Legends of Valour: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

          

Legends of Valour
United Kingdom

Synthetic Dimensions (developer); U.S. Gold (U.K. publisher); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (U.S. publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS; 1993 for Amiga, Atari ST, and PC-98; 1994 for FM Towns

Date Started: 28 November 2020
Date Ended: 14 January 2021
Total Hours: 37
Difficulty: Easy-moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 42
Ranking at Time of Posting: 346/404 (86%)

   

Summary:

 

Legends of Valour is a first-person game that takes place in a single large, gritty city called Mitteldorf. Your character, newly arrived in town to investigate the disappearance of his or her cousin, Sven, must learn how to survive in the big city and slowly advance his or her way through a series of guilds to learn the buried secrets of the city.

 

Legends of Valour is a flawed game but a necessary step in CRPG evolution. It is packed full of innovations that we've rarely seen in RPGs so far, including a guild system that offers a variety of quests, a map in which geography is independent of events, continuous 3D movement, and such a tight economy that it's almost a survival game. Unfortunately, it skimps on so many core RPG mechanics (combat, inventory, and character development are nearly absent) that it's hard to recommend except to see the genesis of elements that would influence later, better games.

 

****

     

Legends of Valour ended the way it started and played: on elements both intriguing and disappointing. It both ramped it up and fell apart in its last act, leaving the player wanting at the end what he'd likely been wanting the entire game: a little more.

     

When I last wrote, I was stuck on the final mission of the Thieves' Guild, unable to proceed because I couldn't find Choker Bloodaxe, who was supposed to give me a map to the Forbidden City. I had started poking around for it, but the underground is too big. Finally, I gave up and looked at the game's clue book (I tried looking for a video first but didn't find any) just to see the map that I theoretically should have been able to steal or loot off Bloodaxe.

   

The map showed the route to the Forbidden City from an entry point near the castle. I followed it and emerged in what the map insisted was a southwest section of the city. After comparing the area with my paper map, I was forced to concede that an entire set of buildings was completely enclosed by walls, and somehow I hadn't noticed this despite passing through the area dozens of times throughout the game. The enclosed area held about seven buildings, including a store and the Hall of Stones, where I found the necessary Jewelled Stone. None of the NPCs in the area had any special dialogue (the Forbidden City was supposed to be an area in revolt).

          

Spying the secret exit through a window.

      

The Thieves' Guild had also asked me to find the secret exit. The shop was selling something called an "exit visa," but I couldn't afford it. I'm not sure what it was; I suspect just a map. I found the secret exit by going around the perimeter and looking for any place it was permeable. On the west side, I found a window that looked into a house with a door. I used my thief skills to get through the window, picked the lock on the door, and found myself back in the main part of the city. This must have been good enough because I got the promotion to "Godfather" when I returned to the guild.

         

Let's go to the mattresses.

         

As before, the special room afforded to the head of the guild provided the fourth skull, plus a map showing the way to a special room from "The Crypt," plus an image of the four skulls, the Orb of Visions, and the Book of Summoning.

         

Even if you hadn't visited in a previous quest, the image makes it clear that you want to enter a building near the Stone Circle.

     

I ran around collecting the skulls and the Orb of Visions (which, as I mentioned last time, I had stumbled upon while trying to burgle the jeweler's shop), although this meant discarding everything from my inventory except my axe and the hourglass, which I nearly sold. Fortunately, I anticipated that the ritual involving the skulls might require exact timing.

     

I think I might lock this up if I owned it.

         

As for the Book of Summoning, I studied the list of buildings and looked for ones that sounded promising but that I hadn't explored. The only thing that seemed to have anything to do with books was the "Scriptorium," which I had already marked as being next to the Troll's Arms tavern in the northwest part of the city. Logic prevailed! It was on the second floor.

    

Use this book spell [sic?] only in the Royal Crypt. And only at midnight, ensuring that you have satisfied the prediction of the Orb of Visions, which you must have with you. Beware--the spell-caster must be protected by the Amulet of Defence, which is in turn protected by captive water dwellers.

    

"Captive water dwellers" suggested something at the zoo. The only thing that fit the bill were the lizard men, who aren't quite "water dwellers," but who do like wet areas. I used my skills to pass through the grate into their cage and found a corridor leading to a small area of waterfalls with multiple lizard men. By this time, I'd had to get rid of my axe, too, so I had to kill everything with bare fists. The Amulet of Protection was resting on a stalagmite. I had no idea how I was going to carry it with everything else, but fortunately it turned out to be the third "wearable" magic item and appeared in the upper-left box rather than in my inventory.

