A Legacy Well-Served

In 2003, capitalizing on the success of The Lord of the Rings film series, The Noble Collection issued an official The Lord of the Rings Collector's Chess Set, with pieces so detailed that they were personally approved by the actors in the film. Many sites carry it, and none of them offer this review:

The pieces and board are beautiful, but seriously: chess? If you're so old-fashioned that moving pieces in discrete squares is your thing, I guess you might like this game, but it's hardly likely to appeal to modern players, raised on games like pool, where you can use every point on the game's surface. It lacks the raw energy and visceral first-person action of games like laser-tag and football. Nonetheless, if you grew up in Eastern India during the Gupta Empire of the sixth century and want to relive the glory days of your childhood, this is the game for you.

I have deliberately avoided looking up any reviews of Might & Magic X, so it's entirely possible that I'm setting up a straw man, but I'm willing to bet that the word "retro" appears in the majority of them. I'll bet they talk about its tile-based movement as "old-fashioned" and its turn-based combat as "vintage." I'll bet more than one concludes with the sentiment that the game is likely to appeal mostly to those who grew up playing Might & Magic IV and V. It will be nice, if embarrassing, if I'm wrong.

These reviews--real or imaginary--might be well-intentioned, but they offend me. The idea that any way of constructing a game ever becomes passé offends me. Good game architecture does not exist on some kind of fixed ladder, on which developers only retreat to earlier rungs because they lack the money, or nerve, to reach for the next one. As the years pass, more options become available to them, sure, but a great game doesn't have to use all of those options, any more than Steven Spielberg had to use color in Schindler's List or Michael Hazanavicius had to use sound in The Artist. Both films won the Academy Award for best picture, no one said that the films most appeal to those who grew up in the 1920s.

Despite my own opinions, I recognize the realities of the modern gaming world, and in that sense, Might & Magic X: Legacy is a daring game. It would not be nearly so daring if it were a standalone title. Then, reviewers could dismiss it as a cute retro offering and move on to praising the next game to offer, I don't know, 3D dragons that are holo-projected in your living room, and you battle them with a light saber accessory for Kinect. But as the tenth installment of a major franchise, issued by a major publisher, the game forces players and reviewers to take it a little more seriously.

Shooting at a giant spider across a bridge, in an underground cave. The game features turn-based combat reminiscent of the turn-based option in VI-VIII.

I was excited when I heard about it a year ago. My last experience with a Might & Magic game was the dreadful IX, the last of the original series before 3DO went out of business and Ubisoft bought the rights. Although I never played them, I understand that Ubisoft's previous offerings under the M&M label, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Might & Magic Heroes VI, and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, received some negative reviews because of a lack of thematic consistency to the earlier games.
 

What I can say is that Might & Magic X: Legacy lives up to its subtitle well in both interface and theme:
 

• The game world is the same as Heroes V and VI (which is unfamiliar to me).

• The tile-based interface feels similar to the III-V series, but most of the screens, shops, NPC portraits, and dialogue feel similar to VI and VII (incidentally, the "deluxe" version of the game comes with Might & Magic VI, which makes its presence on my computer doubly dangerous).

• The skill system is reminiscent of VII-VIII, with certain classes able to receive promotions to "expert," "master," and "grandmaster" in certain skills.

The skill system is a blend of familiar and new skills.

• Each class can get promoted to a higher prestige class, a dynamic that goes back to II and was prominently featured in VI and VII.

• The crusader class has a special ability called "Mandate of Heaven."

• When you click among potential character portraits, they shout "Choose me!" and "Pick me for your party!," a feature found in VII.

• The schools of magic--fire, air, earth, water, light, dark--go back to VI (or earlier?) with the addition of the "primordial" school.

• You can hire one or two NPCs that boost your various skill stats, just like in VI. There are also some plot-related NPCs. None of them fight with you, alas.

Hiring this NPC will boost my "bestiary" knowledge.

• As in IV-VIII, you routinely find barrels of liquids that, when drunk, increase resistance to magic or raise attributes.

• As in all the previous games, random fountains temporarily raise attributes and resistances and restore health and magic.

And of course the opening city is called "Sorpigal-by-the-Sea," complete with a "Goblin Watchtower Inn." I'm sure there are one billion other references that I'm missing, especially since I haven't played the Heroes series.
 

The opening shots of VI (top) and X (bottom). The latter manages to evoke the former perfectly, while still offering updated graphics and dialogue quality.

 
Now, when I say, "tile-based interface feels similar to the III-V series," it would be a mistake to conjure images of those games. Might & Magic X is absolutely not "retro" when it comes to the quality of its graphics. It uses tile-based movement and static screens for their advantages--in particular, the ability to carefully and artfully compose each screen, with excellent graphic detail and lightning. Oh, this is the kind of area where I run into problems, because I don't know modern video game graphics that well, and some jackass will inevitably show up to say "Are you kidding? The graphics look like crap. They should have used blah blah blah technology that was prominently featured in Yada Yada Yada III. Seriously, Blithering Idiot V: Just Shut Up had better graphics in 2002!" So all I can say is they look beautiful to me.
 

