Dragon Sword: Won!* (with Final Rating)

Oh, my...we'll just let it go, shall we?

Dragon Sword

United States

Brian Tieman and Tim Musa (authors); PC-SIG (publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS

Date Started: 30 September 2014

Date Ended: 18 December 2014

Total Hours: 32

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 23
Ranking at Time of Posting: 31% (53/169) 

Ranking at Game #457: 185/457 (40%)

When I last wrote, I was bothered about whether to finish Dragon Sword given that it would take another 24-30 hours, at least, and I felt I'd already experienced all there was to experience about the game, with the exception of mapping 12 more levels. Yet I didn't want to leave the game unfinished, break my winning streak, and miss the opportunity to be the only one online with a winning screenshot. Most of you encouraged me to quit.

Fortunately, Santa Claus came early, in the form of a wonderful Belgian reader who chooses to remain anonymous. He studied the code on the data disks, figured out how it worked, and used it to automatically create the entire series of dungeon maps in Excel, with each square numerically coded to the type of encounter found there.

The final level of the game, courtesy of my own Sinterklaas.

Freed from having to map the rest of the levels, I simply walked--or, in many cases, cast "Open Wall" or "Teleport"--to get from fixed encounter to fixed encounter. The fourth dungeon ended up having 9 levels total. The primary purpose was to get the Staff of Stone, one of six artifacts needed (in some nebulous way) to defeat Oijngate. I had found three others--the Dark Wand, the Ebony Dagger, and the Ring of Mithral--in the other three dungeons. A final one, the Golden Armor, remained.

The chesspiece monsters encountered in the Tower o' Fun turned out to have a thematic purpose. One of the levels had a chessboard theme, with various statues speaking single-word messages that ultimately told me to seek out the black knight and ignore everyone else. I found him in the appropriate place on the chessboard, and he gave me a clue about a puzzle involving keys and color-coded doors--a puzzle I skipped by just teleporting to the next message square. Yes, my last hours with this game were a little pathetic.

Thanks for trying.

The ladder to the final dungeon, The Lair, was found in the center of the city of Bralka, and I had to cheat to get to it. The game's own code indicated that my silver key should open a locked door, but the door wouldn't open despite having the key. I ultimately hex-edited my party to the other side of the door. I'm not sure if it's a bug or if I just overlooked something.

The Lair was another 9-level dungeon full of tough monsters like stone golems, bone devils, earth giants, evil mages, black unicorns, and margoyles. Without the map showing the locations of magic-regenerating squares, battles would have been a huge pain in the neck, but knowing the locations, I was able just to spam my best spells and teleport to healing at the end of the battle. A battle on Level 2 produced the golden armor, the last of the artifacts. Level 3 or 4 had an amusing encounter in which I first received this message:

One wonders if developer Brian Tieman's future wife, who wrote the game music, inspired this sentiment.

While I admired the creators' wisdom, I figured this was just a bit of doggerel--until I found a man and woman fighting.

They demanded I pick a side. I chose WOMAN, and the woman gloated as the pair of them disappeared. I have no idea what this did for me. No future encounter referred to it.

Throughout the level, various encounters suggested that a paladin named Jodvar had previously tried to defeat Oijngate with the Dragon Sword but was converted to evil by the dragon. A tapestry depicted their battle, and a book told the paladin's tale. It became clear that I would have to defeat Jodvar to win the game. On Level 7, I entered the room containing the Dragon Sword...

 ...and was attacked by Jodvar and his minions: 2 stone guardians, 1 "flightstalker," and 1 quasit. I found the battle considerably easier than many of the random battles on the level, and in short order I whittled them down and killed Jodvar.

This text followed:

And finally, the mighty Dragon Sword shall be yours. You have defeated all of Oijngate's minions. A terrible blight has been lifted from the land. You look at the carnage about you and are amazed at how much you've been through just to get to this final moment of victory. With a confident, steady hand, you reach out for what victory has brought you.

Your hand fits smoothly around the handle. The sword's weight feels good in your hand. "Victory!" you scream. But your scream is cut short as the ground beneath your feet gives way to a long tunnel of darkness. Your victory is wretched firmly from your grasp as you spiral down a chute of darkness. And then, suddenly, the ground smashes into you. You know not how long you've been falling, or where you are, or what to do, but you regain your composure and look about you. You will not have your victory stolen!

But I got the Dragon Sword, so that was something. Oddly enough, just like the Golden Armor, Ring of Mithral, and the other artifacts, the game wouldn't let me actually equip it. I guess just having it in my possession was enough to defeat Oijngate.

Then what's the point?!

It was two more levels to Oijngate, and the encounter was anticlimactic. He attacked me by himself, with no minions, and went down in the first round. I didn't even get a screen shot. There was some business at the beginning of battle in which each of my characters "resisted the effects," and I suspect that having the various artifacts in my possession protected them from some significant damage that otherwise would have made the battle tougher. Anyway, the endgame text:

Oijngate, knowing it is doomed, casts one final spell of destruction. A white ball of flame bursts from the dragon's hide, consuming it in the process. A gigantic explosion rocks the caverns and you see pieces of the roof caving in. Then all fades to black as you fall unconscious under the brunt force of the explosion.

