Game 413: Orb Quest, Part I: The Search for Seven Wards (1986)

       

Orb Quest, Part I: The Search for Seven Wards

United States

QWare (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for Macintosh

Date Started: 9 May 2021

         

Orb Quest is not the first RPG that was available for the Macintosh, as there were 1985 ports of Wizardry and the second and third Ultimas. But if we accept that Quarterstaff isn't an RPG at all, but an adventure game, Orb Quest seems to be the first RPG designed natively for the Macintosh. That isn't always a good thing. There are times that the Mac seems too "cute" for its own good--and too in love with its mouse in particular--but nonetheless, it's a historically-important game. It was unavailable for years. In August last year, a copy showed up on eBay and ended up selling for $305. At around the same time, it became available on Macintosh Garden, but copy protection made it impossible to play until a number of dedicated users (including our own LanHawk) cracked it. LanHawk ended up finishing the game himself and sending me all the instructions necessary to get it going on my own.

   

The documentation is still lost, I believe, which creates a conundrum when it comes to the title. When there's a conflict, my policy is generally to go with the best two out of three between the game's title screen, box, and manual. With no manual, there's nothing to break the tie between whether the game has a space between "Orb" and "Quest" and whether it has a "Part I" in its title. I tend to favor the game's main screen and have done so here, but in contrast to what nearly every piece of documentation on the Internet says.

       

Some of the in-game backstory.

       

We also have to piece together the backstory from the game's brief introductory screen plus what contemporary reviews of the time said. It seems to be simple: Evil threatened the land. King Cricken assembled the seven parts ("wards") of an ancient orb that had the power to banish evil. But something interfered with his spell and caused an explosion that annihilated him and scattered the orb. Evil was pushed back temporarily but now has returned. It is up to the hero to find the seven wards and reunite the orb. I hate to start off with a criticism, but is an orb really the best object to use in a "Disassembulet of Yendor" quest? How do you get seven pieces out of an orb? Okay, sure you cut seven equal ungulae. But how do you put it back together?

    

Anyway, character creation has you choose from human, elf, dwarf, hobbit, and half-orc races; spellcaster, fighter, and thief classes; and female, male, and--in perhaps a "first"--other gender. [Ed.: As commenters reminded me, Ultima III had the same "other" option three years earlier.] Your attributes--strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma--are rolled on a scale of roughly 30 to 100, modified by race, class, and gender selection. For a "woke" game, the effects of gender selection on attributes is interesting. Males gain 10 points of strength and intelligence over women, plus 5 points of constitution, but lose 10 points of wisdom and dexterity and 5 points of charisma. "Others" have a male's intelligence, dexterity, and charisma, but a female's strength, wisdom, and constitution; in other words, they get two good attributes and four bad ones.

       

That low intelligence is going to come back to haunt me.

    

The character starts on a monochrome plain, near a castle and town, with a random amount of hit points, food, and gold. Already, the game and I have some problems, as while some actions have a keyboard shortcut, movement isn't one of them. Until this moment, there were only two things I found unforgivable in CRPG design. One is level caps that an average player would hit before the last 5% of the game. The other is forcing the player to click the mouse to move. Unfortunately, this game manages to find a third one that I didn't even known existed: playing a piercing tone with every move. You can turn sound off, but it doesn't seem fair to force the player to miss all sound effects just because there's one stupid one. Oh, and I would note that turning sound "off" doesn't prevent an error message from playing every time you bump into a wall or mountain.

          

Starting out.

        

The menus suggest there is a fixed equipment ladder, with armor starting at "Unprotected" and moving upwards through cloth, leather, ring mail, chain mail, and plate mail, and ending with a magic cloak. Weapons similarly start with "bare hands" and go upward through dagger, battle axe, short sword, bastard sword, and crossbow before ending with a magic wand. I assume some of these things won't be available to my thief character. Already we see a fusion of tropes common to Ultima, but tempered with a little Dungeons and Dragons (including the specific attribute order).

