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Yeah, I fumbled thru the first episode and didn't read anything. In episode 2 of the LP I go over the manual and the documentation. I play games for fun on my channel, not to "be the best" or whatevs, so u get the full experience with me lol. But yeah, eventually it smooths out nicely and I get the hang of it all.
The "real" Deathlord experience was; Character dies, instant save to disk. All die, restart whole game. I cheated this by making two copies of my disks, and saving on the other copy and removing the disk. No, I never finished Deathlord. It was one of the few games back then that I just had enough after only getting about half the items and words. Years later I read through the walkthrough on gamefaqs (Shultz walkthrough) and wondered how anyone could have done it, let alone put all that information together.
The "real" Deathlord experience was; Character dies, instant save to disk. All die, restart whole game. I cheated this by making two copies of my disks, and saving on the other copy and removing the disk. No, I never finished Deathlord. It was one of the few games back then that I just had enough after only getting about half the items and words. Years later I read through the walkthrough on gamefaqs (Shultz walkthrough) and wondered how anyone could have done it, let alone put all that information together.
That's pretty much what everyone who ever played it says. Everyone made copies of disks, everyone save-scummed. And everyone cheated by accelerating level up with attacks on poor sailors in Oceanspray, then swapping disks to reset the town.
In Deathlord Relorded my main goal is to have players ENJOY the game. While it'll still be very tough (I'm currently totally lost
in a pyramid with a minotaur maze
), I want to make sure people don't have to swap backups to play normally, or meta-game to level up. In my normal gaming with just a bit of grind, my team is now level 21-23 and going up pretty well, and I've barely gotten one word. My monk might even reach the point of the original AC bug for ninjas and monks! (it would reset at level 32, and that's fixed in DLRL)
Fluent your worst choice was not to autoroll at the start. A magician with 1 hp is gnarly.
...But still, I am quite intrigued as to why you think the rear rank using ranged weapons is such is big deal. To me it's almost a sidenote given all the changes to the adventuring...
It should be obvious that making 4-6 attacks per turn rather than 3/turn, all else being equal, would make combat noticeably easier than it otherwise would be. Obviously that only applies to turns where the rear rank people make ranged attacks rather than casting spells, but that probably happens frequently enough. Mana limitations mean one is not normally going to be casting spells every turn. In fact, gaining the benefits of the extra attacks would make mana conservation a lot easier, not just making that particular encounter easier but leaving the party better prepared for the next one as well.
It affects class balance. Casters who can use ranged weapons are relatively much more useful than they would otherwise have been. On the other hand, a Genkai or Mahoutsukai who (IIRC) cannot use ranged weapons has been rendered relatively less powerful compared to other casters. That in turn can potentially have a big effect on what party compositions are best, one of the main strategic considerations in a game like this. To give just one example, in the original Deathlord, making one of your rear rankers anything other than a caster would make no sense, as most of the time he could do nothing and would be a complete waste of space. If one can attack from range in the rear ranks though, making one of the rear rankers a warrior type with a bow is suddenly a viable option.
Whether any of the above consequences are good or bad is a separate question, but they are not trivial.
...If you know exactly what to do in the game, then the rear rank ranged change is certainly significant, but if you're playing it as a normal person the main change is that now you can really look at using cool classes like ranger, assassin, etc... which were mostly overlooked originally.
Well, I do tend to be something of a powergamer who tries to take maximum advantage of every resource available, so feel free to assume that is biasing my perspective.
Apart from that, you'll still get crushed by the masses of enemies in dungeons, get lost in the depths, have your critical healer get paralyzed at the wrong time, etc...
rogueknight333 , yes when you’re powergaming every single change matters, and the rear rank ranged is definitely up there. But here’s my reasoning for making it happen:
1- I am convinced it’s a bug. In the original, ranged or melee make ZERO difference.