You awake an indeterminate amount of time later. You are, miraculously, in the guild in Bralka. The dragon, Ojingate, lies dead many levels beneath the town. Bralka is still overrun by evil forces and you know your job here is not yet done, but you grasp the Dragon Sword firmly in your hand. The handle is still warm with power. You know you could not have won without it, and yet, you feel as though you've only scratched the surface of its mighty power--and only just begun a long and treacherous journey.

Everyone got 1 million experience points and the ability to keep wandering around Bralka fighting Level 1 thugs. I used the experience to level my party to the max, heal up, save, and quit. I was disappointed that there were never any endgame graphics. Even a poorly-drawn shot of Oinjgate would have been welcome.

So, obviously, I cheated to win, but it was a kind of cheating I'm comfortable with--one that mostly just saved time. I would have gone through the same encounters eventually, but it would have taken another 24 hours instead of 4.

Let's wrap it up with a GIMLET:

4 points for the game world, perhaps the one part that Dragon Sword does better than Wizardry. The basic structure of the world isn't bad, with five dungeons branching from a common town, and the frequent messages and bits of lore kept things mildly interesting.

The game's attempts to build a history and lore are welcome breaks from endless combat.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There's nothing beyond the Wizardry template here. Moreover, characters level a bit too fast, achieving maximum spell levels before the game is halfway over and thus giving a sense of limited progression for the rest of the game. Starting attributes end up being irrelevant since, thanks to the practice of awarding 1 attribute point per level but capping all attributes at 18, everyone ends up with 18 in everything before long.

• 0 points for no NPC interaction.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The sheer number of enemies offered in the game is a bit ridiculous, and the game tells you nothing about them--but in some ways, figuring out each enemy's special attacks and defenses is part of the challenge. I give some credit for the various navigation, logic, and password puzzles in the game. None of them were terribly challenging or interesting, but they were more than the typical wireframe dungeon-crawler.

One of the "boss" battles with an incomprehensible selection of monsters.

• 4 points for magic and combat. Dragon Sword evokes the letter but not the spirit of Wizardry, and although the combat options seem very similar, the nature of the game--particularly the frequent magic-recharging squares--makes the combat less nail-biting and tactical. The sheer number of battles is annoying beyond belief, but I'm punishing the game for that in the last category. The spell selection was interesting and in some cases original.

My cleric casts "Protection from Breath" in the first round of the battle with Oinjgate.

• 3 points for equipment. It started out good, but the game stopped providing upgrades about halfway through. The artifact items were unequippable, and in general there just wasn't enough variety here.

• 1 point for economy. It started out good, but after you have enough healing spells and have bought everything of interest in the stores (about 5% through the game), there's no point to collecting gold. There's no point to the game's vault at all.

• 2 points for a standard main quest with various steps along the way. No side-quests, no role-playing.

The penultimate moment.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface, both of which go to "interface." The wireframe graphics, with no monster portraits or any other graphic feedback, don't deserve even a single point, and the occasional beeps and horridly-rendered music (from an original composition that I'm sure was beautiful on a real instrument) don't do anything for me.

• 1 point for gameplay, and that's for its moderately-pitched difficulty level. The game is entirely linear, non-replayable, and way, way, way, way, way, way, a thousand "ways" too large and too long. It's like all five of the first Wizardry games at once, with quadruple the frequency of random encounters.

The sum is 25, but I have to subtract 2 points for the many bugs, including one that constantly brought up the "game over" screen in the middle of combat and exploration, forcing me to reload and re-cast all my buffing spells. This final score of 23 is well below what I would recommend and well below the 37 I gave to Wizardry, the game Dragon Sword seeks to emulate. I admire what Mr. Tieman and Mr. Musa accomplished programmatically--particularly the dedication to create and populate 30 levels and so many different encounters and monster types--but making the game so big and long also made it boring and unbalanced.

But let's not be too harsh. It was a shareware title, and not even a very expensive one. The developers weren't intending to create great art. In a long e-mail to me, Brian Tieman said that the path to creating Dragon Sword started when they hacked data files for The Bard's Tale so they could give characters 256 strength and such. Later they did the same to Wizardry. They started to understand the code and adapted it to their own game, patching and jury-rigging when they had to, learning code as they went along. (Tieman thinks many of the freezes and crashes I experienced are due to the interrupts he used to keep the music playing at a steady tempo.) "We were bored," he says. "We didn't party, we programmed--at a time when programming wasn't cool." He denies, in fact, that they even "set out to make a consumable product," and he's a bit baffled by its persistence. "Why the hell is this piece of s****** software two people wrote in obscurity 24 years ago still out there someplace today? How the hell did it even get ONTO the Internet? We didn't put it there!"

As my master list goes forward, we are seeing an increasing number of independent games. In the last year alone, we've looked at Stone of Telnyr, Fallthru, and Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation, and we still have Quest for the Unicorn, Angband, Wraith: The Devil's Demise, and Dungeon coming up before the year is out. The typical independent RPG of the era is scoring around 20-25, so Dragon Sword is an average representative of a nascent subgenre that I expect to get better as the 1990s progress.

I'm glad to have found a middle path through the end of Dragon Sword, and now I can move on to MegaTraveller with a clear conscience. Next!

