Dragonflight: Balancing Average with Average

The game honors Richard Garriott.

With the statue above, the developers of Dragonflight continue to pay tribute to the people who influenced them and their work, including Gary Gygax, father of RPGs, Anne McCaffrey, who contributed the game's title, and Lord British, from whom the developers seem to have taken many of the game's elements.

The more I play the game, the more I feel a strong influence from Ultima III and Ultima IV. The iconographic town and wilderness explorations are the most obvious visual cues. The combat screen is basically a side-view version of the tile-based combat window we first saw in Ultima III, where you could only attack enemies in your line of fire and couldn't move on the diagonal. There are thematic similarities, including detailed back stories, a karma meter, shrines, and the importance of leaving fleeing enemies alone. The approach to dungeons is nearly identical, with a mixture of first-person corridors and third-person rooms, chests in the hallways, secret doors, and--most annoying--traps that you cannot detect or avoid.

Of course, I love the Ultima series, so these comparisons are mostly favorable. Where Dragonflight suffers is in the way it departs from the Ultima games, and this is primarily in a lack of real content. I've explored entire cities where I only found one important piece of information, compared to the pages of dialogue notes I took on every Ultima visit. The Dragonflight world is also much larger. I won't be able to count all the squares until I have a ship, but based on a quick sample of movement and comparison to my positions on the world map, I would estimate that the world comprises around 500 x 750 tiles, in comparison of Ultima IV's 256 x 256. "Larger" translates mostly to "emptier," though. It took me hours of poking around just to find a couple of cities and dungeons.

Actually finding things to enter is a cause for celebration in this game.

Combat eventually got a little boring in Ultima IV. It's happened here much quicker. I now audibly groan every time I enter a dungeon room and find large groups of enemies. There simply aren't enough tactics associated with combat, especially where you cannot switch spells in the middle of combat, use any items during combat, or attack from more than two directions. There aren't even any obstacles in the terrain to help funnel enemies. 

I think there's a ratio between length and the variety of tactics that helps determine the quality of a game's approach to combat. Quest for Glory and Lord of the Rings had hardly any combat tactics, but I never shouted, "Oh, for @%*#'s sake!" when an enemy appeared, because combat lasted less than two minutes in both games. The multi-hour tactical battles of Sword of Aragon also held my interest because there were so many tactics and strategies associated with them. Knights of Legend also had very long combats that were still somewhat fun (although wandering around looking for enemies wasn't so much fun) because of the tactical and strategic options. But I completely lack patience for long (or even moderate-length) combats with only a few tactics.

Here, the only real tactics come in preparation for combat, which makes it doubly important to listen at room doors before entering. Only by learning that you're about to face 9 skeletons, for instance, do you know that it might be a good idea to switch spells to "Dispel Undead" and maybe spend some time healing characters. If facing really tough enemies, like balrons, it might be a good idea to chug a "strength" or "speed" potion first, although I remain paranoid about actually using potions, since some are plot items. The number of enemies is also important because only 4 appear on the screen at the time; the others enter in the lower-right corner as their colleagues are slain. Knowing the number allows me to position my characters in anticipation of new enemies appearing in the lower-right.

Since the last post, I've spent a lot of time just wandering the continent. I found a city called Port Pylon at the tip of the dragon's foot, and they had ships for sale, but well out of my price range.

 

I hope "charter" means "buy." I've been expecting that when I finally get a ship, I can sail it around at will.

The ruler of the city, Duke Drahnreb Sualc-Son IV ("Bernhard" and "Claus" are backwards in there) refused to see me because I "have nothing of importance to report." Elsewhere, a guy wanted a piece of jewelry to give his wife. Fortunately, I had a pearl necklace that I gave him. He rewarded me with a "piece of information" that makes no sense yet: "Today we'll not sail to Dorithannon, but my father was still doing business with the large island. He told me that there would be a route to the southern half."

Also on the south coast was a castle called Scatterbone, where the king gave me a quest to find a potion that would dispel an evil imp always buzzing around his head. (There was a reasonably fun series of animations to accompany this, in which the imp flew around, sparred at the king's head, ducked behind his back, and popped up between the points of his crown.) I tried all the potions I had, but to no avail.

That would be my expression, too.

Far on the other side of the continent, at the tip of the dragon's tail, there was a city called Luthag that seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever, including a shop that--for reasons I can't begin to understand--sells gold pieces at a cost of 3 gold pieces for every 1 gold piece. If you hear me complain later in the game that the economy is broken, remind me that I can always go buy gold.

I also don't know what the hat and cloak are for, but I bought them for my characters anyway.

My quest for the elven queen had talked about finding caves full of treasures, including the elves' sphere, in the dragon's tail or the curve of its neck, which I assumed to be features on the continent. Nonetheless, I couldn't find any caves or dungeons in those locations, although the true "tip" of the tail is a bunch of islands that I can't yet reach.

My current quest has become about collecting enough gold to purchase a ship. Fortunately, I have two unexplored dungeons to work on. One is in the middle of a desert to the south of the continent; the other in a series of mountains on the far west. I'm in that dungeon right now, but I'm out of keys. I've run into so many locked doors that I think before I go further, I need to return to that store in Luthag to buy more keys, lest I miss any major plot items. I'm also--again--running low on food.

This dungeon has a lot of goofy magic mouths.

The dungeon is trickier than most, involving lots of traps, secret doors, teleporters, and magic mouths. One of the latter had a riddle for me, asking who is the "best and mightiest of all wizards." I tried several names from the game manual to no avail.

I find the traps absolutely enraging, since there's no way to do anything about them. Those that cause your weapons to disappear, or that cause the chest to disappear, are particularly unforgivable. Even if I reload after experiencing them, more often than not, the same trap is still active. Oddly, the traps don't seem to apply to specific chests. Instead, the game gets it in its head that the next chest I'll open will have a "disappearing chest" trap, and there's nothing to do about it. The only way I've found to make it go away is to trigger the trap, then go find other chests and open them until I find one with contents I can live without, then reload and go open that chest and let it fall victim to the trap. At that point, the original chest is usually clear, or at least has a different trap.

Why am I taking so much damage just walking through a secret door?!

This is a short post representing about 5 hours of gameplay, most of it just wandering around the continent and battling my way to the fourth level of the current dungeon. I'm ready for the game to be over, but I don't suspect I'm close.

Aside from the traps, Dragonflight doesn't do anything horrid, but neither does it do anything particularly well. There's nothing I look forward to, nor anything I dread, when I fire up the game and start playing. Most games destined for a middle-ranking position on my GIMLET balance good and bad elements, but Dragonflight just balances average and average elements. This makes playing it a somewhat joyless affair, and I can only bring myself to do it for a couple of hours, even when watching Netflix alongside it. Nonetheless, I will continue. I don't want the game to beat me, and I am mildly interested in how the plot resolves.

I will, however, probably intersperse posts on other games in the meantime. As for those next games, there's been a bit of a bloodbath on the list. After some investigation, I've rejected FallThru and Lord of the Balrogs as RPGs. I've also declined to play Knight Quest because it seems like just an extension of Eamon, which I've already covered. If I do every update and remake of Eamon, I'll have to do Eamon II, Super Eamon, and various Windows ports, and none of them have more than a couple of associated adventures.

Objections welcome, but assuming there are none, I'm next going to take a look at King's Bounty (1990) and Maze Master (1983).