Game 100: Dragon Wars (1989)

That is one ugly-looking dragon.

       

Dragon Wars
United States

Interplay (developer and publisher)

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

Date Started: 3 June 2013

     

Everything about the interface of Dragon Wars tags it as an Interplay game, but going in, I didn't know whether it would be more like Wasteland or The Bard's Tale. Since I had heard that it was originally going to be The Bard's Tale IV, I feared the latter, but having invested a few hours into it, I'm pleased to say that it solves a lot of the problems that caused me to prematurely abandon the last two Bard's Tale games, and it nicely incorporates many of the gameplay elements of Wasteland.

If there's any connection with the Bard's Tale games in the back story, I don't see it. The game is set on a dying world called Oceana, orbiting the giant star Sirius, which according to manual is "60 times brighter" than our own sun. It's so bright, in fact, that it never gets dark on Oceana, and the star's intense rays are melting the ice caps, slowly drowning a world that's already 85% water. Civilizations exist only in small islands, never unified under a single rule.

 
The game takes place on a mysterious island called Dilmun, which my adventurer/pilgrims have just reached seeking its fabled lore and treasures. But they were in for a rude awakening when, upon their arrival, they were seized, stripped, and thrown into a horrific slum called Purgatory. It turns out that Dilmun has fallen under the rule of Namtar, "The Beast from the Pit," and he expects us to die from Purgatory's privations.

Character creation in the game is a bit confusing, in the way of Wasteland, with 50 points to allocate among 5 attributes and 24 skills. The skills include weapons (sword, two-handed, bow, crossbow, fistfighting, thrown weapons), magic (low, high, druid, sun), thievery (climb, hiding, lockpick, pickpocket), "lore" (cave lore, arcane lore, town lore, forest lore, mountain lore), and other assorted abilities (bureaucracy, bandage, swim, tracking), and as in Wasteland, I suspect that some of them will turn out to be useless. Also like in Wasteland, you can buy skills at multiple levels, but the manual suggests that they don't improve through use, only through allocating points at the outset and each time you level.

Allocating skill and attribute points during character creation.

You don't explicitly assign classes in the game, but clearly you can bend characters towards particular classes with the allocation of attributes and skills. After studying the manual a bit, I created:

• Bolingbroke, a "fighter/ranger" sort-of character with skills in mountain, forest, town, and cave lore, tracking, swords, and two-handed weapons. The leftover points I allocated to strength, dexterity, and health.
• Valeria, a "fighter/thief," with skills in climbing, hiding, lock picking, pocket picking, and swimming. I put her remaining points primarily into dexterity, then health and strength.
• Ulrich, a mage, with skills in bandaging, low magic, druid magic, sun magic, and arcane lore, and a focus on intelligence and spirit.
• Elspeth, another mage, with skills in low magic, high magic, bandaging, and bureaucracy.

In many cases, I wasn't sure I was making the right choices, and I have no idea at this point how to develop my characters. They've already risen four levels, so I have eight more skill/attribute points to spend, but I'm waiting for better guidance before I spend them. Some skills cost a lot of points. If I want to give low magic to Valeria or Bolingbroke, I need to spend 5 points, and it's 10 points to gain any of the other magic types.

The choice of the name "Ulrich" turned out to be rather funny. After "Bolingbroke," my default, I chose the others based on characters in the film Dragonslayer. It turns out that the first NPC I picked up in the game was named...Ulrik. That might be a little confusing.

In its basic interface and combat, Dragon Wars resembles The Bard's Tale series with slightly more screen elements and slightly better graphics. But it borrows some welcome additions from Wasteland, including:

• The ability to directly "use" skills and attributes to solve puzzles
• A manual full of "paragraphs" that you encounter as you play the game, fleshing out the game world
• The ability to create macros to accomplish common sequences of menu commands

The game also fixes a few common problems that I had with The Bard's Tale. Primarily, combat seems much rarer, occurring every 20-30 moves instead of every three or four. There's a "quick fighting" option, although this doesn't seem to be that much quicker than regular fighting. And the automap actually works.

A small part of Purgatory.

More important, the game (at least in the opening areas) presents actual role-playing choices. It's too early to determine whether these choices are "Morton's forks" that ultimately converge on the same destiny, but there was nothing like it in The Bard's Tale games, so they're welcome even if they're illusions.

Now, if "gypsy" had been an option...

I rather like the setup of the game, with the party tossed into Purgatory with no weapons, armor, or gold, facing hostile denizens, and trying to find a way out. In difficulty, it reminds me of the opening stages of Might & Magic. There's something thrilling about progressing from bare fists to your first short sword that simply isn't present when you're progressing from a long sword +4 to a long sword +5.

