Game 503: The Shadow of Yserbius (1992)

         

The Shadow of Yserbius

United States

Ybarra Productions (developer); Sierra Online (publisher)

Multiplayer online version released 1992 for DOS on the Sierra Network (later the ImagiNation Network)

Solo offline version released 1993 for DOS

Taken offline in 1996

Date Started: 9 February 2024 

      

I often wonder why the makers of MMOs don't try harder to ensnare MMO-shy audiences (like me) by adapting them to solo audiences. If it weren't for the simultaneous presence of other human players, I would be all over World of Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls Online, probably to my ruin. In fact, there are many things I find attractive about the sub-genre, including constantly-changing worlds and near-endless expansions. I would happily pay a monthly fee to experience a world like Skyrim in which there were always new quests and surprises. But you'd have to pay me to experience it with other lunatics who think it's acceptable to put digits in their character names.

    

I was thus initially glad to see that the fondly-remembered Shadow of Yserbius had offered an offline "solo mode" version that included the game's first expansion, The Fates of Twinion (1993). And to be clear: this game was specifically marketed for a single player; it's not just an example of a game where offline play was technically possible but not encouraged, like Neverwinter Nights (1991). Given that, it's a little disappointing that at least one of the features (the tavern) demands that you connect to the Sierra Network and you can only adventure with a single player even though the game is clearly balanced for a party.

      

This is a pretty cool cover. There's also no doubt that you're buying a "solo" version.

       

The Digital Antiquarian published a long piece in 2018 about the genesis and growth of the Sierra Network. He recounts that Ken Williams, Sierra's co-founder and president, got excited about the possibilities of online gaming in 1988, when he first signed on to Prodigy. In 1989, the company created a kind of "shell" for accessing CompuServe called "Sierra's On-Line"; shortly after, they launched a Sierra BBS. Finally, the Sierra Network went online in 1991, offering flat rate access for $12 a month to California residents and $5 per month plus $2 per hour to the rest of the nation. In 1992, the company offered three "premium" services on the Network: SierraLand, LarryLand (a casino), and MedievaLand; unlimited access to all of them cost $150 a month. Yserbius was the "centerpiece" of the latter service, the Network's better-looking answer to Neverwinter Nights. In 1993, the Sierra Network changed its name to the ImagiNation Network.

    

Yserbius was designed by Joe Ybarra, a former Apple and Electronic Arts employee with production credits on Starflight (1986) and The Bard's Tale (1986), among others. As a designer, we've only seen his work on Spellcraft: Aspects of Valor, which I did not finish. The design team included Karl Buiter (Sentinel Worlds, Hard Nova) and Michael E. Moore (Mars Saga, BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception). Given the unconventional choices in the developers' earlier titles, it's surprising to see here what is essentially a nice-looking Wizardry clone.

      

I never like to see "1.0." It suggests to me that no bugs have been fixed.

       

An introductory cinematic establishes the setting as Twinion, once a "prosperous port ruled by the Galabryan Kings." They made the mistake of hiring a wizard named Arnakkian Slowfoot, who killed or arranged the killing of King Leowyn. Leowyn's son, Prince Theowayen, succeeded him, but he became a puppet of the evil wizard. Seeking immortality, Arnakkian summoned the Time Elemental, En-Li-Kil, to pump him for knowledge, but En-Li-Kil escaped his bonds. With the help of some demonic friends, the elemental raised a volcano--the titular Yserbius--right next to the royal palace and buried it in lava. Presumably, Arnakkian and Theowayen were killed, but the text doesn't explicitly say. Later, King Cleowyn the Cruel forced dwarven slaves to carve a castle into Yserbius, but after he took up residency there, the king and his court mysteriously vanished. Now adventurers occasionally mount expeditions into the mountain, seeking fabled treasures.

       

I'm guessing a wizard is about to get involved.

 

Jazz hands!

That is an innovative form of revenge.

            

The game begins in the guild, where the player chooses from a slate of existing adventurers or creates his own. There are human, orc, elf, troll, gnome, halfling, and gremlin races and barbarian, knight, ranger, cleric, thief, and wizard classes. The player chooses between harmony and chaos alignments and allocates a small pool of bonus points to the established rolls for strength, defense, agility, and initiative. You also see your starting spells and skills and can add a few bonus points to those, too.

       

Character creation.

       

I created a human knight (I know--boring), who started with "Shield" and "Resist" spells and the skill of "Binding" (wounds). You can also buy and sell goods in the guild, but you start with a decent set and not much money, so that's best saved for later. Once you leave the guild, you're on a pretty view of Yserbius and its environments, but the only things you can do are re-enter the guild, enter the dungeon, or quit the game. A "tavern" option is unavailable for offline play.

   

The mountain has two entrances. At first, I was confused when both led to the same place. It turns out that if you save the game in the dungeon, the lower entrance takes you back to your save point while the upper entrance takes you back to the dungeon's entry hall. The top entrance also restores your health and mana while the bottom does not.

