Erebus
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2008
- Messages
- 4,771
Largely forgotten today, Betrayal in Antara is the spiritual sequel of the still famous Betrayal at Krondor. It is not set in Midkemia (Sierra apparently didn't have the rights anymore) but it is extremely similar to BaK on most technical points.
(The real sequel to BaK would be "Return to Krondor", a game I gave up on fairly quickly and which inspired an incredibly sucky novel by Feist, but let's stay on topic for the moment.)
BiA is game with a lot of flaws but also some good points that made me enjoy it and play it to the end (quite an accomplishment, as we'll see later).
WARNING : this review is sadly pictureless but you can check out what BiA looks like on Youtube => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9n-2a7orzQ
The first obvious flaw is that it is ugly. The characters look ridiculous during the dialogues and, while the backgrounds are okay, it won't take long for the landscapes to make you sick of the color brown (let's not even mention the "forests"). For a game released in 1997, it should have looked much better. To be fair, the introductions and conclusions of chapters have good art (as long as you don't mind the lack of color diversity).
Thanks to Youtube, I've recently been able to hear the english voice acting for BiA and it sounds fairly poor. Even though I'm usually an adept of original versions, I liked the french voices much better.
The four characters are not exactly original. There's William the nobleman's son, Aren the young tavernkeeper's son who discovers he has magical abilities (saving William's ass in the intro), Kaelyn the young and brash huntress who joins their party for flimsy reasons and Raal the Grrrlf (one of the game's original non-human races ; basically looks like a civilized werewolf) who's only available for two chapters out of nine.
The dialogue and the interactions between the PC are mostly interesting and entertaining, although they sometimes end up being corny. I even enjoyed the sexual tension between William and Kaelyn (unoriginal as hell, but love stories are seldom inventive in computer games).
The combat is almost identical to what it was in BaK. It works well, although your strategic options are rather limited in the chapters where you play only two characters. As far as I remember, the AI is okay : enemies will often target Aren when he's weakened by his spellcasting, before he has time to drink some health potions (amusingly but unrealistically, you can drink up to 25 health potions in one turn). And enemies actually have a strong sense of self-preservation : they will flee when their Health gets too low, which isn't common in CRPGs. (Since characters with low Health move slowly, you're often able to catch up and slaughter them for the loot !)
Injuries work the same as in BaK, if I'm not mistaken : the life points of characters are divided (roughly 50 / 50) between Stamina points and Health points, injuries reduce Stamina before Health and, while Stamina loss does not reduce your abilities, Health loss does. A character with 1 Health point stands almost no chance of doing anything successfully (except drink potions, if he's lucky enough to have some left). If a character loses all Health, he does not die and goes back to 1 Health point after the fight BUT he remains in a very weakened state where he cannot regain more Health until he drinks about 25 health potions or rests for many days. It's a nice system, much more realistic than what's found in most CRPGs.
Other minor elements (your food will spoil with time, your armors and weapons need maintenance, etc) are realistic without being annoying.
The magic system (used only by Aren) is original, but doesn't end up as interesting as you expect it to be. Basically, there are more than 20 spheres of magic (such as fire, distance, divination, multiple, etc.). You start with only three (creation, electricity and touch), which you can combine to research a spell that will inflict electrical damage on touch. You can discover more spheres by observing enemies use them or finding tutors and find new combinations that will produce spells. Unfortunately, you seldom find yourself having to choose between researching two different spells and, anyway, you'll hardly ever use many of the spells you discover.
There's no C&C to speak of, really. The game has been accused of being too linear, but I don't think it's any worse than many other computer games.
There are some ugly dungeons here and there and some puzzles I rather liked.
The main flaw of the game is that it is increasingly buggy. A patch was apparently released but it worked only for the english version (Sierra's way of telling the players from other countries to go fuck themselves). So I had to endure the game crashing at increasingly short intervals. During the first chapters, it almost never happened but it made Chapter 9 pure hell : the game would crash because I had opened a character's inventory, because I'd switched to another character's inventory, because I'd opened a door, because I'd tried to use an object, because I'd taken three steps forward, because a fight had ended, because I had tried to access the map or a character's status page, etc... Doing anything at all risked crashing the game. I don't think I was ever able to play Chapter 9 for more than 5 minutes straight.
The main good points of the game are its story and its setting. The plot is interesting and complex. Who the bad guys are and what's their plan is progressively revealed, keeping the player interested. I would never have persevered through Chapter 9 if I had not wanted to see the ending (which turned out to be very nice and begging for a sequel that will never ever be made).
The setting is really the one point where Betrayal in Antara is obviously superior to Betrayal at Krondor. I enjoyed reading Feist when I was 16-17 but let's face it, Midkemia is a cliché storm. The world of BiA is much more original and interesting. Its society, politics, customs, organizations, non-human races and history are well-detailed and don't feel like the rehashed, unsurprising banality we still find in most recent CRPGs.
