King's Quest: Mask of Eternity

King's Quest: Mask of Eternity

Developer(s) Sierra Studios
Publisher(s) Sierra Studios
Series King's Quest
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows
Release date(s) December 1998
Genre(s) Adventure/Action-adventure
Mode(s) Single-player

King's Quest: Mask of Eternity (also known as King's Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity[1][2]) is a hybrid point-and-click adventure and action-adventure video game written and designed by Roberta Williams and released in 1998 by Sierra Studios, is the eighth, official computer game in the famous King's Quest series (it was neither intended as a spin-off nor a reboot). It is the first and only game in the series where the main character is neither King Graham nor a member of his family, the first in the series to use a full 3D engine as opposed to the 2D cartoon or pixel style of the earlier games and the first to omit the sequel numbering system on box artwork and title screen (though technically the first King's Quest game did not originally have number or a subtitle), though references to it being the eighth game appear in the file structure (and manual) and the game was marketed as KQ8 on the official website, interviews, and other places. The updated 'gamecard/boxart' for digital release on Gog now lists the game as King's Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity.

It has been re-released by Activision as part of the King's Quest 7+8 pack through GOG.com and patched to work on Vista and Windows 7 32 and 64bit. Although this release was a digital download only, it has a bug and will not run unless an optical drive is present on the computer (or use of virtual drive like Daemon Tools).[3] A fan patch is available for retail copies of the game that allows them to run on modern computers and computers without optical drives (such as a netbook), and it fixes several cutscene lockups (it is incompatible with the GoG release).[4]

Plot

Story

The story begins in Castle Daventry with King Graham and his minister talking about the every day affairs of running the country, when the Magic Mirror activates in front of them showing them a bad omen. They witness Lucreto the archarchon of the Realm of the Sun destroy the Mask of Eternity and releasing a wave of energy. The mirror goes on to show the kingdom's only hope, the lowly peasant and knight, Connor of Daventry from a nearby village. He is shown chatting with his neighbor Sarah, when a storm arises and a piece of the mask falls at his feet. He picks it up, and turns around to find Sarah had been turned to stone. The unleashed magic energy turned all mortals in the world to stone, including King Graham. With that the Mirror ends its vision.

Early on in the game, the half-stone wizard that Connor encounters tells him about the Mask of Eternity, Connor's destiny, and conjures for him a magic map that shows all explored areas and allows Connor to teleport between lands once the teleportation sites in each land (except for the Realm of the Sun) have been discovered. With knowledge of his Quest, Connor made his way to Castle Daventry to check on his liege and the royal family, finding Graham and the rest of the inhabitants of the castle turned to stone. He vowed that he would save king Graham and queen Valanice, their family, and the rest of the inhabitants of Daventry, or die trying.

The game ends with Connor rising to the top of the Realm of the Sun with the restored Mask. A beam of blue light shines on the Mask, seeming to restore its power and it sends out a wave of energy that restores everything including the Kingdom of Daventry to life. Sarah is restored. King Graham newly restored looks on proudly at his hero in the Magic Mirror. The game ends with the Archons being released from their stone prisons and joining Connor who triumphantly lifts his sword into the air.

Lands

To complete the task of collecting all of the shards of the Mask of Eternity, Connor must travel to a variety of topographically different lands. These include:

In addition, another realm is seen at the end of the game within the Realm of the Sun, but is not accessed through a separate load screen.

Characters

Gameplay

Interface

The game combines a point-and-click single multipurpose context-sensitive cursor from KQ7, and a variation of the standard Adventure-game item inventory along the top, in addition it also includes information about total mask pieces collected, and total gold coins. Another menu along the bottom of the screen includes information converning level, character experience, curative items, potions offering different abilities. As well as the two current weapons, and armor. On the rightside of the menu is the interface for the grappeling hook item, and rocks.

The cursor itself was dynamic, and could change into four different types of cursors depending on actions. The primary cursor is the Play Cursor, which functions much like the cursor in KQ7, it is used to; look, take, talk and do. Like in KQ7, if you pick up an item from your inventory, the game switches to an Inventory Cursor. This cursor shows an image of the item you have picked up, and allows you to click it on something else like in KQ7. Next is the Sword Cursor, much like the one seen at the end of KQ6 (during the Alhazred sword battle), it is used for combat in the game. The final cursor is the Arrow Cursor, which lets you click on enemies from a distance, and fire projectiles.

