Game 269: Ancients 1: Death Watch (1991)

          

Ancients 1: Death Watch

Canada

Farr-Ware (developer); distributed as shareware

Released in 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 14 November 2017

Date Ended: 17 November 2017

Total Hours: 17

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 30

Ranking at Time of Posting: 151/271 (56%)

      

Ancients--which seems to be the word-of-the-year for 1991--is a prosaic but playable little Wizardry clone. It doesn't offer anything we haven't seen a hundred times, but it surpasses the quality of the other shovelware with which it was distributed. The graphics are cute.

The by-the-numbers nature of the game puts me in the mood to simply structure this entry like a record in a database.

Backstory: Unnecessarily vague. The central character (the game is not clear which of the four characters this represents) is exploring the hills one day near his home city of Locklaven. He comes upon a beautiful fairy playing an instrument and falls asleep, awakening later in his own bed. The experience inspires him to be an adventurer, and he sets out. Years later, he returns to Locklaven and finds it transformed. The population is fearful and mistrustful, and some kind of evil seems to have gripped the city. The "main character" thinks it has something to do with the fairy being captured.
       

Part of the unhelpful backstory.

      

Party members: 4. Only two can fight in melee range; the other two can cast or use missile weapons from the back. 

Races: Human, dwarf, elf.

Classes: Warrior, rogue, priest, mage.
      

Choosing the class during character creation.

      

Attributes: Strength, intelligence, constitution, dexterity. Life points and  money ("dracos") are also rolled randomly during character creation. Attributes are theoretically between 3 and 18, but the rolls are generous and it wasn't hard to get characters with 15 and above in everything.
            

During character creation, you choose from a variety of portraits for the characters. There is only one female portrait. Sex is otherwise not explicitly given.

Game world: Town level and seven underground dungeon levels, generally 18 x 18. Town level has an armory, inn, temple, training hall, and casino with miserable odds.
     

Arriving in the game from the main screen.

     

Encounters: Both fixed and random, including some in the town level. Monsters are typical Dungeons and Dragons fare. Some have mass-damage attacks, but none have special attacks like poison, paralysis, curse, sleep, or level drain.

Combat: Standard Wizardry style, with options to attack, defend, cast spells, use items, and flee.
      

Mid-combat with a troll and a mis-named "black elf."

      

Magic: Both priests and mages have 24 spells, arranged in 6 levels of 4 each. They gain new spells every other character level. They're relatively standard for CRPGs, some single-enemy offensive, some multi-enemy offensive, some protection, some healing. Only one, "Enchanted Flame," is necessary for exploration. Unfortunately, there are no "buffing" spells; all protection spells are cast in combat.
       

A protection spell helps in an early-game combat.

      

The game is slow-going to start. The random combats on the first dungeon level are of extremely variable difficulty, just like in Wizardry. You might face 2 goblins in one fight and then 3 orcs, 4 giant rats, and 4 goblins in the next. The winnable battles deliver an average of 15 experience points, and it takes 500 experience points just to reach Level 2. I had explored and mapped the level (except for its final encounter) long before I was ready to level up. Combat is somewhat annoying throughout the game because the characters' accuracy, even with high dexterity, is abysmal. Even towards the end, your attacks connect maybe one-third of the time.

One thing I rather like is the tight economy.  A wildly successful combat might net 12 gold pieces. You're deep into the game before everyone has their best "regular" weapons and armor. Eventually, gold is only useful for healing (the shop doesn't sell any advanced gear), but it takes a long time to get there.
       

Late-game equipment for my warrior. I never did find anything for the belt slot.

      

Ancients does reasonably well with its equipment, too. You have a paper doll image with slots for left and right hands, helms, armor, gauntlets, boots, and belts, plus 12 backpack slots. There are the usual class-based restrictions on what you can wield, but there don't seem to be any armor restrictions. Since only two characters (the two "middle" characters in the party order, oddly) can engage in melee combat, the other two end up being missile characters and spell casters.
      

Purchasing equipment in the town's shop.

      
Only warriors can use bows, but I can't imagine wasting a warrior in a backup slot unless you were trying to do something unusual, like field an all-warrior party. In my party, the priest and mage both used slings. You have to buy sling bullets to go with the slings, but one bullet apparently lasts a lifetime. There's also a weird bug by which slings occasionally do ridiculous damage.
      