       

To clarify: the volcano is actively spewing lava, but we can somehow go explore its caves?

       

Once you enter the dungeon, the game switches to a familiar first-person view. I agree that it looks nicer than Neverwinter Nights, but it's still tiles and still textures. 

   

There are things to love and hate about the interface. On the "love" side, you move, turn, and strafe using the numberpad. On the hate side, none of the other actions have keyboard shortcuts, so you have to do everything but moving by clicking around with the mouse. This becomes particularly tedious in combat. But on the plus side again, the automap and paperdoll inventory system both work very well.

        

I guess I'll come back.

     

But the best part of the interface is that you can right-click on anything to get more information. Right-clicking on command icons gives you a description of what they do. Right-clicking on spells tells you about their effects. Back on the negative side, right-clicking on weapons and armor tells you nothing about them. Neither does equipping them. You have to go by relative prices, I guess.

Most of all, having only a single portrait where four are clearly intended makes the offline version feel unfinished. You start to notice the consequences almost immediately. The 11 x 9 entry hall has doorways to three dungeon levels, titled Soldiers' Quarters, Hall of Doors, and the Mines. There are no battles in the entry hall. Random encounters in the other dungeons are with one or two enemies, typically, but fixed encounters usually have multiple parties with more than half a dozen foes. I had to grind to Level 8 before I could even hope to win any battles against these fixed foes sometimes.

      

Battles against single snakes are winnable at this level. This one is not.

      

And yet the character development process was rewarding. Sometimes, I'm just embarrassingly simple. All I want is to hit orcs with sticks, pick up shiny things, and buy bigger sticks. So somehow I didn't mind the first couple of hours of the game, in which both character leveling and equipment improvements were relatively brisk. I danced back and forth in the corridors, let the enemies come to me (you don't see them in the environment; they just suddenly appear, like in The Bard's Tale), and killed them one or two at a time.

Early game enemies would be familiar to any CRPG veteran. There are a lot of animals (wolves, snakes, mountain lions), fantasy creatures (imps, goblins, skeletons), and humanoids, including combinations of the game's races and classes (orc ranger, hobbit thief, dwarf knight). Their graphics are well-drawn and lightly animated. 

      

This is a nice picture of a skeleton, but I feel like we've seen it before.

      

Combat is okay, but again clearly meant for a multi-character party. There are six "slots" on your side of the screen and six on the enemies', but the enemies can have multiple foes in each slot. You go in order of initiative. Available actions are attack, cast a spell, use a skill, use an item, or flee. For most offensive actions, you have to choose what enemy stack to apply them to, though I suspect later there will be spells that affect all enemies. I haven't faced any parties using more than two slots so far. The combat system is identical to Wizardry or The Bard's Tale in that both sides line up their attacks and then they all execute at once, in order of initiative.

      

Combat can take a while in the early game.

      

I died in about 50% of combats when I was at Level 1, unable to even hit the foes half the time, my own hit point total easily wiped out. However, I soon learned to use the game's advantages. First, even classes that don't sound like they're spellcasters have spells. My knight started with "Shield" and "Resist." "Shield" turned out to be a life-saver; it subtracts directly from enemy damage and ensured that I often took no damage even when enemies hit. Second, my "Binding" skill could heal me to full health in the middle of combat. Third, Potions of Healing are absurdly cheap and work about 5 times before they run out. 

        

Looting treasure at the end of battle.

      

But perhaps most important of all, making the game fundamentally too easy, is the fact that death has no consequences. When you die, you appear back outside the dungeon, having lost no items, gold, or experience earned. I'd say that it's a shortcut back to town, but when you save the game in a dungeon and quit, you reload back in town anyway.

   

After only a few victories, I leveled up. Leveling up gives you a couple of points to allocate to your four attributes, a few points to allocate to spells, and a few points to allocate to skills. Plus, you get new spells and skills. As I went from Level 1 to 8, I got the spells of "Heal," "Lightning," "Dissipate," "Poison Cloud," "Cure," "True Seeing," "Energy Field," and "Bless," and the skills of "Detect," "Rune Reading," "Deflect Magic," and "Fencing." Some of the skills are passive; for instance, "Fencing" adds to my attack abilities when I use a sword.

 

My skill list by the time I reached Level 7. Note that I've right-clicked on "Detect Magic" to see how it works.

        

As I leveled up, I started by putting most of my points into spells I was already getting a lot of use out of, like "Shield," but in addition to improving the spell's effectiveness, it also increases the casting cost. My knight can cast maybe six "Shield" spells (if I cast no other spells) before I have to leave the dungeon and rest, or find a mana potion, so later I adopted more of an even distribution of points.