If the game has one disadvantage, its that its back story is a little confusing. It takes place on the world of Ashan, and I had to watch the opening montage--again, beautifully-composed and narrated--a couple times before I had a sense of what it was talking about. The world is governed by an empire, which has a religion focused on the worship of ancient Angels, accessible and present in mortal form. One of the Angels, Uriel, used the Emperor as pawns in a game of revenge against an ancient enemy, using "false flag" murders to incite the empire to war. Ultimately, crafty humans saw through "Uriel's Deception" and, I don't know, somehow overthrew him. (The narration says he was punished by dragons, but I'm not sure where they come into all this.)
 

 
The whole episode damaged the legitimacy of both the empire and the church. The empire has begun to crumble as various cities and territories claim their independence. There's talk about separating the government and the religion. Empress Gwendolyn Falcon has proposed reforms, but they've simply had the effect of dividing the conservative nobles from a populace on the brink of revolt.
 

 
Events have "come to a head" on the Agyn Peninsula, dominated by the city of Karthal, which is threatening to secede and join a coalition called the "Free Cities." In this chaos, brigands, pirates, and monsters have started to thrive. The adventuring party has just arrived on the peninsula, on a mission to take the ashes of their mentor to Karthal. They've landed at "Sorpigal-by-the-Sea" only to find that no ship passage is available to Karthal. Thus, they must walk overland, and they can barely move a few steps into the city before their quest board starts filling up.
 

(Some of the names--"Seven Cities," "Free Cities," "Karthal,"--and other thematic elements seem incontrovertibly inspired by George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

Like all areas, the city is a tile-based map, though not a square as in the earlier games of the series. There are back alleys, hidden passages, and other geographic oddities that keep the map from being fully symmetrical. You can't leave the city until you solve one main quest: a bunch of townsfolk have lately disappeared, and it turns out they're being killed by an infestation of giant spiders, headquartered in the caves beneath an old well.

Battling the spider queen. This first "boss" fight was a tough one, and it took me a couple of reloads to get the tactics right.

 
So far, I've only played through Sorpigal and a little of the surrounding wilderness area. There are things I both like and don't like about the game. Sometimes, they're two sides of the same coin, so I've mixed them up below:

Like: The character creation process. It offers a lot of flexibility without becoming so complex you don't understand it. You choose from four races (human, elf, dwarf, and orc) and classes specific to those races. Although each class has advantages and disadvantages, there's enough overlap in skills that you don't feel you're crippling yourself with bad choices.
 

Creating my party leader.

 
Like: Dialogue is only partly-voiced. I "like" this because it means the developers weren't straightjacketed by recorded dialogue and a limited number of responses, the kind of thing that made so many interactions in Oblivion and Skyrim unsatisfying. Don't like: So far, there hasn't been much depth to NPC interaction. There are topic choices, but not really "dialogue options." Like: At least one of the NPCs so far has had special dialogue based on a character's class.

Talking with an angel NPC. Many of the dialogue choices in the game boil down to "continue," unfortunately.

 
Like: Lots of background NPCs that you can't talk to. This makes Sorpigal feel more like a living city than, say, Whiterun, which has a population of about 20, and 12 of them are guards.

Don't like: One thing that was consistent between the first game and IX was the set of attributes. This game had to screw with them a bit: the six attributes are might, magic, perception, destiny, vitality, and spirit. Seriously--"destiny?" Like: Attributes seem to be destined to increase dramatically from the opening. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons games, the Might & Magic series has never been concerned about keeping attribute scores close to their starting position, or within a fixed range. You might start with a might of 9 and wind up with a might of 159.
 

Like: Both the main map and corner automap. It makes it very clear what directions you can go from a square and (through shading) what squares you've already explored. It automatically annotates shops and NPCs, and you can add your own annotations.
 

Like: The game is full of "lore" books that flesh out the game world. So does NPC dialogue. Don't like: The game hasn't been out long enough for some wiki to help me keep it all straight.
 

 
Like: The inventory screen. The characters have a shared backpack, so you don't have to waste a lot of time swapping potions between individuals, or specifying individual characters when buying and selling. Don't like: No evocatively-written descriptions of items like in VI-VIII.

 
Like: Party members offer exclamations and fun comments when they see monsters or treasure. I think this is partly based on the "Perception" skill, too.

Don't like: Everything with which you can interact is made clear when you face it--large text appears on the screen that says PRESS SPACE TO OPEN CHEST or what have you. I think it would be fun if players had to discover some things by clicking on various areas of the screen.

Like: A ton of side quests in addition to the main quests. And there was a laugh-out-loud moment when the guard captain in Sorpigal told me, "Don't worry--I won't ask you to go kill rats in a cellar"--right above a quest that read: "Quest: Spiders in the well." 
 

The game's first main quest.

Like: Almost everything--stats, skills, classes, spell effects, inventory items--are well-annotated just by hovering the cursor over them.

Reminding myself what the "challenge" skill does.

Like: Combat. It plays like the turn-based mode in VI-VIII, with each character taking a turn, followed by an option to move. Between attacks (both ranged and melee), defense, spells, and skills, the characters have more options than in previous games, and the animations for both attacks and spells are pretty. Don't like: No action combat option for the easier enemies you just want to breeze by.