Bolingbroke was doing better towards the end of his Purgatory explorations.

Purgatory is a large city that took me several hours to explore. There seem to be five possible avenues for escape:

• Winning gladiatorial combat in the arena grants you a badge of citizenship. Frankly, nothing really changed for me after I got this, so maybe this was just a way to get weapons, armor, and experience.

The gladiators are defeated, and everyone gains a level.

 

• There's a secret door into the wall surrounding the city, and another secret door from there to the outside.

 

And a few combats in between.

• There's a set of stairs going down into the underworld.
• You can fight past the gate guards and get to an area that seems to offer you the ability to jump into the sea and swim to safety. However, the game hasn't really given me the option to do so, perhaps because not all my characters have swimming skill.

Despite this message, I wasn't actually able to do anything here.

 

• One area presents you with the option to sell yourself into slavery.

Some of these were given as tips in the same bar where I picked up Ulrik by "asking for volunteers."

My explorations of Purgatory also produced a side-quest from a deranged lunatic calling himself the "King of Purgatory." He wanted me to kill a giant in one corner called the "Humbaba."

Humbaba falls.

It took me a while before I developed my characters enough to win the combat, but when I did, I got 1,000 gold pieces.

Gold was otherwise sparse, as you might expect in a city where everyone is desperately poor. True to reality, spiders, wolves, thugs, and assorted low-lifes don't carry any. I got paltry amounts from battles with guards and pikemen, who more sensibly would be expected to have it. Slowly, at a shop called the black market, I purchased weapons and armor.

The weapon selection at the beginning of the game is a little paltry.

The only spells I found were free, from a helpful wizard who just wanted to share. Everyone learned low magic spells like "mage fire," "mage light," and "light healing." These spells turned the tide so much against the guards that I sucked it up and spent the experience on low magic for my two fighter characters as well. From what I can tell, spell points don't recharge naturally, but there was at least one pool in Purgatory that restored them to the maximum every time I stepped in it.

I'll save combat discussions for later, when I understand the tactics better. It is clearly descendant of The Bard's Tale and Wasteland, with enemies starting some distance away, often attacking in multiple groups at varying distances. Unique to this game is a "stun" score, treated separately from overall health, that can leave a character incapacitated in the middle of combat (at which point the enemies stop targeting him). If all characters are stunned, they automatically flee the battle. It appears that stunning is far more common than death. The manual hints that there are few ways to raise slain characters, so I guess this makes sense. It rather reminds me of Don't Go Alone in that regard.

"Spleen-kicking? We're really going to be that PG?"

I do enjoy the paragraph system, which we first found in Temple of Apshai and saw at its peak in the Gold Box games. It won't be long before interfaces and processing power make them unnecessary, but for now they're a fun addition. I found seven of them in Purgatory, explaining various bits of the city and its lore. For instance, arriving at this statue...

...I was directed to a paragraph that explained the following:

A statue of Namtar, the Beast from the Pit, dominates this dirty city square. You carefully examine the statue, trying to memorize the features of the villain who exiled you to Purgatory. You struggle in vain. the citizens of Purgatory, themselves no less fond of Namtar, have taken it out on this image--the nose is broken, limbs are chipped, and the mouth is deformed beyond all recognition. As you watch, a wild beggar spits on the statue. "Filthy face of stone!" she mumbles. "Layed down with the lizards he did, that stone face lies as much as he!" The poor mad creature wanders off, still spitting and mumbling, leading you to wonder if a similar fate awaits you in the months to come.

As you can see, the graphics are reasonably good, but they do feel slightly more cartoonish than in The Bard's Tale. The sound is quite good, too, with different effects for different weapons and spells. When enemies hit party members, there's a "scream" sound, and I find it helpful when sleepwalking through combats to listen for that sound and note who was hit.

This Wasteland-ish graphic and name is a bit silly.

So it's time for my party to get out of Purgatory. Selling myself into slavery is definitely not an option, so it's either wander into the wilderness or explore the underworld. I'm leaning towards the underworld option because I don't know if I can get back there otherwise, and I hate leaving areas unexplored.

My one angst is over those skills. This is just the sort of game for which an experienced player is likely to comment something like, "I can't believe you chose town lore and cave lore! Everybody knows that they don't do anything in this game! You really needed to get your druid magic score up to at least 3, and if you don't have a pocket-picking score of at least 4, you can't win the game." (What would I have done if I hadn't taken "toaster repair" in Wasteland?) Keep in mind that I'm playing the game blind, and I want to do it that way, but if there are any famous pitfalls when it comes to allocating skills, feel free to give me a hint.