Dragon Sword: A Crossroads

Navigating Dragon Sword's interminable dungeons is complicated by "jumper squares."

For nearly three months, Dragon Sword has been at the center of a ludicrous amount of angst. At first, I decided I was going to quit it early, after I experienced all it had to offer, because the purpose of my blog is to have fun. Then I decided I needed to win it, no matter how many endless hours of mapping it took, because the purpose of my blog is (at least in part) to catalog moments in RPG history that everyone else has overlooked. I wrote a post about the next dungeon, then shelved it. I wrote a "final rating" post, then shelved that. I kept playing. I wrote an absurdly long post explaining the core dilemma in the context of the history of my blog, which has evolved from a fairly trivial review of games that I was always ready to quit, to a more in-depth review of games I generally force myself to play to the end.

The simple fact is that if I quit Dragon Sword, it will be the first time I've deliberately quit a game in almost two and a half years. There were a couple others that I thought I quit when I couldn't make any more progress (Drakkhen, Expedition Amazon), only to come back with a "won!" posting after the final rating. There was one for which I didn't technically see the winning screen (Dragonflight) but got one step away before a game-breaking bug prevented me, and there was one that I was forced to quit mid-game because of a bug. (That was Legend of Faerghail, and we are going to have to come back to it eventually because I had a fantastic correspondence with one of the authors over the summer, and I promised him I'd do something with all the information he gave me.)

It actually gets a bit worse than that. Bloodwych may be the last game I deliberately quit, but plenty of other people have won it, and I was still able to show the end-of-game screenshot from someone else's video. Even if I didn't win, I could still discuss winning. To find a game that I quit without even being able to talk about the ending, we have to go all the way back to Scavengers of the Mutant World in June 2011. Thus, the decision about whether to quit Dragon Sword is non-trivial. It is, in many ways, a decision about the soul of The CRPG Addict.

Hell would be another 30 dungeon levels.

I summarized my core dilemma with Bloodwych in August 2012:

Continuing to play Bloodwych is a bit like eating something abominable--circus  peanuts, say, or those awful wasabi snack mixes they have at some bars--for no other reason than a bowl of it is sitting in front of you. In a meta-cognitive way, I'm fascinated by my refusal to give up on it.

 
The same statement could apply equally well to this game. Both are simply too long, too slow, and too repetitive. Dragon Sword does a great job replicating the Wizardry aesthetic, but with bigger dungeon levels, three times the number of dungeon levels, and three to four times the number of random encounters, it vastly overstays its welcome.

As a refresher, Dragon Sword is a shareware Wizardry clone from 1990 in which a group of 6 adventurers (I have a fighter, barbarian, monk, thief, cleric, and magic user) seek to stop the tyranny of the dragon Oijngate. They start out in the town of Bralka, from which at least four separate dungeons are available. You have to explore them in a specific order, with passwords to each found in the previous dungeons. Perion's Place had five levels, followed by Galt's Domain with seven, followed by the "s**t hole" with four, followed by the Tower O' Fun with at least three. That's 19 out of 30. I assume the Tower has at least a few more. Throughout the explorations, I've been finding keys, and I suspect when I have the right set, it will open the area in the center of Bralka, and there will be a final large dungeon leading to the dragon.

The rare fixed encounter. Each dungeon has a boss. This one was named "Frank."

There are very, very few fixed encounters in the dungeon levels--maybe two or three per dungeon. Random encounters happen with maddening frequency. The game introduces dozens of new monsters per dungeon and only keeps them around for a couple levels before abandoning them for harder varieties. I'm mildly interested in seeing how the developers are going to keep this up. They've already burned through most of the D&D monster manual and classic mythology. In the current dungeon, I'm encountering playing cards (e.g., jack o'clubs, ace o'spades), chess pieces (black pawns, white bishops), and completely nonsensical creatures (tic-tac-toes, stupid steps). Pretty soon, they're just going to have to start drawing last names at random from the Naperville phone directory.

A typical enemy party in current exploration.

Combat is almost exactly like Wizardry except that the spells are original to the game. For a while, character development and spell acquisition were enough to keep things mildly interesting, but my mage and cleric acquired their final spell levels several dungeon levels ago, leaving only increases in hit points and spell points to look forward to. The "s**t hole" had so many undead capable of draining levels that I actually went backwards for a while, but I've caught back up since then. At this point, "Protection from Spells" from the cleric and some mass damage spell from the mage are necessary in almost every combat, meaning that it's important to know the way back to the nearest set of recharging squares.

Early in the game, attributes increase randomly by 1 at each level-up, but by now, all my attributes are 18.

I've taken to only saving the game in those squares. Almost nothing in the game is dependent on actually visiting squares; rather, almost everything is dependent on mapping and finding the cryptic messages. Even if I lose a lot of experience upon party death, I still have the maps. I can just reload from the safe zone and stake off in an unmapped direction. The game essentially forces you to take this attitude because it frequently freezes or brings the party to the "game over" screen randomly.

Like most Wizardry derivatives, Dragon Sword confounds navigation with dark squares, spinners, teleporters, and "jumper" squares. The difference between the last two is that the latter notifies you that you've been teleported and the former doesn't. In some dungeons, like the one below, teleporters are so common that you pretty much have to check your coordinates with the "Locate" spell after every step. This level was also insidious in that a message frequently came up that said, "You've been teleported!" when I had not, in fact, been teleported. "A trickster tried and true will sometimes lie to you," another message explained.

