Review RPG Codex Retrospective Review: Darklands

[Excidium]

Female warriors are p. hot though.

 

[abnaxus]

The womyn warriors dressed up as men at least, so it should be Codex approved.

 

[Lorica]

Nice. Codex needs more reviews of games like Darklands.

One small accuracy correction: The number of EP you get at the outset is tied to background; it's not a flat 99 (in fact, only the rural commoner background gets 99 and that's only when taking into account immutable ability modifications). Your description kind of glosses over the fact that you get more EP to distribute on skills with each five year increment--with a bonus for the first 2(?) increments. I don't know that you need to be that detailed, though.

I care because the character creation balance is top-notch: you're nearly 10% 'weaker' as a noble than a rural commoner, but noble lineage is the easiest way (only in some cases) to access the 'best' occupations.

 

[Gozma]

Eh, the balance is pretty poor because strength and endurance are more important than all the other stats combined.

I love Darklands but only as a prototype of games that were never made. It's definitely only gonna be enjoyable for people that are already deep in the mindset of RPG connoisseur. I played it for the first time stunned by all the ideas and methods used that were just never replicated, plus the setting and the literariness, but huge, important sections of it are just miserable. You have to have an RPG lobotomy to find the dungeon crawling in Darklands fun for example, and huge sections of it are unavoidable in the main quest.

Anyway, one thing that should be added to every contemporary review of Darklands is that if you are playing it in DOSBox you absolutely need to set a speed-up key. Being able to double or triple the game speed makes overland travel and dungeon crawling immensely more tolerable.

 

[dnf]

Female warriors are p. hot though.

You mean female cosplayers.

 

[Excidium]

No I mean female warriors.

 

[Trash]

You did great justice to one of my all-time favourite games here, Darth Roxor. Kudos.

 

[Lorica]

Eh, the balance is pretty poor because strength and endurance are more important than all the other stats combined.

You know, this is true if you're looking to powergame and grind up four characters. It'll take you years of in game play, but at the end of it, you'll have German supermen.

But in game, alchemy and the religion attributes are much more useful--STR and END are incremental fighting ability increases, but the other two areas are necessary to resolve a great deal of quests--not to mention, make combat much much more manageable, to avoid combat entirely, to reasonably navigate those extended dungeons, etc. It's an amazing boon to start with just a single recipe or saint when compared to someone without. I think you should definitely give it a go--a party of 20 year old STR & END maxed chars trying to build a recipe book and a list of saints vs. a party with a couple of 30 year olds who've done some basic specialization.

That isn't to say that there aren't definite tiers in usefulness when it comes to skills. The next tier down might be useful but not necessary skills: woodwise, stealth, your speaking skills. The last tier is probably those infamous necessary for one or two sidequests but not much else skills (like riding). None of these by themselves is generally worth taking a big hit to STR & END... But the way the occupation system works, you can't just create some super ascetic monk who has no life skills or way of supporting himself, having lived thirty years in a monastery perfecting only his strength, endurance, alchemical knowledge and religious literacy...

TLDR: Those are two of the most useful attributes. To maximize them, you will hurt your chances of building characters that can do anything other than smack people with clubs. Grinding and metagaming are really the only way to take full advantage of a party built to maximize STR & END.

Need to reinstall, now.

 

[Gozma]

20 year olds is not the way to max end/str. You can do (laborer or recruit)/laborer/laborer/hermit to get 35 year olds with max end/str and a chunk of saints, religion and virtue. Tack on more steps of hermit to taste. Max end/str leaves you enough stat points (with a rural commoner) to get something else to like 30 IIRC, so you can still have a "perception guy" and a "charisma guy" as your dungeon/town specialists. You can either make an alchemy specialist on the side or use another hermit with some intelligence if you just want to abuse saints. Unlike alchemy you want everyone to be churchy enough to support saint calls, since that gives you four pools of divine favor, so a "religion guy" is a poor choice.

Most of the non-combat stats that aren't religion/virtue give you a mediocre chance to avoid combats and solve quests, a saint call gives a reliable solution, and combat is almost always the failsafe.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Yes, it was a total pain to drudge through the dungeons without turbo-speed available and yes, it did suffer from the same problem as Sid Meier's Pirates! - that after a while, you're doing the same side quests but just in a different location with slightly altered names.

