Knights of Legend: Hardly worth the BOTHR

So this didn't go very well.

Knights of Legend has prompted me to come up with an original concept that I'm calling the Bolingbroke Outcomes-to-Hours Ratio, or BOTHR. (Okay, technically, it might not be an original concept; I didn't bother to Google the synonyms.) The statistic is the number of hours you have to invest in a game before you get some kind of achievement, such as the next plot point, the end of a chapter, the completion of a quest, the attainment of some reward, or literally any shot in the arm that wants to make you keep playing the game.

I'm willing to be generous about what we call an "outcome." Gaining a level or finding a good weapon or armor upgrade qualifies, as does identifying a piece of unknown equipment or getting a scrap of intelligence. NetHack has a deceptively high BOTHR. Although you might have to invest thousands of hours to actually win the game, you can be certain that almost every level is going to give you some kind of reward.

The theoretical lower limit of the scale is 0, though you'd only actually have a 0 if there were no achievements at all. The DND series of games comes close: no way to win, and limited character development. Truly addictive games have a relatively high BOTHR of somewhere in the 2-4 range, which would represent an achievement for every 15-30 minutes of gameplay. This is why a game like Skyrim can be so addictive, because you're always on the verge of completing another quest, getting another perk, or forging a better weapon. When the BOTHR gets less than 1 (a score of 0.5 would mean some outcome every two hours), the game gets rather tedious.

Knights of Legend's BOTHR is one of the lowest I've ever seen. I've had random combats with six trolls in which it's taken me 15 or 20 minutes to kill each foe. It's taken me a week of playing at least an hour a day just to solve a quest. Everything takes forever in this game. Most of it I've covered in other postings, but just to recap:

• When you first start the game and choose to "play," you select the lead character. Then, for every other character, you have to click the "party" icon, say yes, you want to load the character from the hard disk, scroll to the right character, and add him to the party. There's no way to save a party as a party. If you accidentally add people in the wrong order, you either have to save the character back to the disk (which costs gold) or just kill the game and restart. (There might be some way to rearrange party members that I just haven't found yet, though. Comments welcome.)

• Moving a bit of equipment from a character's storage to his active weapon or to another character is a series of at least eight clicks with some annoying pauses in between.

• There's no way to transfer gold from one character to another. If you want to buy equipment for one character and he doesn't have the gold, you have to have another character buy it and go through a lengthy transfer process. If the character without enough gold needs training or healing, you're screwed unless you want to have another character buy an item, give it to the character who needs gold, and have him sell it--but you lose some money during this process.

• Conversation, otherwise a strength in the game, is rendered needlessly difficult because the game returns you to the main menu after every response. That means you have to click the "talk" icon in between every keyword.

• Finding quest locations can be hard. In some cases, you're only given general areas, like the name of a forest, and you have to wander around--dealing with random combats on the way--to find the entrance to the quest-related battle.

The "Walbar" seems to be a cross between a walrus and an orc.

 

• In combat, you have to move the party extremely slowly across the combat map. Telling a character to move one space to the north in a round involves at least six clicks to plan it, and then multiple clicks in a separate "execution" phase.

• Finding enemies on the quest-based combat map can be extremely time-consuming. They don't come to you. They often hide in buildings and alleyways, and you've got to search them exhaustively to "clear" a map.

My party has dispersed to individually move around the map, hunting for the last enemy.

• Even with a foe right next to you, combat can take a long time. The tactics of the game are such that you almost never want to simply repeat what you did in the last round (you want to see if you can assess the enemy's plan), so for each round, you have to set the type of attack, the area of attack, and the type of defense for every character, then confirm it, then execute it.

• Even moving through the wilderness terrain is full of annoying pauses as the game switches images for the type of terrain, changes from day to night, and forces you to camp.

The staggering thing is that just a few obvious design changes could have made a lot of this bother go away, and the player would be left to enjoy a challenging game with unique and enjoyable combat tactics and an interesting (if repetitive) expedition-and-return quest system.

I talked before about how the limited ability to save makes it difficult to play the game in manageable chunks of time. This has happened before. I remember several nights in which I sent Irene to bed alone because I needed to play long enough to return to the inn and save in Might & Magic, but Knights of Legend beats any other game I've ever played. On Tuesday, I thought I'd get some playing done in the morning before a noon meeting. I started at around 09:00, and by 11:30, when I really needed to leave for the meeting, I was so close to the end of the combat (I thought) that I didn't want to sacrifice all that playing time by closing my computer (and thus killing DOSBox). I ended up being 40 minutes late to my meeting and I still ended up having to kill the game.

Consequently, I did what I should have done ages ago: I set up my older laptop in my office to use it for Knights of Legend exclusively. I can leave DOSBox and the game running constantly on it. That allowed me to invest more time, in smaller chunks, on Friday and Saturday. The only alternative I could see was to find a version of DOSBox that uses save states (I've heard they exist, in varying levels of stability), but I just know I'd end up abusing it, not just for this game but for many others. I am thus going to choose to remain ignorant about save-state versions of DOSBox.

