Game 149: King's Bounty (1990)

Never have I started a game, seen the words "New World Computing Presents," and been disappointed.

King's Bounty

United Stats

New World Computing (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS, Apple II, and Commodore 64; 1991 for Amiga, Macintosh, and Sega Genesis; 1994 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 18 June 2014
Date Ended: 19 June 2014

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 35
Ranking at Time of Posting: 96/147 (65%)

Ranking at Game #456: 337/456 (74%)

 

King's Bounty is completely not what I expected. Then again, I'm not sure where those expectations came from. It's often called Heroes of Might and Magic 0, or the "spiritual ancestor" of the Heroes series. I've never played Heroes, but I always assumed it was something like Warlords, where you picked a side, created armies, developed resources, fortified and defended cities, and so forth. Expecting to encounter a classic strategy game, I was thus surprised to find something much more akin to Sword of Aragon, with strategic combat used as a means to accomplish an RPG-style quest.

The exploration window. My armies are on the ship in the center. To the northeast, a party of monsters waits to attack me. To the southeast is a treasure of some sort. South of me is a city, and right next door is a castle that I can besiege. The icons on the right show me my current bounty target, the fact I have a siege engine, the fact I can cast spells, the map pieces I've uncovered, and the amount of money I have. The top status bar indicates there are 583 days remaining in my quest.

The game takes place in a world called the Four Continents, ruled by King Maximus, who maintains peace and order via an artifact called the Sceptre of Order. He is opposed by a motley crew of evil powers led by a dragon named Arech Dragonbreath. (Side note: isn't that kind of a lame sobriquet for a dragon? You would think that "dragon breath" would be a given for a dragon. It would be like calling a human warrior "Chester Two-Arms.") Through the discovery of an ancient tome, Arech learns that to conquer Maximums, he'll need to ally with a demon king and steal the Sceptre. His mage ally, Magus Deathspell, summons King Urthrax Killspite from the netherworld. Urthrax uses his magic to open a portal so that Arech can enter the king's throne room, grab the Sceptre, and teleport away.

As per the prophecy, the evil powers sit back to wait for King Maximus to sicken and die, at which point Arech plans to place Urthrax on the throne. But Maximus has at his disposal a Hero, "recently returned from the conquest of a ferocious, evil dungeon," who he has tasked with the recovery of the Sceptre. In anticipation of this, Arech has buried it and divided the map into 25 pieces, trusting 17 to his followers and 8 with "artifacts of power." The player's quest is to use the map pieces to find the Sceptre within a time limit, defeating as many of Arech’s minions as he can, and amassing the highest score that he can, along the way.

Recovering one of the game's artifacts--and a map piece.

The game is built to be replayed. During character creation, you choose your class from four options: knight, barbarian, paladin, and sorceress. Each offers various strengths and weaknesses in terms of magic power, leadership skill (which determines how large an army you can control at any given time), and rapidity of character advancement. You also choose a difficulty level from "easy" to "impossible," which affects both the number of days you have to beat the game and your final score.

Character class, name, and difficulty level are the only character creation options.

The Four Continents have a fixed geography in terms of terrain and the locations of cities and castles, but each new game randomizes the placement and composition of treasures, artifacts, allies, and enemies. Arech’s minions are scattered randomly throughout the castles on their respective continents. There are some parameters to this randomization; for instance, each continent always has the same two artifacts (only their specific placements vary), and each continent always has the same four minions (only their specific castles vary). But in general, the class type, the difficulty level, and the randomization ensures that you face a slightly different challenge every time you play.

Early in the game, you have somewhat cheap, pitiful allies.

Late in the game, you find powerful, expensive ones that cost a lot to maintain.

At the outset, you can only explore the first continent: Continentia. Eventually, you find a map allowing you to travel to the second, Forestria. Explorations there produce a map to Archipelia, and from there to Saharia. The continents feature increasingly difficult encounters, rewarding treasures, and powerful allies. Each is 64 x 64 squares, of which you can see 5 x 5 at a time in the main game window. Each continent has some variety of water, grass, desert, mountains, and forest, the latter two of which are impassable and serve to create small mazes and hidden areas. An automap keeps track of where you've explored.