    

The castle is surrounded by mountains that I cannot yet cross, and the other structure--I assume it's a town--has some water between me and it, so I start heading north and east. Immediately, I'm attacked by a pair of buccaneers. Combat only has one action ("Attack"), plus spells. My thief gets a couple of spell points, but at the outset it's only enough for "Cure Wounds." I kill the buccaneers with my firsts, but it costs me almost half my hit points and nets me 11 gold. A few steps later, another buccaneer takes me down to 36 hit points. I cast "Cure Wounds" twice, but the first one only gets me 8 hit points back, and the second fails. Fortunately, it appears that both spell points and hit points regenerate every few steps, but food depletes fairly quickly, too.

          

Trading blows with a buccaneer.

      

As with the first Ultima, enemies pop up in the environment when they're a few steps away, and unlike a lot of games, they don't have some special ability to move faster than you do on the diagonal, so I'm able to outrun a couple of them on the way to the nearest town. This turns out to be called Barrowsmith. You can only save in towns, which is a difficulty setting that I enjoy provided that the game is otherwise fair. Hit point and spell point restoration stop while in town, but so does food loss.

The town is large but simple. It has a food shop, a weapon shop, an armor shop, and a tavern. I buy a dagger, cloth armor, some food, and a drink, which gives me a tip. I assume the higher orders of drinks, which are expensive, give additional tips. There's a large area in the center of town that's inaccessible. It doesn't look like there's anything there, and as far as I can tell, there's no secret door mechanic. The only commands are "Attack," "Enter," "Inventory," "Use," "Drop," and "Barter." That is, except for a mysterious, grayed-out command called "Global Thermonuclear War." This is obviously an allusion to WarGames (1983), but I have no idea what it means in the context of this game. Wow--Matthew Broderick is 59. I guess we're never getting that Ferris Bueller sequel.

    

Buying a weapon.

        

For some reason, I expected the game to be difficult and grindy, but it's not so bad. I found I could generally keep up with healing against the starting enemies (satyrs, killer moths, buccaneers, bad bats, floating eyes, pygmies), although it was a good idea to stay near a town and periodically save. Every once in a while, an enemy has a treasure chest, and you get a couple hundred gold pieces instead of the usual 0-10. These were the keys to acquiring better items quickly. The thief can also try to steal inventory, but the risk (loss of all your gold and whatever items you had in that category) is too high to be worth the risk.

        

The game has mostly normal enemies and then this really weird one.

      

The opening area has only a couple of towns. Mountains or sea block most ways out. Swamps don't serve as a barrier, but you don't want to walk through them because they sap hit points. To get out of the starting area, you have to cross one of two bridges, both of which are guarded by trolls who demand a 100-gold piece toll. There's no way to fight them instead, so the first task is earning that money.

     

There are no explicit levels, but I noticed I was gaining maximum hit points and spell points, the latter at a rate of 1 for every 100 experience points. I'm not sure if the experience points also serve as a kind of subtle multiplier on your attack rolls. Battles against low-level foes seem to get a bit easier as I earn more experience, but then again I also upgrade my weapon a couple of times. Unfortunately, as I gain more experience, the game starts throwing more difficult and numerous foes at me. The level scaling seems to only apply to the maximum level of each generated enemy, as I still get single buccaneers. But if the generated enemy is a "white knight" or an "iron ape," I might as well just kill the emulator and restart.   

        

The truth is, I was thinking about doing something worse than "crossing without paying."

    

In the wider world, I soon found a city called Petrburg that, in addition to the weapon, armor, and food shops, also had a healer and a shop selling magic items and spells. The spell shop seems to be how you acquire new spells, so I'm not sure what the "Tome of Magic" in the magic shop does. The "Ring of Wishes" is also a mystery.