"TP#" indicates that it's a teleportation square; "#TP" is the destination square.

Here's another one. Notice all those "Js"? Those are jumper squares. Imagine how much of a pain it was to map this level when the "J" squares randomly teleport you every time you step on them.

The game has secret doors, but it also has a lot of squares that are inaccessible without the "Open Wall" spell. Some of these areas hide key encounters and messages. This is one of the few games in which that type of spell is a necessity rather than just a navigation aid.

Most of the levels feature riddles of some sort, usually just an obvious password, like this one:

In case you can't figure out, the password it's hinting is "MAP."

A lot of them seem to set up things that never materialize. For instance, on Level 2 of the "s**t hole," there were two areas shaped like temples. The first held a message that read, "Death, it is true, will soon come to you, but you can stay its falling hand, by issuing a curt, staying command." The other temple had a message that simply read "ENVRE." I assume the latter is supposed to be the "staying command," but either way I never found any encounter that required the use of the password. Another message suggested that there was something called a "no jumper ring" to be found--presumably something that keeps the jump squares from activating--but I never encountered such a thing. It's possible, of course, that I missed something in both cases.

Then we have this one. I don't know if it's trying some reverse psychology or what.

And this was just a blatant lie:

On my current level, there are a couple of dozen rows of alcoves, each with a single word that makes up a longer sentence, promising to set up some kind of chess piece-related riddle. The level also has an annoying gimmick by which you can see through (but not walk through) walls, making navigation very difficult because it's hard to tell what's an open wall, what's a closed wall, and what's a door. I may just let the "Light" spell expire and map if it was all dark, because it's giving me a headache.

The "Fun" part must be meant sarcastically.

By completing a level or two per week while I was dithering about whether to continue the game, I guess I made the decision. I'm two-thirds finished with it at this point, so I might as well go the distance (though don't expect me to do it all at once). I just wish the authors had tweaked it a bit: fewer levels, encounters less often, and leveling better paced throughout the game. If I could just skip to the endgame, even by cheating, I would, but I can't see a way to do that.

I probably won't post again on Dragon Sword until I've won, but if my other posts seem to be slow, it's because this game is still taking up some background time. MegaTraveller or Treasure of Tarmin next, depending on my mood tomorrow.

Dragon Sword: Unmitigated Galt

A message on Level 5 of Galt's Home suggests an encounter that never materialized.

I had committed to playing 4 more levels at the end of the last post, and I ended up playing 6. Galt's Home turned out to be 7 levels, not the 5 I assumed. I couldn't very well quit in the middle of one of the dungeons, so I decided to press on to the end.

The dungeon naturally featured increasingly difficult levels of monsters. I logged 92 among the 7 levels, only one of which (pixies) I encountered in the previous dungeon. Each monster basically appears for two levels and then makes way for harder variants. There were a host of them capable of causing instant death, and towards the end I started to encounter more dangerous spellcasters, some with mass-damage spells. I've only found one creature that drains levels (the pit fiend), which I learned to destroy immediately in combat. Oddly, some of the creatures to make an appearance on the last level of Galt's Home include such pedestrian-sounding creatures as skeletons and zombies. 

Monster names progressively got weirder. It must have been hard to come up with hundreds of these things.

Although the frequency of the random battles seems to have slowed down, the dungeon was rendered a little more difficult by a scarcity of recharging squares. I only found one group on Levels 2 and 3. I didn't find any on Level 5. Level 6 had a bunch of single-square rechargers, but there was something weird about them. They stopped working, at least for a time, if I encountered enemies nearby. Level 7 had dozens, though, so the endgame wasn't so hard.

The first five levels offered virtually no equipment upgrades, but Levels 6 and 7 made up for that with several nice +2 and +3 items, including (for the first time) weapons. I'm beginning to doubt that armor class really does much of anything, though. Enemies seem to hit my monk, who has -40 AC, with the same regularity that they hit my first two fighters at -9 and -10. Perhaps the effects eventually hit a cap.

The navigation obstacles got more annoying as the levels progressed.  Levels 2-5 all had large dark areas. I don't mind those so much because enemies don't attack while you're in them. Spinners were quite common throughout, as were one-way passages, which often dump you into a dead end and require you to cast "Open Wall" to escape. The game is absolutely fiendish about teleportation squares. There's no warning when you're suddenly teleported, and the developers did a "good" job ensuring that the destination squares look a lot like the departure squares. Often, I wouldn't realize that I'd been teleported until I noticed my map was screwed up. Then I'd have to erase several minutes' investment in mapping and start over. This was particularly true of Level 7, which had around a dozen teleporters. I got so paranoid that I was casting "Locate" every few steps, which drained my cleric's spell points.

Level 5 had a huge dark area in the middle; I had to map by feeling my way.

On Level 4, I got a bunch of hints to a riddle that I would ultimately face on Level 5. Stepping in one square, I got a vision of Galt (described as a thief and plunderer) sitting on a mountain of treasure. He had this to say:

The first one I am not--look at me and see! I know no math, but the second is twice three. The third I leave to your own device but do not leave until you've heard my advice. The stairs are guarded by an evil man. Answer in reverse and do not play into his hand!

