#oneaday Day 993: Why You Should Probably Play Quest for Glory

It feels like a good time to explain Why You Should Probably Play Quest for Glory, because 1) the complete series is available on GOG.com for $3.99 for one more day and 2) the Squadron of Shame just released a podcast detailing exactly why it’s awesome. You can listen to it in the player below and go leave a comment here.

Quest for Glory remains to this day an aberration in both the point-and-click adventure and RPG genres, in that it is both. For those who have no experience of the series, the basic gist of all games in the series is that you have the mouse-driven “walk, look, use, talk” interface of an adventure game coupled with the stat-based system of an RPG. You wander around, you find out about quests, you get into fights, you save the sleepy Germanic valley/city/African-style savannah region/world.

Sounds simple, right? After all, RPGs and adventure games already have a lot in common — mainly the fact that both often involve a lot of talking — thus it’s not much of a stretch to imagine an RPG with a point-and-click adventure game interface (or, in the case of earlier games in the series, text parser).

Except Quest for Glory doesn’t stop there, because it makes its games noticeably and significantly different depending on whether you initially choose to play as a fighter, magic user or thief. (It’s also worth noting that the “thief” class is a proper thief who breaks into houses and nicks stuff for personal gain, none of that namby-pamby “rogue” nonsense)

That’s right — join the quest as a fighter and, for sure, you’ll be doing a lot of fighting, but you’ll also be using your brawn to solve non-violent problems. Become a thief and you’ll be using your agility, climbing ability and stealthiness to sneak around and solve problems from the shadows. Become a mage and over the course of the various games in the series you’ll outfit yourself with a diverse array of spells, only a couple of which are of the traditional “throw fiery objects at opponents” variety.

Best of all, if you’re the sort of indecisive person who likes to play as a “hybrid” class, you can spend a few extra points on character creation to take a skill that doesn’t normally belong to that type of hero. Want to be a wizard that’s good at climbing? Go ahead. A thief with a good line in magic tricks? Sure! A fighter who knows what the word “sneak” means? Knock yourself out! All skills that are at higher than zero can be raised through grinding — the Quest for Glory series subscribes to the Final Fantasy II/Elder Scrolls mentality that skills should be raised organically as you use them rather than at arbitrary level boundaries. Crucially for the whole fun factor, though, it’s relatively rare that you’ll need to grind a skill, unless you’re specifically aiming to do and see absolutely everything the game has to offer. (And if you are, you’re a masochist.)

Then there’s the fact that the Quest for Glory series was one of the first series that allowed you to transfer your save file from one game to the next. Beat one game and you’d be invited to export your character ready to import once the next game released. This was remarkably forward-thinking (and confident) of the developers at the time — and also somewhat symptomatic of the different times back then. Now, sure, we have franchises like Mass Effect and Dragon Age allowing you to import your save file from the previous game, but each game in the series didn’t specifically include with a promise of the next one. In other words, whether or not a game gets a sequel these days isn’t necessarily preordained — it’s often dependent on sales. In Quest for Glory’s time, it was built in to the design from the very beginning, even as technology improved over time.

This is one of the other interesting things about playing through any of Sierra’s old adventure series. You can see how gaming technology evolved from game to game. Quest for Glory I and II initially used 16-colour 320×200 EGA graphics and a text parser, though Quest for Glory I was subsequently rereleased with 256-colour 320×200 VGA graphics and a mouse-driven interface. Quest for Glory II never got the same treatment officially, but a fan-made free remake (approved, but not funded or assisted by, the original team) brought it into the latter days of the 20th century rather nicely. Quest for Glory III then brought the series officially into the 256-colour VGA age, and Quest for Glory IV was the first CD-ROM based episode, featuring none other than John “Gimli and That Professor Bloke I Can’t Remember the Name Of from Sliders” Rhys-Davies on narration duties.

Quest for Glory V marked a bit of a turning point, however, not just for the series, but for Sierra’s fortunes and the adventure game genre at large. Being a CD-ROM only multimedia extravaganza with 256-colour 640×480 Super VGA visuals, polygons and a prerendered intro sequence that, while impressive at the time is utterly laughable if you watch it now, Quest for Glory V marked the point where, for many, the franchise lost its way. There are plenty of people who adore the game, of course, but those who grew up with the earlier entries in the series can’t help but mourn the direction it took with its fifth instalment and its subsequent demise.

