Demon's Winter - Getting stronger

Since I have vacation I have been able to play for 5-6 hours since the last post. I was still then at level 1. I finally found the Guild where you can gain a level for free if you have enough XP. When you gain a level you always get more hitpoints, spellpoints and three new levels of some other skills. Everything seems to be random. But according to the manual the amount of hitpoints and spellpoints should be based on your endurance and intellect.

The funniest moment in any game...

So what about the main quest ? To tell you the truth, you get very little help. I know Malifur is in the volcano in the south east. He can not free himself so he hopes his minons will achieve their hideous goals. I am still looking for Xeres but have no clue of where he might be. There was a rumour about a hidden city somewhere which I will investigate.

After having gained one or two levels I felt I was getting to grip with my constant deaths and dared to venture further down in the dungeouns I had found.

The first dungeon I entered was a underground tunnel that led to an island with a temple. The temple seemed looked like any other temple from the outside but by using a password I found on a note somewhere else I managed to get in to its dungeons below. That was scary but exciting. The major rooms are described in the game to give you some atmosphere. It is not often so when you get some texts to read you know it must be important in some way.

The passage below the sea

It turned out the tunnels below the sacred Temple hosted cultists devoted to the evil Xerses. I even met their leader and slained her. That was quite an easy fight and she was alone. But to find her I had to zig-zack myself of a floor full of traps. That was the first time I decided to draw maps of where I am. Another difficult part of the complex was the paths that made you see only the hex you was in. So I had do map every single step on paper to get the maze in front of me. But the rewarding was well worth it. I got a few crystal magical weapons and armour somewhere deep within these halls. I didn´t know of their effect and I could´nt identify them because it said they already was identified. The only mark that showed them different from other items was a certain mark I now know symbolises they are magical. In combats I discovered that the short sword actually could chill your oppnonents but I am not sure of what that effect really mean. I suppose it works like a chill spell and can decrease the enemies fighting capabilities.

Things of interests only show up after you Inspect the room

It took me awhile to understand the difference between look, examine, view room and inspect. But now I know that Look only looks for traps, examine only take a closer look of something you have seen and inspect actually is the option to use to highlight interests in the room as shown above. You can then mover,examine or use objects against the thing you find. For example, I had to crush glass shield that imprisoned a man with a hammer I found elsewhere and then use a potion on him to get him to talk. He then revealed some hints...but not very much.

After the first dungeon my goal was to get more gold so I could better equip my group and also make some money to spend on skills. There are a lot of places where you can learn skills but I want to only let a character get a new skill if he absolutely need it or it will improve the groups chances of success. The games uses the value for the characters intellect to buy skills in the game. Skills have different prices depending on which class that tries to learn it. A wizard pays the least for magic skills and more for weapon skills for example. There is however full possibility of any character to get any skill. This kind of system is very appealing to me and I like that part in the game. What I don´t really understand is that if you buy to many skills so you reach you intellect level, then you cannot learn any more skills until you have risen enough levels and been fortunate to have been bestowed new intellect points. Something that can take a lot of time and efforts. So I am very pecky about who get which skill now in the beginning.

A boat is neccessary to travel between the islands

The world is quite large. The game says it is 32 times larger than ite predecessor Shards of Spring. Much of the world is water though. When I had enough money to buy a ship (costs around 600 gold) I started to explore other islands. I had no idea where to go. When travelling at sea you get into sea combats just as often as if you where travelling on land.

One huge advantage of travelling with boat is that the fights are much quicker and you get a lot of expericence points. But, you don´t get any gold. So by travelling around I quickly got enough experience to raise another two levels. But the fights forces me to go back and repair my ship and that is very expensive. Now I try to evade and run away from the battles since you don´t have docks in all cities and there is a risk that you reaches a continent without a dock with a ship that has so few hit points left that you cannot survive to come back again. That means you are stuck forever! I don´t want fall into that trap.

You always need more gold...

There are only a few different weapons and armours in the game but they could be varied by the endless amounts of magical properties. Magic items are extremely expensive. So much in fact that even if I am in level 7 right now, I cannot afford to buy any. Most of my money goes to reviving dead or binded characters or to repair my ship.

I have now played long enough to better review this game.

What I like:

• The skill system, where every skill is available to every class but at different costs. Also there are quite a few skills and five or so magic shools. Barbarians have shamanism.
• The few but good descriptions of different locations. That´s what creates atmosphere and the feeling of you having stumbled into something important in contrast to the
• Difficulty seems to be good balanced so far. Despite me being at level 7 I still have the same problem of too little gold and too much to spend it on. New skills (teachers could be expensive), better equipment or repairing your boat.
• I like the randomness of the items available at the merchants, as well as their prices and their abilities to lie about items capabilities.
• For some strange reason, I have played for 8 hours now and even temporarily halted Drakensang - River of Time because of this game which is over 20 years older.
• Fights allows for some tactics used. You get bonuses to strike from behind and you can flee. You must also decide wether to save your move points to be able to defend better or to use them to attack more often.

