Regardless of how the developer perceives himself, people will undoubtedly and at first glance recognize Redaxium as the work of an outsider artist. For those unfamiliar with the term, it describes artists who for one reason or another exist outside of the mainstream. They're typically self-taught. Popular examples include musician Daniel Johnston, and programmer Terry Davis. Sure, there are games that appear superficially similar, but a cursory investigation will reveal that they're tongue-in-cheek meme games. Redaxium is not one of them. Too often in these cases people are interested in the artist rather than the art, especially here on the RPG Codex where Prosper is something of a local legend. But this is a review is about a game, not the man who made it. In his own words, "We only have a story to tell because there is a game." I tasked myself to engage with, complete, and review Redaxium with a sense of seriousness. That means respecting that some things ought to remain redacted.​

Me: I've picked up [Jagged Alliance] for the first time recently and played it for over 10 hours already. It's very fun! Then decided to look up the people who originally made it, where they are now and what they are doing. Thanks for making a great game!

NM: Wow, thanks for sharing your experience with the game. That was my first experience creating art in games. I started on the project with two other guys, Ian Curry (programmer and director) and Shaun Lyng (writer). I took care of everything from 3d modeling to animation and user interface design. It was the most fun project I ever worked on and funny enough, it was all done remotely. We used dial-up modems to transfer data and we all worked from our own homes. We were a little ahead of the times I guess.​

Vindobona, Noricum / Hafnia, Daniae, Januarii XX, MMXXII: The hero or heroine of Expeditions: Rome is not off to a good start: father murdered, sister married to an enemy and on their way to Asia Minor, to serve in the legion, far away from Rome. Meanwhile, on board your ship, there is another vessel getting closer - of course, pirates!

In Expeditions: Rome you will play a young male or female roman soldier, making your way through history. Take command of a small group of praetorians and eventually become the Legatus a Roman legion. You'll gather a group of loyal companions, engage in tactical turn-based combat, learn new skills, loot and craft new equipment for your soldiers, and shape the fate of Rome. Expeditions: Rome offers over 50 hours of cRPG-gameplay and multiple ways to end the story.

Try before you buy? Download the Expeditions: Rome demo now on Steam, you can even continue playing from your savegame if you get the full game: https://thqn.net/rome-steam
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CGMagazine 7/10
Game Rant 2.5/5
GameGrin 10/10
Gamers Heroes 85/100
Hey Poor Player 4/5
NME 4/5
Rock Paper Shotgun
RPGamer 4/5
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Today’s subject is one we’ve been deliberately saving for last, since it concerns our most impressive set-pieces. One of the main challenges we’ve always had in the Expeditions series has been how to represent the full scale of the war that you usually end up causing or escalating throughout the story. The squad-scale turn-based combat system that we’re so proud of is all about micromanaging individual people and isn’t designed for full-scale warfare.

In Rome, our main solution to this was the addition of the legion battle system, which uses the resource management mechanics of the game’s meta systems to give a taste of the grand strategy you’d expect to have to deal with as the leader of a Roman legion. It’s a complex little minigame that ties into a lot of other systems, but once in a while you want something more. When the story culminates in a big battle, you don’t want to watch it play out in an abstract way: you want to feel like you and your praetorian guard have been thrown into the fray. You want to see the chaos of a major assault up close.

To address this need, we’ve introduced a new way to use our tactical combat on a larger scale, which we call Sieges. Sieges are big set-piece battles that play out in the same small-unit turn-based mode as our more typical encounters, but with several layers of extra production value on top, and with new systems introduced to help sell the scale of the fighting.

First off, what makes the sieges really stand out is the level design. Every siege consists of multiple encounters played sequentially or even occasionally in parallel, but every encounter of a siege takes place in the same enormous level. Even if you’re only fighting with one group in one corner of a city, you can rotate your camera and see exactly where you are in relation to the other encounters. Our world builders really went above and beyond on these levels, crafting jaw-dropping sets that dwarf our typical encounter areas. As the battle progresses, the lighting will change to show the passage of time. You may begin an assault at dusk, fight throughout the night, emerge to seal the victory at dawn’s first light, and regroup for your celebrations at noon.