2- rear rank being magic only makes a player discard a wide range of classes as being useless
3- pure casters either have no ranged weaponry or just slings which have minimal damage. So if you’re going to use pure casters, either you put them in the rear rank and nothing changes, or you put them in front and they’re cannon fodder with crap AC. The outlier being the priest
So by having the rear rank use ranged weapons I open a whole range of possibilities. For example my team used to be warrior, samurai, monk, priest, illusionist, mage. I swapped the warrior for a ranger and it’s so much more interesting. I can move the ranger to the rear rank when dealing with weaker mobs and accelerate the killing, now that I have the priest with a very strong weapon and a decent AC.
Tactically DLRL is much deeper than DL and that’s something I wanted to achieve. I haven’t even looked at using the peasant yet, and that guy might even be useful since he can now use the crossbow.
Very good question, noble sir. I decided on the change for the following reasons:
1. I hate food issues. In the old days the first thing I did on Ultimas was to find the 2 food bytes and set them to 99,99.
2. Nox Archaist’s solution is very elegant, where food helps heal.
3. Without food, you’ll run out of magic. Without magic, you’ll run out of HP. It’s exactly the same resuly as starvation, except slower.
DLRL’s food implementation doesn’t trivialize food, but it also doesn’t force you to keep it top of mind. The major difference with the original is that you can stay out exploring for a longer period. It’s as if I doubled your max food available. When you run out of food in DLRL it’s high time to rush home, especially if you’re low on magic.
I just released version 1.0.2 that has a fix for the endgame (if you ever get to it) and automatically displays the original screen. Otherwise when you win it looks like the game froze until you hit F11 and see the endgame animation.
Also, I suggest you upgrade to 1.0.3, but before that please make a backup of your /Images directory and the dcmarkers.data file, just in case.
Starting with version 1.0.1, DLRL saves everything (including the modified floppy images) in your Saved Games directory.
It's a solid black block that blinks about every second showing some diagonal streaks of graphics through the black block then blinks back to a solid black block.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong for linking image but it looks exactly like Sotomonte's first image after it blinks, then it blinks back to solid black.
Sorry I frankly have absolutely no idea how to reproduce this. Maybe I could send you different builds that remove pieces of graphical functionality and we can determine the actual culprit.
Read somewhere there was anti-aliasing issue with my card on some games. Is there a way to disable it? In the Amd software there's only the options to use application settings or override application settings, not to disable completely.
Read somewhere there was anti-aliasing issue with my card on some games. Is there a way to disable it? In the Amd software there's only the options to use application settings or override application settings, not to disable completely.
Yeah that's right!! "Deathlord?" More like Dead-lord amirite? Because you died!
Thank you rikkles for enhancing Deathlord and allowing me to finish the game, roughly 33 years after starting. The game still has some major fundamental flaws in its interface, mechanics, and signposting, but you made these much more bearable so that we can focus on the game’s strength: exploration. I really liked many of the dungeon designs and the designers used many aspects of the game’s systems cleverly, such as dark/light regions and illusionary walls (e.g. allowing monsters to pass through these walls to give observant players hints about where to search). Some dungeons really sucked (door dungeon, I’m looking at you ) but the attention to detail seems way beyond which you could expect in 1988, at least for 3rd person overhead RPGs.
My party (Waruihitotachi, “bad guys” in really rough Japanese to be consistent with the rest of the game) ended up around level 25:
Troll ronin (Great fighter, was able to use pretty much all equipment including some special “unholy” gear towards the end of the game, did not use any magic beyond basic shisai healing spells)
Gnome ryoshi (Solid fighter, not able to use the best armor, barely used any magic since low-level shizen spells suck, but team MVP due to the special abilities added in DLRL)
Human ninja (Wasn’t able to use much equipment and didn’t get to a high enough level where I think his unarmed or AC improvements would have been game-changing, but I wanted a thief-type and I couldn’t not play a ninja in a game like this)
Kobito shisai (Best healer plus good fighter, pretty much essential)
Human mahoutsukai (Can’t use missile weapons so only actions were to cast the same 4 – 5 spells the entire game)
Obake genkai (Same as above. Being able to detect illusionary walls is probably OP but it did remove a lot of tedium. Was pumped to finally learn the uku water-walk spell and only used it like once )
General thoughts:
- I went back and read the Codex’s interview with Al Escudero, one of the designers. He blamed many of the game’s flaws on the sudden push from EA to change the setting of the game from Norse to Asian, since that took time away from fine-tuning the other aspects of the game. That’s unfortunate, and while the Japanese influence is kind of half-assed, I find it to be a memorable aspect of the game and one reason why I was initially drawn to it.
