| Darklands | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | MicroProse |
| Publisher(s) | MicroProse |
| Designer(s) | Arnold Hendrick |
| Platform(s) | DOS |
| Release date(s) | 1992, 1995 (CD-ROM version) |
| Genre(s) | Role-playing video game |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Media/distribution | Floppy disk, compact disc |
Darklands is a role-playing video game produced by MicroProse. Released in 1992 for the PC/DOS platform, Darklands is set in the Holy Roman Empire during the 15th century. While the geographic setting of the game is historically accurate, the game also includes many supernatural elements.
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The setting for Darklands was medieval Europe as the inhabitants thought the world was at the time. While the game in the towns and cities was modeled on actual life, Dragons, Kobalds, Giant Spiders, and witches existed in the hinterlands. In addition to adversaries, the players characters can affect events in the game by praying to saints or 'cast spells' by brewing up alchemical potions.
Darklands only ends once the final battle is completed against Baphomet. He can be found in a castle in an obscure part of the game map which can only be found after finding and defeating the evil occupants of various other fortresses around the game, in which you can find information which will point you to the final location. There are a limited number of quest types available, causing the game to become repetitive after extensive play. This type of gameplay is sometimes called sandbox mode. The plot is not linear. There is no set path for a player to follow. However, there is a main quest to follow, which involves preventing the apocalypse. The player is free to complete quests that will give them a positive reputation, or to pursue a negative reputation by performing evil deeds. In Darklands the player's reputation is limited geographically, allowing the player to be simultaneously hated in one region and exalted in another.
Age is a factor. Characters will begin to lose physical prowess as they age. However, the older the player is when the character is generated, the more skills and better equipment he or she starts with. The real-time combat is dependent not only on the characters' skills, but also the type and quality of weapons used against the enemy and its armor. For example, using swords against plate armored foes would be less effective than using flails or maces.
There are no other species available in character creation — all players are human and are differentiated by occupation. Any party member is capable of performing what are known as class-based feats in many other role-playing games, but skillful players usually improve the party member's skills only in the appropriate area. Thus, the equivalent of a cleric in this game would be someone who specializes in religious studies as well as healing skills. Because the character specializes in the above, however, does not preclude him or her from learning artifice skills, such as lock picking.
All the cities that one's party may visit in Darklands are real places that existed in the Holy Roman Empire of the 15th century. Most are in modern-day Germany, but some are in other countries including Denmark, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic and Poland. The city names given in the game are old German names of the cities, some of which are now exonyms. The new local names are given in parentheses.
While the majority of the game uses text-based menus—enhanced with hand-painted illustrations describing the player party's available actions, the party's movement between cities and during battle uses a graphical user interface.
The game was reviewed in 1993 in Dragon #190 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 4 out of 5 stars.[1]
Darklands was released by MicroProse with a number of bugs, ranging from minor to major. These included many instances of what would now be called crash-to-desktop errors. Additionally, the "character colors bug" results in on-screen characters colors being replaced with random (often bright) colorings. The official readme said:[2]
We very much regret that an extremely rare problem may cause a battlefield character to suffer some color changes in battle. However, you as a player won't notice the change until the next battle. The bad part is the change is stored in the saved game file. You can fix up your characters by returning to an old saved game. For example, in battle #3 you notice Gretch has green hair (yuck). If you return to a saved game prior to battle #2, Gretch will be fine again. We apologize for this work-around. We've tried all sorts of tools and traps for this condition, and spent hundreds of hours testing for it. We'd be delighted to publicize the name of the first person who can tell us how to make it occur upon demand.
Most of the bugs in the game were correctable by subsequently released patches. Before ubiquitous Internet connectivity, such patches were typically only available through BBS downloads by modem owners and informal person-to-person copying, and thus many gamers were only able to play the originally-released version. This gave Darklands a reputation as a buggy game.
However, this did not stop GameSpot from adding it to their list of "The Greatest Games of All Time".[3]
Todd Howard cited the game as an influence on Bethesda Softworks' series The Elder Scrolls.[4]