Customer Reviews

Majesty Gold

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Majesty entered a world where RTSes had been solidly institutionalized for over five years (the four Xes, eXplore, eXploit, eXpand and eXterminate) and put a genuinely new twist on things.

In Majesty, you don't waste your time mining and directing minions to go hither and yon. You build your castle, your kingdom's amenities and, as you can afford themn, hero guilds. Each hero guild can support a certain number of heroes (usually 4), although you'll usually have to buy heroes.

But fret not, because each hero will pay you back many times over by visiting your marketplaces, blacksmiths, inns, and son on. In addition, each guild generates a bit of money on its own, and some provide extra services which can generate revenue.

Your tax collectors will walk from building to building collecting gold, ultimately returning it to your castle or nearby guard houses, while your heroes do whatever they do best. (Rangers explore, rogues steal, and so on.)

The more you build, the more support buildings (peasant huts) will pop up, themselves generating some revenue. Other side effects of urban life (like sewer drains) will appear, too.

The lands are always plagued with some menace or other, however, and its your job as king to make the world safe for--well, your taxpayers. Majesty, however, unlike most other RTSes, gives you no means to directly manipulate your subjects.

If you want a monster dead, then, you must place a bounty on it. If you're trying to destroy the evil crypt generating vampires, you must place a bounty on that. If you want to explore a dark area of the map, you can place an explore flag and try to draw heroes there--for a price.

All-in-all, this formula works, though it's not yet perfected. The balance between building facilities (like the marketplace) and building the guilds/generating heroes that you need to protect your kingdom is very well done. The heroes autonomy is good: Sometimes the destruction of a certain target will result in a greater evil being released, so you'll want to delay that--but your Paladins will have other ideas. On the other hand, your heroes can be so aggressive on their own that they win the game for you while you're not even aware of it.

If you've built a solid infrastructure for your city, you know you've won. The difference between a beginner's game and an expert's game becomes whether you can survive the opening minutes, and occasionally how well you prepare for the trigger event (the accomplishing of one goal that results in a rush of monsters).

So, if the game has a fault, it's that it's too easy. I don't mind; I enjoyed all the scenarios and liked that I could finish them.

Majesty Gold includes the Northern Expansion, an add-on of modest proportions with some tweaks to the rules to make the game harder. The add-on parts, with the tougher, winter-oriented monsters, are quite cool. The tweaks to the game rules, on the other hand, show the game's relative newness. They do make the game harder, but only by way of making it somewhat more frantic in those opening minutes: Even with the tweaks, it's an easy game.

But that's to be expected: The designers can't directly borrow from Starcraft (and clones) to get ideas. They have a new framework to figure out. Majesty 2 is not a shoo-in at this point, but let's hope the developers get a chance to do it. This is an interesting new direction that should be explored.

Meanwhile, we have this game, with solid gameplay, great artwork from industry stalwart Cyberlore, and remarkably few bugs.

I bought this game on a whim and have been quite delighted with it. It's very simplistic, you're not getting a lot of strategy play or shoot 'em up stuff (like in CIV III, Warcraft or Empire Earth), but at the same time it's highly addictive.

Perhaps its simplicity is the key. That, and the delightful narrator who sounds suspiciously like Sean Connery. The premise is that you get an area map of the kingdom with all kinds of quests or challenges that you must complete -- from wiping out the monsters, to reclaiming your crown, seeking the holy chalice, to rescuing your son who's been kidnapped by evil elves. The beginner levels will get you into the game and understand how it works; it's fairly intuitive and a fast learn. The advanced levels offer some challenge; some more difficult than others, and will test your ability to logically figure out solutions. I've yet to get to the expert levels.

While there is fighting in this game, once you build your "army" (consisting of necromancers, wizards, warriors, rogues and explorers), they automatically fight any enemy that enters your domain. They will also go off and fight enemies at greater distances. You can set reward flags up to have your army target and destroy one enemy camp over another.

Another great aspect of this game is that you get to build up your little kingdom. You place your wizards' guild, your rogues' guild, your warriors' guild and then magically houses begin to sprout up and pad out your town. You also upgrade your levels with gold, research new attack methods with a library or through the guilds, and create marketplaces and blacksmith's shops. Upgrading will get you new types of buildings (like temples) and you can watch your castle grow along with your kingdom.