Because sieges consist of multiple encounters, you should make use of your entire praetorian guard. Ahead of each siege, you are given a thorough briefing followed by a hand-drawn map of the layout of the battle. Here you must choose which praetorian is assigned to which group, with each group responsible for completing a certain set of encounters, each with their own objectives and their own purpose in the overall strategy. Complicating matters, wounds incurred and health lost carries over between encounters, so if you burn through all your skill charges and tactical items in an early fight, you may be faced with a grave challenge later in the siege.

Every siege has its own unique encounter structure. We won’t give any of them away here, but suffice to say we have a lot of fun with the idea that your praetorian guard is split into multiple teams to carry out different tasks within the same battle. Your performance in one encounter may affect your options in the next one, or in some cases you may even have to switch back and forth between two different encounter groups to play their separate fights at the same time.

The stand-out feature of the sieges is something we’ve been hinting at in previous trailers: catapults. The closest we’ve ever come to featuring siege equipment in an Expeditions game was the small cannon you could build in Conquistador and deploy as a tactical item. In Rome, you finally get to call in real artillery support, but it’s not quite the win-button it might at first seem to be. Catapults get their own place in the team turn order. Each catapult has 3 different types of ammunition: a big ol’ stone to smash your foes; a fire ball to set the battlefield aflame; and a scattering projectile that pelts a wide area and attempts to knock all characters within it on their butts.

However, catapults take a while to aim and loose – when you call in a catapult strike, the actual impact won’t happen until the next turn, giving enemies time to flee the impact area. Finding ways to predict their movements, box them in, or keep them in place until the catapults hit is key to successful use of your artillery. A truly effective commander will learn to think of artillery support as an area denial method: if you call in a fireball behind the enemies, you cut off their avenue of escape. Likewise, calling in a catapult stone on an elevated platform used by enemy archers will force them to vacate that location or die before their next turn. It’s a tremendously fun and destructive mechanic which adds an exciting layer of chaos to every siege.

The icing on top of the cake is how narrative the sieges are. One of the best new features in Expeditions: Rome is our flexible encounter scripting system that has allowed us to trigger dialogue and scripted sequences during fights, which means combat is much more of a storytelling tool for us than it’s ever been before. Sieges make the most of this. Every siege encounter has dialogue to establish the situation, characters react to new developments and comment on the progress towards completing the goal of each fight, and they even comment on the performance of their friends that were assigned to other tasks. Above all else this adds personality and drama to the mix, but it also helps to tie the encounters together and make it clear what’s going on and how well you’re doing.

Sieges are the climactic battles that your conquest builds towards. They usually (though not always) mark the transition from one act of the game’s story to another, and winning a siege is a monumental achievement that further cements your character as one of history’s great figures.​

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We have a lot to get through today, so let’s get started. Companions are a staple of the roleplaying genre. Originally an attempt to emulate the dynamics of a tabletop RPG group, they have become one of the most beloved and distinct aspects of the genre, and we daresay its greatest storytelling asset. With a sufficiently compelling set of main characters, a story can really tug on the player’s heartstrings – and one of the keys to making a group of characters appealing is to give them enough screen time for the player to get to know them. RPG-style companion characters are perfectly suited for this, as they typically follow the protagonist everywhere, participating in every scene and every crisis.

We’d love to say that we wanted to place our companions front and center in Expeditions: Rome right from the start, but that would be untrue. In fact, we originally envisioned something much more like Conquistador: a large pool of bare-bones praetorians who were mostly just a collection of names, portraits, and stats. The player would be able to assemble their team from these praetorians, and as they were all able to die permanently or be kicked out of the group at any time, none would be integral to the plot. Four of these praetorians did have a slightly special status as the starting party that we would use to tutorialize the four character classes, but once the tutorial was finished, they would be treated the same as any expendable praetorian.

