Customer Reviews

Betrayal at Krondor

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Betrayal at Krondor at its release date was the best game ever. At the time its graphics were amazing, its board was huge, the strategy engageing, and its character devolopment and story line enchanting. Almost a decade later the graphics seem palty and the board is just big. Today this game in my opinion still has the best charcter development and story line of any game ever made. The game is an RPG where your small party roams around a large world. Your party eats rations equips armor/swords/ect that can be purchased, taken from dead enemy, or found in clever riddle boxes that are opened when the answer to a riddle is entered. Characters can get sick, tired, and hungry as night goes to dawn to day to dusk and back again. My favorite feature of the game, which has unfortuneantly not been addopted by newer games is how abilities are increased. A party member increases one of his numerous skills by praticing it and focusing on it. You tell you party members to work on a skill by selecting it in the skill characher page. So if you have a battle and a character uses his bow alot he will increase his skill with the bow, if the bow skill is highlighted then it will increase more. There are no levels or expierence points. Atribute devolopment is high on realism and enjoyable gameplay. Combat is turn based and resembles a game of chess. Your strategy makes all the difference in combat. Keeping enemy away from your vunerable spellcaster and killing the most dangerous enemy first are key (eaisrer said than done). As a bonus prevent defeated enemy from retreating (sometimes impossible). The math behind the fighting is simply brilliant and i wish it were implemented in newer games. There is no mana. When you are injured or cast a spell you lose stamina points until they are all gone. When your stamina points are gone you lose health points. Your ability to do anything is proprtional to your health points. If your base health is 32/32 and you have only 16/32 you will run 1/2 as far and hit 1/2 as hard and miss 2x as much. This is great for realism because you don't have a nearly dead guy running fast and fighting to his full ability.
I also like how some weapon chioces are not clearly better than others. The best weapon for a battle depends on the type of enemy, the other members of the party, and the strategy you employ. I also like the expansive use of non-combat items; rope, various keys, herbs, ale, madolin, and many more items add a richness and reality to krondor often absent other games.

I wish siera would simply remake this game almost as is, yet add several features. I also reveal the games shortfalls in this segment.

1) Take the graphics to 2005 standards
2) Make the world even bigger
3) Add more weather
4) Make time based on a clock not on the number of steps you take.
6) Increase the number of equipable items types and diversity.
7) Eliminate the large grid in the combat mode. Make the grid so small that it seems like a continueum. This would allow for a spear weapon to outreach a club type weapon, thus adding greater depth to combat.
8) There should be some large battles that the party sould partake in. This would meld naturly with the storyline and add a few cool events to the game.
9) Everybody loves friendly AI combatants hireable or otherwise.
10) A party of three is fine, but it should swell to four or five for at least part of the game.
11) Add increased difficulty mods and increase replayablity.
11) Last and most importantly; enemy units should actualy travel and pursue the party rather than patrol narrow choke points on the map. Thus they could overtake the party while sleeping or demand great haste. Greater mobility of the AI would allow for missions to be more time critical and add to the suspense of tracking down an enemy.

PS: The existing sequels to this game are not good. If you played Betrayal at Antara and like it you will love Krondor. If you have played Krondor don't waste your time with Antara, play Krondor again.

Hi folks. I'm very glad that you've all enjoyed Betrayal at Krondor, but I want to clear up a long-standing misconception that lots of folks have about this game. Neither the main story for this game nor the dialogue for it was written by Raymond E. Feist. Nor did he design the game or the systems in it. All of those things were handled by the lead designers John Cutter and Neal Hallford (namely myself).

If you want more direct proof of what I'm saying, simply turn your paperback copies of "Krondor: the Betrayal" to Ray's afterword on page 389. "Neal Hallford and John Cutter wrote the game. I got to review things, but they wrote it. I talked with them about story, gave them ideas, listened to their ideas, and the game took form. But even I had no idea what it would look like, or play like, until it was finished."

