When it comes to the most iconic RPG games in the history of gaming, Origin Systems' Ultima series is an unavoidable topic, as it is one of the most successful role-playing games in the history of computer games. Since the launch of this series of games, it has become the object of learning and imitation of many games. The Deathlord I'm going to review today is a role-playing game that looks and sounds a bit like Genesis.
The game was designed by Al Escudero and David Wong and released by EA in 1987. Since there was no game company in China to obtain the official authorization of EA at that time, the market was pirated. Lords of Death is a translation of the version launched by one of the companies, as well as the name King of Destruction. In the following article, it will be referred to uniformly as "Lord of Death".
The Death Lords are set on a continent called Kodan. There is a Kingdom of Lord on the continent that is threatened by the evil Lords of Death. The Death Lord's army and his evil demons burned and plundered the continent and destroyed the kingdom's second largest city. The forces of evil are constantly expanding, and in the autumn of the kingdom's survival, the adventurer will accept the king's call and embark on a journey to destroy the Lord of Death.
After entering the game, the player first creates his own team. The game offers eight different races and a total of sixteen classes in five categories to choose from. Each team requires six members, each with seven different attributes, so just creating characters at the beginning of the game will take a lot of time. There are six preset members in the game that can be used, and if you don't want to waste too much time on creating characters, you can use these six members directly.
In my personal experience, using these six members seems slightly easier to get started at the beginning of the game. Because when you create members yourself, the attributes are determined by random numbers, and the result of this random number is usually that one or two properties are not so ideal unless you have a very good hand. The game is very difficult at the beginning, and the members of the team will be saved immediately if they are killed in battle, so the early stages of the game are often spent in the process of deleting dead players and new members.
The game offers the ability to teleport characters from Ice City, Genesis 3, or Witchcraft games to Lords of Death. All three games were popular role-playing games at the time, and the game was supposed to do so to attract players who played them. However, the characters who are teleported over don't actually retain anything, not even races, classes, attributes, etc., so this function is actually of little effect. Upon entering the game, players will see a game screen that is very similar to Genesis 3. On the left side of the screen, there is the map screen of the adventure, and on the right side is some basic information and information about the status of the team members. If a player who is not very familiar with role-playing games puts the game screens of Genesis 3 and Death Lords in front of them, I am afraid that they will think that the two screens are the same game.
Moreover, in addition to the fact that the configuration of the screen is very similar, even the components on the map are very similar. Of course, the game screen performance of that era was originally relatively average, so it was not very flashy in the image. The tusus of some of the map elements of Lords of Death look like they were borrowed from Genesis 3, which is simply another stitching game. Because of this, the game once attracted the attention of Lord British after its launch, and there were some disputes with EA for this game.
One more episode to mention, as the game caused Origin Systems to have a bad relationship with EA for a while. Since Lord British believed that the game might decompile his game, it terminated its distribution relationship with EA. Since EA did not admit to theft, Lord British later added a dead pirate named Prit Snikwah to his game (EA's head at the time was named Hawkins Trip, who wrote his name backwards) to express his displeasure.
In the promotion of Lords of Death, it was announced that the game had 16 continents, 128 different monsters, and 20 dungeons for players to explore. In terms of numbers, such a scale was indeed quite large at the time. However, the game's balance is rather poor, especially the difficulty at the beginning of the game is frighteningly high. When I was playing this game, I had to die more than thirty teammates before I managed to train six level two players.
The art of the game is a major feature, such as the advertised selling points of 128 different monsters, and the number of this part is indeed very large. In addition, the world in the game has time, and as the sun goes down, your vision will become smaller and smaller, so that you can't see the monsters that are approaching you. If you make a mistake in the town, the guardians of the city will attack you, and even if you escape from the town for a while, they will continue to hunt you down the next time you step into the town. These pictures and design details are actually quite well done.
The reason why the game can feel very difficult is related to the save mechanism used by the game. When a member of a team in the game dies, this state of death is immediately written into the disk. So even shutting down immediately, or choosing to read previous archives, won't be able to save the character. Although the game has the function of backing up the save tiles, it is impossible for players to make a backup every time they experience a battle. Because the punishment for this battle death is too harsh, the difficulty of the game becomes very high.
On the other hand, the difficulty of the game is presented in the part of the game that is explored. In towns or dungeons, there are secret doors or phantom walls. These things have little to no hints, forcing the player to constantly hit the wall on their own. In some places where there are secret treasures, in addition to hitting the wall through the wall is not enough, the player also needs to find a mechanism to close it, in order to be able to obtain these treasures. Most of the games in this part of the game can not find hints (or need to pay the informant to get it), so it is very hard to play.
In addition, although this game claims to use an oriental background, the game does see many very Japanese terms. For example, the game's class has a bunch of English pinyin Japanese (for example, there is a class called Ansatsusha, which is actually the pronunciation of the Japanese assassin spelled out in English), but in fact, the setting in the game is not exactly Japanese background, and there are also a bunch of European and American nouns mixed in, making this game give people a mixed feeling.
It is said that the original version of this game did not use an oriental background. However, after EA's operation department got the game, it felt that such a game background was not attractive enough, so it asked the author to improve this part. So after receiving such feedback, the author chose to convert the story, classes, spells, etc. in the game into an Oriental style. Maybe it's because it was a conversion that was made later, not because the game decided to do it at the beginning, which caused this result.
In fact, in terms of gameplay alone, this "Death Lord" is a pretty good "Genesis 3" imitation. Deducting the difficulty of the game and the game content that is neither Eastern nor Western, the entertainment of the game is still quite high. However, at that time, the game did not get much attention from players. The game's plagiarism dispute ended after EA acquired Origin Systems.