     

With all of these items, I returned to the Crypt--the same Crypt that had led me to the mummy's tomb a lot of quests ago. The map took me on a slightly different route to the Royal Crypt. I had to fight ghosts, zombies, and mummies with just my fists on the way, and I couldn't pick up the valuables that they dropped.

       

You wouldn't think punching a ghost would work.

      

The Royal Crypt had four stalagmites. The Orb of Visions showed one skull on each of them, which wasn't very helpful, since it was pretty obvious that's what I was supposed to do with the skulls. Since the skulls were all named after cardinal directions, I put them all on their appropriate stalagmites, equipped the hourglass, and periodically clicked on it until it told me it was midnight. I then equipped the Book of Summoning and used it.

   

The Orb of Visions' depiction of the chamber.

        

A cinematic took over the screen showing a summoning pentagram. A demon appeared and spoke:

  

At last I am released. As from now the balance of power between order and chaos within the land is equal. All that remains is for Old Wilf to be told. The key to his underground sanctuary is yours. Release him and become a living legend.

At first, I thought I'd done a bad thing.

         

That was an interesting twist that makes a callback to the backstory. Wilf was the king of Mitteldorf before the present king, Farley, Wilf's brother. There are pieces about Wilf in the Mitteldorf Post, calling him "Nasty King Wilf," criticizing his fiscal policies and suggesting he had illicit relations with a hamster. But these were fairly clearly propaganda pieces planted by Farley. The demon's revelation suggested that Wilf was still alive, probably being held by Farley.

    

By this time, I was a bit exhausted with the survival part of the game. I emerged from the underground with combat wounds, severe poisoning, rot, and dehydration, all of which cost most of the rest of my gold to cure. After restoring my food, health, and rest meters, I had no money at all. I really just wanted the game to be over. Nonetheless, I did my best to find Wilf honestly, starting with each of the four named jails and progressing to explorations of the underground, particularly areas with entrances near the castle. Nothing panned out, so I confess that I used the clue book just to show me what entrance I needed to take. It was one I hadn't noticed, in a turret near the castle.

   

Battling through minotaurs, guardsmen, and goblins (just in time for the end of the game, I perfected throwing my axe at them from afar, so I could kill them without having my pocket picked first), I finally reached a door that the demon's key opened. Beyond it was a chamber with an NPC wearing a crown.

  

He introduced himself as Wilfred of Mitteldorf. I asked about his religion; he said, "I believe in freedom and democracy." I asked about his job; he said, "Exiled King of Mitteldorf--soon to be re-instated thanks to you." And that was it. I couldn't get anything else out of him. After the dialogue, he made no motion to leave the area. I went back to the city and visited several places but got no kind of new information or ending. Nothing happened at the castle. There were no new notices in the taverns, although Choker Bloodaxe mysteriously showed up in the Hanged Man again.

         

Believe it or not, this seems to be the "winning screen."

     

To add insult to injury, there was a new dialogue option when talking with NPCs: "Where is Sven?" They all said the same thing: "He has left the city." That's it. That's the closure you get on the main quest. Neither the cluebook nor a walkthrough I found online nor an "ending" video I watched suggested that I'd missed anything.

           

How does everyone know this and yet not know where he went?

         

The clue book offers something of a happy ending for "Lord Sven," who provides a number of annotations. The suggestion is that he became head of one of the other guilds but for some reason lacked the wherewithal to complete the quest. He says in the book that he lives "in quarters at the Palace, with liveried servants attending to my every whim," which isn't an honor that I ever received. Of course, Sven may have had a fall after I freed King Wilfred--maybe that's why he left the city.

   

If I'd had this game as a kid, I probably would have insisted on joining the other guilds and doing their quests. As I have thousands of games waiting for me, I contented myself with simply reading about them. The final quest for the Mercenaries' Guild has you explore a large dungeon area to find and kill a dragon named Nidhug. The Brotherhood of Loki has you infiltrate the theater during a showing of Macbeth to steal the cauldron. You slay a cyclops as part of the Temple of Odin questline and a Lamia of Jotunheim (the creature that killed me in the dungeons) for the Temple of Set. Interspersed with these are a lot of fetch quests like the ones I experienced, but each with a slightly different spin.