The basic dynamic is to explore each continent, collect allies for your army, defeat monsters, earn gold, find the "artifact" treasures, and besiege castles and capture Arech's minions. Each artifact and defeated minion gives you a map piece. Once you have enough pieces to make a guess where the Sceptre lies--which will almost certainly be long before you defeat every minion--you go to the area, "search" the appropriate grass square, and retrieve the Sceptre. At this point, the game automatically ends.

In this game, I defeated all but the top two enemies. Their pieces of the  map are obscured when I look at it.

But I hardly needed those two pieces to figure out where the Sceptre was.

To defeat the minions, you can’t just besiege castles randomly. You have to receive a “bounty” for that minion from one of the cities. You always get Murray the Miser (a turncoat who opened the castle’s gate for the enemies) first, followed by Hack the Rogue,  Princess Aimola, Baron Johnno Makahl, and so forth, all of whom are mentioned (if only briefly) in the back story. Defeating them in combat results in a significant reward in gold, a map piece, and a step towards promotion to a higher rank (the rapidity of which varies by class), which in turn brings more leadership skill and income.

Receiving a bounty for a minion.

And collecting one.

Each day comprises 40 moves over regular terrain or water but only 1 move over desert. Five days equal a week. With every week that passes, you get a fixed income depending on your class, level, number of castles you’ve captured, and other small game events such as finding mines. This income is used to buy spells, rent a boat for each week, make a couple of one-time purchases like siege equipment or the ability to cast spells (if you don’t start as a sorceress), and most importantly, hire and maintain your army. Each unit has an associated weekly maintenance cost. One of the reasons that the “easy” level is so easy is that you could theoretically burn week after week just sitting in place and collecting income.

Random treasure locations might offer any number of rewards, including gold, which you can keep or distribute to peasants for an increase in leadership skill; I found the boost in leadership was always more valuable than the gold itself. You also can find mines, which increase your weekly commission, and special encounters that result in boosts to magic ability or deliver copies of spells.

Monsters in the wilderness are mostly avoidable unless you get caught in a dead-end, but fighting them gives financial rewards and contributes to your overall score. Occasionally, groups of monsters will offer to join you rather than fighting you.

Hell, yeah!

Building a powerful army is the key element of gameplay. You can recruit soldiers of various types (depending on your rank) from Maximus's castle, and you find various monster types in various villages, caves, tombs, and hollows. The number of units you can recruit is limited by both funds and your overall “leadership” skill. It is possible to accidentally enlist more units than you have the skill to control, which can result in the unit going “out of control” and attacking your own people.

Each unit has associated skill levels, hit points, movement points, damage, and special abilities such as shooting arrows or spells from afar, or quickly flying to any location on the combat map. Ghosts can convert slain enemies into more ghosts; demons have a chance of automatically destroying half of the soldiers in a unit; dragons are immune to magic. Each unit also has an associated "morale group" and mixing units of varying groups lowers everyone's morale. For instance, knights don't fight well alongside demons. You can only have five units at any given time, so it's generally better to spend money on very large stacks of a few units rather than small stacks of many units.

My dragons and barbarians (lower right) take on the enemy's giants. His trolls (upper right) are advancing on my party, and his stack of 6 demons (upper left) flew directly over to engage my forces, but my 114 knights, 30 vampires, and 17 trolls are essentially unstoppable.

They're also very expensive. At $20,725 per week, they exceed my weekly income by about $7,000. I need to start winnowing them down. Note that the knights aren't very happy being in the same army with vampires and dragons.

Combat takes place on a tactical map that varies depending on terrain. When besieging castles, it's always an empty castle courtyard. As in most strategy games, units move until adjacent to each other, then begin pounding away. Unique to this game is a system in which the first time a unit is attacked in battle, it "retaliates" against the attacker.

To me, a good strategy game takes a middle path when it comes to logistical complexity. I don't care for games like Spirit of Excalibur in which there are essentially no tactical options, but neither do I like games where each unit has 17 different statistics, all changing depending on terrain and time of day, and where I have to micromanage the cultivation of two dozen resources. I suspect true strategy game addicts prefer things a lot more complex than I do. Sword of Aragon was just about perfect for me.

