Dragon Wars: Final Rating

Dragon Wars

Interplay (developer and publisher)
Brian Fargo, Paul O'Connor, Rebecca Ann Heineman

Released 1989 for Apple II and Commodore 64; 1990 for Amiga, Apple IIgs, DOS, PC-98; 1991 for NES, Sharp X68000

Date Started: 3 June 2013
Date Ended: 10 June 2013

Total Hours: 26
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 51
Ranking at Time of Posting: 87% (91/105)

Part of the fun of finishing "journal" games is reading the entries you never found, trying to determine which of them are fake. In Wasteland, there was an entire plot about aliens embedded among the fake entries. Dragon Wars's fakes are mostly humorous ("Try as you might, you just can't get your nose to remain on your face. That Namtar sure has an odd sense of humor"), but there are a few meant to lead you down the wrong path. There was one that suggested an alternate solution to the flooding problem in the City of the Yellow Mud Toad that would have you searching around for a "magic plant." Another suggests that Lanac'toor can be revived. There are a few related to a nonexistent plot with a vampire lord. But for the most part, most of my unread entries looked like they could have been plausible, and I assume I just didn't get them during the course of gameplay.

This is apparently where I was supposed to use that "Soul Bowl."

The list of unread-but-real entries illustrates how this game differs from many others of the era, with multiple side-adventures, multiple options in several places, and multiple paths to the end of the game. I really appreciated this freedom, especially after the frustrating linearity of The Bard's Tale titles. The game also departed from The Bard's Tale by refusing to overpower the party (in fact, they probably erred a bit too much in the other direction!). But they didn't solve all the problems with their approach, and the sheer weight of the combats made for an unpleasant experience in places--though I allow that if I hadn't feverishly played the game for 16 hours straight, I might not have minded the combats as much.

There aren't many games in which killing the "big bad" becomes "repetitive."

People have been telling me for years how great Dragon Wars is, and I think the review below will disappoint them a little. I had fun with it, but I'm not sure I see it coming up in my Top 10. Let's see.

1. Game World. To me, the game world is unquestionably the best part of the game. Sure, we've seen "kill the evil wizard" in a lot of games before, but rarely has it been done with this much detail and attention to the plot. Namtar's history, the geography and history of the islands, the cities' uses of dragons, the gods, and other bits of lore are slowly and satisfyingly revealed through NPCs and journal entries. The party's own place in the game world is clear from the outset, and I love the beginning of the game, with the characters starting naked in a lawless city. Decisions you make effect permanent change on the world: witness my deciding the siege in favor of Byzanople, or the destruction of Phoebus. There will be later games with even more detail and intrigue, but this game, along with the Ultima series (which lacks a dynamic world) set the bar for other CRPGs in this era. Score: 8.

Areas of the game are well-described and fit well with the game's lore.

2. Character Creation and Development. Very original and intriguing. Through the initial creation and customization, you define each character at a level that simply selecting a "class" (the standard in most RPGs) doesn't reach. The allocation of points during this process is absolutely vital because you get so few of them later on. In contrast to character creation, though, leveling in this game is very unsatisfying. Your reward for leveling up is only 2 skill points--enough to get you a single-digit increase in dexterity, spirit, or health, a two-digit increase in strength or intelligence, or a single-skill-level increase in most skills. No additional hit points or spell points come with leveling (unless you invest the points in spirit or health).

While I admire the developers' aim to avoid the overinflated characters found in their previous games, it's a bad RPG that makes you say "meh" when you level up. There are lots of places where I had to reload multiple times to win combats--places which in most games would send me off to a corner for some grinding. This is one of the few games that technically supports grinding but gives you the sense that it wouldn't really help: spending hours to rise one level and gain 2 skill points is not my idea of a good strategy.

My lead character towards the end of the game. I poured all my skill points into strength and dexterity for him.

