Game 245: Les Templiers d'Orven (1986)

   

Les Templiers d'Orven

France

Loriciels (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for the Amstrad CPC

Date Started: 25 February 2017
Date Ended: 26 February 2017

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 25

Ranking at Time of Posting: 104/248 (42%)

It's gotten to the point that French games give me anxiety. I managed to limp through Mandragore, but just barely. Fer & Flamme was just baffling. I've got a reboot of Tera: La Cité des Crânes coming up, even though I didn't understand it very well the first time and have little hope of understanding it this time given that French players can't even figure the damned thing out. 

In the middle of this comes Les Templiers d'Orven ("the Templars of Orven"), a game I'd never heard of, published by Loriciels, the same company behind Tera. The idea of three incomprehensible games in a row was filling me with dread. Imagine my sigh of relief, then, when I fired up Templiers and found it completely understandable. Very derivative, a little boring, and oddly difficult, yes, but at least not alien. Even the lack of a manual hasn't really hurt me.
     

Combat actions scroll past in a clearly Wizardry-inspired interface.

   
Clearly based on Wizardry, Templiers involves a party of up to 7 characters who venture into a series of dungeons from a central temple governed by a high priest. I guess the idea is that the party--the Templars of the title--are running missions for their boss. The wireframe dungeons comprise four scenarios of three levels each, for a total of 12 dungeon levels. In between expeditions, the characters retreat to a menu town with a temple, an inn, and an equipment shop.

Although it looks, feels, and plays like Wizardry, there are some key differences, particularly in character creation. Each character has six personal attributes--intelligence, constitution, observation, mysticism, agility, and skill--as well as two derived attributes: vitality (health) and concentration (spell points). They also occupy one of four classes: templars, warriors, guides, and scribes. You choose none of these things directly during character creation. Instead, after giving a name to your character, you distribute 30 training points among 8 skills: combat, meditation, long bows, dungeons, parchments (parchemins, which probably has a slightly more nuanced translation), sorcery, lance, and influence. These skills, in turn, affect your attributes and set your affinity for each class. The "dungeons" skill seems like something akin to rogue/ranger skills like pathfinding and trap detection.
     

Creating a character by adjusting the training statistics in the lower-right, which has consequences for the attributes in the upper-left.

    
Characters who invest in a combination of martial and magic skills score high in the "templar" category, while those who concentrate solely on fighting skills will probably end up highest in "warrior." An all-magic character is likely to be a "scribe," and a high "dungeons" skill puts the character solidly in "guide" territory. You also set your origin--city, village, temple, or "vagabond"--which has subtle effects.

A fifth class, "zombie," seems reserved for enemies that you somehow brainwash to your side.
    

At the armory. Some of these things won't be affordable for a long time.

   
Each character starts with a pool of gold to buy weapons and armor (most can only afford a weapon at the beginning). A set of paper dolls, seen only in the temple, change depending on your equipped items. That's cool.
     

Late in this session, the main menu shows my characters with their weapons, armor, and shields.

    
After that, there's nothing to do but hit one of the dungeon levels. Every time you leave the temple, you choose from among four scenarios: The Ultimate Dungeon, The Citadel of Madonas, The Caverns of Xand, and The Guardians of Knowledge. Their difficulty seems to scale roughly in that order.
    

Choosing from among the four scenarios.

    
The dungeons, alas, are pretty bland. I explored The Ultimate Dungeon and poked around the other three scenarios, and I never found any special encounters. Graphically, they pretty much look the same, too. The Caverns have irregular doorways, as if in a cave, but that's it. The enemies differ a little, from a classic D&D bestiary in The Ultimate Dungeon to figures from Greek mythology in The Caverns of Xand.
     

The three levels of The Ultimate Dungeon.

    
There thus isn't much to do in dungeons but wander around and fight. Combat is entirely Wizardry-derived. Upon facing each enemy, each character has options to attack, defend, use an item, shoot a missile weapon, cast a spell, do nothing, or flee. All characters can attack, regardless of rank. Once these options are set for each character, they execute, along with the enemies', in an initiative order.

I've found combats pretty hard, even on Level 1. Enemies routinely hit for more than half of a character's hit points, and they rarely miss. The enemy AI is predictable and merciless, focusing on the lead character until he's dead and then moving on to the next one. Facing more than a couple of enemies in one party, at least at Level 1, is a near-death sentence. You have to retreat frequently to the town to rest and heal. In this, the game is again like Wizardry.
    

I was able to defeat this little dragon. Note my "zombie soldier."

    
Outside of combat, characters can cast spells, use items, or use an interesting mark/recall system to save a waypoint and then "guide" the party automatically back to the stairs or, once you've re-entered the dungeon, back to the waypoint. It fails and you get lost quite often.

Spells work a bit differently from Wizardry. Spellcasting characters--those who invested points in meditation, parchemin, or influence--have three types of magic: influence, invocation, and abilities. Under each of those headings are listed several "spells" such as "Le Mal," "Douleur," "Vitesse," and "Vitalite," along with a number of castings that you have for that spell. Lacking documentation, I've had to experiment. "Douleur" (pain) is a mass-damage spell that affects one enemy party, and "Vitalite" is a healing spell, for instance. Casting them depletes the number of castings but not the "concentration" score, so I'm not sure what that's for.
     

