Game 267: Twilight: 2000 (1991)

     

Twilight: 2000

United States

Paragon (developer); Microprose (publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 16 October 2017

Until firing it up, I thought Twilight: 2000 was going to be an RPG about vampires. I don't know where I got that idea, except for the obvious mental connection to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, which I have neither seen nor read. Instead, the setting is apocalyptic. This makes it fairly original. We've see plenty of post-apocalyptic games, but this might be the first set during an apocalypse.

    
The manual (drawing from the materials from GDW's tabletop RPG) outlines a detailed and realistic set of scenarios by which tensions flare between NATO and Warsaw Pact nations over the reunification of Germany and other lingering Cold War issues. (The scenario was written in 1984, I should mention, before the Cold War ended, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, and Germany was reunified peacefully.) At the same time, war breaks out between China and the Soviet Union over border issues. Tensions flare to skirmishes which flare to all-out war. Nuclear exchanges occur, but with no side committing to complete nuclear annihilation. As a result, economies collapse, millions die in famines, and civilizations slowly unravel, with military commanders and units acting largely independently of any civilian authority.
      

Stock footage from planes and tanks sets up the scenario when you start the game.

     

France, which withdraws from NATO early in the alternate history, comes out relatively unscathed, but most of central Europe is a mess. Military units, cut off from any consistent central authority, become marauders or "go native" and help local populations with life-sustaining tasks like farming. Nations dissolve into fiefdoms.

One such fiefdom is in northern Poland, where an evil ex-police official named Baron Czarny has come to power with the support of his Black Legion. The player commands a party of 20 (!) rogue military veterans who come together in Krakow to support the city and oppose Czarny.

I want to pause here and note how odd this main quest is from an American perspective (and, of course, Americans made up the bulk of those who purchased this game). In the pre-Internet era of 1991, Poland was a far-off, barely-understood nation that kids made jokes about without having the faintest idea why. If you knew anything about it, it was a) that it had been invaded by Hitler, and b) the Pope came from there. But the developers chose it, and approximated realistic geography, instead of setting the game in a more familiar place like Germany or Italy, and players probably picked up a few things about the nation while playing.
   
The way the manual describes it, you create 20 characters, each with a unique background and set of skills, drawn from dozens of possibilities. From this party, you'll assemble squads of 4 to go out on various missions, strengthening the overall party and improving your home base, before taking on Czarny himself.

This is just the sort of game that, based on the description, I'd be very excited to play--if I didn't already have plenty of experience with Paragon's attempts to make anything fun out of one of GDW's properties. The warning bells start with the game manual, in which 25 of the 106 pages consist of errata--changes to the game made after the first 81 pages were written. The changes include the removal of equipment, skills, combat options, and sometimes entire interface screens.
        

The errata file makes it clear that "Interrogation" is the only necessary skill in the game.

         
If that isn't enough, the "readme" file that comes with the game documents another 10-12 pages of errata. One of them makes it clear that the only necessary skill in the game is "interrogation." But I don't know how well to trust that because it also lists 16 skills that "have been removed from the game," and those skills are still, in fact, in the game. Or, at least, they're present during character creation.

With my anticipation thus dampened, I went into the very long character creation process. As with MegaTraveller 2, I think the developers intended that the computer version could be used to create tabletop characters. There are six attributes--strength, education, constitution, charisma, agility, and intelligence---each of which governs 6 to 12 skills. Skills include expected things like heavy weapons, rifles, medical, interrogation, lockpicking, computers, stealth, and a variety of different types of aircraft and vehicles; but they also include such esoteric selections as geology, metallurgy, SCUBA, forgery, farming, fishing, and knowledge of any of a couple dozen languages.
      

Some of the game's many skills. I suspect most will turn out to be useless.

     
The manual says that it bolds the ones that are useful in the game, but half of those are on the list that were "removed" according to the errata, and the one skill that the errata says is essential, interrogation, is not bolded. So I don't know what to believe.

I manually created 8 characters, each favoring a particular set of skills, including at least one weapon. With no way to keep track of so many characters, I based them (and named them) on common archetypes. Thus, "Cagney" the ex-cop has skills with things like pistols, interrogation, persuasion, observation, forgery, and tracking. "Brown," the farmer, has all the rural and industrial skills: horsemanship, farming, fishing, foraging, and so forth. "Maverick" is the pilot. "Quinn" is the doctor-scientist. I've got a couple of combat heavies called "Matrix" and "Dutch" and an engineer named "Kaylee." The rest I auto-generated and just gave alphabetical names. You can start with less than 20, but you end up with less equipment and a chance that someone won't have that one skill that you really need, so there's no major advantage.
     

Part of my completed party.