This wasn’t the only time Sierra did something weird with one of its established series. In fact, almost all of Sierra’s classic, long-running series ended up as something completely different to their original forms — King’s Quest became a 3D action RPG with its eighth instalment; Police Quest became the tactical SWAT series after its fourth incarnation (later dropping the Police Quest moniker altogether); and Leisure Suit Larry just went off the rails altogether after its sixth episode (which, naturally, is called Leisure Suit Larry 7). In comparison to these other titles, Quest for Glory V‘s changes were actually relatively modest — but still enough to put some off.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the demise of the Quest for Glory series is that we really haven’t had anything like it since. We’ve had a resurgence of point-and-click adventures in the last couple of years, sure, but nothing that so deftly blends two genres together with interesting stories, a genuinely amusing sense of humour and satisfying gameplay.

However, there’s some good news for fans of Lori and Corey Cole — they’re working on something new called Hero U, and will be opening a Kickstarter funding drive some time later this month. More details here. I’m pretty excited — they’ve said outright that it’s not going to be a new Quest for Glory game, but it will incorporate some of the things they learned from making those games. Sounds awesome, right? Of course.

Hope you enjoyed the podcast. We certainly spent long enough recording it — and then I spent even longer editing it. 🙂

#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.

#oneaday Day 886: King’s Space Police Quest for Glory Suit Larry

I’ve been playing through the Quest for Glory series recently for the Squadron of Shame’s upcoming podcast. I’d never played them before, and it turns out they’re rather good — particularly once you get on to number 4 and you get John Rhys-Davies on narration duty. I shall refrain from further discussion of that particular series for now, however, as that would get into spoiler territory.

I do want to talk about Sierra in general, however. Sierra, if you’re unaware/a young whippersnapper, was the developer and publisher of these games, and was notorious for being one of the “big two” names in adventure games in the ’80s and ’90s. The other was, of course, LucasArts.

Sierra and LucasArts took wildly differing approaches to what was ostensibly the same genre — the point and click adventure. While LucasArts embraced movie-style presentation and player-friendly interface features such as an intelligent cursor (i.e. one that automatically highlighted interactable objects for the player), Sierra games were punishing. LucasArts made a point in their game manuals to say that they wouldn’t kill off the player character unnecessarily, and indeed in most of their games it was impossible to die or even fuck things up beyond all recognition. The exception to this was the Indiana Jones series, in which Indie found himself in danger and could indeed die — but generally only if the player really messed up.

Sierra games, meanwhile, at least in the early days would kill players if they took a wrong step on a mountain path. Or if they said the wrong thing to another character. Or if they got caught by a wandering monster. Or… you get the idea. They were hard, and not necessarily fair about it either. But the constant sense of peril that you felt a Sierra protagonist was in (at least until later games such as King’s Quest VII and Gabriel Knight, anyway) provided a very distinctive flavour.

This isn’t the only way in which Sierra adventures were unique. They’re some of the earliest “auteur” games I can think of, where a selling point of each game was who it was written by. Each of Sierra’s stable of game designers had their own specialisms — Roberta Williams handled the fairytale King’s Quest series, Lori and Corey Cole handled the adventure/RPG hybrid Quest for Glory series, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy worked on Space Quest, Al Lowe was in charge of the smutty Leisure Suit Larry series, and Jane Jensen worked on a variety of titles including the seminal Gabriel Knight. Each had their own distinctive “voice” and “style” that was all over their respective work, despite the things all the games had in common.

Different people were drawn to different series for different reasons — King’s Quest provided a Disneyesque take on popular fantasy and fairytale tropes, for example, while Space Quest was a self-consciously silly sidelong glance at the world of sci-fi. Despite the early titles all being very clear parodies or homages to existing work, each series evolved over time to develop its own unique flavour — and, curiously, pretty much all of them managed to self-destruct with disastrously awful final instalments, the most notorious being King’s Quest VIII‘s inexplicable shift into becoming a Zeldaesque action RPG rather than the gentle, light-hearted and family-friendly adventure it had been before.

Despite the fact that each series managed to commit seppuku in its own distinctive way, that doesn’t make the earlier titles in the series any less worth checking out. Sure, many of the early entries have graphics that weren’t exactly bleeding-edge even at the time of their original release, but their gameplay is solid, and their stories are the sort of thing I’d describe as being part of a gaming “canon” if such a thing existed. (It doesn’t, making that whole statement pretty much redundant. But they’re certainly fondly remembered by pretty much everyone who played them — even with the frequent and frustrating deaths taken into account.)

They’re a reminder of a simple time when there weren’t quite so many new games being released each month, and “a new game from Roberta Williams” was an exciting prospect. That excitement is still present in gaming to a certain extent today — many people are keen to see what auteurs like Jane Jensen (who’s still steadfastly producing adventure games), Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo “Metal Gear Solid” Kojima, Swery65 (Deadly Premonition) and Suda51 (No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw, Shadows of the Damned) are up to today. The difference is that these “auteur games” are regarded as niche interests or cult hits today rather than big releases.

If you’ve never tried any of Sierra’s games, head over to GOG.com and check ’em out now.