Like: Your "bestiary," covering the hit points, statistics, strengths, and weaknesses of various enemies, slowly fills in as you encounter more and more of them. There's even a quest related to collecting as many bestiary entries as possible.

My bestiary entry for giant spiders is filled in, after I faced about a hundred of them.

 
Like: After Sorpigal, an open game world where you can walk just about anywhere on the peninsula, entering dungeons "out of order" and encountering monsters well beyond your abilities.

Don't like: Having to install extra software on my computer, with a constant connection to the Internet, and a persistent presence in my system tray. I don't know what this frigging "UPlay" thing is, or why I have to log into it every time I want to play the game. I don't have any desire to "connect with others on the Steam community," and I don't know how to turn it off.

The sum of the "likes" far outweighs the "don't likes," and in total, I'm having a lot of fun with this game.
 

Time for a little disclosure: Although I would have doubtless played it eventually, I'm mostly playing it now because Ubisoft was kind enough to send me a free key for the game. They invited me to participate in the pre-release reviews, which I declined, because that's not really what I do, but then they sent me the key on release day (yesterday) anyway. The key was only good for one day, so I had to download it, and after I'd downloaded it, I figured why not check it out, and now my weekend is shot.

I trust my readers know me well enough to know that getting the game for free has in no way influenced my opinion of it. I'd tell you if it sucked. But I'm happy to say that, at least so far, it's a worthy entry in the series, reaching both backwards and forwards. It manages to make loving references to earlier installments while not making players unfamiliar with the previous games feel excluded. I'm not saying it's "Game of the Year" material--I have no idea what else is in the field--but I am saying that it deserves consideration for "Game of the Year," and not simply relegated to some "retro" niche.

I hope Might & Magic X is hugely successful, and more developers--not just indie developers--will realize they can make great games with classic tools. There is room for a great 21st-century text adventure, an iconographic tile-based game with a game world as large and complex as The Elder Scrolls, a game where you type your own dialogue options like Ultima IV or The Magic Candle but against a modern AI. With all this extra memory and storage space, don't just go for better graphics and sound; mash the Infinity Engine games together so I can walk from Icewind Dale to Amn.

This post doesn't interrupt our regular schedule. The final post on Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation will come tomorrow, followed by Sword of Fargoal on Monday. (Fortunately, I have them both drafted, so I can spend most of my weekend on other things. I mean work, of course.) Stay tuned for my "official" review of Might & Magic X: Legacy in 2038!

Might and Magic: Final Ranking

Although I won the game, there were a few encounters I was never able to beat. This is one.

         

Might and Magic: Book One - Secret of the Inner Sanctum

United States
New World Computing (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for Apple II; 1987 for Commodore 64, FM-7, PC-88, and DOS; 1988 for Macintosh, PC-98, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000, and MSX; 1992 for NES

Date Started: 3 July 2010

Date Finished: 20 July 2010

Total Hours: 50

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 60

Ranking at time of posting: 19/19 (100%)

Ranking at Game #556: 548/556 (99%)

Matt Barton, who wrote, Dungeons & Desktops (2008; I talked about the book in this posting) has some good things to say about Might and Magic. He describes the series as a lesser-known younger sibling of many of the more prominent series of the decade (e.g., Ultima, Wizardry). King and Borland don't mention it once in Dungeons & Dreamers (2003). But, as we've seen, the game did "refine several gameplay elements that would show up in later games, such as having the characters' race and gender exert a strong effect on gameplay" (p. 128). Barton calls the game "a labor of love by developer Jon Van Canegham and his wife Michaela" and he praises the size of the game world, the number of encounters, and the mystery of the main quest. It made, he says, "a great impression on critics and gamers" (p. 129)—an impression that still holds favorable 24 years later.

As usual, my ranking is based on the 100-point GIMLET scale that I described here.

1. Game world. This is a tough one. Might and Magic launches you into the world of Varn (or VARN, as it turns out) with very little background and with no lore or history. You are left to explore the world and piece together its nature through quests—this is part of the game's fun. The world itself is large—around 50 16 x 16 maps—and varied in its terrain and encounters. Although graphics limitations make the dungeons and castles look mostly the same, each has a certain distinct character and purpose. The revelation at the end—that the game world is simply a biosphere/spaceship—makes Might and Magic unique among games, I'll give it that. But it also raises a lot of questions that the game doesn't begin to answer. How do fantasy conventions like magic and undeath fit within the sci-fi framework? Who thought it was a good idea to combine people and dragons in a spaceship? (Here's hoping Michael Bay never stumbles upon this site.) For that matter, don't the dragons bonk their heads against the "sky"? Except in a few cases, Might and Magic also has the drawback of most early CRPGs in which the game world doesn't react to your actions—nowhere is this more notable than the ending, in which you can "reveal" the false King Alamar over and over. Final score: 6.