      

Part of me wants the game to rate high on the GIMLET, but it managed to ruin almost every good element that it introduced. It offered continuous movement and made it agonizingly slow. It introduced a crime and punishment system but made it completely arbitrary. It gives you some stealth options but without solid stealth mechanics. It really locks down the economy, but only so you can live hand-to-mouth for the entire game. There's nothing cool to buy. It offers a lot to explore and yet no good reason to explore it, since there's no character development or interesting combat tactics. Thus, I think we're going to see a low rating with a couple of stand out categories.

       

• 6 points for the game world. The setting is boilerplate high fantasy but well described. The use of the Mitteldorf Post to convey key bits of information about the world is a lot of fun, and I'm glad the game found ways to reference it multiple times. Aspects of the game make it seem like it takes place in a real, dynamic city, with numerous factions and institutes jockeying for power--but only up to a point. Like The Secrets of Bharas, Mitteldorf is often more interesting to read about than to experience. I also don't like how the city doesn't seem to change much during the game.

• 3 points for character creation and development. You have a bare-bones creation process, and the only development you get during the game is a barely-perceptible increase in combat skills (via training), the acquisition of magic, and a few thief skills. I can't think of any reason that the developers couldn't have put a more standard experience and leveling system in here. As it is, combat is a complete waste of time except for the occasional loot that you get. I gave it an extra point for the ability to contract lycanthropy and vampirism, which I didn't explore.

• 5 points for NPC interaction. This is a frustrating category. On the one hand, we have one of the earliest examples in which dynamic NPCs go about their business independent of the player and thus make the city feel more lived-in. They keep schedules and act according to type. On the other hand, there's so little of interest to do with them. They all have the same dialogue options, and there's rarely any reason to ask them any questions other than where something is. A keyword-based system with far more dialogue, expanding on the lore of the setting, would have been much better. That NPCs in key buildings never have anything unique to say about those buildings is repeatedly depressing. Without more interesting dialogue, all of the other things you can do with NPCs--stealing, insulting, and so forth--becomes largely pointless.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The monsters are standard fantasy monsters, and other than the goblins' incessant pickpocketing, none of them do anything very interesting, not even the ones that feel like they should be a lot harder to beat.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Everything is messed up about combat. It's too easy, for one thing. Weapons don't seem to do anything more than fists. Training doesn't seem to significantly improve your approach. You can't cast spells in combat despite having a couple of "combat spells." You can't throw things in combat; only before combat. The magic spells aren't even really all that useful, except "Portal" and "Warp."

        

Tossing an axe at a goblin.

      

• 2 points for equipment. It gets this largely for the "survival" equipment that it offers--food, drink, the occasional potion. For standard RPG equipment, it couldn't be worse. Throughout the entire game, the only melee weapons I found were a light sword, an axe, and an ornate axe. There's no armor. There are exactly three magic items that you can find to improve your abilities, and like combat training, I didn't notice that they made much of a difference.

• 5 points for the economy. As I've discussed repeatedly, it's tight. I ended the game broke, which is probably a "first" among all the CRPGs I played. Part of me likes that. I also like that there are several different ways to make money. But when you find a treasure haul in this game, the only reason to be excited is that you can sleep and eat for another couple of days and thus have to do fewer fetch quests for bartenders. That doesn't feel rewarding at all.

       

Every time you think you're doing well, you find out you have 15 diseases to cure.

        

• 7 points for quests. This is perhaps the best part of the game. I want to rate it higher, but very high ratings in this category requires choices and alternate endings. Still, what it lacks in options, it makes up in variety. This is how you do quest chains properly: some easy, some hard; some long, some short; some involving combat, some involving stealth; make the player use his brain, following clues and piecing together connections. No game has done this very well so far, and Legends of Valour comes out of nowhere with it. This category is Legends' most important contribution to the genre.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are good for the era, not very engaging now. There's hardly any sound at all (and no music for you lovers of game music). The interface was consistently annoying throughout, with not enough keyboard backups. Why would you design a movement pad with 9 buttons and not simply map them to their associated positions on the numberpad? Instead, you can move and turn with the numberpad, but not strafe or turn around. If an enemy attacks you while you're moving and thus holding down a key, the game immediately takes you out of combat before you can react. Turning takes too long. The automap doesn't persist after you leave an area. Things like that add up. I originally gave it 2 points but I tossed in an extra one for the window thing; that was pretty cool. We don't see anything like that today.

