The Land of Make Believe

The lone adventurer has become a party.

I didn't want to post again on The Land until I've won, but about nine hours invested in that effort this week has not produced that outcome, and the game has gotten annoying enough that I'm not sure I'm going to continue.

When I closed last time, I was trying to find the Third Ward of Kevin's Lore, and now I'm trying to find the Sixth. But there was more than just Four and Five in between; after the Third Ward, I had to find Berek Halfhand's Staff, Kevin's Sphere, and the Adant of Damelain before I continued with the Fourth Ward, meaning I've solved six quests since I last posted. They have been exceedingly repetitive and mostly uninteresting, following the same formula:

1. Get the quest from Lord Morham.

2A. Wander around and talk to people until someone gives you the lore that tells where the item is. Keep talking until you get a different lore that tells you the Word of Power necessary to break through the barrier around the item. Or:

2B. Go to the library in Revelstone and pay $1,500 for a "lore search." This is a neat invention that I hadn't really understood until recently. After paying the fee, you enter a keyword and you get whatever lore is associated with the term that you normally would have gotten from talking to people. This allows rich players to avoid bumbling around until they get lucky with the right person, and I've essentially used it exclusively since I found it. The game glitches and just shows you a blank screen when you do the search, but the lore shows up in the "lore log" that you can access with SHIFT-L.

Searching for lore on my latest quest in the library. I like this idea, though the broken economy (thanks to the broken gambling system) also breaks this.

3. Travel overland to the dungeon entrance.

4. Battle hordes of monsters as you search for staircases and slowly descend through the levels. The "Clairvoyance" spell, which I got at Level 11, helps by revealing unexplored areas, so it's a little easier to find the staircases down.

5. On the last level--always Level 10 until this last quest--find the barrier surrounding the quest object. Use the Word of Power to break through and grab it.

Finding the Adant of Damelain. I don't think "adant" is a word.

6.  Zip your way to the surface and get out of there. This got easier when I discovered a Word of Power (ABAKAAL) that allows you to jump up a level, and it got a lot easier when I discovered a Word of Power (MINTAAL) that automatically whisks you to the exit. Thus, most of the effort in the dungeon is just getting down.

This was a nice quest reward.

7. Return to Morham for the next quest.

As repetitive as all this is, I had gotten used to it, so the game's changes to the current dungeon, where I'm trying to find the Sixth Ward, are unwelcome. It has 15 levels instead of 10, and the barrier and item aren't on the last level. I'm slowly trying to work my way up and search every level, a process greatly complicated by enemies supremely talented at killing me.

The big change since last time is that the game got hard. For the first four quests, I was unnaturally beefed up in equipment and skills thanks to my gambling winnings. I simply charged through the dungeons and slaughtered the pitiful denizens wherever they appeared. This period of gameplay reminded me unfavorably of Ultima II, with its legions of enemies lining up to be slaughtered. Then I started to notice they were getting harder, and doing significant hit point damage as I barreled through them with abandon. So I slowed down a bit, watched my hit points, and healed myself when necessary.

Before long, though, they got so tough that I started dying every once in a while. I compensated for this by starting to use a bow and sniping them from afar. But soon their own magic missile attacks began to outclass my own, and more important, they started attacking in groups. Instead of fighting them individually in the main dungeon window, I entered the special combat map used in outdoor areas to take on more than one enemy at once.

At first, they attacked in pairs. Then triplets. The numbers kept growing, and now I routinely face six or seven of them.

During this period, I managed to get a "party" of my own. I figured out what I'd been doing wrong, at least in the game's own logic. When you encounter an NPC in a town or dungeon, he'll either talk to you and give you lore or join you. He won't do both. My mistake had been to talk to them first. What I needed to do instead was run right up and hit the (J)oin command.

The NPCs are of varying quality. The mount--a pegasus--is most important, as it greatly limits the time taken in overland travel. Some of the others have died almost instantly. A few have lasted a while and do pretty good damage to enemies with spells and melee attacks while I sit in the back and shoot at them. I feel bad about using the NPCs as cannon fodder this way, but I die, the game's over. Can they say the same?

Group-on-group combat.

There really isn't much you can do with NPCs. They make their own combat choices, although you can give them a broad command as to whether to generally attack or generally evade (I chose "evade" for my pegasus). They gain their own experience from the kills that they make (often stealing it from me!) but I noticed their hit points and levels don't actually increase from this process.

The party command screen.

 
In this last dungeon, the enemies have been too tough for me even with a barrier of NPCs. Some of them are capable of wiping me out with a few missile shots. Thus, combat has become much more tactical. I have a few resources at my disposal:

• Terrain. The pathfinding for enemies in this game is pretty much this: if there's no direct path between the enemy and the victim, the enemy jams himself behind a barrier until there is. (The same bad pathfinding applies to party members, too, who tend to bunch up behind each other in combat.) This makes it possible to rest, heal, and use the horn strategy below. Also, enemies won't step on traps or cross certain dropped objects. They can shoot magic at you from behind these objects (and at this point, almost every enemy is capable of doing that) but not if they can't see you. So one strategy is to get them trapped, go off-screen, and fire arrows or spells down the hallway until the enemy dies.