But soon we ran into a problem: if we couldn’t count on the player to have at least 4 people on their team at any time, certain content in the game simply didn’t work. We decided to promote our four starting characters to “companion” status, making them functionally immortal in that their deaths would result in a game over, and then we added a fifth character to the group to ensure that you could fill a whole 6-person team with companions only. Once we had made this decision, we found ourselves investing more and more personality and agency in these four – after all, if we know these characters are always around, we can use them in dialogue and make them important parts of quests.

But let’s take a step back. Having decided that 5 is the number of companions the game will have, how do you decide who they should be? Well, a game – even a heavily story-based RPG – is first and foremost a mechanical thing, and since Expeditions: Rome offers 4 base character classes in combat, of course all classes must be represented among the companions. This spread of combat roles was the seed upon which we built the player’s tight knit second family. A good short-hand that we like to use to steer our creativity when designing characters is to assign a single title or nickname to each of them that hints at an archetype. Then each companion is fleshed out with details that either support that archetype or counter it, until you have a well-rounded character. Let’s go over them now:

The Centurion: Caeso Quinctius Aquilinus

Every Expeditions game is set in a particular culture at a particular time, and in our view that culture must be properly represented within the companion group. In Viking, we invented Asleifr as the stereotypical ruthless macho viking warrior. In Expeditions: Rome, Caeso represents the archetypical Roman centurion – a dutiful and disciplined veteran soldier who loves the Republic and will happily die to defend it.

But Caeso isn’t a stiff professional, he’s a bon vivant who likes wine, women, and for that matter men when the mood takes him. When you meet Caeso, he is well set in his ways, but eventually the consequences of his easy living will catch up to him, and his sense of duty and loyalty will be tested in equal measure.

In combat, Caeso is a Princeps (heavy infantryman). He wades into battle wielding the gladius and scutum of the Roman legionarius, his polished breastplate and his pristine helmet plume providing a fixed point in the chaotic skirmish for his friends to rally around.
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Today’s dev diary follows up on our diary from just before Christmas, which laid out how we go about designing a good combat encounter. This week we’re going to talk about how the AI has been designed.

Every game is a unique challenge when it comes to AI, and turn-based tactics offer a particularly exciting type of challenge. On the plus side, enemies don’t have to make split-second decisions because of the nature of a turn-based combat system, which means the AI can make more involved or complex calculations. On the other hand, the player has unlimited time to consider their actions and attempt to predict what the AI will do on its turn, so the AI must be quite clever and somewhat predictable without being fully deterministic.

The most important rule when designing AI for games is that the enemies shouldn’t play optimally all the time, but rather they should behave in a way that creates fun gameplay. It’s very easy for us to make the AI never make any mistakes – never step on your caltrops, never walk into your fire, never shoot your shield with their archers, never provoke attack of opportunity, never let themselves be flanked, etc. That won’t make for a fun game though: if you surround an archer with melee enemies, the smart play for the enemy might be to simply skip that archer’s turn, but that will just seem like a glitch. Having that enemy archer try to shoot you, only to get spectacularly skewered from three different sides is much more satisfying.

To this end we have a “mistake probability” value baked into our AI, which is tied to our “AI Difficulty” slider in the options. On higher difficulties, AI will be much less likely to make mistakes, which can feel unsatisfying as certain tactics or skills become more about denying options to the AI rather than provoking and exploiting its mistakes, but does make the game significantly more challenging.

The AI Difficulty setting also has more subtle effects, such as determining how good the AI is at maneuvering past your front line to reach your healer or your archer, or how often they’ll choose to focus their attacks on one specific unit on your team rather than spread out their damage. On the maximum setting, all bets are off as the AI does its level best to kill you, and we even give it a few extra advantages on this level such as extra movement for its melee units so they can maneuver more freely, or a small bump to enemy resistance stats to make flanking more important.