The text refers to the fact that the password has three separate parts. Elsewhere in the level, I got three other clues to the parts:

• "To have no money, to have no name. The word you seek means the same."
• "Of one word I speak, not a bit more. It is larger than five, but shorter than four."
• "It never stops, it has no shame. Into eternity it goes, an eternal flame."

I figured out the answers without much trouble: POOR, SIX, and TIME. The problem lay in Galt's instructions to "answer in reverse." When I got to the stairway guardian on Level 5, I first tried the word order in reverse (TIME, SIX, POOR) to no avail. I then tried the letters in reverse (EMIT, XIS, ROOP), and finally both (ROOP, XIS, EMIT). Nothing worked, and I assumed that I was wrong about one of the answers. Maybe it was IMPOVERISHED or something. I quit for a while, briefly toyed with asking for a hint from Brian and Tim, but ultimately restarted and tried the words in different orders. Ultimately, it was XIS, EMIT, ROOP that allowed me to pass. This goes against the "first, second, third" order of Galt's message.

Level 6 was an enormous maze with spinners, teleporters, and ultimately no purpose. The stairway to Level 7 is mere steps from the entry to Level 6, and there was nothing important to find elsewhere on the level.

A lot of mapping for little purpose.

Some previous messages had suggested that spellcasters would lose their power on Level 7, but actually the reverse was true: the level had so many recharging squares that I never had to worry for a minute about spell points.

The level featured multiple iterations of the same 3 x 3 room, including 7 pairs of them connected by 3-square corridors. It was in one such room that I encountered Galt and his allies.

The dungeon's final battle.

I guess Galt himself was immune to magic, but his allies sure weren't, so I blasted them away with "Ice Storm" and concentrated my fighter's attacks on him. He died disappointingly fast and left an "ebony dagger" behind. An early message in Perion's Place had said, "A dark wand, an ebony dagger, ring of mithral, staff of stone, golden armor, slayer of dragons…" I found the wand in Perion's Place and the dagger here; I assume the other artifacts are found in subsequent dungeons.

In addition to Galt, Level 7 also had one important square: the one that told me the password to the next dungeon. It turned out to be BOOM.

Accessing the third dungeon.

I used the "Teleport" spell in combat to get myself back to Level 1 and out of the dungeon. In consequent level-ups, my cleric and mage both got Level 6 spells--the final spell level. Most important among them is "Summon Deamon." My summoned familiars and dogs stopped serving as anything but cannon fodder a long time ago; it'll be nice to have a more powerful ally in the front ranks.

I've had to name about 200 familiars and dogs. I'm out of good ideas.

Before wrapping up, I stopped by the entrance to the next dungeon, gave the password, and peaked in. I guess the developers hit a nadir of creativity when naming this one.

A few final notes:

• At some point in the dungeon--I forgot where--I found a bronze key. I never found a door for it in Galt's Home, so I assume it must open something somewhere else. It doesn't work on the locked door in town.

• I realized belatedly that "Cure Pet" not only heals the pet but also cures all conditions. I was dumping my poor familiar or wolf every time he got poisoned, slept, or paralyzed because the regular versions of "cure" spells don't work on him.

• The bug that makes the "game over" screen come up randomly in combat has gotten worse. It now also frequently comes up on squares where you'd normally get a message or encounter. This necessitates reloading from the last save. This wouldn't be a big deal, since you can save anywhere, except that spells don't remain active when you reload. For every reload, I have to waste points casting "Light," "Armor," and "Compass" again.

That's 12/30 levels completed. Each level takes a reliable 2 hours, so we're looking at at least another 36 hours in the game, which seems a little excessive. I don't think anyone can say I didn't give it a fair chance. I'll spend a little time playing with my new spells and offer a GIMLET.

****

In list news, I've knocked Moria down a few pegs. I have a lot of notes and material, but for whatever reason, I find the process of compiling it exhausting.

Dragon Sword: One Dungeon Down

Encountering the first boss-level enemy, at the apex of "Perion's Place."

Having Brian and Tim visit the blog and comment on their 24-year-old game has made it more interesting than it would be by gameplay alone. They've offered some fun stories about the development process and have taken my negative comments with aplomb. This earned Dragon Sword at least another 10%; since my last post, I've completed three more levels.

     

Unfortunately, what I said at the end of the last posting turned out not to be true: Tim's investigations have shown that they did not, in fact, implement limited gameplay in the unregistered version. It does appear that all 30 levels are available to us. Again, it's hard to see myself playing 24 more, but Dragon Sword has become a little more interesting as I see what the developers were doing.

     

Essentially, you can think of Dragon Sword as consisting of five separate chapters, all stemming from the town. I had assumed that the dungeon would keep growing in levels, all the way to 30. I was wrong. Instead, the initially-accessible dungeon, "Perion's Place," is 5 levels. In that dungeon, you get the code necessary to unlock the second one back in town. I assume somewhere in there, I'll get a code for the third one, and so forth, all the way to "The Lair," which must consist of levels 26-30. Because each dungeon is only five levels off the main town, it minimizes how much time it takes to get back to town after a successful expedition. 