 

[Lorica]

20 year olds is not the way to max end/str. You can do (laborer or recruit)/laborer/laborer/hermit to get 35 year olds with max end/str and a chunk of saints, religion and virtue. Tack on more steps of hermit to taste. Max end/str leaves you enough stat points (with a rural commoner) to get something else to like 30 IIRC, so you can still have a "perception guy" and a "charisma guy" as your dungeon/town specialists. You can either make an alchemy specialist on the side or use another hermit with some intelligence if you just want to abuse saints. Unlike alchemy you want everyone to be churchy enough to support saint calls, since that gives you four pools of divine favor, so a "religion guy" is a poor choice.

Most of the non-combat stats that aren't religion/virtue give you a mediocre chance to avoid combats and solve quests, a saint call gives a reliable solution, and combat is almost always the failsafe.

Of those, only hermits are going to learn saints. They get one per time they take it. Old age kicks in at thirty, so to max you should stop at 30.

You can take hermit as your second occupation if you go noble, take novice monk as the first occupation (maxing virtue) and taking hermit at 20, 25, and 30. If you stop there, you have a character with 42 STR/42 END/3 Saints/41 Relg/60 Virt (or a decent heal score)... There isn't much call for dicking around with recruits or labourers if you're trying to have your cake and eat it unless you think that it's worth sacrificing saints for attributes or skills you already wrote off (which is what you're doing if you take rural commoner and waste time getting to hermit).

If you want more than three saints to start the game (per character) you'll be sacrificing STR and END. That's 12 saints, distributed among four party members (none of whom are women if you're maxing STR&END, by the way)?

If you want that alchemy guy, you're not going to get the hypothetical 42 STR&END limit, either. If you were correct that STR&END > everything else, then why bother making an alchemist? Just make a reasonably smart guy. Abuse hermits more. The strongest alchemist you could hope to start with will be 40&40 and have three recipes max, if I recall correctly.

My point is, even your recommendations include the assumption that it's worthwhile to invest in secondary skills and attributes at the expense of STR and END. And to access a great deal of the content in the game, you'll need a face, a rogue-type, a religious type, and an alchemy type, even if they're all capable combatants. The only other option is to grind saints until you stumble into enough to substitute divine intervention for doing anything yourself in the game--which is grindy and metagamey, like I said.

 

[Gozma]

43/43 is the limit sir! THAT'S TWO POINTS MORE!! The rural commoner thing has one more +1/+1 end/str. The noble hermit is inferior I say! Bleah! ALL RURAL COMMONERS. You can go to age 35 since the end/str boost of hermit offsets the aging penalty.

However you are right, that is much less of a pain. The way I play I have to take a month long sit at some point after killing a robber baron to educate everyone to religion over 50. A WORTHY SACRIFICE OF MIGHTY END/STR.

Edit: 42/42 can also be done with a rural commoner oblate/laborer/hermit/hermit, giving you two saints and an alchemy recipe and intermediate religion/virtue. Today I learned I could sperg yet more on Darklands characters.

My basic idea though is that wandering around having random encounters, doing quests, and getting more saints and to a lesser extent alchemy recipes (the whole alchemy bit that lets you store up infinite power in your infinite inventory is basically a "how much do I want to obviate the game I am playing?" system) is what Darklands is. There are many, many ways to make a party that is basically a non-sequitur for the real game if you value the stats and skills equally.

 

[Lorica]

I'll have to double check... I was under the impression that 40 was the hard limit despite the rural commoner +1/+1 for someone coming out of childhood. Besides, I think the fast track a noble background can get you to double saint/double recipe occupations is generally worth +1/+1, assuming it works that way.

The hermit increase only staves off the effects of ageing for one step. After that, the effects increase to -2 STR/-1 END at 35 --> 40, off the top of my head.

I guess it comes down to: I can't imagine anyone not giggling to himself about how he's going to have four German supermen after a few years would play Darklands like a seminary simulator, cut off from a lot of good content, would bother playing through the first winter (when his pallid, thickwristed godmen realise that noone among them knows how to survive a blizzard). It sounds like it just might float your boat, though, and I guess you can tell I also enjoy the occasional power-gamey playthrough.

 

[Gozma]

The thing is it doesn't cut off content. You still can try the woodwise solution to whatever problem if you like; it still works a good 25% of the time or so with someone that picked it with throwaway points, as opposed to 50% if you have some skill specialist that has sacrificed a lot to get it. Or you can use a saint boost and get the woodwise (or whatever) that way. Religion is a special case because it's tied to very direct concrete "system" mechanics as opposed to the other skills, which are basically unreliable keys to quests and random encounter locks.

BUT anyway. If I were playing it for the first time now I'd just use the default party, but I'd be very disappointed in how almost all the skills and stats are just fog.

