For historical importance, the series gets a 10. This was back in the day when the King's Quest 'find irrational object to give to randomFor historical importance, the series gets a 10. This was back in the day when the King's Quest 'find irrational object to give to random creature/shove in random place' was called 'adventure gaming' and the Bard's Tale dungeon grind was called an 'RPG'. This series managed to knit both together in a way that involved:
- meaningful character dialogue, unlike the Kings Quest series entries of the time
- compelling story narrative
- character development by doing things
- attachment to the character through their development.
Wasteland (1988) was probably the only other game successfully knitting the genres together at the time.
Throw forward to Fallout, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate and eventually the Witcher series and you'll understand the importance of these contributions.
The downsides?
1. Ailments of all games at the time
- The series kept some of the cutesy king's quest nonsense puzzles (we capture fireflies by offering them candy??)
- The series encouraged the grind, in a bad way. Hours were spent climbing up and down the same tree.
2. Inconsistency across the franchise
More fundamentally, as an RPG, the series never really found a proper RPG framework.
-- The initial design allowed anyone to do everything and all you had to do was invest in your skills. Us kids at the time revelled in making the ultimate Warrior/Magic User/Thief hybrid. In QFG2 there were spells that non wizards couldn't cast, in QFG3 there were no new spells non-wizards could acquire and in QFG4 there was some modest movement back towards the original ethos by allowing magic-using non-wizards to acquire extra skills. What was once an open world became a straight-jacketed world for our hero.
-- 'Stamina' was introduced in the first game as something you needed to be able to fight, a requirement that was removed in the second game allowing you to draw health instead so that stamina became just the thing you could draw on to train skills (severely hacked with stamina pills), and by the fourth game stamina was something you GAINED from combat. Across the franchise, the 'stamina' statistic did more harm than good.
-- Random skills were introduced (yes, I'm looking at you swimming and acrobatics) while other class-defining skills (dodge, parry) were amalgamated, for no apparent reason in either case.
The beauty of the original concept, to me and thousands others, that there were often three different ways of achieving the same objective was throttled down to their being one way to achieve the objective depending upon which of three different classes you belonged to, for no apparent reason.
3. Quality control went downhill, fast.
And then there were the bugs. QFG3 was hard work and required the user to maintain concurrent saves to avoid irreversible crashes ... QFG4 was one of the buggiest games ever released in its first incarnation (think CyberPunk 2077 buggy). It's not really clear from the outside why there wasn't quality control as it was released at about the crest of the Sierra wave and they could have easily paid for another 30 days of quality control. To be a fly on the wall in that corporate boardroom at the time. Someone made a ridiculously bad decision to release a faulty game and in retrospect the release of QFG4 could be called out as the 'jump the shark' moment for Sierra as a moribund brand. Gouging loyal consumers for cash flow by selling a faulty product only works once. And in fact it only did work once. Hence, no Sierra anymore.
By and large this is a review of the first four entries in the series (as I have only casually played the fifth, and didn't think much of it when I played it fifteen years after its release ... the world had moved on).
Still huge credit goes to the Coles for taking the gaming world a step forward at the time and for enriching the childhood of folk like me. Thank you.… Expand
