Betrayal at Krondor

Betrayal at Krondor
Developer(s)	Dynamix
Publisher(s)	Sierra Entertainment
Platform(s)	MS-DOS
Release	1993
Genre(s)	Role-playing game
Mode(s)	Single Player

Betrayal at Krondor is a DOS computer role-playing game developed by Dynamix and published by Sierra Entertainment in 1993. It uses a mixture of 3D and 2D graphics in a large game world based on Midkemia, the world of Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar series of fiction books. The game has a large amount of items, characters, and subquests. The world of the game is mostly open-ended, though the ability to reach certain places depends on the story.

Gameplay

The bulk of the gameplay takes place on a huge overworld map. The player is free to explore most of this map at almost any time, regardless of the party's objective. For example, though the objective of Chapter 1 is to get from the starting point north of LaMut to the southern city of Krondor, the player need not head straight south. The east side of the Kingdom, the Dimwood forest, and even the border of the enemy Northlands along the Teeth of the World comprise only small portions of the explorable world.

In the overworld, there are a lot of enemies who can usually be seen from distance. There are a lot of different kinds of enemies, such as as Moredhel assassins and angry beasts. In villages and towns, one can find information, goods, quests, and sometimes amusement. Outside of them, one may scavenge for items and information in empty houses, chests, bodies, and even graves which may be home to hostile undead. Some of the best known puzzles of the game, found all around the game world, are the Moredhel word lock chests, on each of which is engraved a riddle which the player must solve by putting together the letters given to form the word.

There are some underground areas to explore as well. These are typical dungeons filled with monsters and winding passageways. The game provides a map for these areas, as well as the overworld.

Skills and inventory

A battle scene showcasing the combat engine of Betrayal at Krondor.

Every character has twelve skills of varying proficiencies, expressed as percentages. Skills can be accented ("emphasized") so that they grow faster but impede the growth of other skills. Some skills include weapon accuracy, weapon and armor repair, lockpicking, haggling, barding, and spellcasting accuracy.

The game features a wide variety of items, including equipment, food, treasure, and magical artifacts. Each item comes with interesting background info that goes far beyond the item's function in the game.

Three varieties of weapon are usable in the game: staves carried by magic users, and swords and crossbows for everyone else. Each weapon has modifiers affecting its combat effectiveness, such as accuracy, damage, blessing, and racial modifiers, as does all armor. After combat, weapons and armor must be kept in shape with a whetstone or armorer's hammer, respectively, by a character skilled in their use.

Certain items augment weapons and armor. For example, a character may poison his sword with Silverthorn, or protect himself from it with Silverthorn Antidote on his armor. Other such items include holy oil, Naphtha for setting fire to a blade, and Althafain's Icer for treating it with frost.

Books can teach a character in the use of one or more skills. Perhaps the most memorable skill-increasing item is the lute, which features "This Kingdom Mine" being played, the character slowly getting better as his skill increases until finally it sounds good. There are also rare scrolls which will teach wizards new spells.

The game features a food system wherein one unit of food per character is eaten every day. They may be either simple traveling rations or dishes served at taverns and other eating establishments; many such places sell alcohol with which characters may get drunk for a better night's sleep. Rations found in the field are susceptible to spoilage or poisoning, but luckily can and should be checked for either.

Combat

Combat takes place on a grid, similar to tactical role-playing games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, only with a viewpoint closer to the ground. The objective usually is to kill all the enemies, though occasionally the game goes to the battle screen when a magical trap is triggered, which involves moving a character through a series of magical traps to the other side without getting killed.

In combat there are several options. The player can move to a different location on the grid. If the player can reach the enemy he/she can attack in the same move. Once next to the enemy the player can attack with his/her weapon. There are two options: a thrust and a swing. The swing does more damage but has less chance of hitting, depending on the character's swordsmanship skill. If a crossbow is equipped the character can attack from a distance. If the character is a wizard he can use a spell. The player can defend as well, or rest, which regains health and stamina.

Once heavily damaged enemies will actually try to run away, and they will likely succeed unless the player can cut them down in time or freeze them with a spell. After battle killed enemies remain on the ground in the map, and the player can loot their corpses.

Graphics

The game uses 256-color 320x200 VGA mode. The graphics engine uses textured 3D graphics to draw the terrain and uses sprites for most of the detailed objects. The engine does not support multi-level terrain as such, but obstacles such as walls or hills or mountains are there. Most shops, inns, temples, special locations, and large cities are done as pictures usable through hotspots. Smaller towns have 3D buildings.

NPC, character and some monster art is based on photographs. Environments are a mix of captured images and hand-drawn. In combat and puzzle screens, all characters are animated, except for movement - characters do not appear to move their legs while walking.

Story

The game is divided up into nine chapters, each with its own introduction and closing. These intro and closing segments have quite several pages of text, as well as some character dialogue, also involving some animation. Each chapter features different playable characters.

Although the game was based on a license of Raymond E. Feist's Midkemian universe, a long held myth was that the text and the story of the game were actually created by Feist himself. In point of fact, Feist was busy writing "The King's Buccaneer" during Krondor's production, so the plot, text and new characters for Betrayal were actually left for designers Neal Hallford and John Cutter to create on their own (Hallford is listed first in the story credits of the game followed by Cutter and Feist. Feist later credits Hallford and Cutter as co-authors of the original story for the novelization "Krondor: the Betrayal", and dedicates the book to both of them.) Feist did have editorial final say on the game, but most of what Hallford and Cutter created was left as they created it.

The game is significant in the Midkemian canon in that it first introduced the existence of Lysle Rigger, Jimmy the Hand's long lost twin brother. It also introduced the characters of Abbot Graves and Kat (who would later become known as "Kitty" Graves in Feist's later Serpentwar books.)

Development history

Betrayal At Krondor was originally released on 3½" disks in 1993. A special CD-ROM edition was later released, which includes Redbook CD-audio versions of the original game's MIDI music tracks, a 5-minute AVI video interview with Raymond E. Feist, and a Windows hint program/package ("Multimedia Viewer" + Krondor hint file). Sierra then re-released the CD-ROM in it's budget lineup in the mid-1990's. In the final chapter of the game's history, Sierra offered a free download of Betrayal at Krondor on it's website in 1997 to promote the game Betrayal in Antara. Contrary to popular belief, Vivendi Universal Games has stated that the game is not free to be redistributed by others.

Feist later wrote Krondor: The Betrayal, a novelization of the game and first in a series of new Midkemia books called The Riftwar Legacy. In regards to the Midkemia canon timeline, it is set approximately halfway between Darkness at Sethanon and Prince of Blood. The novel, while adding some more twists of the plot, covers the main plot of the game accurately. It ignores most of the sidequests. The hardcover edition of the book includes a CD-ROM version of the game, albiet stripped of the CD-audio soundtrack, but still containing the video interview with Feist on his thoughts about the game.

Betrayal at Krondor, as one of the latter-era Protected Mode MS-DOS games, remains quite compatible with Microsoft Windows up to the 9x series. The game also works quite well in DOSBox and VDMSound. Additionally, XBAK is a project which allows Betrayal at Krondor to be played natively under X Windows using the original data files.

See also

• Betrayal in Antara

External links

• The Betrayal at Krondor Help Web, one of the most complete resources on the game
• Betrayal at Krondor at MobyGames
• Template:Hotu
• Homepage of Betrayal at Krondor's writer/designer, Neal Hallford
• XBAK project, native play under X Windows using original files