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Title : 1991/1992
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1991/1992

            

1991 was, on balance, a depressing year. It took me nearly 3 years and 1,201 hours to get through its 37 games, nearly a quarter of that spent on Fate: Gates of Dawn. When it was all over, Ultima V from 1988 still stood at the top of the list and only four games had broken a rating of 50 all year, three of them sequels to games that had higher scores. The average rating was 2 points lower than 1990 and 3 points lower than 1989.

Games in 1991 got longer but not better.

        

Even the highlights had asterisks. There were four Gold Box games this year--Pools of Darkness, Death Knights of Krynn, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, and Neverwinter Nights--but still none of them managed to exceed Pool of Radiance, and for the first time I began to wish SSI had better balanced quality with quantity. Might and Magic III was good but not as good as I remembered. Fate was memorable but lasted more than 200 hours beyond the point I should have stopped playing.
          

This screen was not worth the equivalent of 7 full-time work weeks.

      

I did continue to appreciate the growing geographic diversity of our developers. There were more countries represented this year than in any previous year, including Canada (Ancients 1: Death Watch), Switzerland (Antares), Denmark (Chaos in Andromeda), Germany (Die Drachen von Laas, Fate: Gates of Dawn, The Ormus Saga, Dungeons of Avalon, Spirit of Adventure), Australia (Dungeon of Nadroj), Japan (Knights of Xentar), the UK (Moonstone, Heimdall, HeroQuest, Knightmare), and Italy (Time Horn). What's more, none of these games totally blew it. In fact, they all had moments of innovation and brilliance, even if they didn't always achieve high final scores.

I'm also satisfied with my "won" rate for the year. I only gave up on Antares, The Ormus Saga, Dungeons of Avalon, and the sample game with The Bard's Tale Construction Set, and I took both Ormus and Avalon as far as I could. They both still bother me.

The only major theme I can draw out of the year is the surprising persistence of low-quality Ultima clones. Between Quest for Tanda, The Rescue of Lorri in Lorrintron, The Ormus Saga, and Legend of Lothian, I've really had my fill of independent game with iconographic interfaces.

Game of the Year Nominees

Part of me wants to reach down to mid-list for "Game of the Year." Knights of Xentar--at least was different. The limited but satisfying Shadow Keep. Twilight: 2000, because no other RPG has let me drive a tank through Poland. But no, I can't nominate any of them with a straight face. So instead, here's my half-hearted list of nominees for "Game of the Year":

1. Disciples of Steel. The clear victor if I chose based on rating alone. It was the top-rated game of the year and the one I authentically enjoyed the most, despite its many flaws. In a year of blah, this one-hit wonder managed to anticipate dozens of future trends, including multiple interweaving quest threads, multiple modes of gameplay, and lots of player choice. Its character development and tactical combat systems, adapted from Wizard's Crown, are near-unsurpassed, and it gave solid attention to other mechanics of quality RPGs, including a tight economy and a diverse set of equipment. I was sorely tempted to replay it at the end of the year, favoring a completely different approach this time, seizing cities by force and maximizing the use of the optional strategy game hiding beneath the surface. My biggest quibble: it sold about 12 copies and left no mark on the future.
           

Despite hundreds of battles, I never got bored with Disciples of Steel's tactical combat system.

         

2. Pools of Darkness. Technically, as Gold Box sequels went, Death Knights of Krynn ranked higher. But Pools of Darkness took the Gold Box to new levels, maxing out spell capabilities and allowing characters to rise to god-like levels. It told a compelling story, featured one of the most memorable maps of the series (Moander's corpse), and concluded everything with a truly-epic final combat. While not the Omega of the Gold Box games, it's close, and it makes a worthy bookend with Pool of Radiance.
       

The final battle of Pools of Darkness is legendarily difficult.

