Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is a 1993 role-playing video game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Games for MS-DOS, the NEC PC-9801, and FM Towns. It was the first installment of the Lands of Lore series. The player travels around various environments, collecting items and battling monsters in an attempt to save the kingdom from a witch named Scotia, who has acquired shape-shifting abilities.
Westwood wanted to create something new after being acquired by Virgin, and it was intended that the game outperform Eye of The Beholder II. Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos received generally positive reviews, with reviewers complimenting the graphics and the skill system, but some criticized its combat and repetitiveness. In 1994, the game was re-released on CD, adding voice-overs, including some by Patrick Stewart. Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was followed by a sequel, Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny, in 1997.
Gameplay
A typical scenario in which the party is engaging in combat.
The game is a dungeon crawler, presented in a real-time, three-dimensional view from the character's perspective similar to the interface used on the Dungeon Master game and the Eye of the Beholder series.[1] The player can move around and interact with the world by performing actions such as picking up items, throwing them, and using them on objects.[2] Features such as locks and switches (which affect the world by triggering events such as walls appearing or disappearing) are abundant, and the latter can be interacted with directly.[2][3] The player can obtain a map showing the player's current location, as well as important points on the level.[4]
The player can play as one of four characters,[5] each of which have their own statistics and specialize in certain areas.[6] The characters' main statistics are might and protection, which affect the damage dealt and absorbed, respectively.[7] The player can equip characters with items such as weapons and armor, which affect these statistics.[8] Some weapons have special properties, such as having a chance to deal extra damage or kill enemies straight away.[9] Not all special properties are favorable: for example, there is a bow that never hits anything.[10] Other items that can be collected and placed in an inventory include medicine, keys, and rings that grant the wearer benefits such as increased health regeneration.[11] Characters also have Fighter, Rogue, and Mage skills.[12] Fighter affects the character's ability to engage in combat, Rogue affects their ability to use bows and pick locks, and Mage affects their ability to cast spells.[12] Spells include fireballs, lightning, and healing characters, each having four power levels.[13] Performing these actions increases the character's ability to do so.[7] Characters join and leave the party throughout the game.[4]
Throughout the game, the player will encounter and engage in combat with various monsters.[14] Weapons and magic can be used to attack enemies.[15] Some monsters can poison (which drains the character's health) or stun (rendering the character temporarily unable to do anything) party members.[16] Medicines can be used to heal party members, and the party can rest at any time (although the party can be woken by monsters), regeneration health and mana,[17] If all party members lose all their health, the game is over.[17] Party members who have lost all their health can only be healed by magic or medicine.[17]
The player travels through environments such as forests, caves, mines, swamps, and castles.[3] Some contain areas that affect the party by draining mana or causing them to fall asleep.[16][18] Many contain features such as chests, which contain items when opened.[3] Many levels also consist of multiple floors.[19] The player will also come across shops where items can be purchased and sold using silver crowns.[20] Many levels also contain puzzles such as escaping from an area or figuring out how to get to one.[3][4]
Plot
King Richard, ruler of Gladstone Keep, has received word that Scotia, an old witch, has acquired a ring called the Nether Mask, which allows its user to assume any form of any power or capability.[21] The King sends the player out on a mission to acquire the Ruby of Truth.[22]
When the player finds the ruby's guardian, he learns that it has been stolen as the guardian dies.[23] When the player returns to Gladstone, Scotia poisons King Richard and escapes.[23] The player is tasked with saving the King and defeating Scotia.[24] To do this, the player obtains the recipe of an elixir that will cure King Richard.[25] Once the recipe is obtained, the player travels through the realm to find the ingredients,[26] and create the elixir.[27] During their quest, they come across the Ruby of Truth,[28] and when King Richard is cured, he gives the party the Shard of Truth, which combines with the Ruby to make the Whole Truth.[29] The Whole Truth is then used against Scotia to defeat her.[29]
Development and release