    

Fighting battles around Petrburg, I discover that enemy chests sometimes contain clues. In fact, they seem to share the same "hint pool" with the taverns. So far, I've learned:

      

• Beware when the fat lady sings! 
• Beware the floating eye, for it brings bad luck.
• Many come back to town after meeting the cube.
• The swamps are known as the little death.
• The shape changer assumes more than just your form.
• Legend says that only the pure of spirit, the strong of arm, the swift of foot, and the keen of mind may enter the pyramids and succeed.
• Levels maybe make combat easier.
• Many fall upon hard times after meeting the evil eye.
• Only an adventurer with a keen mind will ever reach the center of the pyramids.
• There is protection from dragons to be had.
• Tarry not in thy quest. Evil grows stronger.
• In the temples, it is said that one receives more than what is bought.
• All can be cured within the temple.
• The Orb must be placed upon the throne of the ancient kings.
• Not all places may be reached by foot.
• Judge not and thou will still be judged.
• Few return who behold a beholder. Its powers are many.
• Only by appeasing the spirits may entrance to the pyramids be gained.
• When in darkness, go forward one, left two, left 'til you can go no more, right 'til you can go no more, and left for success.

       

I knew it!!!

         

Near Petrburg is a pyramid. Entering the pyramid, I found myself in a maze with hieroglyphics on the walls. There were no monsters. The maze led to a center, where I found the first ward. It was surrounded by plates that teleported me around the little room. I just had to keep testing plates until I found a sequence that brought me next to the ward. When I picked it up, I got 25 points in my "orb" statistic, and a new menu ("Special") with a "Remove Curse" option. 

       

Trying to approach the first ward.

     

What I do next is only understandable if you know a bit of context. During the period between roughly 7 May and 12 May, I had to grade over 100 papers and other assignments. I'm always looking for something mindless to do in between papers. It can't be too enjoyable, like actually playing an RPG, because I'll get sucked into it and never emerge. But something boring, like mapping a top-down RPG, is ideal. Like grading papers, it's something that you don't really want to be doing. The next paper serves as a break from mapping, and mapping serves as a break from papers. It's perfect.

    

I expect to have to make my own maps for first-person RPGs, but I think the developer should provide one for top-down games, even if it's just a rough sketch to help get your bearings. I don't know if QWare did that for Orb Quest, but I do know that the geography of the place is too complicated to navigate without one. The map probably took about 12 hours total. Dimensionally, it occupies 267 squares north-south and 219 squares east-west. As you can see, a lot of that is blank space, though. I don't know if boats or other methods of crossing water exist in the game--I never saw a hint about them as I visited the towns--but there looks to be at least one important island. There also has to be some way to cross mountains because there's a castle completely encircled by them.

My map of the Orb Quest world. Yes, it looks a bit like Africa and South America have switched places, and there's a land bridge from South America to Australia.

        

The red squares are the poisoned swamps, and as you can see, you have to cross through one huge one to get to the southeast continent. By the way, I want you to imagine me mapping that area, going one row of 13 tiles at a time, figuring confidently that based on the dimensions of the rest of the map, the southern tip of the red area is going to be the end. Only it never ends. There's this trail of single red squares that seems to last forever and ever, and then suddenly it opens up into new, huge continent. There was more than a little swearing that evening.

    

During this mapping, I found seven pyramids. All of them are named after a precious gem, metal, or other material: Emerald, Ivory, Bronze, and so forth. I don't think I tried to enter all of them, but the ones I did try to enter (other than the first, Azure), refused to let me in because I have "yet to be judged at the Island of Mystics." There are 11 cities and towns with names like Cape West, Clearview, New Talos, Three Rivers, Susetta, and Eventide. I didn't exhaustively explore all of them, but none seemed to offer any NPCs or services that I haven't already discussed. 

      

Any chance the "powerful guardian" could give me a lift?

           

I gained a lot of experience during the mapping process, but not as much as you might expect, since well over half my expeditions ended in death and reloading at the previous town. I discovered that chests sometimes contain additional pieces of armor, like steel gauntlets and a magic shield, that you equip and use automatically. I found a Wand of Death at one point, but that character didn't last.

      

Now that I have the map and I'm done grading papers, I suppose the next step is to figure out how to get to that Island of the Mystics. I hope it doesn't linger more than one more entry, because I'm thoroughly sick of the movement system already: If not for that, this would be a perfectly pleasant if somewhat bland Ultima clone.

    

Time so far: 14 hours