         

3. Might and Magic III. I don't think it's the best of the Mights and Magics even among the first three, but it demonstrates New World's commitment to pushing the envelope and updating its interface with new technologies. The mechanics often feel unbalanced, and the game world is sometimes a little goofy, but it's still loads of fun. Between its million side quests, the dozen items of equipment that every character can strap on, and its constant sense of character development, no one else was offering anything exactly like it. The Might and Magic series has always, in my opinion, exceeded its sources (principally Wizardry) and competitors (principally The Bard's Tale), but this was the first year that it truly left them in the dust.
         

Combat in Might and Magic III is turn-based, but through sound and graphics manages to evoke a real-time feel.

          

4. Fate: Gates of Dawn. The game that embodies "go big or go home." Out of nowhere, developer Olaf Patzenhauer took an Alternate Reality base and made the largest physical RPG seen so far, with more monsters, more spells, more character classes, more items, more everything than any of his competitors. More isn't always better, of course, and in the end, Fate is ludicrously, unconscionably, almost maliciously long, with only the thinnest plot and an absurd ending, but it's hard to beat the mechanics of the first 50 hours. As whole, Fate re-defines "epic" and paves the way for Germany's ascension in the RPG world in the 1990s.
         

I managed to map most of the 640 x 400 game world.

            

5. Eye of the Beholder. It's easy to forget that up to this point, the Gold Box series has offered the only truly successful adaptation of the most famous tabletop RPG system. Every other attempt at the D&D license has resulted in something forgettable at best and execrable at worst. Eye of the Beholder comes along and, though flawed, shows that there is another way to do it. It kept Dungeon Master-style gameplay alive and managed to produce its own sequel during the same year.

Honorable mentions: Technically, Death Knights of Krynn rated higher than Pools of Darkness, but who gives GOTY to the middle game in a three-part series? Spirit of Adventure was a surprisingly effective improvement on its Bard's Tale template but didn't really leave a legacy. I had a ball with Conan: The Cimmerian despite it lacking in several core RPG areas. MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients was a poor game overall, but it was an important step to truly open worlds and lots of player choice in how to achieve objectives.

1992 Preview

While we let those percolate, let's look ahead to 1992. If 1991 was a disappointing year, 1992 promises to be the absolute opposite. I'm practically giddy at the list before me. Every franchise had a release this year. We get the final D&D Gold Box title (aside from the Unlimited Adventures construction set) with The Dark Queen of Krynn. The Ishar series begins. The Realms of Arkania series begins. We get the second Interplay Lord of the Rings title. We get the third Magic Candle title. We get a Might and Magic, a Wizardry, a Quest for Glory, and two Ultimas! And in between these surefire hits are a ton of titles that I feel like I've heard good things about, among them Amberstar, Black Crypt, Darklands, Four Crystals of Trazere, and Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace. Surely, one of these games is destined to unseat Ultima V at the top of the list.

Here's the bad news: there are 65 games. This is, in fact, the peak year for RPGs.
         

      
The following year, 1993, has one game fewer, and after that the number drops back to the 30s and 40s for most years, averaging 43 between 1994 and 2009. But 1992 is a definite hump, and I can only be glad that so many of the titles look promising. Given the sheer number, you'll need to understand when I'm relentless with my definitions. I'm tempted to start right now by axing B.A.T. II; the first one was hardly an RPG at all.

Despite the sheer number, there's not a lot of new geographic diversity with the 1992 titles. The USA and Germany remain strong. Canada and the U.K. contribute a few. A few more leak to the west from Japan. Hungary contributes its first RPG with Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes, and Finland offers its first RPG since SpurguX (UnReal World). In terms of platforms, I'm going to be able to abandon most of my emulators. There are four Amiga-only games (Antepenult, Black Crypt, Dungeons of Avalon 2, and Warriors of Releyne), two Macintosh-only games (Darkwood and Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete), and a lone C64 game (Telnyr II). The other 58 have a DOS port.

We're going to be entering 1992 slowly, because I've decided to double up on 1988 and 1989 games until I clear the "old" list and can work off of 1992 exclusively. There are 38 games remaining on that "old" list, although I can tell a lot of them are destined to be cut.

