Paladin: Two Quests Down (with Final Rating)

The adventurers find an armory. That's a secret door below the active character.

  

Paladin

United States

Omnitrend Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1988 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS 

Date Started: 22 May 2011

Date Ended: 24 May 2011

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 21

Ranking at Time of Posting: 7/56 (13%)

Ranking at Game #453: 162/453 (36%)

Determined to get at least one quest finished before I called it quits on Paladin, I kept assailing the house and finally won. In doing so, I learned a little bit more about the game's tactics, although I still maintain that they're not significant enough to hold my interest. The most difficult aspect of the game is that if one fighter (either one of yours or an enemy) faces the other with his full movement strength, he can almost always slay that enemy during the round. Full movement grants between 8 and 10 swings, and it only takes 3 hits to kill most foes (including your characters). Thus, if you are unlucky enough to end the combat round with the enemy right in front of you, you will almost certainly die. This leads to a little bit of tactical maneuvering, in which you try to get your enemy to come to you. If they refuse to budge, you have to assemble your party at a staging point (for instance, just outside the door to a room), and then charge when you're sure you have enough movement points to reach the enemy and engage him in the same round--or when you know you can blast him from afar with bolts or fireballs.

          

Assembling outside a door before charging a room.

     

Fireballs, incidentally, turn everything in a 3 x 3 square to rubble, so you have to be careful using them around objects that you might want to pick up. I lost the quest once when I cast it too near a quest item and destroyed it. 

A room blasted by a fireball.

I won the scenario on perhaps my sixth attempt, mostly by exercising more tactical caution. The goal again was to find the deed and the land grant for the house. One scroll was in the sub-basement, and the other was naturally in the attic. To get them, I had to slay rival fortune hunters and several ghosts.

A ghost keeping me from the deed.

Exiting the level involves marching back to the "exit pentagram" and ending the turn: At this point, the game gave me a simple message that "you have completed the quest" and told me that my paladin's accuracy had improved: The quest is then over, and the game saves my improved paladin file for use in another scenario. This is the only thing that really qualifies Paladin as a quasi-CRPG. Knowing this entry wouldn't be long enough at this point, I started another scenario, called "Trojan Hoax," and was put in charge of two swordsmen, two mages, a ranger, and a thief.

The paladin is the only character that you get to name. Apparently, I have a significantly handicapped thief.

The quest in this scenario sounds a bit dumb, but here it is: I stormed the castle (not a good tactic) and found a the entryway full of guards who slaughtered half my party in about two rounds.

A mage and a swordsman stood where this rubble is now.

The entry hall was a dead end, but I found a teleportation pentagram that took me outside the tower, where my party was attacked by dragons. The dragons fell surprisingly easily given that they were dragons. Making my way around the tower the long way, I finally made it to the tower's upper levels, where I found the princess surrounded by monster guards: I managed to kill them, losing all but my paladin himself in the process, but then I ran afoul of the game's extremely short time limit for this quest. The second time around, with some foreknowledge of the layout, I was able to rescue my beloved and once again given the game's wonderfully rewarding quest completion message: I got another message that my accuracy increased. I admit that I found the game slightly more enjoyable today than when I first posted about it, but not enough to complete a bunch more missions. The game would be more interesting if the quests were unified under some kind of general theme. Fractured as they are, playable in just about any order, some of them not particularly chivalrous...

Ah, a noble quest for wealth and power.

...the game doesn't have a very good overall game world (1). Compare this to Sorcerian, which had the same sort of quest-based structure but tied it together with a kingdom and town that you visited between quests. Paladin doesn't even tell you the name of the world in which you're operating. If the game didn't allow some basic character development, it wouldn't have any CRPG credentials at all, but it's very basic character development. When creating the character, the only option you have is the paladin's name, and the attribute increases you receive at the ends of quests are determined by the game, not anything you decide (2). There are scattered NPCs, usually there to greet you at the beginning, but they tell you nothing interesting and you have no dialog options (1).

Good one.

There are a handful of monsters that the game uses over and over, not even bothering to tell you their names, and no way to role-play encounters, although the monsters do act differently depending on type (2). Combat is tactical, which is the purpose of the game, but you have fewer options than in most real RPGs and the selection of magic spells is paltry (4). There are some scattered bits of equipment--potions and missile weapons, mostly--around the levels, but in general you don't get to upgrade your weapons and armor, and the game barely meets my rule or CRPG minimums here (1). There is no economy at all (0). The game has no main quest; it's composed of various limited-duration side quests that have varying levels of interest and difficulty, but only one outcome (3). The graphics and sound are reasonable enough, but whether you use the mouse or keyboard, the controls are horrible (3). Finally, the gameplay within each quest is very linear, but the quests have the virtue of brevity and the overall difficulty is balanced well for a strategy game (4). The final score of 21 puts it on the lower tier of games, but of course I'm rating it as a CRPG, not as a strategy game, which is closer to its correct category. I have to figure out what I'm doing with Omega before moving on to Pool of Radiance. I'm trying not to let my eagerness for the latter ruin my experience of the former.