2. Character creation and development. Character creation is fairly basic in Might and Magic: you choose from a list of six classes and roll a standard selection of attributes. You can choose name, sex, and alignment. Character development, while still fairly basic, is surprisingly satisfying. In a standard game, you might achieve around 20 levels, and each level-up makes you palpably more powerful and able to handle the game's difficult battles. This is true of spell progression, of course, but also in the way that your fighters get extra attacks and do extra damage, and your robber has a better chance of disarming traps. Because of this, the experience rewards you get from quests and combat are quite satisfying. The game does introduce some "role playing" based on alignments, although it is very light (whether to release, torment, or ignore prisoners) and doesn't have lasting consequences. There is one area in which sex matters. Most encounters play identically no matter what the class, sex, or alignment. Final score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. The game is devoid of visible NPCs, but you come across them in certain squares, and your encounters with them are essential to advancing the game and learning about the game world. The game is one of the first to introduce choices in your NPC interactions—not dialog choices, unfortunately, but very basic ones such as whether to kiss, release, or ignore a maiden you find chained to a wall. A little better than The Bard's Tale (or, at least, more than The Bard's Tale) but not nearly as complex or satisfying as Ultima IV. Final score: 4

Oddly, option (A) is the only way to advance the game. More oddly, all of my characters were female at this point. Jayne will be in his bunk.

4. Encounters and foes. There are dozens of monsters in Might and Magic, almost all with a unique attack or two (sprites curse, centaurs put you to sleep, demon lords can eradicate your characters with a spell), almost all with special resistances, which makes encounters challenging as you try to figure out the best order in which to engage your enemies and the best weapons and spells to use. These foes are not well described, unfortunately, and most are standard fantasy game fare with the exception of some aliens. The game continues The Bard's Tale's tradition of throwing you up against wildly improbable groups of monsters in even more improbable settings: six green dragons and a herd of pegasuses in a cramped dungeon corridor, for instance. There are a few scripted encounters in which you have the option to do something other than fight, but it's almost always the poorer of the options and much of the game is hack & slash. I liked the way the game balanced fixed encounters with random ones. I also like how the game doesn't pull any punches. If you wander into the wrong map early in the game, your level 2 party gets fried by red dragons with no apologies. Areas re-spawn the moment you leave, allowing endless opportunities for experience-boosting. Final score: 6.

Honestly, how did this party of foes ever come together?

5. Magic and combat. Combat is fairly tactical, with a few nail-biting moments, especially at the beginning when opening every door is potentially deadly. The game is one of the first to include missile weapons, and the variety of items you can equip (see below) adds yet another layer to your options. The ability to immediately rest after most combat means that combats are individually tactical rather than tactical by accumulation as in Wizardry or The Bard's Tale. The first-person perspective doesn't offer a lot of opportunities for role-playing in combat. The magic system is well-balanced except at the end, when some of your spells become too powerful and you start to use them as crutches (by then, combat has become a bit boring anyway). Every level increase gives you something new to look forward to in combat, which is nice. Final score: 5.

6. Equipment. In this area, Might and Magic is one of the best of the early CRPGs. You can wield up to six items and carry up to six more, and there are a wide variety of weapons, armor, accessories, rings, boots, and other items to don and use. These have increasing levels of magic power, including some that boost your statistics or cast spells. This may be the first game to require magical weapons to strike certain monsters, but I'm not sure. Some equipment I didn't understand: I held on to a set of rope & hooks and a 10-foot pole all the way to the end of the game, thinking they'd eventually be required, but they never were. I felt that even after around 50 hours of gameplay, I only had encountered a fraction of the possible equipment. Treasure is generally randomized within the game world, but there are a few special items that you receive after fixed battles or encounters. Although the items have no descriptions, and it's tough to tell the relative worth of weapons and armor except by selling cost, this is one of the best CRPGs of this era when it comes to variety and utility of gear. Final score: 7.

Some of the varied types of equipment available in the game.

7. Economy. Not complicated, but not bad for a 1980s CRPG. You start out with no gold, so you have to start making some fairly quickly. As you do, you're able to equip yourself slowly. As you progress through the towns, you find that more advanced equipment is available, so making money to buy things (and to train your characters) remains viable well into the 12th hour of the game. After that, well, there are still things to do with your money. Donating at temples will temporarily bestow upon you every protective spell in the game, at much higher levels than your characters can cast, so it's worth it to pay before a big battle. Second, the magic fountain at Dragadune converts all your gold to experience—meaning that if you make use of it, you need to immediately start building your finances again if you ever want to level up. Third, there's a place in the game where you can exchange gold for gems, through the intermediary of trivia questions. Thus, cash rewards never stop being relevant. Final score: 7.

8. Quests. This is where Might and Magic really excels, particularly among its brethren of the Silver Age. As I remarked several times, the "main quest" reveals itself only in stages, which actually works well in a game that allows you open-ended exploration. The main quest is also unusual in its sci-fi theme and lack of a "big boss." More important, however, there are dozens of side quests—the first real side quests in any CRPG, I think. Some of them are unusual and reasonably complex: climbing all the trees in a grove, solving the magic square puzzle, the mystery of Portsmith, and the prisoner-Statue of Judgment quest among them. They even offer a little light role-playing. Some involve finding items, some visiting locations, some killing monsters, some answering riddles. This is all extremely advanced for a CRPG of the era, and they remain fun even today, even if they don't offer the narrative complexity or role-playing choices of, say, Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion. Very well done, JVC. Final score: 8.

