The Games of my Life

Ah, the hours and hours I spent with this one. Why aren’t there more games like Microprose’s Darklands?

Too intellectual, I’d guess. Or too original. People, unfortunately, do seem to want more and more of the same.

Darklands was a computer role-playing game. “Ah, another Tolkien rip-off with elves and orcs and dwarves, where you do quests and, mostly, kill monsters for experience points (XP), which make you level up, then be able to kill bigger monsters, which give even more XP, and so on”, you may think.

And you’d be right for, well, almost any other CRPG (the exceptions are those which aren’t medieval, but futuristic, for instance - and the rest of the description still applies).

But not Darklands.

It was a medieval RPG, yes. In the Holy Roman Empire (think the territory of today’s Germany, but larger), in fact. And you certainly created characters, and had adventures with them - which included fighting. But…

• Character creation was, basically, choosing who your father and mother were, what you did as a kid, what apprenticeship(s) you had as a teenager, and so on. You could then begin the game then and there, or say that you had a job for the next 5 years. Then you had the same choice. If you began the game young, your skills would be minimal, but it would still be decades before you started to feel the weight of age. On the other hand, you could start older and more experienced, but, of course, with a shorter game ahead. A typical party (of 4 men) would be to have two young characters for fighting, and two older ones as priests or alchemists.
• The game was “historical fantasy” - which meant that everything was as people believed at the time things were. A lot of dangers were simply people or wild animals; some, however, were the things people in medieval times were… afraid of. Not Tolkienesque / D&D-esque monsters, but the things men feared.
• The game didn’t had any “real” magic, but characters with high faith could pray to saints (there was a huge list of them - real ones, not invented for the game) and things would be subtly affected - such as an NPC liking you more, or enemies fighting less well, or being protected from something for a while.
• There were no levels. Skills got better with use.
• Weapons and armor had weight, and your character got tired more quickly when using heavier ones. In other words, often it was a good idea to wear lighter armor, because otherwise your character would be exhausted if fighting a large group of enemies.
• Hit points didn’t go up in a ridiculous way like in most games. Even a “top” character could be killed by a sword blow or two. He would, however, be much more proficient with his weapon, defend himself much better, and probably have better weapons and armor than a beginning character.
• At that time, the Church was all-powerful, and everyone lived in fear of damnation. This means your characters, too. If a village was burning someone as a witch, it was possible she was, indeed, one. A town where everyone acted strange could be a den of Satan-worshippers. And not buying an indulgence from an obviously corrupt bishop was a bad idea, unless one of your characters could convince the bishop that he was already “saintly”.
• You didn’t have to play as a good guy. It was perfectly possible for you to steal, break the law, fight the guards, and escape - or be arrested.
• The game was open-ended, and quests were mostly randomized - even though after a while you began to see the same quests again, there would always be surprises.
• Fame and reputation were a big part of the game. It affected how everyone reacted to you, what happened, what quests you could get, and so on. In fact, the main goal of the game is to be famous, not to defeat any “final boss”.

No, the game wasn’t perfect. It was very buggy (though that was mostly solved by several patches), and some parts were clearly unfinished or “empty”. But it was a completely absorbing game, hard to put down. You just had to had one more adventure, solve one more village’s problems, defeat one more robber knight, or investigate a little further the corruption of the Knights Templar (remember, I said that what people believed at the time to be true, is true in the game - the Templars were falsely accused of heresy, dark rituals and worshipping the demon Baphomet, so, in the game, they naturally do so.)

You can get the game at Home of the Underdogs.