Game 56: Paladin (1988)

       

Paladin

United States

Omnitrend Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1988 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS 

Date Started: 22 May 2011
      
To me, certain computer game genres age better than others. I think CRPGs age very well, which is really the entire point of my blog. The stories, gameplay, and challenges found in titles like Ultima IV and Might & Magic rival or exceed most current releases. Adventure games, too, can provide delight well past their shelf lives because of the richness of their plots and the challenge of their puzzles. Anyone who eschews Zork or King's Quest just because they're "old" is as characterless as someone who refuses to watch Casablanca or listen to Benny Goodman for the same reasons.

But it's also true that other genres struggle to find relevance with age. First-person shooters are a good example. Doom was groundbreaking for its time, but it's hard for me to imagine finding a lot of fun in it now, with other shooters on the market that offer the same basic experience but with better graphics, sound, and controls, and the ability to look up and down. [Later edit based on comments: Oh, for #$*%s sake, people. Fine. Doom is the greatest game ever made. All hail the glory of Doom.] I imagine simulation games suffer some of the same problems, when each new release offers even more realistic simulation. I don't play many simulation games, so I could be wrong, but would anyone really enjoy the first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator today, knowing that a more recent version would offer a more realistic experience, more aircraft, more locations, hardware acceleration, and so on?

Even within the basic genres, certain sub-genres age better than others. When I was playing Sorcerian, I noted that action RPGs tend to age worse than regular RPGs, simply because action RPGs are more "about" graphics and animation.

Strategy games fall somewhere in the middle. Strategy games are fundamentally about variables, and if you really like strategy games, you enjoy weighing the probabilities associated with power, movement, and resources--just like a real war theater. The best strategy games are those that give the most useful and interesting variables, and this isn't necessarily dependent on age. I remember playing a Civil War strategy game when I was a kid that would have given Einstein a migraine. It took me months to figure out what I was doing, but once I had a handle on it, the game was a joy. Graphics are secondary in strategy games; some great ones (Reach for the Stars, Roadwar) barely have any graphics. I thought Warlords took a significant step backwards between III and IV because the latter jettisoned many of the strategic variables in favor of better graphics and animation. Did any Warlords fan really want that?

This brings me to Paladin, which is a strategy game without a lot of variables, which means that it didn't age very well. The game is a quasi-CRPG, and I admit that it satisfies all three of the core criteria that I establish in Rule #1. But I find it so little fun that I'm almost moved to spend the rest of my six-hour minimum staring at the opening screen rather than actually playing it.

Paladin has the least intuitive controls, of any game I've played so far. The game follows the opening screen above with a partially-rendered screen that makes it look like the game has frozen. No amount of clicking or typing seems to help. Only by a careful reading of the manual do you determine that the function keys are the way to control the game, and only by a more careful reading do you realize that the process of creating a new paladin involves opening up a different program and using more arcane function commands.

You control a party of characters moving through one of several scenarios or "quests," each with a different set of objectives. Only your paladin, the leader, can move from quest to quest, and as he does, his statistics improve. Each quest is made up of turns alternating between your characters and enemies, much like in Warlords, Heroes of Might & Magic, or any number of similar strategy games.

10 quests come with the basic game, but the publisher, Omnitrend, released Paladin Quest Disk: The Scrolls of Talmouth later the same year. The game also came with a construction set, and the version of the game that I downloaded contains several files that I can only imagine were constructed by fans.

The first quest I tried was called "House" and the game put my paladin (Drust) in charge of a swordsman and two mages. The quest instructions told me the back story:

A holy quest for real estate!

The "victory conditions" tell me that I have to find the scrolls and get off the combat map within an hour (all quests are timed).

During your turn, each character can move, attack an enemy, pick up an object, use an object, unlock a door, or cast a spell. Total actions and movement are limited by "movement points." In many ways, playing the game is like being perpetually on the combat screen in Demon's Winter or the D&D "Gold Box" games (which, incidentally, Paladin is keeping me from), except that I think you have fewer options in Paladin. You certainly have fewer spells: rangers can cast confuse, speed, invisibility, and detect door, and mages can cast those plus fireball and mind stun.

Targeting an enemy in a basement.

The biggest problem with the game is that without the ability to move diagonally, it takes forever to get around the game map, especially when you're walking through corridors and your characters can't get past each other. I also lost patience when the game decided that the SHIFT key was being held down permanently, and every time I tried to move to the next character (N key), it insisted on ending the turn (SHIFT-N).

Three characters trying to pile through a doorway.

I made three assails against the house, and did find one of the scrolls one time, but you lose the game if your paladin dies, and that kept happening to me.


Sigh. I suppose I can't leave this game until I win at least one of the quests, but I promise you, this game is tedious and boring. Don't look for a lot of postings here.