• Spells. I started accumulating one per level (and occasionally a bonus one based on a scroll) when I switched to the "Loresraat" class. I have a few dozen now. Of them, I use "Cure Serious Wounds," "Identify," "Clairvoyance," and "Fireball" most often. "Lesser Summoning" replaces an NPC temporarily if one dies. "Continual Light" is an odd one; when I cast it the first time, it created a light like a torch, only it's never burned out in six hours of gameplay.

My current spell list.

• Items and Words of Power. Through lore, I've discovered the Words of Power that work with certain items (liberally dropped by enemies) to convey healing, protection, and offensive spells. For instance, MELENDRI used with a Sphere of Protection increases my armor class. I'm still confused by a lot of these, though; many don't work as advertised. For instance, a Lore Staff is supposed to heal me when used with MELEN, but it doesn't.

• Horns of Blasting. These are a strange addition to the game that have been the only things keeping me alive. When you blow the horn of blasting--each of which has hundreds of charges--it damages anyone within a four-square radius. My survival strategy is to try to lead enemies to areas where some barrier blocks them from getting at (or shooting at) me and use the horn to destroy them.

From here, I'm able to hit multiple groups of enemies with the Horn of Blasting. I know they're dead when the status window shows that I've collected their experience points A glitch in the game keeps their icons on-screen even when I've eliminated the parties.

The horn strategy might not work for the rest of the game, though, as I'm running out of them. Enemies in this game tend to drop treasure specific to their level (or the level of the dungeon). In the first few dungeons, healing potions and food were dropped in abundance, but at this time (when I could really use lots of the former) I hardly ever see them. Horns of Blasting existed for about two dungeons when I was Level 17-18, and I haven't seen them since.

As you know, I do generally like tactical combat, and there is a vague NetHack-like feel to my current game state, when every time I see an enemy I have to figure out which combination of terrain, spells, and items work best. Unfortunately, this process isn't nearly as enjoyable as NetHack for two reasons:

1. There are one billion enemies per dungeon. Seriously, I think that might not even be hyperbole. They're relentless. You kill half a dozen packs of 'em, walk four steps, and face half a dozen more. Even the most joyful NetHack player who loves outwitting vampire lords would lose patience if he had to face 600 per level.

2. The enemies themselves aren't interesting enough. They come in two basic varieties--those who use melee attacks and those who use magic attacks--and nothing else differentiates them but icon and difficulty level. There are some theoretically capable of casting "Sleep" and "Fear," but I've never noticed any effect from these spells on my characters. In general, there are no enemy-based special tactics or strategies.

One other weird thing that's happened is NPCs have started showing up in packs with enemies. It was already odd enough to find NPCs in the middle of dungeon levels, but now it's worse because although they might be friendly, their companions certainly aren't, and once combat starts, my other party members don't make any distinction between them. NPCs also keep getting caught in my Horn of Blasting radius. I'm not 100% sure, but I think every time I kill an NPC, it damages my "Oath" and makes my "service" due faster.

Leveling has slowed considerably, with millions of experience points now required between each level. I get about one per dungeon. Leveling randomly increases skills and attributes. For me, strength is the most important. I'm carrying around so many quest items that I barely have room for any equipment, and each increase in strength gives me more carrying capacity.

I feel like I'm close to the end, so I don't want to give up now, but between slowly exploring and reloading when I die, it's taking more than half an hour to clear each dungeon level, and if I have to explore all of them to find the quest item, that could easily come to more than seven hours per dungeon. If I can find the Sixth Ward soon, I might have a go at the Seventh Ward (this is all putting New Orleans on my mind) and see if it ends the game.

I recorded some video below that demonstrates the various gameplay elements and combat mechanisms I talked about:
 

 
It starts in Revelstone, with a couple of examples of talking to NPCs and shops. At 00:41, you see overland travel and an example of multi-enemy overland combat. At 01:03, the game re-sizes the screen (it uses a shorter vertical screen for inventory) and you see some of this posting, in draft, behind it.

At 01:11, I enter Mount Thunder, an early dungeon, and use "Clairvoyance" to expand the map. The combats that follow are indicative of early dungeons in which you just have to charge at enemies and beat them to death. At 02:07, I kill an enemy with a "Fireball" spell and a few others with arrows. At 02:33, I use the Word of Power to exit the dungeon.

When I enter the Westron Mountains next, things change. At 02:58, you see me maneuvering enemies into barriers so I can repeatedly use my Horn of Blasting and wipe them out. A few such combats follow. At 03:49, you see me maneuver enemies against a trap so I can fire at them repeatedly off-screen without them continuing to advance. Even though these icons are showing just one enemy, there are actually multiple enemies behind them, and if I approach them and engage them in melee combat, I enter party-style combat as in 04:55. At first, my character uses arrows but at 05:16, he charges into melee range and uses his sword. He can't survive many combats in such circumstances, and at the end of the video, he dies.

Before we go, we have to deal with my next game, Fire King. I really need to trim some games off the list, and Fire King seems like a good candidate. I read the manual and played it for a little while, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't deserve its "RPG" label. It has no character development, only the most basic action-game-style inventory, and combat is solely based on the speed of the player's maneuvering and clicking. If someone would like to defend it as an RPG, you have a few days.