Twilight: 2000: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

But what did Paragon do if two people got the same winning number?

    

Twilight: 2000

United States

Paragon Software (developer); MicroProse (publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 26 October 2017

Date Ended: 19 November 2017

Total Hours: 42

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 35

Ranking at Time of Posting: 191/271 (70%)

  
I had around another 8 hours and maybe 20 missions to go after the last entry. After a few missions, my intelligence officer told me that "Czarny's regime is crumbling" and "General Andrekov has been called back to Checiny for emergency strategy meetings with Baron Czarny."

I couldn't remember if Czarny's home city had been named before. I decided to ignore the next mission and see what happened if I just assaulted Checiny. I took a tank to the city and didn't see any enemy vehicles. The moment I got out of the tank, the game told me that I was ambushed and captured by Czarny's forces, and that he subsequently captured Krakow. A graphic seen showed my 20 characters being marched somewhere and then shot on a firing line.
  

This ending, unlike the "good" one, has graphics.

      
Returning to doing it the hard way, I had about 10 more missions before my intelligence officer said that "General Andrekov is out of the picture . . . apparently, there's been some kind of fallout [with] Czarny."

The missions towards the end of the game almost all involved combat. I think among the last dozen, I had one supply mission but everything else was ground or tank battles.

Finally, I finished a mission, checked in with the intel officer, and got a message that Czarny was attacking Krakow itself with a force of 2 vehicles and 27 troops. I went to bed at this point without saving. Reloading the next day, I got the same mission but with 2 vehicles and 11 troops. That was much easier.
      

The final mission begins.

     
I drove my M1A1 Abrams outside the garage, blasted the two tanks, got out, and took out the 11 soldiers in a regular ground combat. It was perhaps a little harder than normal; more of the enemies had grenade launchers and rocket launchers.
      

My last kill of the game.

      
The endgame text tells of the execution of Baron Czarny and a bright future for free Poland--but under the cloud of General Andrekov's escape. Despite rumors that he had been executed or fled to the U.S., my party wonders if he was the true source of the trouble and Czarny was just his puppet. The game ends with the question unresolved. In the final line, you're encouraged to send a 30-character alphanumeric to Paragon.
    

Part of the endgame text.

    

In my first entry for Twilight: 2000, I noted that about 20% of the manual consisted of errata. The game then shipped with a readme file that had errata on the errata. To excuse this sorry state of affairs, the developers noted in the errata that the manuals "are always written and printed long before the project is actually completed." I don't know if this is really true; even if it is true, I suspect that Paragon perhaps still printed its manuals a bit too early.
       

This is not the kind of note that instills a lot of confidence in the game you're about to play.

     

In their final paragraph, the developers say: "We believe the changes have improved the playability of the game and we've tried to create a game that is fun, challenging, and convenient to learn and use." I might be reading too deeply between the lines, but these sentences suggest to me a certain desperation. "We tried," it says, almost plaintively. This is the desperation of a company that got the license to make computer versions of several popular tabletop games but, lacking any real RPG experience, managed not to get any of them right. It's the desperation of a company that had similarly bungled a series of action games based on Marvel characters, a company that would be out of business within a year. I haven't been able to find a solid history of Paragon, but my impression is that they had some good fortune in getting the Marvel and GDW licenses, but ultimately bit off more than they could chew.

Twilight: 2000 is much like MegaTraveller 2 in its essential failure despite promising elements. Both have some of the best character-creation processes that we've seen in RPG history. Both offer relatively open worlds. Both attempt to use at least some of the skills offered by their tabletop parents. Both offer a variety of different quest types. But in the end, both are fundamentally boring. They had to cut too many corners in adapting the game from tabletop to computer.

I'll discuss some of the other things I like about Twilight: 2000 as we go through the GIMLET:

• 6 points for the game world. Liberating post-apocalyptic Poland may not be an original plot if you're familiar with the tabletop modules, but it is highly original among CRPGs. The plot and backstory are well-told and the party's place is clear. The world even responds slightly to the party's actions.

• 4 points for character creation and development, all of this going to an excellent creation process that allows you to develop a variety of skills via education, civilian careers, and numerous types of military careers. It also gets some credit for its "find-the-right-person-for-the-job" approach to quests.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. These interactions are minimal and offer no role-playing options. NPCs are rarely named and do not contribute to the game's lore.