Movement in general is the foundation of good AI in a turn-based game – especially one that takes place on a grid. If the AI can’t reach you, they won’t be able to use their clever tactics. To this end, we have fixed a few of the big problems with the AI in Expeditions: Viking. First off, if you create a bottleneck by blocking off a choke point on the map, the AI would naturally attempt to find a different path which could potentially send it all the way around the level to get you. Now, this only happens if the AI can tell that it’ll be able to reach its target within a few turns. Otherwise it’ll find cover near the chokepoint and wait its turn, or even withdraw its own unit blocking the way, so another unit with higher damage potential can reach its target.

Once the AI is where it wants to be, the question is what it should do. Our combat designer has carefully designed which skills each enemy unit has, in order to create maximum tactical variation over the course of the game as you encounter different cultures and the complexity of the game ramps up. Some enemies have skills that are not even available to the player, which makes them much more interesting to fight. Every single ability that the AI has access to is associated with its own AI tactic that defines when, where, and how that ability should be unleashed. On top of this, there are general tactics available to the AI that help it coordinate between its multiple units, to ensure that the units move in the right sequence and get out of each other’s way.

To help you understand what the AI is up to, we’ve added a lot of combat one-liners. Most are related to specific events, such as morale failure, group movement, or flanking maneuvers. Some communicate the state of the AI, such as “defensive strategy” one-liners where enemy leaders order their subordinates to seek cover and stay put, forcing you to advance upon their position if that’s what the mission calls for. Some one-liners are even specific to a particular skill, such as when enemy heavy infantry uses Hunker Down to make themselves impervious to attacks from the front, or when enemy archers use Interrupt to nock an arrow and shoot the first of your units that enters their field of view. Not only does this help you understand the AI’s behavior, but it also adds a lot of personality and intensity to combat.

We’re very proud of how much the AI in Expeditions: Rome has improved compared to Viking. Our AI programmer has been hard at working over the holiday, polishing and improving the AI based on your demo feedback, but since the demo is limited to the prologue of the game, where the AI has access to very few tools in order to ease you into the gameplay, you’ve only seen a small fraction of what the AI can do once the training wheels are off. We can barely wait for you to get your hands on the full game and see for yourselves.
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Dina has finally made up her mind! You can now snag the first official public demo for Call of Saregnar on Steam! Everyone on the dev team has been busting their butts to get this demo to you by Christmas so Ho-Ho-Hold any negative comments til after they've had time to spend the holiday with their families!

The public demo expands upon many of the areas and ideas behind the previous closed demo. While there is a fair amount of additional content, the majority of the work that went into this demo was getting the game into the smoothest version of itself that we could, and finishing the content that had previously been absent from the already created gameplay areas.

Thank you for checking out our demo! Please let us know how you feel about it through the proper channels.
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In Expeditions, every new level begins with a narrative context. Even a random encounter level or a purely combat-focused so-called “pacification quest” level will have some snippet of story associated with it that helps guide the creativity of the world builder. This isn’t just about placing the level geographically so the environment artists will know what kind of nature or architecture to sculpt. At the earliest stage it’s just as much about creating a feeling in the player. A bustling overpopulated metropolis on the banks of the Nile will need a very different layout than a small quiet fishing village on the coast of the Sea of Marmara.

This nebulous yet crucial idea of “feel” will also inform the combat design in important ways. Overwhelming the player with the size and freedom of choice of a wide-open battlefield, or making them feel claustrophobic and limited in a smaller room, are important ways to sell the fantasy of a particular scene. A mix of open spaces with narrow corridors and chokepoints creates variation between encounters and gives the player a choice of fighting somewhere that fits their tactical play style.

