Game 220: Fate: Gates of Dawn (1991)

Not a very fantasy-looking opening screen.

      

Fate: Gates of Dawn

Germany

reLINE Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1991 for the Amiga and Atari ST
Date Started: 21 April 2016

    
In the hours that I spent re-visiting Alternate Reality: The City a few weeks ago, I was actually grateful for the game's lack of a main quest. Despite its fame and reputation, I simply didn't warm to the game, and I had no interest in exhaustively mapping the entirety of the enormous Xebec's Demise. I was happy that I could quit playing when I felt like quitting rather than spending dozens of hours following a meandering plot to its end. I thought that the game was far more intent than achievement.
   

Fate: Gates of Dawn is what we get when a developer makes good on the original intent of Alternate Reality, including an integrated city, dungeons, and wilderness and a main quest. The connection between the two games is so obvious that I'm surprised it hasn't come up on my blog before. Almost everything about the game has a clear basis in Alternate Reality, including the main plot, the size of the cities (or, at least, the starting city), the multiple types of each establishment, the importance of "guilds" to learning magic, the copious options for NPC encounters, the types of gear you can buy and equip, the root of the combat system, and the way you have to manage hunger, thirst, and fatigue. Heck, even the damned rain looks the same.
   

The rain falls during my first visit to the City of Larvin.

   
Alternate Reality wasn't the only inspiration, I hasten to add--among other things, there's a clear Bard's Tale influence on combat--nor did the developer lack for his own ideas, but overall Fate is clearly a love letter to the earlier game. This isn't just my guess: in an interview on a fan site, developer Olaf Patzenhauer explicitly says, "I played Alternate Reality and I liked the atmosphere of the game. Since the story was bad, I wanted to create a game with atmosphere and story."
   

Banks offering interest on investments also appeared in Alternate Reality.

    
The question is whether, given the story, I'll ultimately like it better than Alternate Reality. My reactions so far are mixed. I admire everything that Fate manages to cram into floppy disks and the sound is fantastic, but the interface so far is a bit of a nightmare. More important is the length. From the comments on my blog and my initial scouting of the Internet, it's obvious that the game is legendarily large. The opening city alone is a staggering 54 x 54 squares (roughly, anyway--I screwed something up somewhere), and I guess the wilderness extends so far that it can take hours of real-time play just to walk from one place to another. Estimates for the time it takes to win the game top 200 hours, which, if true, is going to be good news for my efforts to catch up on the non-DOS 1980s games.

Let's start with the basics. Fate is a first-person "blobber," based on tiles, with action progressing in real time except for combat. It was developed primarily by Olaf Patzenhauer and Heinrich Stiller at reLINE Software, the same company that published The Legend of Faerghail, although the only name that the games share is graphics designer Matthias Kästner. I'll have more about Patzenhauer in the final entry on the game, but for now suffice to say that he died in 2011 of a heart attack at age 50, so we won't see him comment on my blog.

In its backstory, the game is ironically truer to the title Alternate Reality than the original game. Where Alternate Reality had the player enter an alien-created virtual reality, Fate has the protagonist literally cross dimensions. There is no character creation in the game. Instead, everyone plays (at least initially) as Winwood, a young 20th-century record store owner happy with his work but a little tired of its long hours. (I've been enjoying the thought of John Cusack's character from High Fidelity playing the protagonist.) One afternoon, he lies down to take a nap on his sofa and begins to have nightmares involving an old sorcerer casting some kind of spell. When he awakens, he is not on his sofa but in a dirty room above a tavern. Dressing himself in the medieval-style clothes he finds in a nearby wardrobe, he heads down to the bar and listens to the patrons' conversations long enough to determine that he's found his way to some alternate timeline of human history, in which the development of magic skewed the balance of power and the growth of technology.
   

The opening screen starts Winwood lost in the woods.