   

Equipment upgrades were also steady, though equipment is a little odd in this game. If you favor a sword, for instance, you can buy a short sword for 25 gold pieces, a broadsword for 125, a longsword for 1,500, or a katana for 6,000. The most expensive weapon is, oddly, a "war hammer" for 65,000. Similarly, helmets go in order of leather cap (35), head chainmail (700), war hat (4,500), and helmet (40,000). So the steps are pretty significant between upgrades, though with four primary things to upgrade (helms, armor, weapon, and shield), I managed to buy something new almost every couple of levels. I'm currently saving for a ¤40,000 helmet and a ¤125,000 breast plate.

     

Looking over the item list.

      

Eventually, I got to the point where I could at least try some of the fixed battles, so I started exploring each of the three dungeons. As I did, I started encountering NPCs. They exist in fixed squares and just have one thing to say, with no interaction.

    

• In the Soldiers' quarters, a human barbarian said, "This area is called the Soldiers' Quarters. Why it is so named is beyond me. I've wandered these halls for weeks and have found nothing resembling living quarters, much less any soldiers." 

• In the Mines, an orc ranger: "King Cleowyn had a special lockpick which opened a set of doors in the Vestibule, leading to his Palace. He was the king of thieves, or so my father told me."

• In the Hall of Doors, a human wizard: "The lone adventurer is often at a disadvantage in this cursed dungeon. Those deeper levels . . . oh, they are very dangerous, indeed."

      

I'm curious if he shows up in the MMO version.

      

• Also in the Hall of Doors, a gremlin wizard: "The volcano Yserbius roils the sea and makes it unnavigable. We are doomed to live out our miserable lives, unknown to other peoples. I would give my left eyetooth for a way to escape this dull island."

• Back in the Soldiers' Quarters, an elf cleric: "You may think you are limited to only those skills you acquire through your Guild. I know there are places in this dungeon where you may acquire new and different skills."

• And still later in the Soldiers' Quarters, a troll knight: "Under Cleowyn's palace is a strange maze. The maze is infested with thieves, and they seem to be the only ones who know how to get through the thing."

          

Apparently, Cleowyn somehow built a "palace" in the volcano.

      

I really enjoy the automap, which keeps track of your overall progress, annotates things clearly, and will stay active while you move. 

   

When I was strong enough, I decided to go all-in on the Soldiers' Quarters. Every level has some unskippable fixed combats eventually. Here, for instance, the first one I have to get past has three vicious orc barbarians and three ornery human thieves. With a combination of "Shield" and healing in combat, I just make it. The good and bad news is that fixed combats don't "clear," so you can keep entering the same space for grinding. But if you barely survived a battle, you'll have to face it again if you hit a dead end on the other side.

    

An orc barbarian pops up in a hallway to tell me that a dwarf knight told her that there were polar bears and ice lions deep in the dungeon. She wants to know how that's possible in a volcano. I agree with her confusion. Around the next bend, I'm killed by a party of troll rangers and halfling clerics.

       

Who ever heard of "ice lions" at all?

     

Battles are deadliest during the first round, when the enemies' generally-superior initiative lets them get in a bevy of attacks before my "Shield" goes up. I find that if I can survive that without losing more than half my health, the battle is usually winnable after that. Every once in a while, you get lucky with a "crippling wound" or "devastating wound" attack and clear out an entire stack of enemies in one blow.

     

I clear out one group with a single attack. They kill me anyway.

       

Now that I need thousands of experience points between levels instead of a couple of hundred, I think I might lose my enthusiasm for the game a bit. The game needed a better ramp for enemy difficulty. It's like the creators adjusted the difficulty of random battles to account for a solo player but not the fixed battles.

      

The graphics are better, but what we have in Yserbius is a classic Wizardry experience from 12 years earlier: A combination of fixed and random battles; enemies do not appear in the environment; threaded, turn-based combat; and no memory within the game that fixed encounters have been "cleared." To extrapolate, I suspect that progress through the dungeon is going to rely exclusively on having certain inventory items in your possession. I grant that Yserbius has more interesting character development and a much more forgiving death system. Also, some commenters have suggested that there are Dungeon Master style puzzles to come.

        

A slightly different character creation window--or maybe it's the same as the original Yserbius and the solo version is different.

     

Meanwhile, a super-fan of the game going by the handle of "ZaneDubya" has re-written the game in C++ and has made it available online for multiple users, thus replicating the original MMO experience. You can read about it, download it, and play it at the MedievaLands web site. I created an account and created a new character (the creation interface was faithful in spirit but looked a bit different). No one was around when I popped into the tavern. The dungeon graphics were a little better than the original game, and the interface was modified to put the automap and a GTFO cluster on the main screen.

         

Dying in the MedievaLands remake.

         

I got killed by a scorpion almost immediately in my first battle. I'm not sure how you join with other characters. I'm toying with asking for volunteers to meet at a specific time and check it out as a multiplayer game, but I don't know how faithfully we'd be recreating the original experience. I'll think about it. If I do, no numbers in your character names.

       

Time so far: 4 hours