• 1 point for encounters and foes. There are two types of enemies: tanks and soldiers. Soldiers are differentiated somewhat by the types of weapons they wield.

      

Until he fires, I don't know what he has for a weapon.

     

• 4 points for combat, which includes the action tank combat and the tactical ground combat. It's a little weird how separated these are, and it makes little sense that you can avoid a tank blast by diving out of your own vehicle, or avoid damage from ground troops by diving back in. Aside from distance and a few terrain considerations, ground combat doesn't have enough tactics, but I suppose it benefits from some gritty realism.

       

Sneaking up behind enemy tanks and blasting them to smithereens was the best part of the game.

       

• 6 points for equipment. This game is a military fetishist's dream, offering numerous types of handguns, rifles, heavy weapons, and explosives, all carefully detailed and described for various factors, including damage and weight. The ability to modify weapons with scopes is a plus, and the game does some original things with rarely-seen (in RPGs) equipment like goggles, snow shoes, medicines, binoculars, tools, and radios. That you have to purchase most of your equipment during character creation is kind of stupid. I was also disappointed at how many items were never used, including flashlights and Geiger counters.

• 1 point for the economy. There is no in-game economy, just during character creation, and it's generous enough that you don't really need to worry about it at all.

• 3 points for the quest. There is only one main quest and no side-quests, but the variability of the main quest missions are a slight bonus.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics and sound effects both get the job done. I was not fond of the interface, and I will never rate a game high that refuses to use the keyboard in the most obvious of ways. There were too many times that the interface was inconsistent or required too much time to accomplish a common task (opening and closing the map being the prime exhibit).

       

The interiors of the buildings were well-designed and almost entirely wasted.

      

• 2 points for gameplay. This is where it really suffers. The open world is wasted in a linear set of missions. There are far too many of them, and they get too repetitive. Since you can't reject missions or choose a path that you want to specialize in (e.g., combat or non-combat), there's no reason to replay the game.

             
This gives us a subtotal of 33. I'm going to give a couple of extra points for the vehicle-driving mechanic, which is reasonably well-done and fairly unusual to RPGs of the period. The final score of 35 is still quite a bit below the 41 I gave to MegaTraveller 2. Both games offer somewhat bipolar GIMLETs: several high scores balanced by several abysmal ones. That's the Paragon experience in a nutshell.
       

Here's another cool image where I've just blown up two tanks in a row.

       
J. D. Lambright reviewed the game in the June 1992 Computer Gaming World. I believe I'm encountering this reviewer for the first time, and I have to say I'm impressed with how well he understood the game. He covers considerations for skills, equipment, vehicles, and overall mission success, and he clearly put a Scorpia-level of effort into it.

He agrees that the character creation system was "possibly the most outstanding system ever introduced in a computer game." If nothing else, Paragon made a great character-generator for tabletop players. Alas, he got sucked in by the fantasy that even if "all the available skills are needed in this game, they may be used in subsequent games." There's only one game--Wizard's Crown--in which that kind of investment has ever paid off. He notes many of the gameplay frustrations that I did, including finding the right NPCs to talk with and dealing with the whole language issue, and like me he found the missions "repetitious." Overall, however, he concludes much more positively than I did. His penultimate sentence is one that I absolutely cannot sanction: "Paragon Software is listening to their customers and learning what role-playing is all about." I don't think the company ever understood what role-playing was all about.
      

This got old fast.

     
For justification for that opinion, I turn to the tabletop Twilight: 2000 materials, provided to me by two awesome readers, Antti and Dariel. Between them, they sent the play manual and several modules. From the play manual, I was primarily interested in whether the tabletop RPG allowed for continual character development or whether a character's skills were presumed to be fixed after creation. As I suspected, the idea of no character development lies solely with the CRPG and its developers. The manual has this to say:
       

As a person grows older and more experienced, it is natural that he will polish his existing skills and learn new ones. In a sense, Twilight: 2000 picks up the threads of the lives of the characters in mid-course. Thus, they already have considerable knowledge of the world, but as time passes they will learn more.

