So you want to be a hero? I can’t believe it’s been almost 20 years since I started the first game in the series. Designed by Corey and Lori Ann Cole and published under Sierra, Quest For Glory (originally known as Hero’s Quest) series spanned 5 chapters. When I got the first game in its EGA version, I instantly fell in love with it, its game design ingenious, a perfect conglomeration of classic adventure and role-playing gameplay. It was the first and last of its kind, in 20 years nobody took the design lessons from these masterpieces to make a modern game in this genre. The genre was dead with the decline of adventures, and with the revival in this decade, the mainstream allure of the genre is already gone, like a gem that lost is polish, and no designer is audacious and competent enough to take on another task like this (and perhaps I shall).
I have played each game in the series multiple times. Since the series let you port your save files from 1 game to the next (and my unorganized self never manages to locate save files), I always replayed the series from the first game every time I get my hands on the next one. I tried to time the release so that I would start from scratch usually 2 weeks before the next game come up so I can start the new game right away but sometimes due to busy schedule I could only stare at the unopened box sitting on my desk while I pull all-nighters to get through the games so I can import my hero to the most recent game.
That was the life before adulthood, before stress of making a living and dying relatives and passing on your genes and fulfilling promises and reality sinking in before your unrealistic dreams. Those were the days I grew up with Quest For Glory and I played them repeatedly with innocence. Before letting my writer’s habit of regurgitating anything in my brains into semi-poetic words kick into full control mode, I better get back on track.
Actually going to talk about the game, the first game in the series.
Arguably not the best game in the series (in its puzzle design or simply plot and characterization), it was the the most memorable game in the series because it simply made the most impact, thus I have to make this contradicting conclusion, it WAS the best game in the series. What differ the first game from the rest is not simply because it was innovate, it made the player feel impending danger right when they start the game. It was a true RPG in the sense that stat growth really mattered because when the hero started, provided you started as a fighter and not a multi-class idiot (which means you pumped some skills into weapon and strength), you would still barely last 3 consecutive battles with goblins. And if you started with a thief or magician, you would be running away from anything you saw in the wilderness back into the safety of the vicinity of the town and practiced your craft until you got better. What QFG1 did and no other game has come close to doing was added pacing and longevity into traditional point-and-click adventure gaming. It solved the main weakness in both genre with just one simple master strok. It’s no longer just about fetching X to solve Y, and you could finish an adventure game with a walkthru in 2 hours or be eternally stuck for months. It’s about getting to X with your stats and solving Y with your skill set that you picked. It is impossible to get truly stuck in QFG because you have multiple paths to each solution and they are usually as obvious as the sun in the sky (and not in a bad way). To get to something out of reach on a tree, you can either climb the tree, cast a levitate spell, or throw a dagger to drop it so you can pick it up, and you are either skilled or not skilled enough to do those things, if it was the latter you would spend a day just to practice your skills, and you could do it just next to a wall not unlike a tennis player practicing his swing, it is all a very logical process. QFG eliminated the boredom of grinding in a traditional RPG and gave you a different set of grinding that actually made sense, that you don’t have to go through series and series of incessant meaningless random combats just to let the game tell you that you got stronger. Your “levels” don’t increase in QFG, only your stats, and if you were a mage and you wanted your fireball spell to be more damaging you don’t actually have to fight goblins, even though casting it on a goblin would help, you could also cast it on a tree. But fighting would give you a more well rounded increase like dodging and stamina, provided if you dodged at all. Solving puzzles in QFG make you feel smart and accomplished because you have practiced that skill enough just to do that task, as opposed to in a game like Fallout 3, if a lock required a skill of 100 to pick it, you won’t be able to pick it with a skill of 99 unless you went outside and shot some monsters so you could go up a level and assign 1 point to your lock-picking skill. In QFG you would simply keep picking the lock until you could pick it, and if you gave up, you probably would pick some easier locks somewhere else and came back later and tried again, and the game never told you how many points you needed to get through. If you understood what I said, wouldn’t you ask, shouldn’t Corey and Lori Ann Cole be teaching about game design to current mainstream developers? Does anyone not see the irony in that, why are they not making games now?
Not that stat growth didn’t matter in the later game in the series, but letting you import the characters as they go through each series they become more “god-like”, I never felt helpless in the latter games. At times the hero was not strong enough to go somewhere but it was not like the first game when you had to tread carefully even while the whole world was opened to you right from the start, but if you made it too far, you might not make it back.
The QFG series were designed with seasons (or winds/elements) in mind, at first. The first game was obviously Spring, and the second Summer. The third one threw that out the window and autumn came back in the fourth game, as for the fifth game — we can probably ignore the fifth game, for it lacked the charm of the first four, it was rushed (before the the major layoffs of the whole QFG development team in 1999). But as the title of this article indicated, I need to talk about the second game, Trial by Fire, a masterpiece of storytelling built on top of an already innovate design, not unlike how Ultima V was built from the entrails of IV, as mentioned in my previous article.
Trial by Fire was the only game in the series that was not officially released in VGA and point and click interface as the first was. The task fell on AGD Interactive Studio (short for Anonymous Game Developers Interactive) who was previously known as Tierra. The Studio had released the excellent King’s Quest I and II VGA remake (even with professionally done voice acting) using the AGS platform, with the permission of Vivendi (who now owns Sierra). Earlier this year Trial By Fire was released and it could be nabbed here.
While the voice acting is missing here due to the large amount of dialogue, every other added aspect of the remake made the already exceptional original even more, immaculate. Aside from the graphical face-lift with added cut-scenes and the obvious point-and-click advantage over typing (the verb parser is still there if that floats your boat), many other aspects of the original is improved. Combat of the original is too easy, it is addressed in the remake with much more difficult AI and added movements (combos , special attacks), making the combat more strategic while giving arcade-newbies an option to let the computer take over and veterans much more challenge. Readers who are interested in the details can read the developer interview here. The dungeon-like 3D map of the original was hard to navigate (it could be frustrating especially before you got the map), a fast-travel option is added here to make the game much more friendly. Easter eggs are added here and there to please fans of the genre as well.
The remake retains the option to import a character and will also work with the third game. Those who are new to the series can start from the first game and jump to the remake. If your hero follows a certain path (with honor) he can become a paladin (the 4th class) which will carry out through the rest of the series. Sticking to that path makes continuing the hero’s quest much more interesting, even though the rest of the path lacked the charm of the first two.
There really isn’t much more I can say to persuade and dissuade you from getting on with your quest to become a hero, if you haven’t already. This is one of the finest games ever made, if you had only 10 games to play in your lifetime this is one of them. Get it now, or regret it for the rest of your life.
Source: AGDInteractive
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