![]() Weapon and armor smithing let you keep your gear in top shape - a very valuable thing as all but the most basic of equipment is very expensive. Stealth can potentially warn you of an upcoming ambush or even let you turn the tables on enemies and get the first move in battle. Not all are centered strictly on combat, either. However, you do have the option to emphasize on a particular skill to help it grow faster - focusing on just one will give it approximately a 50 percent bonus to growth, while adding more will result in less, but still faster than an unfocused skill. Instead, each character has an array of skills with varying degrees of proficiency at the start, and these can only be improved with active use, paying a trainer, or finding/buying skill books. Units will actually visibily swing their swords and hit their foes, load and fire crossbows, and visually cast spell effects, complete with some nice flourishes - when a fireball impacts on an enemy, it will explode and scatter particles across the screen for a few seconds.īetrayal at Krondor is one of the earliest examples I know of of an RPG to completely do away with a traditional experience system. ![]() On the other hand, combat animation is rather good well, aside from the chess-piece-like gliding each character performs while moving around the grid. Dungeons are similarly in full 3D, though design-wise they still feel much like Might and Magic or Wizardry, mostly consisting of large rooms connected by long, uniform corridors. While the pre-rendered objects in your inventory and character sprites aren't bad (they digitized stills of actors in costume for them), the environments you wander through definitely look a bit rough - you walk on flat grassy ground with paths denoted only by brown or gray, and the world is populated by square buildings and triangular peaks with crude textures applied to give the appearance of hills and mountains. Each leg of the story is referred to as a "chapter", with the perspective shifting several times throughout to different sets of protagonists, and even quicksaves are referred to as "Bookmarks".īeing an early 3D game also means that Krondor hasn't aged the best on a visual level. (A CD version was released later, but like many enhanced CD ports, it just adds a Redbook audio soundtrack and fixes a few bugs in the original release.). The world itself fits this too even in spite of the limited technology of the time, putting the player in a first-person 3D perspective and letting them explore the world as if they were really in it - no small feat for a game that shipped on a handful of floppy disks. Even using items like potions and whetstones gives you a fun little text blurb, which helps you feel like you're there in the moment rather than doing mundane number crunching. Characters interact with even nameless NPCs on a familiar and personal level, making them feel like they're actually inhabitants of this world with histories and rich backstories even if you don't get to see much of them. While it still has many familiar tropes of the genre including dungeon crawling, battling enemies, finding treasure and setting traps, these are worked into the narrative too, with quite verbose (and well written) text blurbs for even mundane interactions with enemies, treasures and objects. However, the developers did such a good job replicating his style that Feist changed very little from what they wrote In fact, he liked it so much that he made Krondor part of his official canon, writing a novelization for it a few years later. Feist's Riftwar series, and while he didn't write the script for the game, he had final approval on what was written. Fittingly, it was set in the same universe as Raymond E. Krondor's goal, as stated in its manual, was to be something RPGs had never dared to be before - an immersive narrative experience above all else. Dynamix is a PC gaming company that lasted from 1984 to 2001 and created a pretty wide catalog of games spanning a number of genres most people probably remember them for their flight simulations (Red Baron) or their prevalent puzzle series The Incredible Machine or for kicking off the fan-favorite online FPS series "Tribes", but RPG fans remember them too, primarily for one reason - a little gem known as Betrayal at Krondor.
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