This character can cast 3 "Le Mals" and 3 "Douleurs."

    
I had a much easier time once I realized that the "Effroi" spell (fear) lowers enemy morale to the point that they might offer to join your party as "zombies." Enemies typically have much better armor class than the party members, so putting one in the front slot can give the "real" party relief for a few combats while enemies whiff their attacks at him.
   

Damian demoralizes and enlists a soldier.

   
The temple serves as "home base," much like the top of the dungeon does in the typical RPG. The high priest is supposed to level you, but leveling is slow in this game. You need around 650 experience points to go from Level 1 to Level 2, for instance, and the typical Level 1 combat might only deliver 5. Equipment upgrades, from money found after combat, are similarly slow, with each character getting only a handful of gold pieces for a successful fight. It was 4 hours after their initial purchases that my party members could buy shields for 150 gold pieces each.
   

So, you're saying this is going to take a while.

   
It took me a while to figure out how to rest and heal. You have to remove each character from the party and add them back in. This requires typing each character's name as you add them. You also have to type the character's name when examining him. I began to wish I'd given everyone single-letter names.
    

Returning characters to the party from rest requires typing everyone's full  name--which the game doesn't even show.

    
Templiers is notable for what it lacks. I haven't found a single fixed encounter, message on the dungeon walls, quest, or quest item. Enemies don't seem to leave any items after combat, just gold. There are no treasures or chests in the dungeon rooms. Navigation puzzles and traps are few.
           

Random notes:

   

• If you walk into a wall, the game says, "Plaf!"

• Notes online suggest that parties who die in the dungeon might return as enemies for the next party.

         

"Sorcerers, demons, and undead welcome you among them" is the full-party death message.

          

• One of the options in the inn is called "(C)offres." Choosing it just brings up the message "Vide!" (empty). I have no idea what's going on there.

• The dungeon levels have several inaccessible areas that in a normal game would suggest secret doors, but walking into every wall produces no results. If there are other ways to find secret doors, perhaps discussed in the manual, I don't know them.

• Fleeing has not worked for me once. 

• There does not seem to be any way to trade gold from one person to another.

• There is no mechanism for raising dead characters--they disappear from the game when you return to town. Perhaps later there are resurrection spells you can cast in-dungeon; I didn't get that far.

• The only sound in the game consists of beeps when you run into a wall.

     

Level 2 of the Ultimate Dungeon brought an area of traps and a few one-way walls but no other special features. Level 3 was about the same, although it had a door leading to a corridor of darkness. When I reached the end, it teleported me back to Level 1.

I'm not sure about the issue of fixed combats. No square seems to inevitably offer a combat, but a number of squares have a tendency. For instance, there's a square in Level 1 on which a guard usually appears. Sometimes you have to enter the square and turn a couple of times. Sometimes he just never shows up at all. There's a similar square with a dragon on Level 1, and with other monsters on the lower levels. If combats were inevitable, I never would have mapped all three levels. It was only by reloading and squeaking past such squares that I managed to make complete maps.

    

This square on Level 3 generally has some combination of sorcerers, knights,and dragons. I'm nowhere near able to take on these foes.

    

In about 5 hours of gameplay, with lots of reloading, I only managed to amass around 250 experience points--less than half needed for Level 2. I touched every square on the three levels of The Ultimate Dungeon and didn't find any messages or anything that seemed like a quest reward, although it's possible that these exist and depend on defeating the quasi-fixed combats. When I return to the high priest in the temple, he says something like, "You haven't accomplished anything," suggesting that there must be some kind of quest. On the other hand, it's possible that it's his "you can't level up yet" message, and there truly is no quest in the game--that the four dungeons offer different maps and monsters, but no real purpose or endgame other than (very rarely) leveling up. It's further possible that the manual would give some more clues about this, if anyone can turn it up.

     

The back of the box suggests there are things to "résolvent" (solve), but whether this is just advertising hyperbole or something I didn't discover remains a mystery.

     

I opened the files in a text editor and scanned them for messages that might indicate some kind of quest--or anything other than dumb exploration and combat--but I didn't find anything.

The existence of a second disk was a little puzzling. The game calls for it for a split second during startup and then never again. Curious, I checked the catalogue on the disk, and it has an entirely different game called Duel Master: Blood Valley (1987), an action game based on a couple of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, published by the UK's Imagitec. I can only imagine it was crammed onto the disk by whoever ripped this particular copy of Les Templiers d'Orven, but at the same time I can't imagine what files Orven is accessing on this second disk.

     

Where did this come from?!

     

Absent any further intelligence or documentation, I'm going to assume that the game has no quests and it's something like a Temple of Apshai approach--you can explore several dungeons from a central hub, but with no real purpose--crossed with a Wizardry interface. As such, it earns 19 in a GIMLET, with the best scores in economy (4), equipment (3), and magic and combat (3). A good character creation process is rendered inconsequential without much to do with the characters and very slow character development (2). The interface is fine, but wireframe graphics were pretty passé by 1987. A lack of NPCs and quests hurts the game. If I get any information that suggests the game has a raison d'être beyond random combat, I'll re-open it.

At least I basically understood what I was doing. Let's see, in contrast, how I do in a re-match with Loriciels' other 1986 offering: Tera: City of Skulls.