Just picturing my characters doing this one is fun.

9. Graphics, sound, inputs. The graphics of the era still have not advanced out of the "functional" stage. The game makes good use of sound, for the time, but to modern ears it's repetitive and ultimately annoying—I played most of the game with the sound off. Keyboard controls are easy enough to get used to. Final score: 4.

10. Gameplay. As I previously covered, gameplay in Might and Magic is very non-linear, which (as I also previously covered), I like a lot. Except for a handful of locked doors for which you have to find the keys, there's almost nowhere in the game world that you can't trek from the starting town—assuming you can survive the monsters (hint: you can't). I liked that the game essentially required me to explore to even figure out what the main quest was about. The difficultly of the game is well-balanced. Although you die a lot, particularly at the beginning, the pace of the gameplay is fast enough that you don't really mind (assuming you haven't been a complete idiot about saving). Just as it starts to drag a bit, you start to get a selection of spells—time warp, fly, teleport, town portal—that make traveling about the world a bit faster, and low-level monsters much easier to dispatch. It was over just when I was about ready for it to be over, which is always the mark of a good game. My only complaint: no replayability. But that's par for the course in the Silver Age. In the end, this game was exactly what it should be to earn a high score on my blog: addictive. Final score: 8.

The final tally of 60 is the highest of any CRPG so far, even higher than Ultima IV. This gives me a few pangs, but although I like Ultima IV better as a story, I admit that I probably like Might and Magic better as a game.

As you'll see in my next posting, my next steps are not all that clear. More soon.

    

***

   

Further Reading: The series continues with Might and Magic: Book Two - Gates to Another World (1988), Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra (1991), Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen (1992), and Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen (1993). There was an unrelated game that preceded this one, called Might & Magic: The Lava Pits of Aznar (1983).  

Might and Magic: Won!

Might and Magic ends with a shameless plug.

     

Well, damn that took a long time, but in the wee hours of this morning, I completed Might and Magic: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum, easily the largest and, hence, longest game I have played in my blogging project so far. In fact, I think it's safe to say that it rivals modern games in its overall number of game hours. My last hours in the game were marked by stupid mistakes and laughable errors, starting with the revelation—after I had won the game—that I had missed the graphics setup executable in the game folder. Instead of seeing this for the past 50 hours of gameplay... 

       

       

...I could have been seeing this:

       

      

Oh, well, the important part is the gameplay, right? We'll get to that. When I last blogged, I was working to fill in pieces of each map and stop dying all the time. This was helped greatly as my spellcasters advanced and got hold of the more powerful spells, some of which could completely obliterate large groups of enemies in one casting. I was able to finish most of the surface and all but a few of the underground maps at this point. I solved two of the more important side quests, one of which involved slaying four big bads in each corner of the map and then spinning a wheel of fortune to get gold, gems, and experience as a reward. The second involved visiting each of the castles in the game world and determining what to do with prisoners found there. This quest was kicked off by a wizard named Ranalou who I met in a cave: 

      

      

The quest offered some real (if basic) role-playing choices that had to jive with your alignment. Among the prisoners you found were scared children, helpless maidens, and vicious demons. I had to decide what to do with each one and then head to the "Statue of Judgment" after dealing with all of them. Good characters were rewarded if they tormented the demon but set the other prisoners free. Evil characters were rewarded for tormenting everyone. Neutral characters were rewarded for walking away from each prisoner. Since my party had a mixture of good, neutral, and evil characters, no one got the full reward. If I were to play again, I would stock my party with characters of a single alignment.

       

As I covered in another recent posting, sex turned out to play a role. In one town—Portsmith—male characters were drained of hit points every time they walked through certain (unavoidable) intersections. This turned out to be the work of a succubus holed up in a secret room, and in due course I was able to find and kill her and her minions. But to even stand a chance, I used a magic pool in the town's dungeons to change the sexes of all of my male characters so they wouldn't be drained before the big battle. Then, in horrible show of non role-playing, I never got around to changing them back. "Redbeard" the dwarf fighter, and all of his compatriots, ended the game as females. I spent a lot of time fighting my way through the four levels dungeon of Dragadune to find the enigmatic "Clerics of the South," who rewarded me with this message: 

       

    

I had absolutely no idea what this meant, and I was a little annoyed at having worked so hard for it. Only after winning the game and checking a walkthrough did I find that this meant I could return to various spots that boosted my stats and get them boosted again, as well as complete the Statue of Judgment quest again. Oh, well. In the Castle of Doom, after battling my way through hordes of tough monsters, I found this message scrawled on a wall: 

       

         

I remember the Star Trek episode of the same title, and at first I thought this was just a geeky reference to it (the MM team is well known for its frequent Star Trek references, including "Q" in VI). But it turned out to be an important plot point in the game, as we'll soon see. In the corner of another map, in an area accessible only through the use of the "etherealize" spell, which allows the party to pass through walls, I found a "Land of the Lost" in which dinosaurs roamed. 

