I strongly disagree here. Master of Magic had a ton of interesting touches that put it beyond other 4X games and still makes it one of the best strategy fantasy games ever. One of the most interesting aspects is how complete it felt, given you had a ton of spells, races, heroes and special items (you could even create your own powerful artifacts to equip your heroes; waiting turns and turns for creating your own “Sacred Sword of Apocalypse” and see how your heroe basted everyone with it was great).
It had turn based battles and they could be really long and hard, with lot of tactic chooses. Given the ammount of units and spells, combat felt pretty unique. Is, of course, my opinion, but Master of Magic is for me a masterpiece (of couse, it could use more refinement but “masterpiece” doen´t mean “perfect”).
You didn’t miss too much. MoM was just civ with a fantasy/magic theme and some nasty balance issues. Rather innovative at the time since it was the first big fantasy-strategy hybrid I can ever recall playing, but other games have done similar fantasy-strategy things since then and done them better.
Not to derail the thread too far (I never got into Darklands, but tried it long enough to really think the static art, game world, and different city concepts were awesome), but I too have to dissent with the above quote.
MoM had a very unique feel, and it was truly epic in the breadth of options and choices available in a way that I don’t think any later game accomplished. Maybe Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic came close, but it never felt like it was trying for the same scope.
MoM is “just civ” in the way that Civ is “just civ”. If it wasn’t butt ugly and AI-less, it would remain an incredibly playable title to this day.
Ahh, Darklands. I started but, unfortunately, didn’t get too far with a tabletop RPG campaign based on Darklands. What a fantastic, and buggy, game.
Take the Darklands musical challenge. From memory:
Hum the campfire song.
Hum the Universitat (university) song.
Hum the shell game song.
Hum the traveling song.
Obscure Darklands lore:
Name the woodlands creature that you could find the hunt chasing.
What was the uber stat boost he gave you?
Name the saints that would be “worshipped” in a satanic village.
What city has the best weapons quality?
Name a saint that would help you get an audience with someone.
Answers:
Schrat.
+2 strength wasn’t it?
I remember Erasmus but not the other one.
Paderborn! 38 quality.
Alcuin is the one I always used but there are several others.
I’d heard that but hadn’t been following it too closely. I was thinking more along a game with medieval lines. Along with the freeform gameplay and the fun tactical battles, the real big draw that makes it stand out so much is the incredible work that went into bringing real medieval topics into the setting and what you were about.
There are quite a few games I can stand back and appreciate for the amount of work that went into the design but outside sports games and flight simulators, and they’re actually getting to be a bit much to keep up with, you don’t see folks making games about subjects they seem to understand much less have a passion for. It’s good for a game designer to have a passion about game design. It’s better for said designer to also have passions for subjects outside his professional calling that he can bring to life through gaming.
Too often I get the sense that there’s really not alot of thought put into what a game is going to be about and what that really means, if anything. A setting, storytelling, visual design and the like seem to be something you slather onto a compilation of gameplay in order to give it some cohesion and a reason for the player to advance. The subject is mainly just the detailing, not the chassis or the engine. Why else so many games about very similiar subjects with identical characters and situations? Just profit motive? Or is it that developers and writers just don’t have many references outside their own industry, or generic popular culture, to draw upon for inspiration?
A game like Darklands, just reading the manual, tells me these guys loved history, they loved roleplaying and they really put their effort into bringing the two together in as flexible and convincing a manner as they could sort out. It’s really rare for me to grin and nod along, become an instant collaborator, with designers just by reading a manual. Darklands, and the introduction to Daggerfall, are the only two I can even think of off hand where I knew this guy was on my side and trying to bring me something I could respect because he loved, and knew, his subject and didn’t assume I was an idiot.
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but MoM really wasn’t all that. Fire it up in Dosbox and play it again. I did that last year and it really reminded how much nostalgia can inflate the coolness of a game in my memory and how much better games have gotten over the years.
The Dominions series has eclipsed MoM in about every way, even in graphics though it was a close thing. AoW:SM was a better game all around, and there’s been other fantasy strategy titles that were fairly respectable. Even if given a fresh coat of graphical paint MoM wouldn’t hold up to more recent games.
They are notoriously stingy with fairly worthless old licenses.
Lead Pursuit got Falcon 4 cheap, I imagine. Then again, the source code was already on the net. Maybe somebody should hook up an old MPS employee to “leak” the Darklands source…
I am not famous for inventing what I say (not like I am famous at all). But there is not nostalgia here, I played MoM recently and it still feels like a great fantasy strategy game packed with options (will you say that what I have said about spells, races, city building, item creation is false?).
I have heard great things of AoW: SM but I has been unable to get it. I just have AoW (and was not better than MoM). But even if SM is good, how many years took a fantasy strategy game to overshadow an old game like MoM? This use to mean something.
well…it was! seems to be down now(darn and that was the link i always used also!). Darklands (video game) - Wikipedia This is the wikipedia entry for the game.
There’s an argument to be made that MoM’s unbalanced nature is part of why it is so fondly remembered. Finding an uber-powerful (unbalanced) strategy is part of what makes gaming enjoyable to many people.
Certainly, one of its immediate ancestors, Magic: The Gathering, was badly unbalanced in that way, as was M:tG’s ancestor, Cosmic Encounter.