What I don´t like so far:

• Too many battles, almost always occuring after around 40 moves unless you stumble inte an important location. It could get a little tedious. I would rather have fewer but stronger opponents. I haven´t even fully utilised my single wizard because that takes time. I just want to get rid of the small battles to be able to move on to my greater goals.
• Almost every item you find is accompanied by the? symbol which means it COULD have some special properties but i almost never has (at least not from random encounters). It costs a lot of gold (75) to have them identified.
• Skills separate identification by types, like weapons, potions etc That is a waste of skill points in my opinion.
• You could get stuck on an island with a boat of only 1 hp. If you have saved on that island without a dock you can´t buy a new boat or get away in any way and since there is only one save slot you could get stuck forever.
• Only one save slot. They could at least have allowed for a few more. You never know when you save underground if you ever will get out alive. If you save by mistake in a very bad situation you have no way of managing to get out and continue the game.
• Monsters, at least the ones to meet certain death by the group, should be able to flee if everything seems lost. Instead they fight to the death. It only gets frustrating trying to kill a few thugs when your powerful enough.
• The A.I could have been better. Monsters don´t attack together and divide their numbers. They might go for the weak ones but often one at a time. You often win by concentrating all your characters at one enemy at a time. Something which is very common even in SSI:s goldbox games.
• The cumbersome interface. It is quite horrible in the beginning. Why am I not able to sell severla items at once ? Now I have to repeat the whole sale process for every single item. SELL -- > Who --> Choose item --> Confirm price --> repeat....you get a loot of loot after a while and it is quite tedious to get rid of it.

Demon's Winter - Starting a new adventure

Before I begin, let me tell you of my gameplay style. I do not like to cheat or use walkthroughs unless I am really stuck or if it is no fun anymore. After all, we all have a life and career beside this hobby and we can only put so much time into it. I think I am quite a normal player in that regard. I save regularly and often. Everytime I am stuck and need help I feel I have failed and that drains the enjoyment of a game. I use the games built in rules to maximize my survival chance. For example, if it allows me to re-roll my statistics I do that until I am satisfied. I am sure I will have enough of a challenge in any time. Just wanted to state that. I do not follow the strict rules of CRPG Addict in this case. All the credit to him though for his excellent blog.

I have read half the manual for the game and have to say it is really well written. SSI was always great at writing manuals. It is full of tips and hints and really tries to build up the atmosphere for the game. Ten classes, 30 skills and at least as many spells divided into several schools makes for varied gameplay. How it works in practice remains to be seen though.

It took me one hour to roll-up my group of five adventurers for Demon's Winter. I both love and hate the ability to re-roll statistics for the characters. Love it because patience is rewarding and hate it because my expectations are so high that I very seldom live up to them and gets frustrated about not being able to complete my character. My group consisted of:

Karon, human ranger
Merrilon, elf wizard
Gnarl, troll barbarian
Legio, dwarf monk
Denvall, human paladin

It was very hard do decide which classes should go inte the group. There are 10 classes to choose from. The more unique being scholar and visionary. The visionary class has easy access to skills such as view land, view mind, view room and view item. It enables the visionary to see a larger view of the surrounding area and also to read merchants mind to decide if they are lying or exaggerating the wares capabilities. That must be the first time a game let the merchants really try to cheat you of certain items. I have never come across it anywhere before.

Paladin and Wizards are always mandatory when I create groups. The monk was choosen because I´ve read somewhere that the skills they utilise (karate and kung-fu) are very efficient and well implemented in the game. And besides, I don´t think I´ve ever had a monk in my team before. The barbarian was throwned in because of the skill berserking which increases the probability of a doing a critical hit to 25 % instead of 10 %. That will come in handy I hope.

The Ranger have the skill hunt which means you don´t have to pay as much for food. Yes, you need food when travelling around in the wilderness and in the dungeons. With this skill you can get it without having to visit a town (not all towns sells provisions by the way).

I have to say that I am quite impressed of the 30 or so skills this game has. They are quite broad and not very similar one to another. It seems every class could be teached every skill in the game but certain classes pay less intellect points for doing so. For example, it is much cheaper and easier for a Ranger to learn the axe skill than it is for the Wizard.

What do we know about the background and story ? Not much actually. You know that blood-thirsty kobolds have been sweeping across the landscape plundering and burning the defenseless villages. The goblins led them with cries of "Praised be our master Xeres". Well, that´s about it really. We have at least one clear enemy.

With the group ready to go I started my adventure into the unknown....

I started out in the Wilderness somewhere. I have no clue where I am or what I am to do. So I go along with the group and managed to survive the first few battles. But I got bold and ventured to far away from known civilization and was suddenly overpowered by a lot of thugs. As you can se below, my Wizard boldly tries to fend them off while the rest of the group is slained. The reason the Wizard is so long-lived is that I used the spell Armour and the enemies have it hard to pierce it for my death to come...