Level 4 of "Perion's Place." About half of it consisted of dark squares.

Level 4 of "Perion's Place" was half-shrouded in darkness. It offered a few more teleportation squares (which always screw-up mapping unless you notice right away that you've been teleported) and a couple of "jumping" squares that move you a few squares away. Navigating the darkness wasn't too bad; you just have to feel for walls. In one of the squares in the middle of the dark zone, I encountered a riddle: "On wings of fire, eyes full of hate, flies the dragon named . . ." Only someone who hadn't been paying the least bit of attention wouldn't know that the answer is OIJNGATE. Answering it returned the message that "the Dark Mage awaits" and unlocked the stairs to Level 5.

Level 5 was more of a classic maze. The monsters got a lot harder, but there were so many magic-recharging squares that I never felt I was in a lot of danger. The maze culminated in a battle with Perion himself, surrounded by two packs of "moon dogs," in the center square. Perion was capable of instant-kill spells, but at this point so was I. Killing him produced a "Wand of Death" and a big pile of experience points.

The first boss dies.

The level had two message squares that opened up the path to the next dungeon. One said, "A man named Galt, thief tried and true, lurks in a pit hidden from view. A secret word to enter, one must speak, and that word, I'm afraid, is always bleak." The second warned me that I needed to "speak thrice the word to open the pit."

Level 5 of "Perion's Place." A previous message had told me that he was behind a "wall of darkness," which turned out to be that sequence of 8 dark squares.

Back in town, I checked out the several squares where I'd been asked for a password during my first explorations. None of them specifically asked for anything from Perion's Place, but there was a voice in the southwest corner just asking for a password. I've played enough cryptic crosswords with "obvious clues" to know that the password was, in fact, BLEAK. I entered it three times and opened up the way to the first level of Galt's Home.

There wasn't much to the level: tough monsters, a couple teleport squares, one spinner, and a few messages about traps, including this absolutely incomprehensible one:

I only explored the first level. The up staircase beckons to the other four.

Level 1 of "Galt's Home."

Both my cleric and mage reached Level 5 in spells before starting Galt's Home. The spells are quite awesome. "Party Heal" heals all damage to the party. I finally got "Raise Dead," which, unlike the Wizardry version, never fails. "Destroy" and "Disintegrate" are powerful Level 5 mage spells that affect single enemies; "Ice Storm" and "Swarm" are powerful mage spells that do up to 100 points of damage to all enemies in all groups—usually killing every one of them, at least at my current dungeon levels.

There are a few mysteries. "Recall" would seem to return the characters to the adventurer's guild in town, but upon leaving the guild, the party finds itself not in town, but on the same dungeon level that they cast the spell—yet at the guild's coordinates. I don't know if this is a bug or what. "Teleport to Stairs," a cleric spell, doesn't seem to work at all. The mage's "Teleport" works like MALOR in Wizardry, allowing you to specify a number of moves along the X, Y, and Z coordinates—but you have to be in combat to cast it. Once combat finishes, then it executes. Weird.

Casting "Teleport" in the midst of battle.

In general, the game does a good job balancing power with cost. "Ice Storm" and "Swarm" would be game-breakers if they didn't eat up 15% of my spell points with every casting. Just like in Wizardry, you have to economize and only cast when necessary. What makes Dragon Sword a little easier, however, is the ubiquitous presence of magic-recharging squares. If there was only one or two per level, it would still be very challenging, but the first level of "Galt's Home" had four locations (and 11 total squares) that recharged. While I love being near magic-rechargers and knowing I can sling about powerful spells with impunity, it does make the levels a little less tactically challenging.

There are a staggering number of monsters in the game. I started keeping track in the middle of Perion's Place, and I've catalogued more than 100 already. Most are used for only 1 or 2 levels, then supplanted by higher-level monsters. 20 new monsters were introduced on the first level of Galt's Home alone: bandits, bloodworms, burlgars, creeping coins, driders, gnolls, gray oozes, harpies, lizard men, minotaurs, mobats, murderers, piercers, robbers, ropers, superheroes, swordmasters, taers, and trappers. Many of these are, of course, drawn from D&D.

What kind of superhero hangs out with a bunch of murderers?!

The creators did a decent job implementing special attacks. I discussed poison- and sleep-causing monsters the last time. Several (e.g., assassin bugs, murderers) are capable of instant kills. Some, like creeping coins and piercers, can "call for help" and boost their numbers. "Moon dogs" have magic immunity and "ropers" can turn you to stone. Lots of creatures can steal from you, and the first level of Galt's Home had a message offering a tip for how to prevent good stuff from being taken.

Kids: poetry is about meter as much as rhyme.

Pixies are perhaps the most varied creatures, capable of calling for help, paralyzing, stealing, and turning you to stone. They receive first priority for mass-damage spells when I meet them.

Finally, before I go, I'll note that each level has offered incremental equipment upgrades. I've slowly outfitted my party with +1 armor, shields, boots, gauntlets, and helmets. I still haven't found any magic weapons during combat, and it's still a little annoying to have to periodically clear the automatically-taken junk from my inventory. 

Abacan's current inventory. That flail can go.

Some miscellaneous notes:

• As Brian noted in a comment, hitting ALT-T, ALT-B, or ALT-J brings up little homages to the developers.