• 7 points for gameplay. We end on a positive. Legends is strongly nonlinear, and the selection of guilds (plus the territory size as a whole) makes it rewarding to play a second time, and it lasts a reasonable amount of time for its content. If only it were a bit more challenging.

   

That gives us a final score of 42, definitely in "recommended" territory, but perhaps not all the way to the end of the game, which is disappointing. Despite its flaws, it occupies such a clear place in the history of CRPGs--marks such a clear turning point in the use of game elements like guilds, quests, and NPCs--that I feel compelled to add it to the "Must Play" list for those who want to experience the full history of the genre.

     

The game did some interesting things graphically, but saying, "Move over, Ultima Underworld," was overdoing it a bit.

      

Its legacy is most notable in The Elder Scrolls, and even into Skyrim, we can see similarities in the approach to NPCs, guilds, and guild quests. (The Elder Scrolls, it must be noted, also adopted many of the same flaws, such as NPCs who don't have much to say, and guild promotions that seem overly generous.)  But equally important to how it influences the future is how it uses the past. By drawing on the themes of Alternate Reality, which itself goes back to Moria and Oubliette, Legends creates a direct link between the PLATO titles and modern titles, even future titles.

    

It's amazing how little contemporary reviewers seemed to understand about any of this. They all rushed to compare Legends to Ultima Underworld despite the games having virtually nothing in common except continuous movement. I know that was a novel experience, but it's still disheartening to see experienced reviewers so obsessed with graphics that they completely overlook the game's innovations. I waited for any review to point out how promising the questing system was, or the use of NPCs, or the system of crime and punishment, but instead all they do is complain about how often you have to feed yourself, or how you can only save in hostels and taverns, as if taking three minutes to walk to one is so onerous that it completely eclipses gameplay. Chuck Miller's May 1993 review in Computer Gaming World complains about all the things you might expect but finds reasons to praise the interface, of all things, and the manual, with which I wholeheartedly agree. Dragon gave it only 2 stars--and the reviewers hardly played it at all--which is the lowest rating that I've seen from that magazine for anything that wasn't an eroge.

    

British magazines, on the other hand, tended to be a bit too complimentary.  Where I'm frustrated by American reviewers' inability to see the innovations, the Brits didn't seem to have seen the flaws. The One Amiga magazine gave it 92% and gushed over the graphics and world-building without once bothering to mention the lack of character development or interesting combat. (As I've pointed out, though, in this era neither British developers nor British reviewers seemed to understand the fundamental elements of RPGs. They were mostly happy if they looked pretty.) Amiga Format gave it 91% and at least mentioned the windows. The Germans were much less enamored and gave the game ratings from 49% (Power Play) to 87% (PC Joker), with the average in the 60s.

 

The person most responsible for Legends seems to be Kevin Bulmer. It was his first RPG, although his previous Corporation (1990, which some sites list as an RPG but I rejected for lack of character development) has a passably similar interface and also features continuous 3D movement. He seems to have gotten into the gaming field in 1985, when he was already 37, converting Gauntlet for a U.K. release by U.S. Gold. We will see his work again on Druid: Daemons of the Mind (1995), which seems to switch to an axonometric interface. Synthetic Dimensions still existed at least up to 2009 but doesn't seem to have published anything since Ed Hunter (1999). A British subtitle for Legends--Vol. 1 - The Dawning--suggests that sequels were intended but, alas, never produced. Mr. Bulmer died of prostate cancer in 2011.

   

In addition to Bethesda's Todd Howard, who has noted the influence of Legends of Valour several times, the game seems to have inspired at least one other American millionaire. Cryptocurrency tycoon Charles Hoskinson reportedly purchased the rights to the game last year, with eyes towards making a remake. In a video he published last May, Hoskinson shows honest love for the game, which he played as a youth, though he seems aware of its flaws as well (he comments on the lame ending around 7:30). I'm normally not excited about remakes, but I can get behind this one if he can improve the combat and character development systems. It has a few elements that only it does, but their value was lost in is flaws. Maybe Hoskinson's team can correct that.