The game was designed primarily to be played in third person mode, but also offers a first person mode for those who want to use it. The first person mode was primarily put into the game, to allow players a chance to better look around or get closeups of things the screen. But it can be used to play the game in most instances, except during character interactions.[5]

The developers created different levels of combat for different types of players these included; Easy, Normal, and Hard.

Genre

Roberta classified KQ8 as either 'Adventure' or within a possible new genre, a 3D Adventure[6] (Although a similar 'genre' description was used for 2-Dimensional '3-D Animated Adventures' in Sierra's early history), and it went beyond traditional 'Adventures' (with maybe the exception of other hybrid adventures such as Quest for Glory, Beyond Zork and Azrael's Tear). As a '3D Adventure' it retained a point-and-click puzzle system of traditional adventure games, but also included Action-adventure elements (such as avoiding traps and rolling boulders) & action-RPG elements (the RPG elements were inspired by the point and click combat in Diablo, albeit at a much slower pace with fewer enemies). The game includes many actions and puzzles that could only be done in 3D, many based on physics, rock tossing, jumping, climbing or 3D combat. For example cutting down a tree to block a river from turning the wheel on a mill, or killing an enemy so that it falls and depresses a pressure plate (alternatively a rock could be used). 3D also allowed her to expand on and focus on the exploration element which was one of the main highlights of previous King's Quest games. Other puzzles included the more traditional variety of point-and-click inventory-based puzzles seen in previous games of the series.

This change or 'evolution' in the direction of adventure games was part of Roberta and Ken William's attempts to innovate the genre and prevent it from becoming stagnant and 'mediocre'; it represented what would have been the future of 'adventure games' had Ken Williams continued to own the company.[7]

"The traditional adventure game is dead."...it's time to change adventure games at least as much as the gamers themselves have changed over the last few years. It's time to make them "less pretentious. More open-ended, faster paced, and just more fun to play than they have been." After all..., "what's the use of creating these super-serious, overly literary, and downright studious games when the major audience that will play them played a Nintendo or a Sega last year? These folks are used to playing games where the correct answer to any problem might be jumping over something, hitting it with a hammer, or maybe even shooting it with a big bazooka. Why hassle through all the literary pretense when most of today's gamers just want to blow something up." (Interaction Magazine, Spring 1997)
"It appeared that adventure games were just dying...It just appeared that no one wanted adventure games anymore. ... I needed to do something strong and relatively risky in order to get it back.", Roberta Williams[8]

Name

This was the first King's Quest (not counting the original King's Quest: Quest for the Crown), to not have a numeral in the title. But followed a pattern in several other Sierra games to release games that lacked numerals in their titles but were intended to be continuations of the series, including Quest For Glory: Shadow of Darkness, Police Quest: Open Season, Police Quest: SWAT, Police Quest: SWAT 2, Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!, Lost Secret of the Rainforest (part 2 of the EcoQuest series), The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, and The Dagger of Amon Ra. Each of these games retained their numerical title within marketing materials or within the file structure (and/or manuals).

Development

Primary development

Mask of Eternity went through two or three main development phases, in which Roberta's ideas changed, the engine was finalized, and the graphics were finalized. In Fall 1996 Roberta showed off some of her first screenshots of the game's levels, a few enemies, and the placeholder for Connor. Video showing the level development of this version of the game was included in the Roberta William's Anthology. There are scenes for two or three levels that were cut from the final game (including an undersea area, and a green forested area with a village).

By July 1997, the game had gone into its final phase, and appeared much like it does in the final product. Roberta's team was forced to build a new engine from scratch based on an earlier version of 3Space (as Dynamix was behind schedule finishing the updated Red Baron II version of the 3Space engine for their own games). The first gameplay footage of this version appeared in the King's Quest Collection II. This version was completed until December 1998.

Davidson's involvement

Between September 1996 to January 21, 1997, due to conservative criticism over the content in Roberta's King's Quest: Mask of Eternity and Phantasmagoria by the Davidsons of Davidson & Associates, a team of managers was assigned to work above Roberta Williams. They began creating their own version of KQ8 while ignoring Roberta's version. Their version was purged of combat, violence and possibly religious themes.[9][10] While Roberta continued to work on her own game including its own script and puzzles, the Davidson's team of managers began to design their script and puzzles for their own version of KQ8.

This ultimately lead to Roberta to believe she had lost control of the game during that period; she even thought about removing her name from the product.