I'm of a similar dual mind about the skill point system. While I love the inclusion of skills in CRPGs, I don't love CRPGs that introduce a bunch of useless skills, causing you to squander precious skill points. A player ought to be able to approach the game blind and still find success no matter how he chooses to specialize. It wasn't quite as bad here as in Wasteland, but I still didn't appreciate a host of "lore" skills that had limited use and a "pocketpicking" skill that, as far as I could tell, had absolutely no use. There were, however, a few places where you could choose how to solve a puzzle based on your skills, and this makes for a slightly more interesting game. Score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. We start getting into "disappointing" territory here. First, you have the ability to recruit three additional NPCs into your party after the start of the game. But you can get them so quickly, and once you have them the game treats them indistinguishably from PCs, that the mechanism is rather pointless.

Barkeeps give occasional welcome hints.

There are other NPCs scattered about the game to give you quests, items, journal entries, encounters, and so forth. While they're almost all interesting, well-written, and non-goofy, there's really no depth of interaction with them. Score: 4.

A Dragon Wars NPC offers a depressing description of life.

4. Encounters and Foes. I've lately begun to realize that it was a mistake to mash encounters and foes into a single category. In doing so, I was thinking of modern games, in which interesting enemies often produce interesting options for dealing with them, but in this era they fit together uncomfortably.

On the "encounters" side, the game is pretty good. In every map, you find locations that require some creative use of a skill, attribute, or item. The best part is that most of these encounters are completely optional, producing only some extra treasure, bonus, or item. There are significant role-playing opportunities with some of the encounters, such as whether to sell yourself into slavery to escape Purgatory, or whether to use "bureaucracy" in the slave camp or just kill everyone, or whether to doom Phoebus by interfering with the dragon's feeding or not. These rich options fit well with the game world and history.

On-screen messages are almost always a hint to use some skill. In this case, it was "climb."

On the "foes" side, not so much. There are a lot of enemy types in the game, drawn from the typical CRPG rogue's gallery, but few of them are authentically interesting. They tend to come in two varieties--those that use melee attacks, and those that attack at a range--meaning that you have two basic templates for dealing with them. The "boss" encounters, though, are universally interesting and well-written, even if the tactics don't change much.  Score: 5.

Every time I fight a bear in a CRPG, I wonder whether in real life, a skilled warrior could honestly hope to prevail against one (without a gun).

 
5. Magic and Combat. I've bellyached about combat throughout these postings--long, frustrating, repetitive, relentless, and often too hard at the boss level--but I have to admit that things have improved since The Bard's Tale and Wasteland. The need to conserve spell points brings a tactical edge to the game that I didn't find in its predecessors. Yes, I was frustrated by having to reload multiple times in many of the quest-based combats, but each time that I finally won, I did feel that it was the right tactics--and not just random luck--that led me to that end. And even though I didn't really like the "distance" element of combat, I admit that it separates this game from many other multi-character first-person series. The "stun" system was also very original.

The magic system itself is nothing special: you acquire spells by finding or buying them, and you can learn them if you have the right school of magic. Different spells have different spell point costs, and the only real tactics involve the conservation of magic in between trips to recharging pools. I admit this game did a little better than its predecessors by making most buffing spells available only in combat, so you have to make more careful decisions about offense vs. defense.

I'm going to give this category a relatively high score of 5, but I'll be subtracting some gameplay points for the sheer number of combats.

6. Equipment. In terms of variety and usefulness, very good. Because character development happens so slowly and in such an unrewarding manner, improving weapons, armor, and other gear is vital to success. The game has a nice selection of weapons, armor, shields, helms, potions, wands, and other assorted equipment. Some of the weapons and items have special functions beyond simply wearing them.

Ulrik's equipment towards the end game.

But the game joins Dungeon Master and a few other titles by frustratingly refusing to be transparent about the amount of damage that weapons do. I guess they expected that each new weapon acquisition would be an occasion for experimentation, but I find that approach obnoxious. I also think that different weapons and armor had non-obvious effects on offense and defense attributes. Skill levels, too, aren't figured into those statistics, and it might have been better if the game hadn't even offered them.

Beyond that, my only complaint is that all items seemed to be fixed rather than random. I like some randomness in the acquisition of gear. Score: 4.

