Review of AGD’s Quest for Glory 2 VGA

This isn’t my usual political/philosophical/hate-mongering diatribe today.  Unless you care about Sierra On-line adventure games from the late 80’s to early 1990’s, you can skip this post.

A few weeks ago AGD released its Quest for Glory II - Trial by Fire VGA remake.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Quest for Glory series.  Quest for Glory 3 (back in 1992) was one of the first computer games I played.  Before that, it was all consoles.  QFG1 and 2 were originally 16 bit EGA.  QFG1 was remade in 256 colors (VGA) by the vendor in 1991, but QFG2 never was.  That’s where AGD came in.

I’ve had my eye on this fan project (done with Sierra’s blessing) for at least the last 7 or 8 years.  I just finished playing it a moment ago and I wanted to comment on a few things while it’s fresh.

First – the graphics are not what I would call beautiful, but they are true to the original series, and I think that’s the most important part.  It looks and feels like it could have been made by Sierra Online, so it gets points in that category.  The weakest part, by far, are the character portraits.  Many of them are amateurish and not quite in the right style (Issur, Keapon Laffin, Khaveen).

The music kicks ass.  I’ve been a fan of Tom Lewandowksi’s work for a long time, and one of the best things to come from this release is his digital soundtrack finally being available from his website.  I love track 15.  It’s a new, original track for casing one of the houses as a thief.

The gameplay feels like a Sierra original and is mostly true to form.  The alleys were redone, and although they look better, I can’t say they were any easier to navigate.  The major change was in the combat system though – it’s much more complicated than any of the other VGA titles, and I actually found it difficult (QFG games are typically very easy).  Another thing which is both good and bad is the fact that the difficulty slider actually does something.  If you put the “skill” bar all the way up, most of the game is virtually impossible.  Even with 200’s in all combat skills, I couldn’t even hit Khaveen.  No matter what I did, he parried me.  This was irritating because I had to quit and restart, since saves/loads aren’t allowed in combat.

In fact, this is one of my biggest complaints – too much of the remake is unnecessarily hard.  Most of the people who are going to be playing this game are not playing it to be challenged in an arcade-like fashion – we were kids, or teenagers, when we played the first one.  That makes us all at least in our twenties but probably older.  For the majority of the people interested in this project, we’ve already played through the EGA version at least once.  Hard combat is not high on our list of turn ons.  In fact, it really pissed me off.  I am used t putting the slider all the way up on QFG games because they are so ridiculously easy anyway, even on hardest, that I instinctively put it on hard and I couldn’t even beat the easiest monster in the desert, even after importing a perfect 100-stat character from QFG1.

Once I got past these facts and got the hang of the combat system, it was actually quite fun and well-done.  I could tolerate the irritation of having to play with the slider on a fight-per-fight basis since it was impossible to predict how my character’s stats would line up with the encounter (for example, I had straight 200’s against the earth elemental, and even though I flawlessly dodged his attacks, he still destroyed me multiple times.  I had to use 2 healing pills).  The combat is rather slow and choppy, but that actually adds to the nostalgia value since these games originally ran on 80×286 processors.

The engine itself was a little annoying.  I’m running Vista and I had to screw around with the video options under settings before I could get a resolution that was useful (640×480 didn’t work on my hardware).  I also had to hide my task bar since it had the tendency of flickering through into the game window.  If you switch tasks and switch back in, dialog doesn’t work anymore – the text comes up and disappears before you read it.  I am a software developer by day, so I have a high tolerance for bugs (and high aptitude for working around them), so this didn’t bother me too much.  Given what they accomplished a few minor hardware/environment issues shouldn’t be held against them.  When AGD started this project, Windows XP hadn’t been released yet, so the fact that it runs on Vista at all is impressive.

I only ran into one crash, and that was during the Fire Elemental issue.  If you use the mouse to click your character through the alley way (instead of using the arrow keys to walk him through the door), the game has a tendency to cause your avatar to walk around with the incense forever (instead of stopping and being prompted that “you have successfully lured the fire elemental into the alley” message).  I also noticed this happens if you screw up the first time, where you use your incense but don’t capture him before the time runs out.  If you fail once, each subsequent attempt to lure with incense will cause this behavior.  During one such experience, the game crashed.  This caused me some frustration, but not much.

A word of caution: during any time-sensitive sequence, like the fire elemental, or Ad Avis at the end, set the game speed to super slow.  The animation speeds and the event clocks are not in sync (this is also a problem for the original QFG series by Sierra too) and I found that reducing the game speed doesn’t solve the problem but it still gives you enough time to finish the puzzle.