After Westwood Studios was acquired by Virgin Interactive, the decision was made to drop the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons license to focus on a new property. Producer Rick Gush said that the executive producer Brett Sperry, was involved in the decision.[30][31] Gush explained that Sperry knew about the benefits of such a venture, and Gush believed that creating a new brand was a good move for the studio's promotion. According to Joseph Hewitt, an artist for Westwood, Westwood wanted to develop their own properties instead of games for other publishers to profit from.[30]
Westwood already had the engine and experience from the Eye of The Beholder series, but it was known that creating a new game was going to be difficult. Gush said that the lead programmer Philip Gorrow proposed the ideas for the new game.[30][31] Bill Crum was hired and became the designer. Westwood's intention was to outperform Eye of The Beholder 2, which included increasing the story's depth. One concern was making the game accessible so it could reach a wide audience. Hewitt said that Sperry wanted to make the game user-friendly. He also explained that the team did "odd things" for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons games. The team's desire to be different with Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos affected game design significantly, especially the in-game characterization. Sperry was frustrated at the prospect of creating a character for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which would have involved creating statistics which he knew little about. He came up with the idea of the player having a choice of four pre-made characters.[30]
During development, the team knew the game was going to be "special", but Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, which used 3D graphics, was released. Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was too far into development for the team to rework its 2D engine, so the team worked hard to tweak it. Blurred movement was added to give the game a 3D effect.[30]Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was developed from the engine of Eye of the Beholder, and the user interface was also updated from that game.[32]
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was released for MS-DOS in September 1993.[30][33] An Amiga version with 32 colors was planned.[34] Initial versions of the game contained a bug that prevented players from completing the game: at one point, the player can be tricked into handing over a crucial item. If the player does so, the item was supposed to be retrievable later in the game. The team missed this and did not put the item back into the game in the event the player handed it over, making the item permanently lost and the game unwinnable. One player who encountered this bug was asked to send his save game file to Westwood, so they could edit it to add the lost item to his inventory.[30]
The game was re-released on CD-ROM in 1994,[35] which featured voice-overs, some of which were performed by Patrick Stewart.[30] It also features an additional narrative history read by Stewart.[36] According to Gush, the team was "really impressed" with Stewart's professionalism, and he stated that they had paid $30,000 for him to be with the team for three hours. Stewart finished the voice-overs in less than three hours, and the team received a cardboard cutout of him in a Star Trek uniform.[30] This version features 130 MB of digitized speech.[37]
The game was re-released on GOG.com in November 2011, bundled with the sequel.[38]
Runner-up, Role-playing Game of the Year, June 1994[45]
According to Westwood Studios, Lands of Lore was a commercial success, with global sales in excess of 250,000 units by November 1996.[46]
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was well received. Writing for CD-ROM Today, Trent C. Ward called Lands of Lore one of the best games for the PC.[42]Computer Gaming World's Scorpia stated that Lands of Lore "breaks new ground in a number of pleasantly surprising ways". She approved of the graphics that improved on those of Eye of the Beholder, sophisticated automap, and simplified skill, magic, and inventory systems. While disliking the combat, Scorpia concluded that "Lands of Lore is a better-than-average game of this type [and] worth playing, especially" for Eye of the Beholder fans.[47]InfoWorld described it as "a new standard in" Dungeon Master-like games, with excellent UI, graphics, sound, puzzles, and story. While wishing to disable the automap, the magazine concluded that Lands of Lore "is destined to be a classic".[1] The reviewer of Dragon believed the game's graphics are "good and quite varied" and said the game is not significantly more advanced than other RPGs. Despite this, he said that Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was "a lot of fun to play" but criticized some puzzles for being easy.[4] Ray Ivey of Just Adventure stated that the game is one of the longest he had ever played and said that locations with multiple levels cause the game to be repetitive. He also criticized the subtlety of certain aspects, such as requiring certain skills, but praised the combat and skill progression, saying they give the game "real purpose".