Merrilon the wizard fights for his life...

The outcome could only be one....

Mr. Death has taken his toll

I realise I have to be more careful and so I try to spend most of my gold on equipment like daggers and small axes. A few selected members even got cloth to protect them with in combat. I then run around trying to build up more gold to buy enough provisions. While at the Pub in one of the cities I learn a few rumours from other adventurers...

This the first information I can find. Jesric, an evil priest, has embarked on a quest for some powerful crystal and works for someone named Eregore. It doesn´t help me much but in another city I meet an old woman complaining about her home having been burnt down by the marauding Kobolds to the south. I immediately prepare myself to investigate the matter....

Inside the Kobold camp

The Kobold camp is very near the city and I managed to sneak in and looks around. There are a lot of tents inside the camp and I have to investigate each and everyone. The kobolds are often acting in groups of four. Very managable by my group and eventually I wipe them out. In the last battle though, I meet 2 kobolds, 2 orcs and the Kobolds leader which I eventually kill. There is no loot or other interesting stuff in the camp. I managed to free a imprisoned woman who was harassed by the kobolds.

It seems the Kobolds are just puppets of yet another power that control things from afar. Who that is, is yet not known to me but it seems they worship someone (or something) called Xerxes.

After having cleared out the camp I return to investigate the world around me and stumbles upon a College of View land. That means they can teach you the skill if you have enough intellect points and can pay for it. The price asked for is ridiculous for the time being so I have to decline the offer and search elsewhere....

Scattered around in the land are colleges ready to teach you skills....if you can afford it

 So what are my first impressions after a couple of hours play ? Well, I like it so far. I am struggling to get gold and experience points to be able to advance in levels so I dare to enter some of the dungeons I´ve found so far. The gold are needed for the greedy merchants. There are a lot of different items to buy, or rather different enhanchements of the items. A dagger could be a dagger, a well-made dagger, a dagger +1 or inscribed with powerful spells or charges. And there are even more variations.

I fear the combats will get tedious over time but they offer some tactics which I´ve not seen in other games from this time. For example, you speed skill determines how many moves you have during your turn. You could spend those moves by moving, attacking or dodge. Every attack costs 3 pts. For every move point you left unspent you get -1 to hit from opponents if you choose to dodge which also ends your turn. That kind of tactical considerations is a move into the right direction. What I don´t like though is that you cannot see how wounded your opponent are and when there are several opponents of the same kind in the battle it could get confusing.

I will continue my exploration and return here to report my progress and my observations. I am just now waiting to reach to level 2 with my group. I don´t really know what will happen then but hope I will get more hit points at least.

My first revisit - Demon's Winter

I created this blog to be able to revisit classical CRPGs. Right now I am halfway through Drakensang - River of Time and have to finish that game before starting my new blog with serious efforts.

I have always wanted to try out Demon's Winter from SSI. It seems it was originally released for the Apple II and came 1988 to Commodore 64 and IBM PC. In 1989 it was released to the Amiga platform. It is obvious by the graphics that the game was ported without any use of the capabilities of the Amiga. But the sound is even less used with the occasional blip-blop.

However, as you all know the graphics and sound in CRPGS is not primarily what made them so immersive and entertaining. It is the feeling and depth and the always present character building and leveling, the exploration of the unknown and the hope that somewhere, someplace there lies a chest with that certain magical weapon you need to swing the tide...

Look at the back cover below. There was a certain appealing text that accompanied these games which made you drool over them. Ok, ok, that might be explainable  by my meager age at that time but anyway.

I had it to my Amiga 500 but never understood how the game worked and did not have any manual to go with it (yes, it was long before Internet came to the rescue). I will either try it out with DosBox or with an Amiga Emulator like WinUAE. That depends on how much efforts it takes to get it to work and how much it differs in quality.

I remember the graphics was very bad so I will probably go for the DosBox version.

I loved the SSI brand when it existed. They produced a lot of high quality RPGs and strategy games.

However, having installed WinUAE and downloaded Demons Winter and loaded the game from floppy I quickly started to roll up one character named Rolf just to try out the Amiga version.

After around 30 steps in the wilderness I met a group of spiders. I am sure the pictures of them will probably pass as giant ants or whatever other creatures there might be out there....










Having found a city I immediately went to the temple only to be met by this holy guy. I was quite astonished about the image compared to how the spiders looked.

Amiga version

I noticed the game loads from the floppy when entering or leaving places. I forgot that delay in the Amiga version so I will try out Demons Winter on DosBox as well before I decide to start upp my new party of adventurers. Below is the same guy in the PC version. Not much difference but the aspect radio and resolution is better in the Amiga version and the Amiga version has mouse support.

 

Pc version

In the next post I hope to have created and started up with my new party. I have to read the manual first though so I get to know the game first. I hate playing games without the proper and complete manual. In those days the manual was what you really payed for when buying the game. Especially so for games from Microsprose. But that is out of the scope for this session since they did not do any RPGs (if not counting Darklands that is).