The gladiators are defeated, and everyone gains a level. Frankly, nothing really changed for me after I got this, so maybe this was just a way to get weapons, armor, and experience.
Winning gladiatorial combat in the arena grants you a badge of citizenship.There seem to be five possible avenues for escape: Purgatory is a large city that took me several hours to explore. There's something thrilling about progressing from bare fists to your first short sword that simply isn't present when you're progressing from a long sword +4 to a long sword +5.īolingbroke was doing better towards the end of his Purgatory explorations. In difficulty, it reminds me of the opening stages of Might & Magic. I rather like the setup of the game, with the party tossed into Purgatory with no weapons, armor, or gold, facing hostile denizens, and trying to find a way out. It's too early to determine whether these choices are "Morton's forks" that ultimately converge on the same destiny, but there was nothing like it in The Bard's Tale games, so they're welcome even if they're illusions.
More important, the game (at least in the opening areas) presents actual role-playing choices. There's a "quick fighting" option, although this doesn't seem to be that much quicker than regular fighting. Primarily, combat seems much rarer, occurring every 20-30 moves instead of every three or four. The game also fixes a few common problems that I had with The Bard's Tale.
After studying the manual a bit, I created: You don't explicitly assign classes in the game, but clearly you can bend characters towards particular classes with the allocation of attributes and skills. Also like in Wasteland, you can buy skills at multiple levels, but the manual suggests that they don't improve through use, only through allocating points at the outset and each time you level.Īllocating skill and attribute points during character creation. The skills include weapons (sword, two-handed, bow, crossbow, fistfighting, thrown weapons), magic (low, high, druid, sun), thievery (climb, hiding, lockpick, pickpocket), "lore" (cave lore, arcane lore, town lore, forest lore, mountain lore), and other assorted abilities (bureaucracy, bandage, swim, tracking), and as in Wasteland, I suspect that some of them will turn out to be useless. Character creation in the game is a bit confusing, in the way of Wasteland, with 50 points to allocate among 5 attributes and 24 skills.