[19]Edge's reviewer praised the game for not being reliant on irrelevant statistics such as hunger and described it as "a joy to play".[39] A reviewer of the French magazine Joystick believed the graphics are "beautiful" and the intermediary scenes "magnificent", but complained about the inability to skip non-interactive scenes.[48] Paul Rand of Computer and Video Games believed that Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is "everything Eye of the Beholder III should have been—and more" but criticized the game for being too easy because the party can frequently rest and heal. The review also described the presentation as "beautiful" and the animations as "wonderful".[33] The reviewers of Génération 4 were highly complimentary: one described the graphics and animation quality as "perfect" and thought elements such as the scenarios and puzzles combined to make the "ultimate" role-playing game, and the other described the game as "Perfection in the domain of PC role-playing games".[43]
Computer Gaming World in May 1994 said that the CD version's "quality voice-overs ... may offer just enough freshness to tackle this superb RPG again".[49]Joystick thought the music and voices of the CD version are "excellent quality" but said that the CD version does not add much to the floppy original.[50]PC Gamer UK said of the CD version that Stewart's voice evoked phrases from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and that it added "enormous weight" to the game's soundtrack, which was described as "spooky". The magazine added that the characters' voices were "really well directed" and that the CD version is what the game should have been from the start.[35]
Lands of Lore was a runner-up for Computer Gaming World's Role-Playing Game of the Year award in June 1994, losing to Betrayal at Krondor. The editors wrote that it "features impressive special effects that some said couldn't be done in the MS-DOS world and a delightful story that blends together many of the classic fantasy archetypes of shape-shifting". Stewart won the Best Male Voice-Over Award. The editors wrote that he was perfectly cast as the royal monarch and that his vocal range gave a sense of urgency and reality to the game as the story unfolds.[45]
In 1994, PC Gamer UK named it the 22nd best computer game of all time. The editors wrote that it was one of the few RPGs to compete against the Ultima series, while also being different.[44]
Related Research Articles
Westwood Studios, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was founded by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle in 1985 as Brelous Software, but got changed after 2 months into Westwood Associates and was renamed to Westwood Studios when Virgin Games bought the company in 1992. The company was bought by Electronic Arts alongside Virgin Interactive's North American operations in 1998. In January 2003, it was announced that Westwood, alongside Westwood Pacific, would be merged into EA Los Angeles. The main studio location closed in March of that year.
Pool of Radiance is a role-playing video game developed and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc (SSI) in 1988. It was the first adaptation of TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) fantasy role-playing game for home computers, becoming the first episode in a four-part series of D&D computer adventure games. The other games in the "Gold Box" series used the game engine pioneered in Pool of Radiance, as did later D&D titles such as the Neverwinter Nights online game. Pool of Radiance takes place in the Forgotten Realms fantasy setting, with the action centered in and around the port city of Phlan.
Eye of the Beholder is a role-playing video game for personal computers and video game consoles developed by Westwood Associates. It was published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in 1991, for the MS-DOS operating system and later ported to the Amiga, the Sega CD and the SNES. The Sega CD version features a soundtrack composed by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima. A port to the Atari Lynx handheld was developed by NuFX in 1993, but was not released. In 2002, an adaptation of the same name was developed by Pronto Games for the Game Boy Advance.
Dungeon Keeper 2 is a strategy game developed by Bullfrog Productions and published by Electronic Arts in 1999 for Microsoft Windows. In the sequel to Dungeon Keeper, the player takes the role of a 'dungeon keeper', building and defending an underground dungeon from the would-be heroes that would invade it, as well as from other keepers. In the campaign mode, the player is charged with recovering the portal gems from each area in order to open a portal to the surface. The player can also construct a dungeon without strict objectives, and multiplayer is supported over a network.
Dungeon Master is a role-playing video game featuring a pseudo-3D first-person perspective. It was developed and published by FTL Games for the Atari ST in 1987, almost identical Amiga and PC (DOS) ports following in 1988 and 1992.