7. Economy. The game has an economy, but I can't honestly say that I paid attention to it. Almost every useful item is found, not purchased, though there are a few exceptions. Shops exist but are mostly useless. Gold isn't very plentiful; you only find it in a few chests and through killing human enemies (and even then, paltry amounts). I basically had enough gold whenever I needed it and didn't think about it otherwise. Not one of the better parts of the game. Score: 3.

8. Quests. We're back to the good parts of the game. The main quest is compelling and fun, proceeding in multiple stages, with a host of side-quests for better equipment, or even just more of the story, along the way. I didn't finish every quest in the game, which is a good thing. It's just too bad there's only one ending to the main quest. Score: 6.

The Universal God is a very Old Testament god.

 
9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. All tolerable or better. The monster portraits varied in quality, but were animated and almost always interesting. I found the sound satisfying if not spectacular--especially when I whacked an enemy with a melee weapon. The interface was uncomplicated and featured a helpful automap.

The automap looked so good, I kept forgetting you can't actually move on this screen.

 
I have to say a word about the macros. I used them a little. In theory, it's a good idea: if the player wants to use a character's "bandage" skill a lot, rather than making him type U-6-S-A-B every time, just map those keystrokes to one of the function keys. The problem is that the macros don't save with the game, so you have to re-create them every time you reload. Even if you don't reload for a while, little changes in things like the character order or the number of skills available can "break" the macro. Still, few games of the era offer any options along these lines. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. Dragon Wars gets point for being nonlinear and, because of its nonlinearity, mostly replayable. It was satisfyingly compact and didn't overstay its welcome. I do feel like it was a little too hard and exasperating at points. You shouldn't have to reload quite as many times as I did to win battles, and there are just far too many combats. Having only one save game is a little unfair (it's easy to get trapped), and the game offers essentially no recourse for death until late in the game--you can't even dump the character and create a new one. Score: 5.

The final score of 51 puts it just below the top tier of games in my list: the Gold Box series, the Might & Magic series, the Starflights, and the last few Ultimas. It has some great elements, and with a little extra effort, it could have been among those greats. But it was certainly good enough to keep me addicted and playing well into the wee hours of the morning;

Despite not being able to use the name, ads for the game tried to tie it thematically to The Bard's Tale.

Scorpia's review of the game in the December 1989 Computer Gaming World is a little more positive than mine. She agrees with me on the compelling plot and open game world and criticizes the mysterious equipment attributes and shallow NPC interaction, but she found the combat "balanced" in a way that I didn't. Of the final battle with Namtar, she says it was "probably the best end-game battle of any CRPG I've ever played." I thought it was one of the most needlessly frustrating, though I allow it was pretty cool if you count throwing Namtar into the pit. I don't get the sense that she minded the slow pace of character development or the overall volume of combats. The commenters on my blog might fall closer to Scorpia's opinion.

Matt Barton's interview with Rebecca Heineman suggests that the lack of a Bard's Tale name hurt the game, and sales were low. Perhaps this is what led Interplay to abandon this type of CRPG. With the end of Dragon Wars, we've really reached the end of a lineage. The game that was supposed to be The Bard's Tale IV feels enough like its predecessors to belong to the same family, but at this point, Brian Fargo becomes more a producer than a developer, and Rebecca Heineman moves on to programming action games (her only RPGs that I can find after Dragon Wars are conversions). One final game, Swords and Serpents, released solely for the NES, shows a certain Bard's Tale ancestry, but otherwise it's up to Might & Magic to carry the multi-character, first-person genre forward for a while.

We're definitely not done with Interplay, though. We have a pair of Lord of the Rings games from them in 1990 and 1992, a very intriguing-looking game called Stonekeep in 1995, and of course they'll explode back on the scene in the late 1990s with Fallout, Fallout II, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale.

After a quick visit to the early 1980s again, we'll be moving onto The Land, which I understand is a roguelike based on Stephen Donald's "Thomas Covenant" series but I otherwise know nothing about.