King's Bounty falls a tad--just a tad--on the uncomplicated side. There are tactics associated with spellcasting, the use of ranged attacks, creative use of terrain, the morale system, which enemy units to target first, which unit should attack first and thus absorb the “retaliation” damage, and so on, but I felt that I mastered it all pretty quickly. Moreover, most of these tactical concerns pale in consideration of raw power, and it isn’t hard to amass enough money to simply hire huge stacks of powerful friends like trolls, knights, or even dragons, and have them just plow through your foes. If money was just a bit less plentiful, players would have to pay a lot more attention to other tactics.

My party of vampires prepares to fly over to the enemy's druids so they can engage them in melee combat.

The game's approach to magic is reasonably blunt but effective. There are 14 spells in the game—7 combat and 7 non-combat--which characters find or buy during their adventures. You can own multiple "copies" of each spell, but your total spells in inventory is capped by a maximum, which starts at varying levels for different classes and grows from special encounters. A separate “spell power” statistic also starts at different levels depending on class and grows from special encounters and promotions.

Non-combat spells include useful navigation spells like “Bridge” (creates a bridge over a body of water), “Castle Gate,” “Town Gate,” and “Raise Control,” which temporarily improves your leadership skill and allows you to control more units in combat. Some unique combat spells include “Clone” (makes extra copies of soldiers in a unit) and “Resurrect” (restores lost individuals in a unit) as well as common spells like “Fireball” and “Turn Undead.” You can cast one spell per combat round as long as you still have some copies.

My available spells. I need some more combat options.

When you first encounter an enemy in the wilderness, the game gives you some sense of how many you're facing, and of what type. You have the option to attack or flee. Fleeing always works, which is good, since there’s no fleeing once combat starts, no surrendering, and no quick combat option. This means some side ends up having to fight a hopeless battle to the bitter end, and when things are too one-sided, they get a little boring. But I had a lot of fun with battles late in the game, when I had lots of available spells and was fielding powerful units. Pitting six score knights and 200 elf archers against stacks of demons, dragons, and vampires, disrupting things every round with lightning bolts and fireballs, felt suitably epic.

"A few" usually means less than 10 and "some" usually means less than 25.

 
When you arrive at a castle, on the other hand, you get no sense of what enemies await you in the courtyard. You have to collect that intelligence from various cities in the area before making a educated decision about whether your armies can defeat the enemy.

Collecting intelligence from a town.

 
There are a few things that make Sword of Aragon an RPG where King’s Bounty is not. First, Aragon featured more attributes, experience, and leveling for the hero. More important, the hero actually appeared on the combat screens and participated in combat, while in King’s Bounty, you never see the protagonist. He can’t even die. If all the armies are defeated, you just end up back at the castle with a scolding from the king but all of your funds intact.

The consequences of failure.

The game really doesn’t have any “inventory,” either. Technically, the artifacts are a kind of “inventory,” and as you find each one, you increase in some ability. The “Crown of Command” doubles leadership ability; the “Sword of Power” increases every unit’s damage; and the “Shield of Protection” increases every unit’s defense. But they’re not inventory items in a classic RPG sense, where you can equip, unequip, trade, drop, or sell them.

Since so many elements of the game are randomized, you have to take notes as you play so that you remember the locations of key ally camps, cities that sell specific spells, and of course which minion is in which castle. The manual came with a couple of grids that it encouraged players to photocopy and use for each new game.

I just used Excel.

As I played, I found that a  decent early strategy was to rent a boat immediately and explore the perimeters of the landmasses, avoiding monsters (who never come out to sea), darting in to collect treasures and artifacts, collecting intelligence on who’s occupying what castles, and noting the locations of potential recruits. Especially if you can find the artifacts early in the game, the battles become much easier, though sometimes the randomization places them in locations not easily accessible by the sea.

You can get a lot of these "treasure" encounters without ever having to fight anything.

After a number of weeks, your weekly income has probably given you enough money to hire decent units, which allows you to explore the interiors, defeat wandering monsters for profit, and start collecting bounties. This process essentially repeats for the first three continents. The fourth, Saharia, is a special case. Most of it is desert, and exploring the interior means burning weeks and weeks unless all your units are capable of flight.

However, even visiting the last continent is essentially optional. As I mentioned, you can usually find the Sceptre well before you finish defeating all of Arech’s minions. The bounties culminate in Arech himself, and his piece (the center of the map) is always the last one, but when I tried to defeat Arech, I found myself against absurdly large stacks of dragons and demons, and I’m not sure exactly how I would have defeated them with my available armies. I’m sure it’s possible with more practice, but you’d have to be an idiot to actually need that last map piece. I found that I could usually identify the location of the Sceptre (always in the center of the treasure map; always on a grass square) after seven or eight pieces, sometimes a lot fewer depending on what the early pieces revealed.