        

       

Battling through them, I found an "Hourglass of Time," which reverted all my characters to the age of 18. Many of them had been pushing 50 by then, which means that in game time, my party had been adventuring together for 32 years. That's quite a quest. My dungeon explorations allowed me to assemble the two strange "messages" that you find in pieces around the world. The first was singularly unhelpful, only telling me where the various fountains and pools and other sites were that raise each of your stats by 4 points each. I had already found them all by the time I figured out the message. The other one spelled out the game: 

     

THE SCOOP: FOR SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF BOOK ONE, THESE ARE THE TASKS THAT MUST BE DONE. RIDDLES AND QUESTS, DISCOVERIES AND TRAINING, EACH HAS A VALUE THAT INCREASES YOUR RATING. THE KING'S TRUE SELF YOU MUST IDENTIFY, TO BE WORTHY OF THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU CAN APPLY. RETURN FROM THE ASTRAL PLANE FROM 5 DIFFERENT LOCATIONS, THE 6TH VISIT WITH A KEY CARD SHALL END YOUR FRUSTRATIONS! YET 9th LEVEL YOU MUST HAVE ATTAINED FOR THE INNER SANCTUM TO BE CLAIMED. FROM MY DREAMS TO REALITY, AND REALITY TO DREAMS, A SEQUEL IS IN ORDER, WONDROUS IT SEEMS... JVC

        

A little helpful, I guess, but nothing I wouldn't have figured out on my own. "JVC" is the creator, Jon Van Caneghem, who I think is still in the business. Jon, if a little ego-surfing leads you to this blog, you made a hell of a game. The toughest quest leading up to the endgame concerned the blind seer Og. One of the first clues I got in the game, from a statue in Sorpigal, was that I needed to restore his sight with two idols, and this was somehow connected to a black and white checkboard pattern I kept finding in dungeons. Well, I did find the pattern a lot, and in two of the locations, searching yielded the necessary idols. I took them to Og and got this... 

      

      

Now, if I'm not mistaken, this is another Star Trek reference—specifically to the unexplained three-dimensional chess that they sometimes play in the original series. At least, it's the only way I can explain "levels." To solve this, I first thought, the creators wanted me to know the rules of 3-D chess from Star Trek? Jesus. Then I remembered three clues I had received in other black and white checkboard rooms. They were:

• The first part is female
• The second part is most valuable
• The last part is the first

Helpful, right? Friends, I came awfully close to breaking my "no spoilers" rule. The first clue was easy enough: "Queen." The other two, I just couldn't figure out, mostly because I was thinking that 3D chess might have all kinds of esoteric moves. Answers I'm embarrassed to say that I tried include "QUEEN TO GOLD QUEEN" and "QUEEN TO DIAMOND QUEEN LEVEL" or some such nonsense. Ultimately, I realized the answer would have to parallel the challenge, with the name of a piece, the name of another piece's "level," and the number of the level. The "most valuable" piece is a king and could "the first" refer to something as absurdly simple as....yes, the answer was "QUEEN TO KING'S LEVEL 1." After all that, this is what I got: 

       

       

Great, right? Except that I had already found the prisoner in Doom! So all that was just for the 25,000 experience points, which by this point in the game I was getting in three or four battles with dragons. Bloody hell. Here was the aforementioned prisoner: 

      

       

This dovetailed nicely with what the crashed aliens had told me earlier in the game, so with the Eye of Goros, I went off to challenge the fake Alamar. 

        

       

Alamar revealed himself as the alien "demon" and threw me into a dungeon called the Soul Maze, where I was immediately confronted with this question: 

        

       

Now, folks, if I was embarrassed at how long it took me to solve Og's riddle, this one really fills me with shame. I spent hours mapping the dungeon making sure that I turned and faced each wall. To my frustration, I couldn't find any messages written anywhere that told me my captor's name. I must have gone through it three or four times before I finally took a good look at the map I had been making: 

       

       

I mean, could that be any easier to see? MY NAME IS SHELTEM (I don't know what to make of the enigmatic "HELP" in the upper left). Anyway, I gave the answer, and here's when things got weird:

       

        

Okay...well, I had a pretty good idea where the Inner Sanctum was: on the Astral Plane, which I had the foresight to have already visited and mapped. Somewhere along the line—I missed to tell ye in my tale—I found the key card I needed to get into the place, and so without further ado, I made my way. 

      

       

So it turns out that the game world, called Varn, was actually VARN (Vehicular Astropod Research Nacelle)—a space ship. An alien invader named Sheltem crashed on the ship and impersonated a king. And all the monsters and undead and magic were...what?....aspects of the same technology that powers the ship? Things get weird when you combine fantasy with sci-fi. The references to Corak are never explained, and it remains unclear what happened to Sheltem. Quite oddly, there is no final battle. I expected an epic confrontation with Sheltem that never came: if you re-visit Alamar's/Sheltem's castle, you just get tossed into the Soul Maze again. The game allows you to keep playing and finish any side quests. There are 37 according to one walkthrough, and I think through my exhaustive mapping of the game world, I was able to complete them all.

       

I made a video of the end game (it starts with me killing some dragons just because I can and is interrupted a couple of times while I take screen shots) if you're interested. Otherwise, it's time for my review posting and then on to...The Bard's Tale II. Bollocks. 