Also, apparently they kept using the same QA testers who became so familiar with the game that they complained it was too easy, so I guess we have them to blame for a lot of the contrived difficulty and frustration . There truly was no consideration of “casuals” in those days.
- I noticed that missile weapons tended to improve AC. I guess this was meant to simulate archers being further away from combat, and since these weapons typically do less damage than melee weapons maybe these tradeoffs were meant to be tactical elements for the player to consider (not that the manual makes this clear). That’s really the best I can come up with regarding why the original version of the game included missile weapons but did not allow them to be used from the back 3 spots.
- Being a somewhat proficient Japanese speaker, I was interested by the Japanese names used throughout the game and wondered how they were chosen. Most of them make some amount of sense, but many seem like words that could only be formed by a non-native speaker working with an RPG-centric vocabulary. For example, the word motu (actually motsu, “to hold”) is used in spell names involving causing or curing paralysis. I assume the authors started with “hold person” as the English-language spell name and looked for a suitable Japanese translation for “hold”, while someone who looked up words actually relating to paralysis itself would have found different/better words.
Some other highlights:
Toshi (elf) – I have no idea where this came from. Since toshiyori means “the elderly”, I wonder if they focused on the longevity aspect of elves, looked up a word related to that, and cut the word in half.
Nasu (heal) – I assume the root word here is naosu which means “to fix/cure,” but they left out an important letter and ended up with the word for “eggplant” instead . I imagined the priest summoning vegetables with curative properties, like a fucked up version of Goodberry in D&D.
Zuma (lightning) – Inazuma does mean “lightning,” and the -zuma part of the word is written using the same kanji as “wife.”
Unmei (finger of death) – Unmei means “fate” and I thought this was a rather poetic name for such a spell, then realized it’s more likely that this word was chosen due to some confusion in translation between “fate” and “fatality" .
- I’m genuinely surprised and impressed that the ending
does not involve the Emperor Pearl Harboring the party in some way. While this may be because the designers were truly progressive for their era, it may be equally likely that this is another consequence of the late setting change and they might have made different choices had they designed the game to take place in pseudo-Asia from the very beginning.
In closing, I’m glad I got to fully experience the game even in this non-grognard form. While I hope many other people give it a try, I’m curious what broader appeal it will have to those who never played it, even those who do enjoy modern “retro” RPGs.
Fatberg Slim thank you so much for your report and comments. It really made my day, and that’s exactly what I was aiming for! To have people really enjoy the superlative dungeon design and exploration, as well as at least sample some of the incredible difficulty of Deathlord while removing the most obvious design mistakes and sadistic tendencies.
i agree that the gnome is somewhat OP with their superb darkvision, but I wanted the players to be able to decide for themselves what level of difficulty they wanted. After all, they can always play an all-human party without bonuses, just like in the original where it made no sense to use anyone other than human.
The monk and ninja are imho a bit diappointing. I finished my game with a level 27 monk and she didn’t hold a candle to the samurai. That said, the ninja in DLRL cannuse the katana, which makes him as good as a samurai, trading some HP for thief skills.
I’m thinking (time permitting) to add instant critical kill to the monk and ninja, which would be level-dependent (delta level between the char and the enemy). But that would add some pretty extreme imbalance and I’m quite worried about it.
Just FYI, my ninja was not able to equip the katana. I played version 1.0.1 though, so this may have been fixed later. He did pretty well with the shuriken and nunchaku through most of the game.
I’m thinking (time permitting) to add instant critical kill to the monk and ninja, which would be level-dependent (delta level between the char and the enemy). But that would add some pretty extreme imbalance and I’m quite worried about it.
) but the attention to detail seems way beyond which you could expect in 1988, at least for 3rd person overhead RPGs. 
)
. I imagined the priest summoning vegetables with curative properties, like a fucked up version of Goodberry in D&D.
.