The vast majority of the game behaves exactly like you would expect it to, in keeping with the original.  In some situations, simple skill checks were replaced by minigames.  The acrobat tight rope, for example, now requires a balancing interface similiar to the balancing beams in QFG3: Wages of War.  The only problem was that for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out whether to lean left or right.  The unbalanced animation looked exactly the same in either case – I just had to randomly guess, and I was always wrong.  Even with an agility skill of 200 (max), I couldn’t walk the rope with the skill slider all the way low.  This frustrated me.  Also, the EOF thing was kind of annoying – having to duck the swords, having to use special combat moves like “lock swords” (whatever that meant – I never got it to work - I just slid the skill slider to low and slashed him to death).  It was more irritating than fun.

They greatly improved the Raseir experience.  In the EGA version, arriving in Raseir was one of the low points in the game because, since it’s day linear, you have to wait until day 28 for anything to happen.  You’re stuck killing 2 days in a place where there’s nothing to do, the game won’t let you rest, and you can’t “fast forward” at the inn.  The only solution in the EGA version is to use cheat codes to set the day/time, or bang your head against the keyboard for a while.  I didn’t notice this at all in the QFG2VGA version.  It seemed like Ferrari was ready for me as soon as I was.  Once you witness the Ugarte event and help Zayasha, it’s sunset.

The changes to the skill system were, from a game dev perspective, the right choice.  Earning perfect 200’s was much harder in VGA remake than the EGA version, which is kind of a good thing (and kind of not, depending on how you’re playing it - I’ve played QFG dozens of times, but I’m also a powergamer and must max my stats or I don’t feel like I’ve completed the game, so this equated to wasted time for me).  Even after you accept the slow rate of skill increase, the stats are not consistent.  For example:

In QFG1 VGA, Luck is almost always the first stat to hit 100.  Raises in any stat seem to have a chance to also raise luck by a point.  In QFG2VGA, I couldn’t max luck even after virtually everything else was maxed.  My luck hovered around 170.

It is impossible to increase communication skill to 200.  I spent an enormous amount of time greeting, saying farewell, bargaining, etc. and I couldn’t raise communication past 130.  I know this stat gets eliminated later in the series but it is still in place in QFG3 and 4, and it does affect gameplay in 2 (minimally).

I couldn’t find any places to learn climbing or throwing.  I could climb my magic rope, but apparently magic ropes expire.  I never had pause to use my rope enough in the EGA version to know if this is true to the original, but for 100 dinars (a huge ticket item for the thief/anyone with climbing), it shouldn’t wear out after 50 skill points of use.

Weapon skill/dodge/parry were annoying as sin to level.  I had to sit in Uhura’s room popping vigor pills for over an hour to get from 150 to 200 in those two stats.  Very boring.

I couldn’t max throwing.  I picked up over 1000 rocks and couldn’t move throwing from 190 to 200.  Throwing daggers did not seem to help either.

These are all somewhat annoying, but what really got me - and still gets me – is that somehow I managed to not become a paladin.

I have played QFG2 dozens of times.  I know exactly what can and cannot be done to become a paladin, and even though I solved the puzzles the exact same way I usually do, it didn’t happen for me.

I chalk this up to two possible reasons.  First, I made the thief sign to Dinarzad.  I also made the mistake of visiting her at night later.  She asked me if I wanted a job.  I said no.  The other possible transgression was stealing the bellows.  In the EGA version, stealing the bellows does not qualify as stealing for the purposes of paladin qualification.  There is a specific reason for this.  A bug in the EGA version (which suprisingly was also ported to the VGA version) causes you to be unable to acquire the bellows from Issur if you happen to beat him in arm wrestling before the Air elemental shows up in the Palace Plaza.  Normally, he bets them against 20 dinars, you win, and you get them.  But if you beat him in a straight wager, he refuses to arm wrestle you any more, so when you need the bellows, he won’t give them to you.  Your only recourse is theft.

Needless to say I was pretty pissed when Rakeesh didn’t hook a brother up, but it’s OK because QFG3 lets you turn any character into anything (including a Paladin that you didn’t earn) when you start it, so no big deal.

Overall, the project was really quite impressive.  I can appreciate the sheer amount of will required to reproduce a commercial work that took a huge team many months to do when working full time.

However….

Would I ever play QFG2VGA in place of the EGA original when I burn through the whole series?

The answer unfortunately is no.  I like the graphics, but honestly, there were enough annoyances to make it less enjoyable than the original.  Glitches aside, the difficult combat (in which some fights are simply impossible) and the weird stat raising is enough to keep me on the EGA.  Plus, even though the AGD team did an incredible job staying true to the original and truly remaking the game, it felt like I was drinking New Coke instead of the original.  Almost like I was cheating on Sierra, but more importantly, cheating on my own memories of the series.

Bottom line: awesome remake, really impressive work, high quality, innovative.  Too innovative for its own good in areas that are highly important to me.  I’ll stick with the EGA.