       

Might and Magic and Quests

The adventurers get a quest that truly tests their ingenuity.

    

I've been waiting for Might and Magic to settle in to a more cohesive narrative before I posted again, but that just isn't happening. The game is, rather, coming together like a puzzle, and until I get more pieces I won't be able to see the full picture.

After I found the Merchant's Pass, I was able to visit a couple of the castles and get quests. It appears that each lord gives a series of quests, starting with very easy ones ("bring me garlic!" or visit a particular location) and escalating to hard ones. My current quest is to find a medusa's head. I have a pretty good idea where to look, but gorgons and basilisks keep turning me to stone, and I won't have "stone to flesh" for another level yet. Fortunately, whenever I encounter obstacles like this, there's another map to explore.

In my first Might & Magic posting, I thought there might be around 35 maps to explore. Ha! I didn't account for all the dungeons, caves, castles, and fortresses—some with multiple levels. I'm up to 53 now, and I think it might be finally slowing down. Still making very little progress on the "main quest," but I'll let you know when that changes.

The game got a little easier when I reached Level 4 and got two spells: "time warp," which allows you to escape combat, and "surface," which allows you to quickly exit a dungeon. These coupled with "fly" mean that I'm never more than a few moves from a town, healing, and a save point. But you can't always rely on them. "Time warp" has a way of failing right when you need it most, and I still get wiped out in about 25% of my forays from town.

A few other random things from the game.

1. Black & white checkerboard rooms. I keep finding rooms like this one in dungeons:

A statue in Sorpigal suggests these have something to do with the seer Og (who I found on one of the maps but couldn't do anything with), but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with them. (S)earching returns nothing and there are no secret doors.

2. Magic square puzzle. One of the dungeons had this neat soduku-ish game where the entire dungeon was laid out in a 4 x 4 grid. The center of each room had a dial that you could set to a number from 1-9. Some of them were already pre-set to numbers higher than 9. I figured out right away that it was a magic square in which all of the rows and columns needed to add up to the same number (34) and you could only use each number once. With a little help from Excel, I figured it out and was duly rewarded. I can't remember this type of puzzle in a CRPG earlier than this one.

3. Messages. One of the consistent features of Might & Magic is that you encounter a series of nonsense messages at various places in the game (in VI and VII they're on obelisks scattered throughout the land; in I they're written on walls). Once you've found all the messages, you interleave the letters or words to determine the total narrative. I've only found a few, so I can't even begin to guess. There seem to be two sets—one with letters and one with entire words.

4. Corak. In one dungeon, I found this message scrawled on a wall. It is the first reference to the enigmatic Corak, who appears in a bunch of the Might & Magic games, but frankly I forget what his specific role is. I just remember him—or references to him—in III. Maybe this game will remind me.

5. A dungeon with invisible walls. I stumbled into this one from a magic door. The "locate" spell didn't work and you couldn't see most of the walls—you could only try to walk into them and get a "blocked!" message. This was a pain to map. I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to do there; I apparently need some kind of card.

6. The experience fountain. In a ruined castle called Dragadune, I found this fountain, which takes your gold and gives you an equivalent number of experience points. I thought this was unique to Might & Magic VI. Now I'm wondering if all Might & Magic games have one and I've just forgotten—or missed them.

6. Little touches. Wandering through the fortress of the minotaur lord, you come across things like this. Yes, it would be nice if the game actually showed you these tapestries, but we're a few years away from those graphical capabilities. It's still a neat touch that keeps the game interesting.

My basic strategy has been to explore each map until I get blocked—either because I need an item I don't have or because the monsters get too hard—and then move on to the next map, revisiting the previous ones at higher levels. As much as I enjoy the game, I'm getting ready for it to end—my long list awaits—but I actually want to find out what the main quest is, who Corak is, and the fate of the alien invader. To me, that's a sign of a good CRPG.

Might and Magic and Adventure

I do like riddles in CRPGs, even if this one was pretty damned obvious.

     

You will be pleased to know that I've been living up to my name. I happen to be working on my PhD right now. I should be done with my coursework in February, provided I don't flunk out of the program before then. Yesterday, I had two papers due, but I put them off until today—turning them in a day late—because I spent most of yesterday playing Might and Magic. How far I've come since high school!

Usually when I don't post anything for a few days it's because I'm traveling or working and trying my best not to think about CRPGs. Lately, it's been for a different reason: I've been playing. Over the weekend, I didn't want to tear myself away from my gaming to blog about it. I have essentially the same problem with vodka.

As I mentioned towards the end of my last posting, I was dissatisfied with the combat performance of my spellcasters, largely because I hadn't taken into consideration the effects of speed on combat initiative. I rolled a new sorcerer and new cleric and spent much of my playing time getting them up to speed while still exploring. I've mapped at least some of all of the 20 outdoor areas, although almost all of those maps have notes for things I have to come back and do when I'm at a higher level or have found some key or something.

