Betrayal at Krondor is a game from 1993; It’s also one of the forgotten rpg classics, and certainly should find it’s place on every best of list.
The game takes place in a fantasy world called Midkemia. This world, along with the game script has been created by Raymond E. Feist, who is a renowned fantasy author. The result is a living word, with it’s own history, laws and a set of inter-dependencies. One minus is that if you haven’t red any of Feist’s works prior to playing you might not understand some of the things that are happening on screen. I’m not talking about some sort of plot devices which will only be understandable by those who read Feist; I mean that some of the references, or character perks might not become clear to you until you get the books in your hands.
Two things are worth noting, first of which is the character development system. You don’t gain experience the way it’s done in other rpg’s (well, most of them anyway). In BaK instead you have a list of attributes and skills. Two of those skills can be “activated” at any time, meaning that the given character is concentrated on them. Skills advance by way of usage. So in practice if you want your defense skill to rise you must block a lot in combat – this will have double effectiveness if your character is “concentrated” on his defense skill, and even more if it’s the only skill he’s developing.
This system allows you to micromanage you characters rather easily by way of concentrating on specific skills. If you have a ton of patience you can boost some of your team’s skills very early in the game; that is if you really prefer to endlessly click for an hour or so instead of playing the game.
Second thing: the fighting system is also done very well: It’s turn based, and characters movie in order of speed and stamina. You have the standard few options of turn based combat – mêlée attack, ranged attack, magic attack, defense and rest. There is also an option of auto combat, but that definitely takes away half of the fun from the game.
Generally the game puts as much emphasis on combat as it does on the story. You never get the feeling that you have to face some huge amount of fighting as a filler or read through nonsense amounts of text. The balance is very well done and you get fun of both fighting and reading.
There’s a lot of interaction, dialogues and sidequests in this game. Coupled with a world which you can freely roam (except certain instances) this gives a great feel of adventure – not just a task to perform, but places to discover, people to save and swords to buy. Well, that and much more of the things that make great adventures and adventurers.
Don’t be put of by the game’s age, it’s really worth a try – definitely one of the best rpg’s in pc history.