You get, in this package, not only the original game, but the second release add on of the game for further adventures and quests.

It's a fun, addictive game. The quests can be short or long, not requiring a high demand on time that some games do, and is fairly straight-forward to play. I could see both children and adults enjoying this game (there's no vulgarity, but there are some jokes and humor with dialogue).

Enjoy the game. I have.

First of all, this version is a substantial improvement over the original, because the music actually works!

The game itself is a blast - easy to learn, but not so easy to master. You can learn the strategies, and you can be successful, yet the game isn't so easy that you can simply "win" it in an hour.

In otherwords, it's within almost everybody's capabilities. It won't leave you feeling stupid, and it's not a cakewalk either.

One gripe - why is the Northern expansion seperate from the regular edition, when the Northern expansion INCLUDES the regular edition? If you start playing games in the regular edition, then go to the Norhtern expansion, you lose all the games you won beforehand. Wierd.

Overall, very enjoyable. Get the gold edition.

I've always been attracted to sim games, but I inevitably get bored with them -- as neat as "SimCity" is, there's really no POINT. It's like a digital aquarium, really: Get the system stable and thriving and then ... watch it.

"Majesty," though, solves that problem. Sure, it's a sim, a medieval fantasy version of "SimCity" by way of "Dungeons & Dragons." In addition to creating rogues guilds, dwarven settlements, blacksmithies and the like, "Majesty" is based around "epic quest" scenarios wherein you're challenged to defeat some evil facing the land, send your heroes on a quest for some fabled artifact, rescue a hostage taken by villains and so on.

Just as in "SimCity," you don't control your wizards, warriors, rogues, elves, dwarves, gnomes, thieves and so on. Instead, you have to do what any good monarch does in a fantasy game: Put prices on monsters' heads and offer rewards for heroes willing to explore unknown (and almost certainly hostile) territory.

"Majesty" is a hoot, and a massive timesink: You'll lose whole nights and weekends to it without realizing it, and love every minute of trying to squeeze a bit more service out of heroes who'd rather laze about the inn than go study new spells or visit an elven hut-of-ill-repute than go fight the troll heading for the kingdom's market.

The epic quests included with on the original disk are fun, and an additional one is available from on the official Web site. But while there's a large jump from the beginner to advanced quests and then another more moderate jump from advanced to expert quests, they ultimately don't prove too challenging overall. Expect to finish most of the quests with a week or two of nightly play (less if you've got more time to devote to the game).

The good news is that this edition includes "The Northern Expansion," and suddenly, the game jumps up a fair bit in difficulty -- although not beyond that which most players can handle, if they've played through the original missions -- and the difficulty scales up nicely from there. The expansion otherwise adds new buildings and monsters, but while these are nice, the real value of it is in having more (and more difficult) adventures.

An excellent game for sim fans who, like me, want a bit more direction and focus to their gaming experience. While it's worth the price -- it really is a unique and entertaining game -- it's not one you're likely to spend playing for months and months to come. Even now, years after having purchased the original game, I still pull this game out periodically, something only Sid Meier's "Pirates" is otherwise able to do.

A true classic and a great addition to the library of any RPG or RTS or Sim player.

This is a game is a real treat, especially for this price. Compared to other RTS games, such as Warcraft, where the micromanagement of units and resources can be a drag, this game really does add a finely-balanced way of simulating your kingdom and improving repeated gameplay. The plot and story are rich, although without the multi-million dollar cinematics like in Blizzard games, and the building and game units are well developed and balanced (certain temples, for example, cannot be built alongside rival ones, making the building choices intriguing). As always, you should download the demo to get a feel for the game (on the official site), but the full version itself (this includes an expansion) is much more intricate.

This is a game you must give a chance when you first start playing. I constantly find myself going back and replaying Majesty, trying to improve on the time for quests, or simply trying another method to win. The options in the game are great, each quest can be won using different methods for economy, defense, or production. The graphics are excellent, the sounds and voices are a delight. I am not lying when I say this is the best PC game I have ever played.

I like this game a lot. You create your village and heros and defenses and have to accomplish feats to finish goals. What I really like about it is when you complete your goals you can continue to play and exterminate the evil doers or quit right there and go to the next chapter. It seemed to get a little easy about half way through the chapters, but now I am having a crazy time getting through the last chapter of the main game playing about 30-40 hours total. I still have the entire northern expansion yet to do. For the price I would say this is an awesome game!

