Betrayal at Krondor

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Platforms:	PC
Publisher:	Dynamix
Developer:	Dynamix
Genres:	RPG / Classic Role-Playing
Release Date:	1993
Game Modes:	Singlepalyer

Computer role-playing meets a plot.

Dynamix has taken fantasy role-playing into a new direction with Betrayal at Krondor. The game famously had fantasy author Raymond E. Feist weaving the narrative, when in actuality the story was constructed by a number of people. The final result is a quality fantasy setting nonetheless, rendered as a huge 3D world that was more akin to a flight sim than an RPG.

The environment wasn’t exactly lifelike in its fledgling polygonal makeup – jagged mountains, sprites of trees and rocks, texture-mapped cubes that are supposed to be villages – but the detail was so vastly superior to anything on the market that Krondor was the RPG to own. Instead of traversing a single huge dungeon, Krondor gave you an entire world that you could explore at your own leisure, traveling from town to town, meeting up with people and facing perils along the way. It wasn’t difficult to see why this was so engrossing.

Several views make controlling the game a snap. When your party is walking through the woods you get a 3D perspective, but can switch to an overhead camera for a better look at your surroundings. When you encounter enemies, the game goes into turn-based combat mode and you fight it off on a grid. As the adventure unfolds, you receive new quests, can buy better items and will face tougher enemies.

Betrayal at Krondor supports many sound cards, as well as 256 color VGA graphics. Real actors have been digitized to give the game a more realistic look and feel. For the die-hard role-playing gamer, Betrayal is a fascinating and surprisingly playable piece of role-playing history.