Game 87: Wilderness Campaign (1979)

I feel like we've seen this before...

        

Wilderness Campaign

United States

Synergistic Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1979 for Apple II

Date Started: 9 February 2013

Date Ended: 9 February 2013

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 24

Ranking at Game 388: 162/388 (42%)

      

A few weeks ago, I fired up an Apple II emulator and delved into the brief world of Dungeon Campaign, a 1978 offering from Robert Clardy that was one of the earliest CRPGs. Wilderness Campaign was his follow-up from 1979, and what a difference a year made. While the first game was a low-res dungeon crawler with a primitive interface, the second game is close to something that we might call a proper RPG, although it clearly shows its Dungeon Campaign heritage.

The game takes place on a single map full of castles, tombs, towns, temples, and ruins, the locations of which are randomly generated for each game. As with Dungeon Campaign, you lead not a single character but a large party, starting with 10 fighters. You can hire both mercenaries and bearers in towns, but you periodically have to pay them for their services, and they'll abandon you if you run out of money.

The Wilderness Campaign world on payday.

You start with a generous supply of gold, and an early goal is to get to the nearest town and stock up on food and supplies. Equipment like weapons and armor is simply shared among your men and contribute to your overall combat and defense prowess. Other equipment--including shovels, grapples, rope ladders, inflatable boats, planks, and lanterns--provide solutions to the many mini-encounters that you face in the wilds.

Half the game is preparing for any contingency.

Still other items, such as particular types of weapons, holy water, silver arrows, and crosses, provide bonuses against certain enemies. Different towns sell different items, so you have to visit two or three before you have a good stock of gear for adventuring.

I had all three of these bonuses but was still slaughtered.

You start with attributes of speed, strength, dexterity, and charisma that are fixed and apply to the entire party. The numbers are generated randomly, and it's possible to start out with a party that is extremely difficult to play because of low figures. (With a low strength, it's hard to survive the first combats, and with a low dexterity, it's hard to get out of the way of traps that deplete the party.) Throughout the game, you can find "magic lamps" that increase dexterity or charisma and "magic rings" that increase speed, strength, or dexterity.

This party is going to avoid every trap but probably won't win many combats.

As you wander through the wilderness, you have random encounters with wandering monsters; traps such as earthquakes, quicksand, and avalanches, against which you have to roll a saving throw; and minor inventory puzzles, such as chasms that you need a plank to cross, or dense jungle that you need a machete to cut through. You also deplete food, slowly or quickly depending on the size of the party and your speed attribute.

Since you can't lie, I don't know why the game bothers to ask.

This is still the early era of computer games, so when you finally find your way to a ruin, temple, castle, or tomb, you don't get to explore it on a separate map or anything. Instead, you get the simple option to search or leave, and searching might produce treasure, combat, or traps.
 

Arriving at a ruin.

 
There are special encounters at castles, where the lord might look favorably on your campaign and supply you with fighters, equipment, or gold. No matter what happens in any structure you visit, it seals behind you when you leave, so you can only visit once.

This was really nice, but now I have more mouths to feed.

It's combat that has advanced most significantly from Dungeon Campaign, and the idea that your respective parties are actually armies creates a combat dynamic that might be unique among CRPGs.
 

Encountering a party of ogres.

Combat uses a variety of statistics to determine the effectiveness of attacks and defenses. These include:

• A "personal score" based on the party's strength attribute plus the amount of experience divided by 10.
• "Bonus points" based on any special items the party carries that do extra damage against that particular enemy.
• Further bonus points obtained by spending a round getting into an advantageous position.
• Further bonus points caused by the casting of an offensive or defensive spell.
• A weapon class total based on the number of weapons you own, their relative levels, and the number of fighters you have.
• An armor class total based on the number of suits of armor you own, their levels, and the number of fighters you have.
• A luck factor based on a random role of  (I think) 3 to 18. As in Dungeon Campaign, you watch numbers flash by on the screen and you hit SPACE to "freeze" one for your roll. They go too fast to try to time it for a favorable roll, and it would have been better if the game had cut out the manual part.

 
In each round, the party ("campaigners") and the enemies trade attacks, and for each attack the game evaluates the totals above. If the attacker's attack score (weapon class total + personal score + bonus points + luck factor) outweighs the defender's defend score (armor class total + personal score + bonus points + luck factor), it causes one or more "casualties" among the party. The number of casualties seems to be about the difference in the scores x 5, but you can never kill more than half of the enemies plus one in a single round.

This is my attack round. My attack score outweighed their defend score by 14, causing 2 casualties (they already had 3 casualties going into the round).

As you might expect when armies clash on the battlefield, the outcomes of the initial rounds are vital for the rest of the combat. Since the weapon class totals and armor class totals are a factor of the number of individuals in each party, too many casualties in the opening rounds can easily result in a situation in which combat is essentially unwinnable from that point forward. At that point, the best option is to run. Again, it makes sense in battle terms: if a squad of 20 Spartans meets a squad of 20 Persians and 8 of the Persians die in the first attack, the odds are suddenly 20 to 12, and it doesn't look good for the 12. But it also goes against the typical CRPG experience in which a small party can prevail against hordes of enemies.

The first few combats are also vitally important. Not only do they provide the experience that raises the "personal" score, but they provide the gold you need to hire more fighters and equip them properly. I started about 20 Wilderness Campaign games, and in 15 of them, I didn't survive the first few combats, but in the 5 that I did, I found the game became a lot easier from that point forward. To keep things from become too imbalanced, the game occasionally allows the enemies to cast an "evil spell" that mysteriously provides just enough of a bonus to raise their attack score to 1 point above your defense score, and thus causing you to lose one campaigner.