No design choice is purely about gameplay in a game as story-driven as Rome, but the gameplay is generally the most important aspect of level design. Pathing choices is one of the driving factors when setting up an encounter area: by placing small islands of obstacles in an open space, we create smaller paths that lead to the same area. When faced with multiple paths, the player begins to think about why they should go left or right. That choice can be based on enemy positioning, what cover is provided along either path, or if one path is slightly longer than the other. Conversely, an open space gives the player more freedom to manoeuvre around enemies, but also makes it more difficult to control enemy movement and positioning.

Height differences have also been a huge focus for us this time around. Encounters in Expeditions: Viking usually took place on flat planes, and several mechanics in the game were designed around that relatively 2-dimensional landscape. In Rome, we wanted to use elevation better, which involved redesigning ranged attacks to use a real line-of-sight check and giving archers a bonus to their range from high ground. The most important piece of that puzzle was to make sure the levels themselves offered high ground and permitted vertical movement.

Designing levels with plenty of vertical elements such as cliffs or scaffolds creates a height difference that separates hexes from each other by their edges instead of needing to place an empty hex between them. This is another, different form of pathing choice. A landscape with a lot of verticality will block the player’s vision and occasionally force the player to rotate the camera to see the encounter area from a different angle, which gives the player new ideas for how they could approach a problem they’re trying to solve.

We also added new ways to traverse those new obstacles, in the form of ladders and jump points. Using a ladder as a shortcut while another character flanks around makes you feel smart, as does spotting a jump point to get quickly from an elevated platform to a lower position. Not only does jumping off a cliff look and feel cool, it connects the different paths of an encounter area in interesting ways since you can typically only jump in one direction (thanks gravity).

Traversal isn’t the only way to interact with the environment, however. We’ve also implemented a host of new combat objects to use during an encounter. Many combat objects allow you to pick up tactical items just until the end of combat, such as torches from a bonfire, water from a well, or bandages from a medicine box. Other objects can change the battlefield if damaged, such as oil jars which can make someone’s day a lot worse if targeted with a fire arrow.
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Difficulty & Tutorial

Despite our best efforts to keep the difficulty manageable and engage players who struggle, some players find the game frustrating and unplayable rather than challenging. Needless to say, frustrating people was never our goal, so we added Easy difficulty mode and a tutorial explaining key concepts.

Coincidentally, now that we don't have to worry about first-time players, we can make the Hard difficulty a bit more challenging.

Feats & Derived Stats

Charisma now adds Neural Resistance (see Psi Overhaul below). We added 3 new feats (Master Trader, Frog Hunter, Slow Metabolism) and 3 new mutually exclusive mutation feats as quest rewards. Plus balance changes to the existing feats as suggested by the players.

Weapons & Armor

• Extensive balance changes, added new armguards and leg armor.
• We added Old (-1DR) and Damaged (-3DR) armor sets to boost variety on the visual side. Most enemies will be wearing old and damaged armor. New armor will be sold in stores. Unique (custom-made) – looted from notable enemies.
• New weapons: long requested laser cutter, two energy 'shotguns' (a close range energy gun, Earth-made and Ship-made) and 'SMG' (a rapid-fire energy gun), a Ship-made energy club, a clawhammer for the bashers, and a bunch of firearms: a revolver, shotguns, rifles, etc.

Combat & Stealth AI

Improved enemies behavior in combat and stealth: target and attack selection, grenade and stim use, reaction to sound and dead bodies, alert levels, etc.

PSI Overhaul

• PSI attacks always hit (as they don't rely on sight), but the effect can be resisted and damage reduced by Neural Resistance (NR).
• You can't be faster than a thought so PSI enemies have a much higher initiative
• Charisma boosts your NR, which can be increased further with implants, helmets, feats, and stims.
• Zen stim increases NR by 40 for 2 turns
• Improved Mindworms' attacks

Fight Balance

Some fights were way too easy and we apologize to everyone affected.