• The game has music, composed by Brian's then-girlfriend, now-wife, Jennifer Anderson. I'm sure it was beautiful on the piano, but rendered on a constant loop through the PC speaker, it's what I imagine music in Hell is like. Naturally, I play with the sound off.

• Until the last level, all of my characters were going up at least one character level for every one dungeon level I explored. That appears to have ended with the continual doubling of needed experience points. 

Right now, battles are producing an average of 1,500 experience points. It'll be over 300 battles to the next level.

• Adding to the bugs: the game seems to freeze most times that an enemy with thieving abilities (e.g., rogue, pixie, burglar) steals something from one of my packs.

• My armor class frequently fluctuates by 1 or 2 points for what appears to be no reason.

• In an e-mail to me, Brian said he was disappointed that I didn't show the opening screen shot of the game—the first view outside the adventurer's guild—which caused many early players to ask him why they'd drawn an image of two crayons pointing at each other. It took me forever to understand what he was talking about—mostly because I've gotten so used to wireframe dungeons that my mind automatically interprets them in 3D.

It's like a reverse "Magic Eye."

I suppose it's time to stop procrastinating and get on to Crystals of Arborea. I'll have to offer at least one more post on Dragon Sword, though, to give it a GIMLET. I'll probably complete Galt's Home—another four levels—and move on.

    

***

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

 08/07/2026 

Dragon Sword: The First 10%

The first three levels--perhaps more--are called "Perion's Place." I do not yet know why.

I've spent about 7 hours mapping the first 3 dungeon levels in Dragon Sword, and the game has offered pretty much the same experience I expected after the first post. It's okay for a shareware title, but like many shareware titles, it has an inflated sense of its own value. The idea that in 1990, someone would be willing to play this game for 30 levels--3 times the size of Wizardry--is a bit staggering. I frankly wonder if anyone ever made it to the end.

The game continues to adhere closely to its Wizardry roots, but with a few crucial differences that seem small but greatly affect the quality of gameplay. First, by allowing you save and reload anywhere, the game jettisons Wizardry's permadeath and thus much of it's predecessor's tension. Second, Dragon Sword has far, far more random encounters. The average is an attack roughly every 10 actions, but with a lot of variance; it's not uncommon to have one every step for a few steps in a row. Moreover, there's a chance of a random encounter after every action, not just every step. They might come as you turn, check your inventory, or even save the game.

Because the random attacks are so frequent, they naturally have to be less difficult than Wizardry to give the player a fighting chance. Among the first three levels, there are enemies capable of spellcasting, sleeping, poison, paralysis, and instant-death, but they're rare and easy to blast out of existence with a "Fireball" in the first round. The rest of your foes don't have any special attacks and just pick (slowly) away at the characters' hit points. A party in Wizardry might be wiped out by a single unfortunate encounter with a pack of enemy mages. If a party in Dragon Sword dies, on the other hand, it'll be after a long process of getting nibbled to death by bats, rats, and spiders.

Assaulted by a motley party. Unlike Wizardry, there are no images of your foes.

  
A third major difference is in the existence of magic-recharging squares in the midst of the dungeon. In Wizardry, you always have to be worried about how far you're extending yourself into the dungeon, lest you find yourself too weakened and spell-depleted to make it back. Magic-rechargers mean that you only need to return to town for leveling up and occasionally buying new equipment.

In this last session, poison was my most hated foe. A poisoned character loses several hit points per action and will die very quickly unless healed. The danger diminished when my priest hit Level 6 and got "Cure Poison" as one of her spells. Even then, it costs so much in spell points that you want to avoid getting poisoned at all costs. I've learned to preemptively "Fireball" packs of scorpions, spiders, cobras, and rats, all of which are capable of poisoning on each hit.

Common enemies on Levels 1-2 are "tarantellas." No word on whether they're gay.

  
Figuring out the effects of spells has been somewhat fun. I figured "Friends," a Level 1 mage spell, would be like its D&D counterpart and improve prices at shops. Instead, you cast it on a pack of monsters, which causes each of them to "shake hands and leave." So far, no pack of monsters has "saved" against the spell, making it wonderfully effective, except you don't get experience from those monsters. "Open Wall" allows you to quickly move through dungeons, though at a high spell point cost. "Sanctuary" seems to prevent random encounters for around 10 actions. It's also clear that spells level with the character, so even first-level spells like "Sparks" are still viable options through the game, doing a couple dozen points of damage at Level 8 where they did only a handful at Level 2. For every level increase, "Familiar" summons a stronger familiar.

I just got Level 4 spells before the end of this post. I look forward to seeing how they work. I have no idea what "Partial Cure" is about, since the cleric spell "Cure Poison" is one level lower and 3 points less.

  
Speaking of damage, the enemies are oddly low in hit points. A successful attack against one is almost always a fatal attack. If my mage casts "Fireball" on a stack of enemies, it almost always wipes them out. I assume this will change as I ascend and enemies get harder.

My summoned wolf kills a giant slug, who despite his name is a bit of a lightweight.