 

[Lorica]

Saints are a late-game "I win." Those other skills aren't fog. They're how you navigate a lot of the text adventures the game throws at you... You're correct that you'll eventually be able to stomp everything with saints, but I reckon that you'll need some pretty saintly characters commanding the better 50-70 of the games 140 saints before you can do that. And even then, relying on saints and combat so much will mean a lot of downtime as you recover strength and divine favour unless you're good at micromanaging saints' days. The game doesn't penalize you much for that much downtime or for building your characters to only take advantage of the late-game 'I win' powers... But I just think that it's not as fun to be unable to finish quests or random encounters satisfactorily in the early game and then relying on saint domination and recharges during the late game, other than that power gamer in me that likes building characters in Fallout to dominate everything with power armour and a turbo plasma rifle (even then, that doesn't require you lay low for a couple of weeks between quests) in the end.

Besides, I do wonder if you aren't underestimating the success rates possible with a decent specialist. 50% increases pretty nicely. And it's better than 0% in every encounter until you get the right saint, you know?

P.S. Yay, someone will talk about Darklands with me!

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

If you want that alchemy guy, you're not going to get the hypothetical 42 STR&END limit, either. If you were correct that STR&END > everything else, then why bother making an alchemist? Just make a reasonably smart guy. Abuse hermits more. The strongest alchemist you could hope to start with will be 40&40 and have three recipes max, if I recall correctly.

My point is, even your recommendations include the assumption that it's worthwhile to invest in secondary skills and attributes at the expense of STR and END. And to access a great deal of the content in the game, you'll need a face, a rogue-type, a religious type, and an alchemy type, even if they're all capable combatants. The only other option is to grind saints until you stumble into enough to substitute divine intervention for doing anything yourself in the game--which is grindy and metagamey, like I said.

I played this game for the first time about 6 months ago (my monocle level is pretty low and it was still awesome) but I found saint grinding to be pretty much par for the course. Every time you enter a town, just go find what saints you can research and after a while you have a far more reliable saint pool than what you would get from character building. You will never get all the saints, but b/c so many have overlapping uses you'll have pretty good versatility. I did find the dedicated, well trained alchemist to be hugely useful. High quality essence of grace recipes are basically a win button and they seemed harder to grind than saints.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I just finished Darklands, and pretty much agree with the retrospective review done on it by Darth Roxor . The Codex was split on this one between those that see this game as one of the best CRPGs ever created, and others who saw it as a flawed gem. Now that I'm done with it, I'm siding with the 'flawed gem' crowd. The game itself is a great achievement when it comes to depth and historical information. I lived in Trier for three years, so it was a real treat for me to recognize the names of the various landmarks. They even got the name of the central market area (Hauptmarkt) down correctly, though there were some odd bits that didn't quite fit due to how the game manages its points of interests, such as how there is no fortress overlooking Trier, the city being surrounded by a defensive wall. It was also neat to see Saarbrucken nearby as a tiny village.

I started a new game several times as I was getting used to the interface, and it was pretty cool how the game starts you off in different locations with each iteration. Ultimately I decided to start with a very young party of 20 year olds on the middle difficulty. I was worried that this might lead to my rookie team gettings its butt handed to it, but the game was for the most part pretty easy. We started out killing local thieves and taking their stuff. My meagerly armed rookies easily won these encounters, clubbing the more seasoned thieves to death as if they were poachers after baby seals. I upgraded equipment by taking from the dead. In fact, I don't see the reason to start with a more veteran team. By the time my characters were 25 years old they were superbly equipped, rich and famous, had 99 points in the melee weapons of their choice, had ranged weapon skills in the 50-70 point range, and had trained so often in secondary skills that alchemy was at 60, and most of the other important skills somewhere between 30-50 points-wise. The only thing I lacked was riding skill. I spent most of my time in populated areas and turned down jobs that would have me travel far, which helped keep me from losing too much time. I killed tons of robber barons, rescued a mine, recovered lost papers from rival organizations, saved gospels, killed tons of witches, and stopped the Wild Hunt. Good times and a pretty solid skill system in most places. In other places some of the game just doesn't work. I started my final game in Magdeburg, and did good there, killing robber barons and local bandits. The local government sent me on a mission to kill another robber baron when I hit 20 points of local reputation. When I came back I decided to try to see if he had any other quests, but his men threw me on my face and into the street. I went back again later when I built up on conversation skills and the same thing happened. Next thing I know my rep in Magdeburg was -15 despite the good deeds I did before. The guard tried to arrest me, so I tried to talk them out of arresting me, but ended up in a fight. Some dead guards later and my rep went down to -55. I escaped, ran to Braunschweig, where I had a positive reputation, but was attacked by the city guard anyway. I surrendered instead of fighting them, and was soon executed. All because the ruler of Magdeburg was a dick and due to a possible bug which made other guards in other cities attack me despite my local rep.... derp. I reloaded an earlier save, sucked up my -55 Magdeberg rep, avoided the city, and hung out in Leipzig instead where I was a local hero and could enjoy their university. The Sabbat quest had me do a bunch of tasks before the devil summoning, but my sabotage seemed to have no effect on the ritual, which was a bummer.