Misc

• Implants: you can extract them from dead bodies and repair them if they get damaged during extraction due to low skills.
• Gadgets: new tier and rebalance
• Expanded dialogues and quest improvements
• Attack effects' balance changes

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For those who never played Telepath Tactics, Telepath Tactics Liberated is a deep and engaging strategy RPG built upon the combat mechanics of Telepath games past, albeit with layers and layers of tactical depth poured on.

Featuring a cast of dozens of engaging characters, a well-told story, 72 classes, more than 150 skills, branching promotions, and mechanical depth still not seen in any other strategy RPG to date, Telepath Tactics Liberated is an SRPG fan’s SRPG.​

• New hand-designed maps!
• New difficulty modes!
• 3D terrain! (Elevation effects no longer distort the map; characters visibly sink into water or lava and disappear into chasms.)
• More than 40 new skills to learn!
• More than two dozen new classes!
• Smarter AI! (You will now get shoved off of cliffs if you’re not careful!)
• Support for saving mid-battle!
• A vastly improved user interface, including a dedicated shop interface and a dedicated promotion interface!

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Ein Verletzter! JAFFA KREE!​

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Despite Scorpia’s rapture over it, this first Might & Magic game was, like all of the ones that would follow it, disarmingly easy to underestimate. It wore the influence of Wizardry and its successors, The Bard’s Tale among them, prominently on its sleeve: it too was an exercise in turn-based, grid-based exploration, which you navigated from a first-person point of view despite controlling a party of up to six characters. (The oddity of this has led to its sub-genre’s modern nickname of “blobber,” for the way it “blobs” all of your characters together into one octopus-like mass of sword-wielding arms and spell-casting hands.) Its technology verged on the primitive even in 1987, the year which saw the introduction of real-time gameplay to the CRPG genre in Dungeon Master. Nor was it any paradigm of balanced design: the early stages, when your newly created party consisted of naked, penniless club-wielders, proved so difficult that Van Caneghem grudgingly added a slightly — slightly, mind you — more hardy pre-made starting party to later releases. Even once your characters made it to level three or so and were no longer as weak as infants, the difficulty level remained more jagged than curved; monsters could suddenly appear on some levels that were an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else you’d met there, killing you before you knew what had hit you. This was an especial problem given that you could only save your game from one of the nine adventurer’s inns scattered around the sprawling world, a result more of technical limitations than designer intent. Meanwhile the story was mostly nonexistent, and silly where it did exist, culminating in the revelation that the entire world of Varn you’d been exploring was really a giant artificial biosphere created by space aliens; “Varn” turned out to be an acronym for “Vehicular Astropod Research Nacelle.”

If you could get past all that, however, it was a surprisingly rich game. Caneghem has noted that, though he became a pretty good programmer in the course of making Might and Magic, he was always a game designer first, a game programmer second: “I wasn’t a programmer who knew a neat graphics routine and then turned it into a game. I think most people at the time, except for a few, came from that end of it.” As one of the few who didn’t, Van Caneghem took a more holistic approach. Here we have to return to this idea of generosity that the CRPG Addict broached for us at the beginning of this article. Primitive though it was, Might and Magic was still crammed to bursting with stuff, enough to fill a couple of hundred hours if you let it: 250 different items to collect, 94 different spells to cast, 200 different monsters to fight, 55 individual 16-square-by-16-square areas to map. It boasted not only dungeons and towns, but a whole grid-based outside world to explore. The lumpy amalgamation was riddled with cheap exploits as well, of course, but discovering them was half the fun. One should never dismiss the appeal of building a group of adventurers from a bunch of babes in the woods who fall over dead if a goblin looks at them sideways to a six-person blob of terror that can annihilate a thousand of the little buggers at the stroke of a key.

For all its manifest derivativeness in the broad strokes, Might and Magic wasn’t without a smattering of genuinely new ideas, at least one of which became quietly influential on the future course of its genre. As you explored its maps, you often met people who gave you quests: tasks to accomplish apart from revealing more territory and collecting more experience points. These could range from such practical affairs as delivering a letter to another town to more, shall we say, whimsical endeavors, such as climbing every tree in a given area. Completing these side-quests provided rewards in the form of additional experience points and riches. More importantly, it added an additional impetus to your wanderings, a new dimension of play that was different from methodically lawn-mowering through a sometimes numbing procession of dungeons and monsters. In time, sub-quests like these would become an essential component of many or most CRPGs.

