narration to its art to its narrative delivered time after time.
The game continues some of the series successful innovations but drops others: events that work on a schedule return, but Shadows of Darkness walks back the stat building games, and it’s much harder to get your self in trouble and miss events with poor dialogue choices. Unfortunately there’s not much to talk about here in terms of technical narrative innovation in this game, that is to say, the way one plays this game is not different. That’s not to say the developers did nothing new, but that technical narrative innovation is a narrow lens through which a game can be viewed.
My Personal Experience
For the first time in the series, the characters in the game came alive across the board for me. Part of it was the voice acting which I found to be very fun, but that’s not to diminish the actual events of the game. Just about every character goes from viewing you skeptically to warmly as you help more and more people, which was just so gratifying! And there were a lot of very emotional stories along the way, from reuniting couples, to reuniting families, to reuniting another couple… and another family… but hey, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel warm and fuzzy.
One area in this game that felt like the biggest missed opportunity was the castle Borgov.
These games have a lot of Easter eggs in them so it’s plausible I missed something, but very little happens while navigating this castle. I arrived for the first time rather later in the game, and was greeted by spooky music, creaky doors that set up a tense atmosphere that was never paid off. The castle is just empty cupboards and even more empty rooms! I only remember about 3 rooms of interest in the entire castle of 13 or so rooms. Due to how the story plays out there isn’t really room for a sequence of fighting guards, and the emptiness of the castle does mirror the emptiness of its owner, so there’s a bit of a narrative win there. But this large area that’s a source of mystery for a lot of the game being fairly anticlimactic left me wanting more.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to see why so many people regard this as Sierra’s best series. Even from the first game it avoids many of the now tropy adventure game pitfalls of stranding players in either unwinnable situations or unsolvably bizzare puzzles. And if that weren’t enough, the series regularly delivers on memorable art, music, and gameplay moments.
As a bit of a confession I’m sure I’m not alone in, I feel like I rarely understood the connection between dodging, blocking, and not taking damage. Except for Shadows of Darkness where effects had very clear visuals, I never felt like I understood why I was taking damage. And when I won fights, it was mostly through stat sheet attrition.
Quest for Glory is a narrative game from 1989 that fashions itself after role playing games, so it’s perhaps not fair to judge it by improvements that have been made to both genres since then. The partial/scaling success popularized by Apocalypse World, the more transparent tests shown in modern CRPGs and adjacent like Torment: Tides of Numenera and Disco Elysium, and the modern autosave that enshrines inescapable consequences are the things I think most missing from Quest for Glory.
Overall I was extremely impressed by these games, and I’d have a hard time saying whether they or the Laura Bow series were my favorite now from Sierra. And if you’re looking for more like these, don’t forget to check out Quest for Glory designers’ new series, Hero-U!
Next time I’ll be chatting about Torment: Tides of Numenera, and how they took a similar approach to resource based narrative tests. Ciao, and thanks for reading!