How, precisely, do sand serpents cast spells?

But for the most part, after you have a well-equipped, sizable party with some reasonable experience, the game starts to become more of a logistical effort of keeping the party size optimal (it's easy to run out of food and starve with too many characters), plotting your route across the map, and making sure you don't stray too far from the nearest town. When you hire mercenaries, you get to specify the pay, but fewer mercenaries will agree to sign on for small amounts of money. There are also logistics associated with item and treasure weight: everything has a weight factor and your characters can only carry 200 pounds each. But you can hire bearers and buy pack mules to handle some of the extra. Bargaining with merchants brings its own challenges. If you lowball them on an item, they get offended and won't sell it to you for any price.

Combat eventually gets tedious, but you find items like "crystal balls" that allow you to see enemies coming and avoid them.
 

I never found a manual for the game, so I didn't know what the main quest and plot were supposed to be, but I figured it had something to do with the big castle in the upper-left corner of the map. I was right. As you get near the castle, you're told that you're at the "evil necromancer's magic barrier" and given the option to attack. You have to have some kind of magic weapon to pierce it.

Eventually, as you explore the ruins, you encounter an "Oracle" who shows you a location on the map. Travel there, and you find yourself in the "Sanctuary of the Great Mage," who gives you the choice of two gifts.

As the screen indicates, either the Staff of Power or the Lightning Rod will destroy the necromancer's barrier. Once you do, you're assailed by an army of over 50 soldiers, so you need to have a pretty big army of your own by the time you arrive. This generally involves building up large reserves of gold, buying plenty of food, and hiring mercenaries in the towns.
 

We're about evenly matched.

When this battle is over, you get a message that the evil necromancer is dead, followed by a flashing screen that says "You Win!" and drops you to the prompt.

Ding-dong.

The game gets a little bit too easy after the first third. It's not hard to get lots of gold, keep your staffing levels high, and equip everyone very well. The monsters seem to scale with you in number, but not in power. Nonetheless, I had some legitimate fun playing this one and checking out its unique elements.

Original document and disk photo courtesy of Thorium.

You probably haven't noticed, but I've been doing a GIMLET on all of these early CRPGs within my "Game Rankings" Google spreadsheet, but I haven't been putting the scores into the postings, since they've almost all been 0s and 1s, and I think the reason for that is fairly obvious. For this one, I'll give a proper (if brief) GIMLET here in the posting.

The game world and story presents a typical kill-the-wizard motif, but it's interesting in the way that it organizes the terrain (plains have earthquakes and chasms, swamps have quicksand and dense foliage, mountains have precipices, and so on), and it even offers a persistent world in its limited way, with previously-visited locations closing behind you (2).

The character system in this game is fairly unique in that you have no named characters nor permanent PCs, but constructing a party of volunteers and hirelings is interesting, and you do see development in both attributes and experience scores. Attribute scores are used to escape from pits, fight battles, attract hirelings, and bargain with shopkeepers. I can think of a lot of modern games that do it worse (3). The brief oracle and wizard aren't really enough to count as proper "NPCs" (0), but there are otherwise interesting encounters throughout the game involving enemies and inventory puzzles (3).

Magic and combat are very interesting statistically, but most of the "tactics" take place pre-combat; you don't really have many options in combat except to run or seek better ground. The incessant button-mashing to roll statistics and such would have been better automated (2). There's a large variety of equipment in the game necessary to fight and solve puzzles, and I liked how my fighters automatically grabbed the best stuff from the pool instead of making me distribute it (3). The economy is very important to the game, for both hirelings and equipment, though it's a little too easy to find heaps of gold (3).

There is a main quest, although not a very compelling one, and no real side quests on the way (2). The graphics are serviceable enough for the era, but the sound (including a post-battle victory tune) is annoying, and I turned it off. We had a discussion in the Dungeon Campaign forum about the slightly nonintuitive interface, which involves the (N)orth, (S)outh, (E)ast, and (W)est commands instead of arrows. A big problem with the interface is that if you get a little too enthusiastic about pressing the keys during movement or combat, the game caches the commands and applies them to the next decision you have to make. When faced with a "Yes/No" question such as whether you want to fight monsters, it regards anything other than "N" as "Yes"--the same is true for whether you want to continue searching a dungeon--so I often found myself doing things I didn't want to do (1).

It's always nice to find treasure, though sometimes the rewards are a little imbalanced.

Overall gameplay is brisk, as you would expect from a game that doesn't allow saving, so you can easily win it in an hour or two. Though it tends on the easy side, it has a certain pleasingly-compact quality that made it a nice diversion on a snowy afternoon while taking  a break from Chaos Strikes Back (5). The final rating of 24 puts it in the realm of something that you might actually want to check out.

I talked about the developer, Robert Clardy, in my posting on Dungeon Campaign, and he was nice enough to comment in detail there. In 1980, he updated and repackaged both Dungeon Campaign and Wilderness Campaign as Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure. I look forward to playing that version coming up. As for influences on other games, call me crazy, but doesn't this game sound a little like an early version of Warlords?

***

Further Reading: The rest of the "Campaign" series: Dungeon Campaign (1978), Wilderness Campaign (1979), Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure (1980), and Apventure to Atlantis (1982).