Even my buff party was no match for Arech's 159 dragons, 106 demons, and 112 vampires.

In the first game I won, with a knight (according to the manual, the easiest class) on the “easy” difficulty level, after just a few pieces, I knew I was looking for a grass avenue in between some mountains to the northwest and forest to the southeast. There were only a few places that qualified, and pretty soon, I found the exact location in Forestria. I won with a score of 3,310.

In this game, the presence of the tomb helped me identify the Sceptre location after I'd only found a few pieces.

The next time I played, I chose a sorceress (supposedly the highest difficulty level) on “impossible” mode. I immediately bought a boat and prioritized coast exploration and collection of artifacts over battle. I avoided every step of desert. I got very lucky in the reveal of map pieces when one of them showed a tomb (where I could recruit some kind of undead ally) with a bit of forest around it. As I continued to explore, I kept watching for tombs, and I found the right one in Archipelia with about 80 days (out of an initial 200) to go. I kept defeating minions and other armies until I was down about a dozen days and then grabbed the Sceptre, earning a final score of 24,080—much higher than the knight, mostly because the “impossible” level earns points at 8 times the multiplier of the “easy” level.

My best game so far.

I suppose the ultimate way to win would be to find the Sceptre on the “impossible” level after defeating every minion, including Arech, but I’ll leave that for another time or a better player.

There were a couple of things I didn’t care for. The first is the copy protection scheme, which requires you to type a word from a specific page, line, and word count in the manual. I kept getting it wrong, probably because I was mis-counting a couple dozen lines. The game gives you only one chance before dumping you to the DOS prompt. I suppose if nothing else, this limits “save scumming.” Although the game allows you to save anywhere, there’s no reload option in the game itself; you have to quit and go through the copy protection mechanic again.

I found the sound effects a little sparse—no satisfying crunches or howls in combat, for instance. The icons on the side of the screen are entirely unnecessary. Everything they tell you—your current bounty, whether you have a siege weapon, whether you’re capable of casting spells, the number of maps you’ve found, and how much money you have—are all instantly retrievable with the “View” or “Info” commands. I wouldn’t care about superfluous icons except that the developers felt the need to keep them in a state of constant animation, which was a little distracting.

I don't need to be reminded so constantly that I have a siege engine and spellcasting ability.

On the plus side, movement was through very easy-to-master keyboard commands that can be referenced with a quick look at the “options” menu. I thought the overall difficulty was a bit on the easy side—especially since I won on the “hardest” level on my second try—but overall I think it’s a fun game with just enough tactics to be slightly interesting, and at about 2–4 hours per campaign, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

In a GIMLET, I give it:

• 4 points for the game world. It’s got an interesting novella, and I like how the bounties in the game are referenced in the novella, so you understand every minion’s contribution to the back story.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There isn’t much in the way of creation—just class and name—but I like that different classes face different challenges, and that the characters steadily improve throughout the game from exploration, combat, treasure hunting, artifact collection, and bounties.

The character status screen about mid-game. The leadership and spell scores are really the only "attributes." The artifacts found on the bottom are the only "inventory."

• 0 points for no NPC interaction.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. There are no special encounters in the game. The foes are well-described in the game manual. While typical D&D fare, they do have special attacks and defenses that make a difference in how you approach combat.

• 5 points for magic and combat. The magic system is a bit basic, but the combat system is satisfyingly tactical, creating more interesting scenarios than a typical RPG but probably less exciting than a typical strategy game.

Reviewing options in combat.

• 1 point for equipment. I nearly gave it 0, but I suppose I’ll regard the artifacts as “equipment” of a sort.

Gideon, late in the game, with all the artifacts collected and god-like levels of leadership.

• 6 points for economy. Your fortunes wax and wane throughout the game as you purchase spells and armies. Given the difficulty of some of the battles (which aren’t necessary to win), money never becomes superfluous.

This would be a less-obvious choice if the money was greater or the leadership increase was smaller.

• 3 points for quests. There’s a clear main quest with multiple steps along the way.  You can kind-of regard some of the bounties as “side quests,” as you don’t need every map piece to figure out the Sceptre location and win the game.