Maggar somehow ended up with the Sling of David.

    

That bug is representative of an unpolished feeling to the game in general. Spelling errors abound; for instance, the equipment shop has an option to "sell and item" and a main menu option advertises the game's "sequal." The interface works poorly. There are theoretically redundant mouse and keyboard commands, but in practice you have to use the mouse for almost everything. There are times the game outright lies: when casting spells, for instance, it offers function keys for each selection, but the function keys don't do anything. Often, it's unclear how to back out or exit a menu option.
    

Despite the labels to the left, the function keys do not in fact serve as shortcuts. I have to click with the mouse if I want to cure "serius" wounds or "casue" wounds to the enemy.

        
Anyway, as you penetrate the dungeon, you find the occasional magic equipment upgrade, like elven boots and dwarven helms. Platemail is also only available from looted enemies, not the shop.

The world is small, as it uses the "wormhole" convention by which corridors always have 10 feet of dead space around them. The town is particularly void of anything interesting except a few hints in the tavern. A large number of "private residences" plus the use of the term "review board" when you level up suggests a Bard's Tale influence, but you can't actually enter the residences and encounters on the town level are few and far between. It would have been better as a menu town.
      

Level 6 of the game.

      
Among the dungeon levels, there are fewer than 1,200 mappable squares, and among those squares fewer than 20 fixed encounters. Thus, you'd coast through the game pretty quickly except for the difficulty of the monsters. Because of that, about 16 of the 17 hours I spent playing the game, I spent grinding. I might not have done it, but the game came along right as Netflix released The Punisher, so it was easy enough to go through the motions of fighting combats while I binged the episodes. Plus, grinding in Ancients 1 is authentically rewarding. Attributes, spell points, magic points, accuracy bonuses, damage bonuses, and resistances all increase notably between levels. The spell rewards are particularly palpable, as characters go from single-enemy damage spells to single-group damage spells, to all-enemies damage spells.
       

A late-game character sheet.

  

The plot unfolds as you progress through the dungeon. As with Wizardry, there are a couple of special encounters on each level, and a number of wall messages. Level 1, the sewers beneath the town, has a light puzzle in which a well asks you to drop in "a ball of force that can crush bone," a fancy description for a mace.
      

The game's first puzzle.

      

Beyond the well is a fixed encounter with some priests and skeletons. Winning provides a key for a lower level. Miscellaneous encounters on the level include orcs, goblins, "kobalds," giant rats, and "riff-raff."
      

Messages--some helpful, some not--are scattered about the levels.

     
On Level 2, labeled as "access tunnels," you fight barbarians, black ogres, evil priests, skeletons, and giant snakes to the Tomb of Relnor, an ancient knight. Sleeping in the tomb rewards you with a vision and both the Sword and Mace of Relnor. These are powerful artifact weapons, but oddly they show up as random treasure in later combats.
     

     
Level 2 also has a key encounter with some yellow mold. Killing the mold allows you to take some of it back to the bartender in town for a key.
       

       
Level 3 brings an encounter with a "golum" holding a key in a chunk of ice. You have to cast "Enchanted Flame" to melt the ice, then kill the golem.
       

      
The three keys obtained so far open the way down to the next level. There's a bug in the game, though, by which other found equipment can accidentally replace one of the keys. I didn't find this out until I had lost the key and saved the game (there's only one save slot). I had to start over with a new party. I hex-edited them to where my old party was in terms of experience so I didn't have to do all the early-level grinding again. I also took the opportunity to replace my rogue, who has absolutely nothing roguelike to do in the game, with another warrior.

Level 4 is an odd one. It hardly uses any of its allocated space. It consists only of two long corridors, one through a secret door off the other. The secret door is cued with a message that it's windy (plus a message on the previous level about a hidden area), and as far as I can tell it's the only secret door in the game.

The corridors culminate in a battle with Kilrah, a red dragon. Killing her gets you a fireball wand which only has a few uses.

A lot more undead enemies--wraiths, ghouls, zombies, and such--start to appear on Level 5. There otherwise isn't much on this level, but I did most of my late-game grinding here.

  

Some vague warning accompanies my arrival on Level 6.

      

Level 6 brings gargoyles, dragons, vampires, and hell hounds. As you enter the level, there's a message suggesting that you've entered a keep on the outskirts of town; a tavern tale mentions the keep as being inaccessible from the outside. This doesn't quite fit with the geography of the dungeon in which all the staircases go down from level to level, but whatever.