Temple of Apshai is a dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed and published by Automated Simulations in 1979. Originating on the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, it was followed by several updated versions for other computers between 1980 and 1986.
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny is the fifth entry in the role-playing video game series Ultima released in March 1988. It is the second in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy. The game's story takes a darker turn from its predecessor Ultima IV. Britannia's king Lord British is missing, replaced by a tyrant named Lord Blackthorn. The player must navigate a totalitarian world bent on enforcing its virtues through draconian means.
Ultima VI: The False Prophet, released by Origin Systems in 1990, is the sixth part in the role-playing video game series of Ultima. It is the third and final game in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy. Ultima VI sees the player return to Britannia, at war with a race of gargoyles from another land, struggling to stop a prophecy from ending their race. The player must help defend Britannia against these gargoyles, and ultimately discover the secrets about both lands and its peoples.
Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle is a role-playing video game released in 1993 as part of the core Ultima series, its story beginning eighteen months after the conclusion of Ultima VII: The Black Gate. In Serpent Isle, the Avatar follows Batlin to the eponymous land called Serpent Isle, finding three city-states founded by those who left Britannia generations before and ancient ruins from a still-older lost civilization that was there long before them.
Stonekeep is a role-playing video game developed and released by Interplay Productions for the PC in 1995. It is a first-person dungeon crawler game with pre-rendered environments, digitized characters and live-action cinematic sequences. Repeatedly delayed, the game that was supposed to be finished in nine months took five years to make.
Dungeon Hack is a 1993 role-playing video game developed by DreamForge Intertainment and published by Strategic Simulations for DOS and NEC PC-9801.
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands is a turn-based role-playing video game that takes place in the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of Dark Sun. It was developed and published by Strategic Simulations in 1993. It received positive reviews although released initially in an unfinished state. The game had a sequel, Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager, in 1994. An online MMORPG taking place in the same setting, Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands, was released in 1996 and hosted on the Total Entertainment Network.
The Elder Scrolls: Arena is an open-world action role-playing video game developed and published by Bethesda Softworks. The first game in the Elder Scrolls series, it was released for MS-DOS on March 25, 1994. The game follows the player trying to uncover a conspiracy against Emperor Uriel Septim VII.
Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor is a 1993 role-playing video game and the sequel to Eye of the Beholder and Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon.
Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager is a role-playing video game developed and published by Strategic Simulations in 1994 for the MS-DOS operating system. It is the sequel to Dark Sun: Shattered Lands.
Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny is a 1997 action role-playing game, second installment of the Lands of Lore series, a sequel to Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos. It brought about a drastic change in gameplay style from its predecessor, opting away from the original's D&D turn-based style in favor of more action elements. A sequel, Lands of Lore III, was released in 1999.
The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two - Hand of Fate is a 2D point-and-click adventure game, developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1993. It is the sequel to the 1992 video game The Legend of Kyrandia, and the second game of the Fables & Fiends series. The game focuses on the story of a young alchemist and magician saving the kingdom of Kyrandia from being wiped from existence.
Menzoberranzan is a 1994 role-playing video game created by Strategic Simulations (SSI) and DreamForge Intertainment. Menzoberranzan uses the game engine that was used previously in SSI's Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), and is set in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
Isle of the Dead is a point-and-click first-person shooter horror video game developed by Rainmaker Software and published by Merit Software in 1993 for IBM and compatibles. The game centers around Jake Dunbar, the sole survivor of a plane crash, on a mysterious tropical island inhabited by zombies under the control of a mad scientist. Dunbar can interact with non-player characters to acquire weapons and obtain items through adventure game commands.
The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One is a 2D point-and-click adventure game, developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Games in August 1992. The game is the first in the Legend of Kyrandia series, and focuses on players taking on the role of a young prince who must put an end to the tyrannical chaos of an evil court jester.
References
1 2 Petreley, Nicholas (December 20, 1993). "Lands of Lore". InfoWorld. InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. p.85. Retrieved September 21, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