The quest to retrieve the witch's magic quill from some ghouls took forever. The only clue I had as to their location was in a forest south of Brettle, which describes most of the land south of Brettle. I wandered around for a long time, despairing that I'd have to search every forested square, fighting off random combats every 10 steps. I finally got sick of all the random combats, and I started fleeing from every one, losing all my weapons, just so I could find the ghouls, reload, and journey to them for "real."

Seriously? For a random combat?

At length, I found an elf living in a tree who provided training in different bows, and somewhere west of him I found the ghouls' camp. On my first visit, I had been so weakened from random combats that I lost fairly quickly. I reloaded, revisited, and won on the second visit. It took about two hours. There were a lot of ghouls scattered about the map in inconvenient places. Finding the last one was about 30 minutes by itself.

Each map so far has provided an obvious place for my party to stage an ambush--provided I'm willing to expend the time necessary to lead each enemy back to it.

Returning triumphant to Brettle--fighting two random combats on the way--I presented the quill to the witch and got the password for her guild.

Determined to limit the random combats--or at least to only fight them when I felt like it--I had everyone buy horses at the stables. I had this idea that purchasing horses allows you to flee from every random combat. I soon found out that it only gives you the option to try to flee, but it fails about half the time--at least with the "draft horses" I purchased. I assume the chances increase with better breeds.
 

"Attempt" is the key word here.

 
At that point, I didn't think there was anything left to do in Brettle--I had solved all three of the quests--so I decided to head out to another town. First, I returned to the elf living in the tree and had him train my two archers about 10 points on their bow skills. At that point, he told me to progress any more, I'd have to go to "the arena." The manual mentions that, "to progress through the ranks, characters must periodically prove their worth by fighting in the arena." Unfortunately, neither the game nor the manual tells me where the arena is, and I don't see it on the map.
 

Increasing my longbow abilities.

I didn't have any strong opinion about where to go next, so I decided to head to the closest city: Shellernoon, which is notable for being just across the lake from the Dark Tower of the evil sorcerer Pildar. Shellernoon is a walled city with a couple of odd shops that sell items whose purpose is unclear to me.
 

What the hell am I supposed to do with any of this stuff?

The lord of Shellernoon, Norgan, is a milquetoast who spends his days hiding in his castle with fake guards on the walls.

The ruler of the largest city in the kingdom.

Neither he nor the rest of the townsfolk had anything for me in the way of quests, nor did the weapons trainer specialize in any of the weapons I was already proficient in--which was partly a good thing, because they refused to train my Dark Guard.

Aedd faced prejudice wherever he went.

Conversations referred me back to a bridge that I crossed on the way to get to Shellernoon. It turns out that each of the four corners of the bridge hold inhabited houses, and it was in one of these that I got a quest to destroy a band of ettins on Sheller Ridge.

Sheller Ridge plays an interesting role in the game's lore, as the site of a crucial battle in the first war against Pildar; a battle in which the normally-clever Seggallion was outmaneuvered by the enemy. A lot of soldiers died, and a lot of people still blame him for it, calling it "Seggallion's Folly."

I found the ettins in short order, but it was clearly too soon for me to be there. They hit hard, with most of their blows rendering my limbs useless and knocking the weapons out of my hands. Thanks to my archers, I managed to kill three of them, but I can't imagine that I have a chance in hell of winning this battle until later in the game.

This was the first blow struck in the ettin combat. It also incapacitated my left arm.

So my plan for now is to scout out the other cities in the land, see if I can find this arena and some more weapons training, and find quests that are a little easier.

A few other random notes:

• I was worried for a while that the order of the quests might be very linear, but since I found a new quest almost immediately in the first city I visited, and since it's clearly too advanced for me, I'm now thinking you can probably do them in almost any order.

• Selling weapons recovered after each battle continues to provide far more gold than any quest rewards. I've yet to find a post-battle weapon or piece of armor that improves upon what I already have.

• The achievement of each quest has resulted in a little award symbol on a special screen for each character. I have three symbols now, and there appears to be space for about 24. That jives with VK's spoiler that there are "20-something" quests in the game. I wonder what they were planning to do on the expansions.

 

• I bought spells for a couple of characters, but casting doesn't show up as an option in combat. Anyone know why? Do I need items from the "mage things" shop to cast the spells? The manual says nothing about this.

• The NPCs continue to be interesting--just shy of crossing the line into the "absurd" territory of Origin's previous offering, Tangled Tales.

A crotchety old man named "Chauncy Lawnwatcher" lived here.

I'm not ready to quit on the game, but there's no way I can sustain it as my only primary game--not, at least, if I want to play anything else in the next four months. So expect to see me moving on to some other games while keeping Knights of Legend on the board as I dip into it for a quest or two a week.