


But this map? Like 80% of it, you can just wander off the path and go explore from day one. eventually, grudgingly, let the player have an air ship once they'd exhausted about 80% of the game's content in a linear fashion. one of the first genuinely open-world RPG's, in my opinion. In proper form for late 80's, early 90's fantasy writing by men, their roles are mostly to pine for their missing men and occasionally cry when said men happen to get their dumb asses killed), but at the same time they don't feature anything I recall as being outright gross(no racism, slurs, etc.) with the exception of one book(Jimmy the Hand) which I have opinions about, but since that was a cooperative work with another author, I'm willing to drop most of the blame for that on the other author since it doesn't seem to be Feist's thing in his other books. Not everything about the setting and books have aged equally well(good luck finding a female character with meaningful agency in the first four books. Since Betrayal at Krondor is a canon installment set after four major novels in the setting, obviously some things will need explaining(but the game is actually quite good at explaining what needs to be explained without the player having read the books, I will, of course, provide huge, poorly-remembered lore dumps anyway.). Midkemia itself is both a bog standard fantasy world(it has elves, dwarves, goblins and wizards) and has its own unique flourishes at points. Feist, and received a proper novelization about five years later(and is, in my opinion, one of the rare few videogame novelizations that aren't rancid dogshit). Set in the world of Midkemia, it was developed and written in cooperation with the setting's primary author, Raymond E. If you don't know them, they later brought us Tribes and Tribes 2, they were an odd mix of RPG's, adventure games and sim games) back in 1993, and I want to say it was kind of ahead of its time in having a 3D world(even if the Y axis didn't see much use), digitized photos for characters, tons of animations, a really good soundtrack and probably one of the more intellectually demanding RPG combat systems of the time(for context, this released in the same year as Darkside of Xeen, yet looks generations younger). Elves in the BaK setting aren't barred from having sweet facial hair.īaK was produced by Dynamix(rest in peace, beautiful angels. Oh, yeah, and that guy on the cover? That's an elf. Alongside Albion(1995), it was absolutely one of the first RPG's I played and enjoyed, enough that I still appreciate a lot of things it does.