The combat in this game, and the various bugs really dragged down the experience. I found it quite hard to try to line up my characters in a fighting formation I liked, and the pathfinding is pretty bad. Sometimes a character would kill an enemy that a second character was walking towards in order to engage in melee. Once the first character killed the enemy, he would move onto a new enemy, but the second character would keep walking all the way towards the blood stained floor before turning around. Pause and reassign often. Walking through dungeons is a chore. Also numbers matter, as if you fight a single enemy like a demon or the Hunter the fight will be a cakewalk, but once your characters find themselves outnumbered by three or more, they are likely going down unless you have a alchemist with expensive potions to handle crowd control.

Early on I encountered equipment bugs that gave me one item that weighed 200 pounds and was worth nothing, and another item that was worth thousands but weighed nothing. Both item names were ASCII nonsense like '%$7&4s'. I sold the second item early and traded it for some awesome equipment. Another time I was asked to find the Tanshelm, and did indeed locate it, but once I got out of the dungeon it never showed in the inventory and the person who sent me on the task never acknowledged the mission was complete. Sometimes combat was impossible for several seconds as I could see the enemy but they refused to move towards me and were untargetable. During the Sabbat quest I fought a devil and killed it, beat the first wave of witches and worshippers, then lost to the next wave. After a couple of retries I gave up, set the game to easy difficulty, tried again, and found an endless horde of worshippers that would generate at the bottom of the screen and keep coming regardless of how many I killed and regardless of the fact that I killed the witch or warlock beside the altar, because the game must have figured lulz. Most bugs were fixed by closing out the program and trying again.

I enjoyed the game, but the bugs and moments like becoming a criminal for trying to meet a local lord in which I was already in decent standing brought the experience down a bit. Ah well. Good times, but now it's time to move on t something new...

 

[octavius]

Also numbers matter, as if you fight a single enemy like a demon or the Hunter the fight will be a cakewalk, but once your characters find themselves outnumbered by three or more, they are likely going down unless you have a alchemist with expensive potions to handle crowd control.

Yeah, The Wild Hunt was in many ways the biggest disappointment to me.
Instead of facing

you faced one lone minor demon.

Another time I was asked to find the Tanshelm, and did indeed locate it, but once I got out of the dungeon it never showed in the inventory and the person who sent me on the task never acknowledged the mission was complete.

I can't recall any of the bugs you mentioned, but there is a limited number of open quests, so if you take on too many the program will "forget" the oldests quests and you will find yourself unable to complete them. I found this annoying, since it ruined the logistic challenge of finding the optimal travel routes to do as many quests as possible as quickly as possible.

 

[cherry blossom]

Just saw this. A really good review and the best of Darth Roxo yet.

 

[Invictus]

This is, along with Wizardry 7 and Might and Magic III, are by far the RPGs I've replayed the most.
The game has some flaws and turn based combat fans are bound to come up with a thousand explicitives over it real time combat and the annoying AI and glitches but overall this is one of the finest RPG I have ever played.
It was a sandbox game even before the concept even had a name.
The character creation is not only the deepest for this type of game ever but its level less design which relies on your skills as a measure of your advancement has never been toped yet.
The intricate saints "magic" system, the alchemy system, and the overall history vs superstition setting was simply superb.
Yeah yeah you can find some bugs and the combat and pathfinding might be a bit wonky but believe me that this game was really surprising and like it or not it lay the framework for the combat system in the Infnity engine games...too bad some of its innovations like the character creation have not been implemented in modern games...although I have faith Avalone can get some imput into PE

 

[Silva]

Gorgeous review.

Darklands is the number 1 "Should have a remake" rpg. I wish it was kickstarted someday.

 

[Lady_Error]

Gorgeous review.

Darklands is the number 1 "Should have a remake" rpg. I wish it was kickstarted someday.

Luckily, Josh Sawyer (Pillars of Eternity) thinks the same...