Year-End Superlatives

Total games played: 37 (from an original list of 45)

Highest-rated games: Disciples of Steel (57), Death Knights of Krynn (54), Pools of Darkness (52), Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra (52), Gateway to the Savage Frontier (49).

Longest played (hours): Fate: Gates of Dawn, at 272. It's hard to write that without feeling like I need therapy. The average was 31 hours per game and the total was 1,201 hours.

Longest played (start to finish): Martian Dreams, which was on my mind between October 2015 and March 2017 despite only taking 35 hours.

Percentage won: 89%

Hardest game: Knightmare, the only game to which I've given a full 5/5 for difficulty.  I question whether it's possible to win without a hint guide. Even then, it takes more than 400 hits to kill the final enemy, who can kill you instantly if he hits once.

Highest category score: The 8 awarded to Disciples of Steel in "gameplay" for its nonlinear approach and replayability. It was a little too hard at the beginning for a perfect 10.

Best game with a bad category: The damned Gold Box games still can't get the economy right. Death Knights of Krynn and Pools of Darkness came in at 2 and 1, respectively, in that category despite breaking 50 in general.

Worst game with a good category: Playing Neverwinter Nights offline, I could enjoy all of the strengths of the Gold Box engine with none of the content. Knightmare was a beautiful-looking game that was absolutely enraging.

Game of the Year

          

          
In a year where I'm lukewarm about all my choices, I've chosen Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra less for the specific title and more as a representative of the overall series. If I don't give it here, you can imagine what will happen: IV will lose to one of the Ultimas, or Darklands, or one of the other awesome 1992 titles. V will fall to something like Betrayal at Krondor. VI, perhaps my favorite of the series, had the misfortune of being released the same year as Baldur's Gate and Fallout 2; VII came out the same year as Planescape: Torment. No way is VIII or IX getting it.

I liked Terra less than its predecessors, but I still liked it quite a bit. It continues to exemplify an approach that hardly no one else is taking: an open world that may reward or punish you for exploring in a non-obvious order; lots of side-quests (seriously, when do these become standard?); a heavy dose of lore attached to individual maps and areas ("Corak's notes" were particularly brilliant); and copious methods of character development. I love its contrast with development in, say, D&D, where a character's attributes remain (mostly) fixed his entire life and his reward for slaughtering a thousand orcs is four extra hit points and one new spell slot. A Might and Magic III character, in a fifth of the time that it took that D&D character to go from Level 5 to 6, will stumble upon a fountain that raises his strength 5 points, upgrade 6 items of equipment, gain 8 new spells, come across an amulet that doubles his hit points, and turn in a quest item for 3 levels' worth of experience points. I hasten to add that Might and Magic's approach isn't universally the better one--there's something to be said for more spartan character rewards--but it sure feels more rewarding when playing.

You also have to admire the engine, which manages to feel fast and action-oriented despite being turn-based and tactical. It offers a nice halfway point between Dungeon Master and Wizardry.
       

There are problems, of course--see my "Cabbage Theory" in my final entry. The rest of the game has long outgrown 16 x 16 maps. And the creators' inability to craft a plot with any gravitas remains a significant liability. But more than most developers of the era, you sense that New World has the capacity to learn from these mistakes and grow. We will soon see the results. Well, not soon--in like 100 more games. It is highly likely that I'll end 1992 and start 1993 with the IV/V pair. Whether I try them independently or combined remains to be Xeen.


Let's jump right in to 1992. In choosing the play order for the year, I often think of John Cusack's advice on making mix tapes in High Fidelity: "You got to kick it off with a killer, to grab attention," but it can't be the best, because you have to leave room to "kick it up a notch." Thus, I've chosen Ultima Underworld. It's a groundbreaking game that makes us feel that we've stepped into a new era, but parts of it haven't aged well, and I thus doubt it will be the highest-rated game of a very competitive year.

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