         
The manual gives several ways by which a character can increase a skill, including successful use, observing another character, training, and literature. The rules behind these increases are not strict, however, and a lot is left to the discretion of the "referee." I suspect the lack of hard rules has something to do with Paragon's failure to include any kind of development.
     

The play manual cover.

     
The tabletop materials also make it clear that the party's assemblage of skills is supposed to provide various alternatives to completing the missions. The CRPG's primary problem is that the player has no choices. If the next mission is a spy mission, he needs "Interrogate." If it's a vehicle retrieval mission, he needs "Mechanics." He can't use "Stealth" as an alternative, following potential spies and observing their behavior, or "Persuasion" to convince someone else to fix the vehicle. Twilight: 2000 should have been a bit more like Wasteland, where different combinations of skills can all lead to a successful outcome.

The modules, all from 1985, show the game's sources, beginning with The Free City of Krakow, which establishes the home base of the party. Pirates of the Vistula introduces Baron Czarny as one of several regional warlords, and The Ruins of Warsaw deals primarily with Czarny. (The CRPG doesn't go as far north as Warsaw, instead relocating Czarny's headquarters to Checiny.) Reading these, I can't help but be a little heartbroken at what could have been. A full CRPG based on these modules would have offered air and river travel (and combat) options, dozens of interesting NPCs with backstories and even romance options, a much more subtle and complex plot, half a dozen intriguing factions to role-play, more detailed maps, and cities and towns with shops and bars and individual character.

The game's one addition to the plot seems to have been General Andrekov, who appears nowhere in the modules. I guess they were setting him up for a possible sequel.

Of course, there was no sequel. In finishing this game, we are done with adaptations of Game Designers' Workshop properties, done with Paragon Software, and mostly done with the lead developers who worked on this or MegaTraveller. After the company was bought by MicroProse in July 1992, some of the Paragon principals founded Take-Two Interactive, but I guess by then they had learned that RPGs weren't their strong suit, as Take-Two has never made one.
           
[Edit: Long after originally posting this entry, I found the ad below for both Twilight: 2001 and MegaTraveller 3: The Unknown Worlds. The games are promised by Microplay, a division of MicroProse, suggesting that MicroProse got the rights to the GDW licenses. But despite this full-page ad in the August 1992 Computer Gaming World, nothing was ever heard of these games again.]
          

Two games that never were.

           
I said "mostly done" with the developers. The major exception is going to be Challenge of the Five Realms (1992), a MicroProse title conceived by Marc Miller, the GDW co-founder who contributed the scenarios to the computer versions of MegaTraveller 2 and Twilight: 2000. Paragon programmers F. J. Lennon (design) and Paul M. Conklin (sound) also appear in the credits. Summaries of the game suggest that it heavily involves the use of skills and includes the "PAL" system that was featured in both MegaTraveller 2 and Twilight: 2000, in which characters with an appropriate skill will pipe up at the right moment. In short, it sounds like Challenge of the Five Realms is a Paragon title developed without the constraints of a GDW tabletop rulebook. Will that make it a better or worse game? I guess we'll soon see.

Lennon has one other RPG in his future: MicroProse's BloodNet (1993). Finally, another Twilight: 2000 programmer, Don Wuenschell, found post-Paragon work at DreamForge, and we'll see his work on Veil of Darkness (1993), Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), Menzoberranzan (1994), and Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (1995).

It's been a strange ride, Paragon. Whether I was trying to map the crazy corridors of Alien Fires, looking for the right artifact in Wizard Wars, or going through the detailed character creation processes in Space 1889, MegaTraveller, and Twilight: 2000, I always thought you had some intriguing ideas. I don't know if you never bothered to check out titles like Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic, or the Gold Box series, or if you did check them out and just didn't understand them. Either way, you never did really figure out what CRPGs were about. I'm not sorry to see you go, but part of me will always be sorry that you never reached your potential.

*****

The bizarre French Oméga: Planète Invisible was supposed to be next, but I found plenty of evidence that its release was not in 1987, as most sites report, but in late 1985 or early 1986. I'm using this flimsy excuse to kick it backwards on the list and relegate it to a final "sweep up" that I'll have to do when I get to the end of 1989.