Work on the Davidson version was ultimately cancelled (Davidsons left the company in January 1997[11]) and Roberta reasserted her control. But this was not without its damage to Roberta's version of the game's final release (due to loss of time and funding), which was already hurting from other technical issues caused by engine development issues and others.

Reception

King's Quest: Mask of Eternity was released to generally positive but mixed reviews (a general improvement over the scores received by the previous game, King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride).[12] The controversial addition of combat (and RPG mechanics) into the KQ franchise was praised by many, and criticized by others. The game was one of the best selling adventures that year, outselling Grim Fandango 2-to-1.[13][14] Reviews for King's Quest: Mask of Eternity tended to be positive, with most at 70% or higher, while many were above 90%, and only a few dipped as low as 10%. The game earned Adventure Game of the Year at Digital Entertainment On-line,[15] was CGW's #1 Adventure Game, and was nominated as the Adventure Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World (one of the Finalists, losing to Sanitarium and Grim Fandango).[16]

Notes

The game's dialogue has also been written in a more conservative style rather than the modern English style of King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride. Though conservative language does appear in other KQ games, such as the Godmother and Elf in KQ1 remake, Alexander in KQ6 occasionally speaks with more conservative terms. Graham and Rosella speak with a more conservative style in Hoyle, Book of Games, Volume I. In fact, in KQ3 Rosella used British terms such as "mum" in regards to her mother.

In this game Connor visits Dimension of Death rather than the Land of the Dead shown in King's Quest VI. However, as noted in the manual for King's Quest 6, Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles, the Land of the Dead is a legend specific to the Green Isles. It is the place where Green Islanders believe they go when they die. They journey to Samhain (Death) to be judged and end up in the Sea of Souls in preparation for the next stage of the afterlife. It is not a legend in Daventry, and author of the guidebook was the first person from Daventry to learn or write about it when he visited the Green Isles. Whereas according to Mask of Eternity's Manual, the Dimension of Death is part of Daventry's legends. It is a kind of limbo ruled by Azriel where souls are judged before being moved to their rightful afterlife.

According to the game's producer Mark Seibert, "Roberta's point of view was that the Dimension of Death was not the under world (KQ6). It was a unique and different place." Thus both places are considered separate locations which happen to share a similar purpose. Despite this the River of Death seen in the Dimenson of Death is referred to as the River Styx on the official site, and in the assets in the game files showing that it was at least inspired by similar legends. The Boatman/Ferryman/Charon shares the same or similar role as he did in KQ2 and KQ6 and is a composite of the grim reaper Death and Charon.

King's Quest: Mask of Eternity inspired a 12-minute musical 'sequel' suite, called Daventry Suite by Donald M. Wilson, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University.[17][18] The multi-movement work for wind ensemble was divided into three pieces, "Sarah's Song", "Connor's Triumphal Return to Daventry", and "Celebration with Ringing Peal". Wilson's piece was featured by Sierra On-Line as "the first musical work of extended scope to be inspired by a computer game."

References

  1. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20041206141248/http://community.sierra.com/WebX?13@111.7vWqdian44M.0@.ee6b539
  2. ↑ http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/kings_quest_7_8
  3. ↑ GOG Forums - KQ8 and Win7 64bit
  4. ↑ New Mask of Eternity installer for XP/Vista/Win7
  5. ↑ KQ8 Manual, pg 17
  6. ↑ http://www.sierragamers.com/uploads/24082/The_Games/kings_quest_8_e_spine.jpg
  7. ↑ http://www.adventure-treff.de/artikel/interviews/ken_williams_e.php
  8. ↑ Gornstein, Leslie. "The nonbloody adventure games preferred by female players are a dying breed." Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. 1998. Retrieved March 11, 2012 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-5625438_ITM
  9. ↑ All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg, pg 157, 158
  10. ↑ http://www.sierragamers.com/aspx/m/634063/bbs/Topic.13499.530202
  11. ↑ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1997_Jan_21/ai_19048930/
  12. ↑ GameRankings
  13. ↑ Roberta Williams Speaks Out ...
  14. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20010430012657/http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/lair/7500/rwinterview.html
  15. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20011202094643fw_/http://www.sierra.com/games/mask/updates.html
  16. ↑ http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-53901262/tie-best-adventure-sanitarium.html
  17. ↑ http://www.cfamc.org/concerted_offering/co_2000.html
  18. ↑ (1999-11-11) "King's Quest: Mask of Eternity Inspires New Ensemble Piece" IGN.com.

External links