     

The monsters become particularly difficult on this level because a lot of them have a way of shrugging off spells. I learned through experience that there's not much point in conserving magical energy, since you can rest anywhere, resting has only a small chance of interruption, and it only takes a few rest periods to restore all spell points. Thus, you might as well bring out the big guns every combat. This means mass damage spells called "Disfiguration," "Mar Enemies" and "Vision of Pain" for the priest, at Levels 4, 5, and 6 respectively. At the same levels, the mage gets "Lightning Storm," "Fire Burst," and "Disintegrate." At Level 6, both the mage and priest get a "Death" spell that kills a single enemy.

     

A typical late-game enemy party.

     

Warriors with their single attacks become somewhat useless towards the end of the game, particularly since their accuracy never really improves. If I had to play it again, I'd probably do two priests and two mages. For the most part, I let the warriors use the magic wands and scrolls that I found.

Things become a lot easier after a fixed encounter on Level 6 with a "Lord Vernon," apparently a lich, who attacks with a group of vampires.

    

"Vernon" might be the least-intimidating name in RPG history.

   

It's a tough combat, but it rewards you with a magic amulet that, when used in combat, negates enemies' magical protections. After that, the game becomes almost too easy. No single enemy resists the "Death" spells.

      

Of course, it took me a while to figure out what "negation" meant.

     

Level 7 pounds the party with dragons, death knights, more golems, and so forth. The goal is to make your way to a magic portal. It took me a while to figure out how the portal works. There are two levers on either side of it, and you have to click them to change where the portal goes. Nowhere else in the game do you interact with elements on the screen this way.

One lever takes you back to town. This is the only shortcut back to town in the game. Towards the end, I neglected to raise myself a couple of earned levels simply because I didn't want to trek up and down all the levels again. The second portal presumes to take you to the "sequal" of the game. Until I discovered the third option, I thought this was the end of the game. I was pretty angry.

      

Cue enraged entry.

     

Pulling both levers takes you to a throne room. After a battle against three red dragons, you face two demons named Binatuus and Arulus. As far as I can tell, they're named for the first time when you encounter them, and their story is never really explained. They attack without allies and thus die extraordinarily fast to a combination of the magic amulet and two "Death" spells.

    

The two final foes.

    

Upon their death, the game says that their "black, ghost like" forms "dissipate into the air, returning to the evil dimension from which they came." Pressing forward through a door, you encounter the beautiful harp-playing fairy that at least one of the characters remembers from his childhood.

   

Let's hope it's not the priest.

      

She smiles and whisks the party from the castle to the wilderness area where the character first encountered her. Game over.

      

One character is happy; the other three would rather be in a pub.

    

Aside from the rampant spelling errors, interface issues, occasional bugs, and a lack of any sound, Ancients 1 offers a reasonably solid, classic RPG experience--the kind of experience I describe as "fight orcs, level up, fight stronger orcs." It wouldn't compete with more polished classics for anyone's attention today, but if I was a poor teenager in 1991, I would have been happy enough to find this game on a shovelware disk.

     

It earns a 30 in the GIMLET, boosted by decent character development, combat (particularly magic), equipment, economy, and overall gameplay length and difficulty. It does worst in the area of NPCs (there are none) and the nonsensical story. I thought the graphics were fine, but the lack of sound and a good keyboard interface hurt the game in that category.

      

Even if it's unpolished, I always appreciate a game with rewarding character development.

     

Ancients 1 was apparently released as shareware in 1991, then picked up by Epic MegaGames for re-release in 1993, when a sequel had been prepared. I guess it's technically "freeware," not shareware, as the documentation makes it clear that the shareware fee is for the sequel and not the present game. After its 1993 release, the title found its way onto about half a dozen shovelware disks.

The sequel, Ancients II: Approaching Evil, is on my 1994 list. It seems to use the same interface, but with slightly more refined graphics, and it promises additional character options and a larger game world. It does not appear that the Ontario-based Farr-Ware is known for any other games. I've had trouble discovering if lead programmer Mark Lewis ever worked on other titles; his name is simply too common.

Frill-less though it was, Ancients 1 offered a better classic RPG experience than its concurrent title, Twilight: 2000. Some intelligence from commenters in my last entry gave me reason to hope that it will be over soon.