I'm also finally getting hints about the main quest—I think. Actually, a few things happened and I'm not sure which are related to the main quest. Here are my options:

Main Quest Possibility 1: Something to Do with a Minotaur King

I found clues in two towns directing me to a particular map square where I found a whistle that will allow me entry to the minotaur lord's enchanted lair. Part of me thinks this is the main quest because the hints came from two brothers I was told to seek by the wizard who finished off the first quest in the game. Also there was a statue in the first town that talked about the minotaur lord's castle in the Enchanted Forest. The strength of this possibility is that it appeared early in the game, which main quests usually do.

Main Quest Possibility 2: Aliens

On another map square, I met "the exiled Lord Kilburn" who gave me a map that prevented me from getting hopelessly lost in the desert.

            
               

It took me forever to explore the desert anyway because it's full of teleporters that randomly pop you around the map, and even if you don't get lost, walking through the desert consumes a unit of food for every step. Nonetheless, I finally found a circle of mountains in the middle of which was...wait for it...an alien spacecraft.

            
              

The game gave me a role-playing choice and I decided to be friendly. Suddenly, the alien spoke English:

           
             

Now, any player of any other Might and Magic game knows that the series has a way of diverging suddenly into science fiction. In Might and Magic III, the final dungeon is a spacecraft. Might and Magics IV and V have a sci-fi game ending that I won't spoil here. Might and Magics VI and VII have you battling alien invaders. There is a basic sci-fi mythology to the whole series, and I wondered if it would appear in the first game. I'm glad to see it does; maybe it will solve some of my confusion on the rest of the series. So the sci-fi element makes this very likely to be the main quest, but I can't be fully sure.

       
Main Quest Possibility 3: It Hasn't Started Yet

         

Main quests are often introduced by lords and kings, but I have yet to be able to speak to any of them. Why? Every time I go into a castle, I get booted out because I don't have a merchant's pass. It turns out there was one very easy to find early in the game but I overlooked it. Now that I have one, I can start speaking to kings and queens, see if they tell me anything useful, and perhaps expose the alien impostor besides.

       

Not having any idea about the main quest this late in the game is a bit unusual, but in Might and Magic, you get so easily distracted by side quests and other encounters. I've lost track of all the fun things I've encountered just wandering around the maps. Here's a quick sample:

• A gypsy who reads my characters and tells me their signs. On another map, accurate knowledge of these signs compels a bridge guardian to extend a magical bridge across the ocean to a hidden area; getting the signs wrong destroys your characters(!)
• A throne adorned with gems. A mysterious voice poses a riddle whose answer is "love." The correct answer provides the characters with a diamond key (don't know what it opens yet).
• Very powerful creatures, including a black knight and a sea dragon. I know from a statue in Sorpigal that if I kill them, I'll get rewarded at the Wheel of Fortune (which I found), but I'm a long way from being a high enough level to do that.
• A mountain peak whose views give you hints as to encounters on other maps.

           

             

• A town (Portsmith) in which every resident is a woman and male characters are continually drained of their hit points, making combat nearly impossible.
• A cave full of teleporters, the successful navigation of which puts you in touch with a wizard named Ranalou who gives you access to a bunch of portals to other places.
• Fountains that temporarily raise your statistics.
• A grove of trees. You apparently get some reward for climbing each one, but climbing them leads to encounters and I haven't survived yet.

         

                        

• A statue of a lion asking for a password.
• A statue with a "scroll of judgment." Haven't figured out what to do there yet.
• A forest in which mysterious weeping echoes throughout.

             

            

And finally, several notes to round out my previous discussion of combat in Might and Magic.

               

• Might and Magic continues The Bard's Tale tradition of throwing at you rosters of monsters that seem implausible as coordinated groups. Three clerics, six vampire bats, and a acidic slug. A minor demon, three militiamen, and four swarms of bees. How do you plan an attack with a swarm of bees? Why do you?

           

                 

• There's a handy keyboard shortcut, CTRL-A, that makes you cycle through combat very quickly. Each character in melee range attacks, each one with a missile weapon shoots, and other characters just guard. Very handy for low-level monsters.
• Donating at temples causes the priests to bless you with a battery of protection spells until you rest. You could cast each one individually, but they take time.

               

                  

• Attacking certain creatures (unicorns, pegasuses, clerics, etc.) causes your alignment to slip. Good characters become neutral and neutral characters become evil. You have to pay to right things. This is particularly annoying because there's no "talk" option, so if you want to avoid attacking a group of creatures, you have to try to flee.
• Flee almost never works. Especially when you need it most.
• Even when wandering low-level areas with high-level characters, you can never get too cocky. Centaurs and sprites, for instance, are both easy to deal with singly, but run into a pack of them and they will repeatedly cast sleep or curse (respectively), destroying your chances of fighting back. One unlucky random encounter can ruin hours of work if you don't keep going back to a town and saving (which has the unfortunate drawback of resetting the map).
• I am still dying at the same rate as before: for every 30 minutes of gameplay only about 10 is "saved." This isn't as bad as it sounds because most of that time is spent mapping, and once that's done, it's done whether your characters survived or not.
• I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but the "turn undead" spell, even on the basest of creatures, works about 1 time in 20.

             

Still having a great time, though. Games like this are why I started this project. No question about finishing this one.