     
Manual generation takes a long time and includes options I can't imagine a CRPG of even today's complexity making full use of. You start with a name and sex and then select a portrait from 15 choices for each sex. Then you choose a nationality from 9 options: Britain, Canada, Germany, Denmark, the United States, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (they used to be one country, kids!), and the U.S.S.R. But it gets better. If you select Canada, Britain, Czechoslovakia, or U.S.S.R., you then choose the character's regional or cultural origin; for instance, Anglo-Canadian or French-Canadian for Canada. For the U.S.S.R., you get 18 sub-options: one for each of the 16 republics plus Chuvash and Tartar. Your selection confers one or two language skills from a list of more than 30.
     

Irish readers, how do you feel about being a sub-category of "Britain"?

  
Then you go to attributes. You can choose the "allocation" method where you divide a pool among the 6 attributes as you'd like, or the "random" method where the game rolls the dice. The "random" method is vastly superior, since with the "allocation" method you only get 32 points, and "random" routinely serves up totals in the 40s. You just have to keep re-rolling until you get the numbers you want. Holding out for at least 6s in everything means that most paths will be open to you.
     

Probably the best set of stats that I got among dozens of tries.

     
You start by allocating 4 points to a random selection of skills that are supposed to represent your hobbies. They include things that the game says will mostly be unused, like fishing, swimming, and motorcycles.

You then move on to your career choices. It starts with three major divisions--education, civilian and military--and branches out significantly from there depending on your choices and attributes. You can even back out of one path and start down another, for instance going to undergraduate school and working as an engineer before joining the Air Force. Usually at some point in your background, war breaks out and you end up with experience in some branch of the military. Various skill selections accompany your choices, and in between terms you get a chance to make further improvements to those "hobby" skills.
        

Various nonmilitary career options. Some have prerequisites for attributes, education, or prior careers.

      
For instance, Cagney started off in an education role as an undergraduate, which earned her computer, instruction, persuasion, and various engineering skills (she changed majors a lot). From there, she went on to law school, which conferred observation, persuasion, and interrogation skills. Instead of practicing as an attorney (which is an option), she went into federal law enforcement (pistol, interrogation, observation, stealth, computer) for three terms. War didn't break out until she was 37 and starting to lose attributes. Despite her age, she was drafted and joined the Army, where basic training conferred rifle, unarmed melee, swimming, wheeled vehicle, and thrown weapon skills. She joined the medical branch (medical, wheeled vehicle), got promoted to sergeant, and starts the game at the age of 41.
     

Cagney's final skill list.

    
Matrix (who I made German, since Austrian wasn't an option) started in the National Military Academy for the Army and immediately developed skills in rifles, heavy weapons, and combat engineering. (I had him focus on vehicles for all his hobbies.) From there, he went to basic training, with its associated skills, and directly into the Special Forces as an officer, which brought various weapons skills plus leadership, persuasion, and the like. He's currently 33 and a captain.

The number of combinations are near-infinite. There are six basic educational paths, twenty-three civilian jobs, and four military branches, each with a handful of arms. A medical character could start as an undergraduate, then go to graduate school, then medical school, then practice for a couple of terms as a physician--or she could head right to the medical corps of the Army. You can start as an entertainer, turn to crime when society collapses, get sent to prison, get drafted from there to the Marine infantry.

Once each character's career finishes, he or she can spend accumulated money on a selection of weapons, armor, and other useful equipment. They typically already come with several grenades and armor items. I made a big mistake here, the consequences of which I didn't fully realize until later in the game. Primarily, I didn't realize that as you scroll from left to right, what you see is the first item in the item's category, and you have to scroll up and down to see the rest of the items. I missed key items like tracked vehicle tools, antibiotics, snow shoes, Geiger counters, and other things. You really want to spend all your money during this phase.
     

Buying my starting items.

      
Once you have your party and deploy them, you begin in your "office" in Krakow. You click on the various icons in the office to accomplish tasks.
      

Didn't anyone in 1990 anticipate dual monitors?

     
The computer shows you your current status; the map indicates what territories you and Baron Czarny control; the radio communicates with your intelligence officer to get the next quest; the file has drawers for game operations and party management; and the lamp takes you out of the office and on to the mission.
    

Choosing which characters are part of the party.

   
For the first mission, the intelligence officer reported that one of Czarny's raids has left the city of Zator in crucial need of medical supplies. The city of Skawina is willing to donate some, but my team has to go pick them up and deliver them.
      

       
After leaving the office, you can visit the store room to get equipped. All the items that you have your characters purchase at the ends of their careers get dumped here, again something I didn't realize until I started playing. I was woefully short on equipment.
   

    
Then it's off to the motor pool to select the vehicle for the mission, which was easy enough for the first one because I didn't have any vehicles yet.
      

The motor pool later, after I'd acquired one vehicle.

      
I headed out the door and began walking to Skawina. The main interface shows an oblique view of a single character representing the entire party. Icons at the bottom, activated with the SPACE bar or the function keys, allow you to find food, handle game operations, radio back to base, check the character sheets, enter combat, talk to NPCs, pick up items, use items, check the map, and use the "observation" skill to gaze far off in various directions.
      