(The real sequel to BaK would be "Return to Krondor", a game I gave up on fairly quickly and which inspired an incredibly sucky novel by Feist, but let's stay on topic for the moment.)
BiA is game with a lot of flaws but also some good points that made me enjoy it and play it to the end (quite an accomplishment, as we'll see later).
WARNING : this review is sadly pictureless but you can check out what BiA looks like on Youtube => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9n-2a7orzQ
The first obvious flaw is that it is ugly. The characters look ridiculous during the dialogues and, while the backgrounds are okay, it won't take long for the landscapes to make you sick of the color brown (let's not even mention the "forests"). For a game released in 1997, it should have looked much better. To be fair, the introductions and conclusions of chapters have good art (as long as you don't mind the lack of color diversity).
Thanks to Youtube, I've recently been able to hear the english voice acting for BiA and it sounds fairly poor. Even though I'm usually an adept of original versions, I liked the french voices much better.
The four characters are not exactly original. There's William the nobleman's son, Aren the young tavernkeeper's son who discovers he has magical abilities (saving William's ass in the intro), Kaelyn the young and brash huntress who joins their party for flimsy reasons and Raal the Grrrlf (one of the game's original non-human races ; basically looks like a civilized werewolf) who's only available for two chapters out of nine.
The dialogue and the interactions between the PC are mostly interesting and entertaining, although they sometimes end up being corny. I even enjoyed the sexual tension between William and Kaelyn (unoriginal as hell, but love stories are seldom inventive in computer games).
The combat is almost identical to what it was in BaK. It works well, although your strategic options are rather limited in the chapters where you play only two characters. As far as I remember, the AI is okay : enemies will often target Aren when he's weakened by his spellcasting, before he has time to drink some health potions (amusingly but unrealistically, you can drink up to 25 health potions in one turn). And enemies actually have a strong sense of self-preservation : they will flee when their Health gets too low, which isn't common in CRPGs. (Since characters with low Health move slowly, you're often able to catch up and slaughter them for the loot !)
Injuries work the same as in BaK, if I'm not mistaken : the life points of characters are divided (roughly 50 / 50) between Stamina points and Health points, injuries reduce Stamina before Health and, while Stamina loss does not reduce your abilities, Health loss does. A character with 1 Health point stands almost no chance of doing anything successfully (except drink potions, if he's lucky enough to have some left). If a character loses all Health, he does not die and goes back to 1 Health point after the fight BUT he remains in a very weakened state where he cannot regain more Health until he drinks about 25 health potions or rests for many days. It's a nice system, much more realistic than what's found in most CRPGs.
Other minor elements (your food will spoil with time, your armors and weapons need maintenance, etc) are realistic without being annoying.
The magic system (used only by Aren) is original, but doesn't end up as interesting as you expect it to be. Basically, there are more than 20 spheres of magic (such as fire, distance, divination, multiple, etc.). You start with only three (creation, electricity and touch), which you can combine to research a spell that will inflict electrical damage on touch. You can discover more spheres by observing enemies use them or finding tutors and find new combinations that will produce spells. Unfortunately, you seldom find yourself having to choose between researching two different spells and, anyway, you'll hardly ever use many of the spells you discover.
There's no C&C to speak of, really. The game has been accused of being too linear, but I don't think it's any worse than many other computer games.
There are some ugly dungeons here and there and some puzzles I rather liked.
The main flaw of the game is that it is increasingly buggy. A patch was apparently released but it worked only for the english version (Sierra's way of telling the players from other countries to go fuck themselves). So I had to endure the game crashing at increasingly short intervals. During the first chapters, it almost never happened but it made Chapter 9 pure hell : the game would crash because I had opened a character's inventory, because I'd switched to another character's inventory, because I'd opened a door, because I'd tried to use an object, because I'd taken three steps forward, because a fight had ended, because I had tried to access the map or a character's status page, etc... Doing anything at all risked crashing the game. I don't think I was ever able to play Chapter 9 for more than 5 minutes straight.
The main good points of the game are its story and its setting. The plot is interesting and complex. Who the bad guys are and what's their plan is progressively revealed, keeping the player interested. I would never have persevered through Chapter 9 if I had not wanted to see the ending (which turned out to be very nice and begging for a sequel that will never ever be made).
The setting is really the one point where Betrayal in Antara is obviously superior to Betrayal at Krondor. I enjoyed reading Feist when I was 16-17 but let's face it, Midkemia is a cliché storm. The world of BiA is much more original and interesting. Its society, politics, customs, organizations, non-human races and history are well-detailed and don't feel like the rehashed, unsurprising banality we still find in most recent CRPGs.
I am such a loser. 
