Everything Quests: Games and Distractions
Game: Dragonflight
Potted description:
Amiga fantasy RPG with varied perspectives and environments. Point-and-click interface, mainly 16-colour graphics. (also released for
PC and
Atari ST, but those are not the versions reviewed here).
Description of the gameplay and experience of Dragonflight by my computer-games savvy brother who is thinking of becoming a noder, and helped me build this WU for the Quest - your comments, please:
Dragonflight was brought out around the end of the 1980s by
Thalion, a
German company. It took the form of a fantasy adventure set in a totally original world which was notable, firstly for having a
continent shaped like a
dragon, and secondly for being shaped like a
doughnut, although there was never any suggestion that the game's creators were aware of the latter. The map's opposite edges were simply
identified. The player was presented with four pre-designed characters and the task of finding the world's last dragons - if, indeed, there were any.
My specific interest in the game comes from its ability to display many of the
trademarks of a
bad fantasy computer game, whilst being captivating, genuinely enjoyable and even inspiring. The flaws were, in general, small and irritating
inelegancies. For example, in underground areas, there were
teleporters and hidden doors in walls which dealt
damage to the group, based on the party members'
maximum health, however high or low they were. The exploration of
urban areas was frequently hindered by
peasants who stood in your way, and this became particularly frustrating when a certain
maze area was encountered which relied on this means of creating moving obstacles. The
trite message about
courtesy which marked the
labyrinth's entrance did not exactly encourage, either.
At a basic and technical level, an obvious
merit was the flexibility of the game's interface. It had a set of nine buttons which would display a different set of
icons, depending on the group's situation, which could be any of: the
open country, a
town, an
underground area (done through a first person view) or
combat, which was done on a
turn based system with a side-on view and
tactical map. The general rule was that when you had
more interesting things available to do, you seemed able to move in fewer directions.
The variety of possible situations gave the game the potential to approach and develop its setting from many perspectives. This was achieved very effectively, mainly because of the constant sense of
mystery, created partly by the manual's total
ambiguity in describing anything. The opening
novella seemed to have little bearing on the
plot of the game itself, moreover. This forced the players to do their own research through exploring the extremely detailed world which was available and make their own notes and maps. The detail on offer was different from that of modern games. Today games' 'secrets' are made for their fanatics and devotees to find and have
quoted at them as a percentage, but in Dragonflight even these form part of the game's carefully planned learning curve - which is all too closely linked to the world of marketing and target market groups. In this case, the target group was
European-style
roleplayers. Dragonflight was at times so
obscure that you really thought the writers put things in purely for their own amusement, although it was a pity when these details proved to be vital to winning the game, which I feel I should add, I never came close to doing.
Characters:
Bladus the
fighter, a
blond himbo
Rinakles the
mage, a
scrawny fellow
Dobranur the
dwarf, a
sturdy type
Andariel the
elf, a
token female
The magic system was unexpectedly complex, with a potion-brewing engine and a light/dark magic split, with characters able to switch between the types of magic at any time, but at the cost of learning time. Temples could be used to regain magical strength, resurrect dead characters, and receive teleportation spells. The conversation system involved showing the
NPCs various items, and suffered a little from the
Denglisch translations. We also found that the learning curve was not pitched quite right: it was easier to obtain insanely good weapons, and stand a good chance against any creature, than it was to explore the plot satisfactorily.
There was an entertaining bestiary of monsters to encounter.
Orcs were the weakest normal monster, appearing in this incarnation as hairy, bestial humanoids, and
balrons the toughest. Balrons appeared in a form which their name will render
entirely predictable to most fantasy readers. There were also energyballs - weird green glowing things - and an assortment of other cannon fodder. Some creatures - such as the crystal guardian and the
banned unicorn - were undefeatable without the proper tools. Extensive travel by land, sea,
dungeon and
magic was necessary to find all the exotic locales and visit all the towns and cities, and it was quite possible to wreck your boat.
Fantasy clichés employed in the game included
magic mouths, the inevitable
dungeon environment with monsters staying nicely in identical square rooms, monsters that would attack a superior party for no apparent reason, magic-item shops, and
artsy-fartsy elves. The game had a few
Easter eggs, such as statues of '
Anne McCaffriel' and '
Girouar Tolkien' in certain towns, and NPCs who said absurd things.
Similar games include FTL's
Dungeon Master, the
Baldur's Gate series, SSI's
Gold Box games such as
Pool of Radiance. It's hard to think of many games both as early and as varied as Dragonflight.
A Dragonflight website at http://www.cus.org.uk/~alexh/games/dragonflight/df.html shows that the designers were
Erik Simon,
Udo Fischer and
Jochen Hippel, that at least one version of the game had a release date of
1990, and that it was Thalion's first release.