  
About one-third of the enemies defeated in the actual dungeon will drop chests. The process of disarming them works just as in Wizardry: you (E)xamine the chest for traps, are told what type of trap you face, type (D)isarm to remove it, and type the name of the trap. The one big difference is that disarming, at least with a thief, never seems to fail (except when I accidentally type POSION or something).

The only danger is that I will accidentally try to disarm a KINVES trap.

  
This is good because the thief otherwise seems a bit worthless. I have him in slot #4, meaning he can't attack in melee combat. Since there are no missile weapons in the game (at least, not that I've found), he has nothing to do unless someone ahead of him dies or falls under a "sleep" attack. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to get rid of him and put another cleric in that slot, casting "Untrap" whenever I encounter a chest.

Opening chests often rewards you with some piece of equipment, but as in The Bard's Tale series, usually it's something banal that just takes up space in your inventory. Every once in a while, you have to clear it out by (D)ropping unwanted stuff. On the plus side, the economy in this game seems strong. Every dungeon expedition gives me enough funds for some new upgrade, like a shield+1 or a plate mail +1. When I run out of weapons and armor to buy, there are always scroll versions of the most common spells, very useful for when spell points run out.

Some of the game's expensive options. I wonder what a "Wand of Spells" does.

  
The game has a few regrettable bugs. Occasionally, at the end of a victorious combat, you get the "game over" screen, as if you lost. It also frequently freezes in the middle of combat, forcing a quit and a reload. If you have to reload a game, it doesn't remember any spells you had active at the time; if you're unlucky to have to reload with low spell points, you might not be able to cast "Light," which is necessary to find your way around.

The endgame screen comes up when every party member is killed...or whenever the game feels like it.

  
The first level of the dungeon was labeled "Perion's Place" and it begins with an eerie voice that says, "Welcome...Welcome to my domain." The player has the option to pull a rope or not, and it took a bit of experimentation before I realized that the rope is actually a light switch that turns on a permanent "Light" spell for the level. The large level had only one "encounter" in which I found the already-looted remains of a previous party. There was also a message in one room that said "The Black Mage lives behind a wall of darkness."

My map of Level 1.

  
Level 2 introduced spinners, which I hate, but also a couple of squares that restore 1-4 magic points every time you step in them. These were very welcome and allowed me to keep exploring without having to return to the town. (There is no "resting" in the game, so the only way to restore magic is to step in these special squares or the fountain in town; the only way to restore hit points is to first restore magic, then cast "Heal.") But the process of restoration takes a while because you have to keep walking through the square and fighting random encounters every 5-7 moves. I'd get almost restored, then have to fight a few battles that knocked my hit points and spell points back down. It took maybe 15 minutes each time to finally "top off."

My map of Level 2. The two exclamation points mark spell-recharging areas.

  
Level 2 had a couple of messages:

• "The best kept secrets are often enshrouded in darkness."
• "A dark wand, an ebony dagger, a ring of mithral, staff of stone, golden armor, slayer of dragons..."

Thanks for the tip.

So far, I don't know what any of these messages mean. They don't seem to be helping at all with the puzzles on the town level.

Level 3 introduced more spinners, an area darkness, a ton of secret doors and one-way doors, and a number of squares that cause you to immediately teleport to another area of the dungeon. Two messages advised me to step on every square and to try the fountain in town, both of which I'd already figured out. There was also a "statue of a decrepit old man" whose "eyes seem to follow you around the room," but I couldn't think of anything to do there. "Cure Stone" doesn't work except on your own party members.

Level 3.

None of the levels offered anything that felt like a fixed encounter. All were labeled "Perion's Place," as is Level 4, so I've been assuming I'll encounter "Perion" at some point. I suspect that the messages I'm accumulating in the dungeons will be important for some key level, and that in intervals throughout the 30-level dungeon, I'll get the passwords necessary to unlock the three password-protected areas back in town.

Navigating the levels is a little disappointing in places. You'll have an entire area sectioned off from the rest, with a sequence of rooms or long corridors that seem to be leading to something, but when you get there, it's just an empty room. Secret doors, more often than not, lead to empty areas.

Unlike Wizardry, the levels (so far) offer no shortcuts back to town. Getting from town to the ladder to Level 3 is 138 moves (less if I use "Open Wall," but that's expensive), which brings around 14 random encounters along the way. I assume things will get faster when I reach Level 10 and get Level 5 spells, including "Teleport" (mage) and "Teleport to Stairs" (cleric).

At this point, all my characters are Level 9, and my two spellcasters are capable of Level 4 spells. Each level-up brings increases in some random attributes, but the max attribute score remains 18. I suspect that within a few more levels, all of my attributes for all characters will be 18. With each level-up, my monk's armor class goes down, but despite this he still seems to get hit quite often.

My current cleric character.

There are some intriguing elements in Dragon Sword, but I cannot possibly imagine spending the 60-80 hours that I estimate it will take to map the additional 27 levels and win the game. It isn't the size of the levels (441 squares vs. Wizardry's 400) as much as the frequency of random battles that makes the game a bit tedious. However, in a series of comments on my first Dragon Sword posting, developers Tim Musa and Brian Tieman gave me a bit of an "out": apparently, in the unregistered version, the game is only playable through the 7 levels of "Perion's Place," and they're having trouble recovering a registered copy. If that's the case, I think I can stick it out for those 7 levels.