Really a good game, but different. Unlike a standard role playing game, in Majesty you build infrastructure, create heroes, etc., and then let them go. The characters roam about on their own; you can influence them by placing rewards and a few other ways but overall they go where they want and attack what they will (or won't). One of the really nice things about this game is that you don't generally have to take that long to play a scenario. Most of them last around an hour or less, which is great if you actually have a job and have to get up in the morning. It may take many hours to replay and WIN a scenario but it doesn't take long to play one.

This review was written by my son, James Shea

The basic concept behind Majesty is that the player is a king or queen in a medieval fantasy country called Ardania. This kingdom is inhabited by all the adventurers and monsters one would expect from such a setting. As monarch, the player cannot directly intervene in most cases; compare this to, say, Warcraft, where everyone is under the player's direct control. The monarch in Majesty can place building plans (which peasants will automatically redirect towards constructing), cast spells (if the appropriate facilities are constructed), hire heroes, purchase upgrades to buildings and place reward flags. This is the extent of your power; you cannot directly tell a warrior to go destroy a troll attacking your town, but you can place a bounty on its head so that heroes will want to go get it. This is the key difference from Warcraft; the game is half about strategy and half about convincing your kingdom's heroes that they should help you.

The main focus of the game is the heroes, of course; by building various types of guilds, you can recruit a certain number of heroes (usually four per guild). These guilds include warrior's guilds, ranger's guilds, wizard's guilds, and temples of various gods and goddesses. Different heroes have different temperaments and abilities. Rogues are greedy and will pilfer from enemy buildings and lairs more than they'll destroy them, but are easily influenced by reward flags. Rangers spend most of their time exploring, and act as the eyes and ears of the sovereign. Wizards can cast powerful spells, but are fragile. Gnomes aren't good fighters, but are cheap and will help the peasants build things around the settlement. Certain groups (priests and non-human races, primarily) do not like certain other groups. Elves, gnomes, and dwarves all dislike each other, so you can only have one group in your kingdom at a time. Temples have rivalries and friends - the temples of Law and Good like each other, but dislike Chaos and Evil (and vice versa). The same goes for the temples of the Sun and Moon Gods - you can only have one of either at a time.

Other buildings are usually meant to either defend your settlement (namely, the guardhouses that are staffed by city watchmen and can shoot arrows at enemies) or support your hero population. Of the second group, there are blacksmiths (that upgrade weapons), marketplaces (that sell various magic items), tournament grounds (for training), and various types of inns and relaxation areas. Heroes earn money through adventuring or by collecting the bounties you set for them; they spend this money on upgrades for themselves. The hero AI is pretty smart, and heroes most of the time will know when to purchase new things, when to use their special abilities, when to use healing potions, and when to flee from battle. Heroes also level up through combat, so it's to your benefit to try to keep your heroes alive (so that they can deal with the stronger threats plaguing your kingdom). Enemies also come in various sizes, as well, from the low-level giant rats to various types of goblins and ratmen to stronger foes like medusas and hydras. Their level belies their rarity; rats will come through sewer vents to attack your town and cannot be stopped (the sewer is a necessary part for a growing city) but medusas will only come into your kingdom once in a rare while.

The graphics in this game - done in a 2D cartoonish style without being weirdly proportioned - still look pretty good today. Unlike a lot of old games, it looks like "well-drawn 2d" instead of "blocky 3d", which works to its advantage. Heroes and monsters all have portraits (one per class or monster type, not individual portraits) that are well illustrated. The music is good, though the same music gets used a lot. The voice acting is extensive, with a different voice for every type of hero, and a quip for every situation (the things they say are helpful with running the kingdom, to serve as a quick indication of what they're doing). There is also a royal advisor who assists you during play who has a fairly humorous Sean Connery accent.

Even though this game is old, it runs fine on Vista when acquired through GamersGate. The gold edition also includes the expansion, which adds some new buildings and many new missions. This is one game that is still just as good now as it was when it came out.

Rating: 9/10.

There are not many games I will say this to: Wow. Right from the beginning to the end this game is a journey you will never forget. If there was an award for best balance in a computer game, it would either go to this title or The Sims. If you enjoy similar games of medieval conquest and such, this is a game for you. If not, give it a try. You might be surprised! Bottom Line: Wonderful game! ^_^