Paragon needs to find a happy medium between the tiny characters of MegaTraveller and the ultra-zoomed in perspective of Twilight: 2000.

    
Each map has a number of buildings that you can enter, but most are empty. You see furniture, but there's no way to interact with it, not even an "open" command for chests and wardrobes and whatnot. I'm guessing there isn't much reason to go inside places unless your quest object is there.

It took me a long time to figure out how to get around. The game map is divided into a number of small, discrete squares. It takes a long time--like, 10 minutes real-time--to cross each one, and there are about 20 of them in between Krakow and Skawina. So instead you use a kind of "fast-travel" by clicking on your destination and letting the computer take you there. When I did that, the computer told me the trip had taken 12 hours on foot but would have been faster if I'd equipped everyone with snowshoes. I hadn't even seen snowshoes as an option when was purchasing equipment, so this was my first clue that I'd missed something.
       

The smallest-scale game map.

      
Skawina had far fewer buildings than Krakow. It had a large building that the legend tagged as a hospital, so I figured the medical supplies must be there, but I searched it and didn't find anything.
       

This hospital isn't big on privacy.

     
I thus started searching the smaller houses. Soon I realized that if you look at the zoomed-in game map, you actually see a tiny flashing light where your quest objective is. In this case, it was in a house to the south of the hospital.
       

If the create is so small that I can hand-carry it for 30 miles, is it really enough to save a city?

      
I picked up the medical supplies and then used the fast travel option to get to Zator, over a day to the north, receiving the same admonishment about snow shoes along the way. Zator also had only a small number of buildings, and this time I was primed to look for the little flashing pixel.
    

You can't really see it in this static shot, but it's in the center building in the north row. The pixel representing me is on the street.

     
I entered the house and encountered my first NPC: a uniformed man. The game adopts MegaTraveller 2's convention by which you have to "hail" an NPC to get him to stop walking, after which you can talk to him. Unfortunately, when I tried, we had a communication barrier: he spoke Polish and none of my party members did. Stupid oversight, given that we're in Poland. I guess if I'd remembered to take a hand-held radio on the mission, there's a way I could have had a Polish-speaking character sent to me, replacing someone in the party, but as it was I had to go back and get him.
      

Maybe giving Polish skills to my character named "Dutch" was too confusing.

      
I returned to HQ and swapped out Matrix for Dutch, who speaks Polish, and returned to the NPC. He gratefully took the supplies and said that, in reward, a Humvee was waiting for us in the center of town.
     

We honestly couldn't have pantomimed this?

     
We found the vehicle and entered, at which point the interface switched to a real-time 3D driving view. This was unexpected and impressive. I haven't played enough with it to see the effects of crashing it into buildings and whatnot, but you certainly get around a lot faster than on foot.
  

I careen through the snow trying to align myself on the road.

   
Within 30 minutes, I was back at the base, where I had to maneuver the vehicle into the garage to finish the quest. One quest down!
    

An animation shows the car going into the bay. From what I can tell, those buildings in the background correspond to Krakow's real skyline, with one of the towers of St. Mary's Basilica at the highest point and the Church of Saints Peter and Paul with the pointy roof to its left.

    
Miscellaneous notes:

• The game manual says that you need to eat and rest every 8 hours, and indeed there are options for fishing, foraging, hunting, and sleeping on the "necessities" menu. But I ignored this for the first quest and nothing ill seems to have happened.

• For all the problems I have with their games, Paragon is one of the only developers of the era offering detailed item descriptions in-game.

   

      

• Navigating is a little hard because the map screen shows north as straight up, but the main game screen has north to the upper-left.

• Some of the buildings are annoying because they have back entrances that are obscured by the front-facing perspective. Fortunately, I read the manual and saw that the "V" key toggles the exteriors of buildings on and off so you can see the doors.

      

The "V" key removes the building's structure so I can see the back door.

     
Having experienced a basic sense of the game--though no combat yet--I started over with a new party (but keeping the same names and basic profiles) so I could properly equip them. I also created a couple characters who spent years and years in undergraduate school learning languages so I could call on them if I really do run into someone in Poland who only speaks Scottish Gaelic.

I'm also going to check out an add-on for the game that came out in 1992 called "The Colonel"; it supposedly embeds more graphics and sound into the main game.
      

Quitting the game gets you the 1991 equivalent of an ad for DLCs.

    
I leave this first session with a slightly positive reaction. The production values on the game are quite good, and the character creation process is more fun than even MegaTraveller. But I worry that Twilight: 2000 will end up delivering the same problems as other GDW games, including too much reliance on a limited skill set and no character development. The manual mentions nothing about skills increasing after creation, and I don't even see a mechanism for it (i.e., no "training center" or something). This omission, which seems to be a chronic issue with GDW games, calls into question its very status as an RPG.

*****

Time so far: 4 hours