King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human

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King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human

Developer(s) Sierra On-Line
Publisher(s) Sierra On-Line
Platform(s) MS-DOS, Apple 2, Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, TRS-80
Release date October 1, 1986
Genre(s) Adventure
Mode(s) Single player

King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human is the third installment in the King's Quest series of computer games produced by Sierra On-Line. It was the first game in the series not to feature King Graham as the player character, though it was not the last; King Graham is only the protagonist in three of the eight King's Quest installments.

Contents

[edit] Story

In King's Quest III, the story moves away from Daventry and King Graham to the land of Llewdor, where a boy named Gwydion is being kept by the wicked magician Manannan. Gwydion was kidnapped from Daventry by the magician when he was young, and this adventure tells the story of his journey back to Daventry.

The player plays Gwydion in King’s Quest III. The major events of the story include breaking free of Gwydion’s captivity by turning Manannan into a cat, escaping Llewdor, returning to Daventry where he frees both the land and Princess Rosella from a three-headed dragon, and finally discovering that he is actually the royal couple's lost son, Rosella's twin and heir to the throne, Alexander.

Because King’s Quest III initially shows no connection to the previous installments in the series, some fans initially criticized the third installment of King’s Quest for not tying into the previous games. Only after playing to the end of the game did players find a connection to King’s Quest I and King's Quest II.

[edit] Name

The name for this sequel is a play on the common phrase "To Err is Human." This is a pun, since the words heir and err sound alike in some accents of spoken English.

[edit] Technology and development

This was allegedly the first adventure game featuring auto-mapping, with a 'magic map' found in the game that can be used to teleport to most locations that the player has visited before. This feature was unpopular among some fans who claim it made the game too easy, hence magic maps in future Sierra games were more limited in their teleporting ability (if they had the feature at all).

[edit] Copy protection

King’s Quest III was the first game in which Sierra used a manual-based copy protection scheme. Nearly all AGI games (including King’s Quest III) have a disk-based copy protection, requiring the original game disk to be present in order to play the game. This wasn't entirely effective and unofficial versions were widespread. (This key-disk check was removed from the later released "King's Quest Collection" versions.) However, to complete King’s Quest III, the player needs to create a number of magic spells, through alchemical formulae that are only available in the game’s manual. Many considered the process slightly overdone — 140 of the 210 possible points in the game are obtained through simply doing what the manual says, leaving less room for real puzzles. Additionally, the original manual contained typos, resulting in the copy protection failing and the game ending. Sierra openly released the corrections to the typos. Starting with King's Quest IV, later Sierra games would open with a dialog requesting that the player enter a specific word from a given page of the manual (e.g. the ninth word of the third paragraph on page eight).

[edit] Remakes

In 2004, in the tradition of recent remakes, an independent group of game developers, Infamous Adventures, proceeded with a VGA style remake of King's Quest III. The game is the style of later King's Quest releases, such as King's Quest V and VI.

Infamous Adventures released King's Quest III on June 19th, 2006.

[edit] Reception

A review in Computer Gaming World described the game as exceedingly frustrating, from the task of climbing stairs to identifying objects from their low-resolution graphics. The hint guide was highly recommended as a way to alleviate some of that frustration. The reviewer suggested gamers new to the series play King's Quest I instead, as being much easier.[1]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wagner, Roy (June-July 1987), “King's Quest III”, Computer Gaming World: 18-20 

[edit] External links

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