This isn't to say Ray had no significant impact on the game. He absolutely, positively did. He wrote a whole set of magnificent novels that gave me a lot of meat to play with. I had some really fun characters to threaten, beat up, and send off on weird adventures. I had the priviledge of having the personal phone number of a New York Times best-selling author whenever I wanted to bounce a story idea around. But Ray did not write the story. That burden, and that priviledge, fell to me.

Ray made a mint off the game. I never got royalties from one of the best-selling RPGs of the early 1990s. Ray made another mint off the novelization. I never received a single red penny for that, or for any of the characters I created that he later used in his other books (Lysle Rigger, Abbot Graves, or Cat (called "Kitty" in his books)).

If you wish to praise Ray for his phenomenal books, go right ahead. It is praise well deserved. But when it comes to Betrayal at Krondor, give credit where credit is due.

Thanks,
Neal Hallford

The title says it all. It is a classic.. up there with Adventure and Pong for its genre. An amazingly crafted synthesis of novel, action and adventure. Groundbreaking use of Chapters. Combat system is an improvement over what I regard as the prior pinnacle of Turn based combat, that being the gold box series. Brilliant use of puzzles to unlock needed items was a masterpiece of design. So much has never been improved on since then, and I have bought and played every RPG out there. As someone says elsewhere.

This is a classic game that should be re-done to take advantage of modern technology. It has a great story line, excellent gameplay considering its age, and was a pre-cursor to other legendary RPGs like Diablo and Everquest. It should be in everyone's collection as it still, many years later, is very playable and enjoyable.

It's now possible to play good old Betrayal at Krondor again, one of the best RPGs ever made and certainly the one with the best and most engaging storyline thanks to best-selling author Raymond E. Feist. BaK is downloadable at http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=116 and runs on any pc if you also install the free software DOSBox. The graphics and extremely basic now but it's the gameplay that counts.

Aside from the storyline the game was also huge for the time - you have the feeling that you can go anywhere and do anything. It's therefore a precursor to more recent popular 'epic' RPGs like Daggerfall and Morrowind (not Diablo as one reviewer suggests, this game is almost exactly the opposite!). The combat engine was also extremely innovative and is still one of the best around - turn-based, and not just slash and hack but actually requires some brains if you want to outwit the opponent. The many people you meet actually have personalities, not the dumb cloned villagers who all say the same thing as is common in today's RPGs.

Many people have been asking for a sequel but I agree with the other reviewers here who say we need a remake instead. Fans have been dissapointed with the two sequels - Betrayal at Antara (same engine, terrible story/graphics/voice) and the official sequal Return to Krondor (Raymond E. Feist story, but different engine, and too short).

I read the book Magician and loved every page of it. I was just browsing for a new rpg, but couldnt find an interesting one. That was before I found this amazing game. Take on the roll of Pug, an interesting young boy who has a talent for magic but doesnt know how to use it until he is made a slave on the alien planet Kelewan. He is then sought out for his magic abilities and made into a Great One (the tsurani's magicians.) It is all very interesting and fun to play so dont waste money or time on food and clothes just wrap yourself in a blanket and play this game!

The game designers, John Cutter and Neal Hallford deserves the credit here.

on to the game!

It's the best combat systems of the RPG style I've ever played. It's simple, yet fun to play. It's complex, yet makes sense and it doesn't involve so much pointless clicking!

This game evolutioned and spawned PC games with stories, at least as far as I can tell. The success of the game is owed to the great story, and the complexities of how the story was told. Solving the puzzles as James, and Locklear made you feel like you're part of Midkemia.

The music was outstanding as well. This is perhaps, the best and most intense video game music I've ever heard (coming from PC, at least).
I'm truly sorry the game designer did not get any royalties, that is royally wrong.

on that note, this is by far the most outstanding game ever developed.

This really was an outstanding RPG when it came out, and one of the few RPG's I have played to the end rather than getting bored and deleting before finishing.

It is really not worth the effort to do a full review as the game is so old and I don't even know if it would run on a modern PC with an XP or Vista OS.

But it would be interesting to dig it out and see.

I don't know how the game is b/c I have not recieved it yet. Will write review when the game comes in