Although the characters and enemies take turns in gentlemenly fashion, it never gets boring thanks to an excellent system that actually makes range and positioning important. The actual battles are just as effortless. You can even attempt a preemptive attack, your success depending on your characters' Stealth statistic. Most enemies can be seen before you fight them (although some stealthy foes do appear out of nowhere to ambush you), and they always appear in fixed places, never respawning until the end of a chapter. Tedious battle systems and ad-nauseam encounters have ruined many a game, but this one handles combat with rare grace. Of course, every RPG must have its battles. Many doors and chests are locked, but you'll rarely have the good fortune to just happen upon the key nearby instead, one must simply hold on to all the keys he finds and hope for the best - or leave it to the lockpicking skills of his characters. Fiendish traps are everywhere, requiring you to painstakingly navigate your characters around fire-blasters and electric currents. Even something as trivial as opening a treasure chest can become a grueling mental exercise, as many are guarded by mind-boggling riddles you must solve to break open the lock. But exploring isn't something you must force yourself to do: with over half the world map accessible from the very start, it's almost impossible not to goof off.Īn adventurous player will find Midkemia a land teeming with enemies and littered with puzzles. Do not expect to be harried from one point to another. Do not expect this game to spoon-feed you every single plot detail. To enjoy Betrayal at Krondor, one must be willing to explore. Now, it is entirely possible to look up Krondor in the handy in-game map and immediately march your characters towards that direction. Here you learn of you very first objective: ''Escort Gorath to Krondor''. Realizing that they should keep their journey as secretive as possible, Locklear persuades Owyn to go to Krondor with them. Just then, an assassin breaks into the camp, but is quickly disposed of by Gorath (despite the chains that bound him). We learn that Locklear is in charge of bringing a prisoner named Gorath to Krondor. Owyn, a young magician, tends to the wounds of a high-ranking Kingdom official called Locklear. The first of these sequences will introduce three of the game's heroes. Krondor is divided into nine chapters, each beginning and ending with a story sequence. No, to understand the appeal of Betrayal at Krondor, we must examine it as a whole, not a sum of its parts. Its plot, while intriguing and well-paced, is quite simplistic and uninventive the battles are fun, but rarely strategic or exciting and, being released in 1993, immersive or stunning or detailed are not the most accurate adjectives one can use to describe its technical merits. This may be surprising, if one breaks Krondor's elements down one by one. While I am not familiar enough with the book series to judge whether it does it justice, I can say without reluctance Betrayal at Krondor feels exactly like playing out an epic fantasy, its enthralling adventure drawing you in with a fashion usually reserved for the greatest novels. Krondor is not just an adaption or a side-story it has its own place in the Riftwar saga, and many of the books' main characters figure in prominently. Feist's Riftwar book series takes place - in fact, Feist himself was involved in the game's development. But perhaps that's not so bizarre after all, Betrayal at Krondor is set in Midkemia, the same land where Raymond E. Stating that it seeks to feel like ''reading a good adventure novel'' doesn't quite help its case. It's quite strange, then, for Sierra's Betrayal at Krondor to bill itself as an ''interactive story'' in its manual. Perhaps I generalize, but undoubtedly PC RPGs value non-linearity and sprawling paths over the scripted plots that seek to tell one focused story. The PC side will most likely then turn around and point at the endless customization and choices that every player of computer RPGs must face, then haughtily dismiss their cousins on the console as pathetic imitations of the real thing. It seems to be a law of the universe that this argument must pop up in ever console vs. One of the worst things one can say about console RPGs in general is that they are not games, but ''interactive novels''. Perhaps I generalize, but undoubtedly PC R." "One of the worst things one can say about console RPGs in general is that they are not games, but ''interactive novels''.
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