#oneaday Day 890: Glorification

I’m probably about halfway through Quest for Glory IV so far and I have to say, I’m a big fan of the series. Back in “olden times” our family were pretty big fans of Sierra adventures, but the Quest for Glory series was one which passed us by for some reason. While the games have aged better in some respects than others, one thing has become very clear from playing them: the combination of adventure game and RPG works. And it works very well indeed.

The reason it works so well is because the two aspects are intertwined so seamlessly with one another. Rather than being an interactive storybook with battles (as I once heard Final Fantasy VII described ) the RPG elements are woven into the adventure gameplay. Your character’s stats are for more than simply how tough they are in battle — and in fact, combat plays a relatively minor role in most of the series. Instead, standard adventure game actions in Quest for Glory often involve a behind-the-scenes “skill check”, with the on-screen character either succeeding or failing at the action in question according to his skill levels. What this means in practical terms is that there are multiple solutions to every problem according to the player’s chosen play style and character class. A wizard might get through a problem relatively simply with a flick of the wrist and the cast of a spell; a fighter might have a more direct approach; and thieves have plenty of their own nefarious plots to get up to at night. Yes, here we have a thief character who is actually a thief rather than simply a DPS.

In terms of mechanics, the closest equivalent today would probably be one of the Elder Scrolls series, though it’s not a great comparison. In both series, you gain in power simply by practicing skills; in both, there are multiple solutions to problems that are often related to skills; but where the two diverge is in the amount of character and personality they’re infused with — not to mention the fact that The Elder Scrolls’ idea of a puzzle is rarely anything more complicated than switch-flipping.

The Elder Scrolls has rich lore but I’ve never felt like I was a particularly important part of the story. I was just “that guy” who turns up and solves problems whom everyone then promptly forgets about — in Oblivion, for example, you do all the hard work but then Sean Bean gets to do all the spectacular stuff at the end. Meanwhile, in Quest for Glory you are the hero. You are the most important person in the room when you walk in, and the game’s characters quite rightly come to love and respect you as you systematically sweep through, right all their wrongs and proceed on to your next adventure.

There’s a number of contributing factors as to why this works so well in Quest for Glory yet feels so bland and uninspiring (to me, anyway) in Bethesda’s epics. The main issue is one of scale — while it’s unquestionably impressive to explore all of Skyrim, Cyrodiil, Morrowind or the other provinces seen in the earlier Elder Scrolls games, this vast scale means that you never really get to know the locales and the people therein. The vast majority of characters are templates who say the same thing to you, and most of them have no personality whatsoever, acting simply as walking quest-giving machines and information kiosks.

Contrast with each Quest for Glory game, each of which is set in a very tightly-focused locale — usually simply a single town and its surrounding environs — and it becomes abundantly clear why it has that much more personality. Because there’s not so much vast empty space to fill with NPCs, quests and random events, everything was hand-crafted rather than resorting to templates. As such, everyone you meet in Quest for Glory is an interesting character — often with hidden depths. The plot for each game manages to remain mostly non-linear, with the required steps to proceed to the climactic “endgame” scenario in each usually completable in any order, but somehow it manages to provide a far more satisfying, compelling experience than I ever got from 50 hours in Skyrim.

The comparison between these two series isn’t fair at all, of course, as I’ve already said, but it’s somewhat telling that the closest equivalent to Quest for Glory I can find in modern gaming is so vastly different from these fascinating old titles. Why did the adventure/RPG crossover never take off? It’s clearly a combination that works, and imagine what a great job we could do of it today. One could argue that games such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect from BioWare take heavy cues from the adventure game genre, particularly with regard to interpersonal interactions, but even in those indisputably excellent games it’s still pretty rare that you’ll find yourself solving problems in creative, class-specific ways. They’re still stat-based, combat-focused RPGs first and foremost (with Mass Effect becoming more of a shooter as time went on) rather than adventure games that use RPG mechanics to help colour and direct the experience.

Part of the reason we haven’t seen more of this type of game is, of course, due to the supposed “death” of the adventure game as far as the press and, presumably, publishers are concerned. But look around for a moment; the adventure game most certainly is not dead. High-profile developers such as Telltale are putting out some high-quality, well-written point and clickers. The genre is having something of a resurgence on touch-based devices such as the iPad. And some developers are even still releasing 320×200 super-pixelated traditional point-and-clickers like the recent Resonance. Why hasn’t anyone just lifted Quest for Glory’s system and applied it to a whole new adventure, perhaps in a new setting? I’d play a Quest for Glory in space, or in a 1920s noir style, or… you get the idea. The stat-based adventure game where the outcomes of your actions are determined by your skill values has a lot of scope for exploration, and I really wish we’d see more of it. Unfortunately, it seems that despite the universal adulation the Quest for Glory series receives, no-one is willing to defile its long-dead corpse and resurrect this fascinating subgenre for a modern game.

The first developer who does shall most certainly be in receipt of some of my money.