   
Winwood wanders outside the tavern just in time to avoid a massacre of all its inhabitants, carried out by henchmen working for a mage named Thardan. He overhears that Thardan is looking for a "traveler between worlds" and surmises that Thardan is the mage of his nightmare. He hides in a tree for a day or so, then takes a chance on approaching an old guy poking around the inn's smoldering ruins. The old fighter, Naristos, takes Winwood in for the evening and fills in some holes. Thardan is indeed an evil wizard, in command of an army of henchmen and monsters, who probably brought Winwood through a portal to exploit his knowledge of advanced technologies. Warning Winwood to avoid staying too long in one place and suggesting that he find some like-minded companions, Naristos kicks him out and points him in the direction of the nearby city of Larvin.
   

That was a freebie.

   
The game begins with Winwood alone in the forest, clad in regular clothing, armed with a dagger, carrying 6 water bottles, 4 lunch rations, and 1,355 coins. There's not much of an indication of where to go. I bumbled about for a while, fighting successful combats against rats, finding a few random treasures (including a short sword upgrade), before I finally found a road.
    

Killing rats wasn't hard.

But not all the combats ended well.

    
I followed the road a ways, and a group of signs started directing me to the city of Larvin. I had to reload a few times after getting killed by bandits (human enemies seem beyond me at this point), but eventually made it into the city. Larvin is apparently one of four large cities in the game world. There are also five small villages and an unknown number of dungeons. The manual warns you not to bother entering the dungeons unless you have a particular reason to be there.
   

I guess I won't head here just yet.

   
I tried just wandering the city at first, but its walls offer no more safety than those of Xebec's Demise. Robbers, burglars, and evil mages kept attacking and killing me. I thus started to carefully map so at least I'd have something to show. Before long, I realized I'd kill a couple of game sessions just mapping Larvin. For this first entry, I managed to get most of the perimeter mapped, but I must have missed a square on the west side, because the squares didn't come together right on the east side. I'm sure that will take a while to work out.

What I've mapped so far.

   
The city has a variety of inns, taverns, equipment shops, banks, temples, and guilds. I've been annotating their locations, but I otherwise haven't done much with them. I've won a small minority of combats, but I'll save a posting on combat for later. About a dozen squares produced some random treasure.
  

I could afford it, but I think I need to save more money first.

  
I also ran into a number of non-hostile NPCs. The game takes an interesting approach to NPCs. The copious options in the right-hand menu bar include "Chat" and "Ask for." "Chat" takes you to a screen where you can insult, adulate (compliment, basically), enchant, curse, joke, brag, tell fibs, or just introduce yourself. "Ask for" gives you more substantive dialogue options like "Name," "Profession," "Hint," and "Being." Back on the main menu, you can also ask NPCs to join you.

In general, NPCs have been friendly but not helpful. They'll tell me their names, but when I say something like "Help," they say, "Why should I help you!?"
   

If this was the default response to JOB in Ultima IV, it would have been a really short game.

   
Over time, however, I got two of them to join me: a mage named Dolly and a mercenary named Auzack. It appears that there are quite a large number of NPCs who will join the party--I guess you can even have multiple parties--so every player's specific composition is going to be different than every others'.
   

The stats for one of my new party members.

   
I read somewhere that if you get stuck, NPCs start offering you clues as to how to proceed. Late in my wanderings round Larvin, Winwood suggested that we start talking to more mages. I'll let you know if that produces any results.
   

You just got here. What do you know about anything?

   
I don't really care for the interface which, like most Amiga games I've encountered, is all mouse-driven. As if the keyboard wasn't just sitting right there in front of the player. Technically, you can hit the number keys to correspond with the menu options, but since they're not numbered on screen, it doesn't help very much. It's very easy to click on the wrong option with the mouse, and you end up insulting an NPC instead of adulating him.

On the plus side: oh my god, the sound. Finally, finally, finally we have a game that could care less about music (there is none) and has instead invested all its efforts into sound effects. They're fantastic. You get birds chirping, rain falling, footsteps, and howling wind in the background, and fun clangs and swishes in combat. This is only the third game I can remember that features decent ambient sound; the other two--Legend of Faerghail and Dungeons of Avalon--were also German games for the Amiga.
  

I can't show sound, so here's a nice shot looking across a lagoon in the middle of the city.

   
There's much, much more to cover in subsequent postings. I haven't even touched on the game's races (they include "Morons" and half-Morons), magic, combat, or equipment. Even if I don't finish, this is going to be a long one.