This is what you get if time runs out.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and inputs. Nothing special for sound, but the graphics are attractive enough and the keyboard interface was easy to learn.

• 5 points for gameplay. Fun, quick, with a little bit of challenge. I like that you have a lot of freedom in how you explore and how you prioritize combat. Maybe a little too easy, but that’s only if you regard getting the Sceptre alone as winning the game.

That produces a final score of 35, not bad for a game that isn’t an RPG being ranked on an RPG scale. (If the RPG-specific categories were removed and everything was re-scaled, it would score about a 50; less than 10% of games I've played have reached that level.) It obviously fails most in some classic RPG categories, but for what it intended, it does it quite well. I would regard it as a fun “lite” strategy game for people who aren’t really that into strategy games.

This would be the scene if you fulfilled the "bounty" on Arech, I guess.

Alan Emrich’s review of the game in the November 1990 Computer Gaming World is interesting because it also approaches the game from an adventure/RPG perspective and also makes comparisons with Sword of Aragon:

King’s Bounty is an army game of large battles and sweeping continents, not a six-characters-hit-the-dungeon variety of role-playing game. If [adventure gamers] feel cheated by games which are of a more introductory caliber (e.g., if they thought SSI’s Sword of Aragon was too simple), they should avoid this one. If, however, quicker, cleaner, and simpler fantasy/strategy games are one’s forte, there is a feast of fun at the King’s Bounty.

"Quick, clean, and simple" describes King's Bounty reasonably well.

     

This is the fourth or fifth game from New World Computing, after the first two Might and Magics (1986 and 1988), a 1989 strategy game called Nuclear War, and perhaps Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan (which came out the same year and which I will eventually finish). When I blogged about Might and Magic I and II, it was early in my career and I didn’t do a good job talking about companies and developers, so I never offered the praise for the company and its founder, Jon Van Caneghem, that I should have.

King's Bounty had this brief thematic connection to the Might and Magic series. I suppose that means the Four Continents are just another VARN.

Van Caneghem is perhaps second only to Richard Garriott in nurturing my CRPG addiction, and I think the Might and Magic series is perhaps the best overall series in the history of RPGs. Yes, individual titles in the Ultima series and the Gold Box series are, in my opinion, better games, but Might and Magic is the only series that for eight consecutive titles never really hit a wrong note. Might and Magic VI and VII would appear on my list of the best RPGs I’ve ever played (I’ve won them each at least 12 times), and the entire series really perfected the first-person multi-character RPG that began with Wizardry. For years, I’ve wanted to know if the Heroes of Might and Magic series did for strategy games what its namesake did for RPGs, so I’m pleased to finally have the chance to find out, starting with this predecessor.

When JVC plays Ultima IV, I bet he has the hardest time with "humility."

New World lasted as an independent company from 1983 to 1996, when Van Caneghem sold it to 3DO, but he remained as president of 3DO until 2003, when the company went bankrupt and the New World division died. Fortunately, the Might and Magic series (including Heroes) lives on at Ubisoft (see my quick initial review of X). Following the collapse of 3DO, Van Caneghem started Trion World Network, which made the MMORPG Rift. He moved to Electronic Arts in 2009, then left that company earlier this year. I’m having trouble verifying, but his LinkedIn profile indicates he’s the CEO of a new company, currently starting up in “stealth mode.”

Heroes of Might and Magic is the “spiritual” descendent of King’s Bounty, but there are a couple of literal ones. In 1992, an independent Russian developer created King’s Bounty 2; it exists only in Russian. In 2007, the Russian developer 1C Company purchased the rights to the name and released King’s Bounty: The Legend, followed by King’s Bounty: Armored Princess (2008) and King’s Bounty: War of the North (2012). There was also a 1991 board game by Task Force Games that has the same cover as the computer version, but no one seems to know if it was made with New World’s cooperation and assistance or not.

I won’t be playing any of these sequels, of course, but as with King’s Bounty, I’ll check out Heroes of Might and Magic in 1995 so I can explore its thematic connections with the Might and Magic series. [Later edit: I don't know why I said I wouldn't play them. I guess I assumed they were strategy games like this one. Apparently, they're RPG hybrids and will, in fact, appear on my list.] Next up, I'm simultaneously continuing Dragonflight and exploring Maze Master.