Jon Van Caneghem took advantage of his first game’s success to set up a proper office for New World in Van Nuys, California, and hire a staff made up of people much like himself. “A lot of our employees had met at game conventions, and all of our roots were in gaming,” he says. “At 5:30, the office would shut down and the gaming would start. Everyone was always there until all hours of the night, playing games.” He noted in a contemporary magazine profile that he wished above all to keep the New World offices “loose, friendly, and creative.”

He and his fellow travelers shipped Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World in December of 1988. Although clearly of the same technological lineage as its predecessor, it was a big step forward in terms of the details. Not only did it offer an even vaster profusion of stuff, spread over 60 different discrete areas this time, but it came with some significant quality-of-life improvements, including a reasonably usable auto-map if you chose to invest in the Cartography skill for at least one of your characters. Another subtle but welcome improvement came in your ability to set a “disposition” for your party, from “inconspicuous” to “thrill-seeker”; this allowed you to set the frequency of random monster encounters to your own liking, depending on whether you were just trying to get someplace or were actively grinding for experience points. But the most obvious improvement of all was the revamped graphics, courtesy of the full-time artists Van Caneghem had now hired; a version for the Commodore Amiga, the audiovisual wundermachine of the era, looked particularly good. The story was as daft as the last one, taking place on another world… err, alien biosphere called Cron instead of Varn. (The stories of Might and Magic do rather tend to satirize themselves…) But, just like last time, it really didn’t matter at all in a game that was all about the joy of exploration and exploitation.

The improved audiovisuals of Might and Magic II highlighted another aspect of the series that had perhaps been obscured by the primitiveness of the first game. In keeping with Van Caneghem’s sunny, optimistic personality — writer and designer Neal Halford, who came to work with him at New World during this era, calls him “terminally mellow” — the environs of Might and Magic would always be bright, colorful, fun places to inhabit. The series would never embrace the “dark, gritty” aesthetics that so much of the games industry came to revel in as the 1990s wore on.

Jon Van Caneghem the businessman seemed to live a charmed life not out of keeping with his vaguely fairy-taleish visual aesthetic. For instance, he dropped Activision in favor of becoming an affiliated label of Brøderbund in 1989, just before the former company — by this point officially known as Mediagenic — imploded, defaulting on their payments to their entire network of affiliated labels and destroying many of them thereby. He even escaped relatively unscathed from a well-intentioned but financially ill-advised venture into the board-game market, which I’ll cover in more detail in my next article.

For now, though, suffice to say that it was a big part of the reason that Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra wasn’t released until 1991. Like its predecessors, this latest entry in the series tossed you into another new world and let you have it. Still, while philosophically and even formally identical to the first two games — it remained a turn-based, grid-based blobber — it was a dramatic leap forward in terms of interface and presentation. Designed on and for a 32-bit MS-DOS machine instead of the 8-bit Apple II, it sported 256-color VGA graphics that replaced many of the older games’ numbers with visual cues, a lovely soundtrack composed for the new generation of multi-voice sound cards, and a mouse-driven interface. But its most gratifying improvement of all was more basic: it finally let you save your progress inside dungeons or anywhere else you liked. I would venture to guess that this change alone cut the number of hours the average player could expect to spend finishing the game in half, in spite of the fact that its number of individual areas actually grew slightly, to 64.

Veterans of the series could and sometimes did complain that the new level of professionalism and polish came at the cost of some of its old ramshackle charm, and Van Caneghem himself has confessed to being worried that people would notice how the new game’s average completion time was more likely to be in the tens than the hundreds of hours. But he needn’t have been: gamers ate it up.
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