Games Thursday : Replaying the Original Majesty Demo

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007, 9:12 pmRoys0 comments

Read at 2404 Gaming a while back that Paradox Interactive, makers of ultracomplex strategy games like Hearts of Iron and Crusader Kings, had acquired the IP to the 2000 game Majesty : The Fantasy Kingdom sim by Cyberlore Studios, which also probably meant that a sequel is in the works

For nostalgia’s sake, I downloaded the demo from the official site www.majestyquest.com (under Downloads). The official site is still online which is an absolute miracle considering the lifespan of most “official” game sites nowadays. The site also includes a generous dose of goodies like wallpapers and game assets like artwork as well as character voices and in-game music.

The demo itself is only 43.5 MB (quite big for its time) and contains a single quest not available in the full game. Works fine on my Win XP machine except that scrolling is too fast

My castle! Yay!

To complete the quest, you have to build guilds to recruit and house heroes with maximum of 4 per guild. The heroes level up and improve their stats when fighting or exploring unmapped lands.

As with most sims, the subjects of your kingdom as well as the heroes (only warriors, rangers and wizards in demo) are not directly controllable. Each hero class has its own personality e.g. rangers prefer exploration over combat, paladins attack any enemy in sight without any sense of self-preservation and warriors often charge mindlessly into combat with stronger foes.

A warrior guild to recruit brave (and greedy) warriors

Assist your heroes by providing facilities like blacksmiths and markets for your heroes to upgrade themselves with gold looted from fallen foes. It’s quite fun to watch your heroes walk to the blacksmith to buy new weapons and armor or replenish their healing potions at the market after defeating powerful enemies like trolls and looting their corpses.

Build and upgrade guard towers and patrolling guards generated from these towers will attempt to keep your kingdom and subjects safe from marauding monstrosities like trolls and minotaurs while your heroes are out fighting.

To obtain the money to build all these facilities, your kingdom sends out a tax collector who travels from building to building collecting taxes before returning to the palace after a certain (configurable) amount. If he happens to be waylaid and killed by a hungry monster, the hero who kills that monster will collect and keep that monster’s loot including the taxes

Casting protective magic on your heroes or subjects and offensive spells like thunderbolts on tough foes via the Wizard Guilds or Wizard Towers and setting bounty flags by double-clicking on enemies are two ways for you to actively assist your heroes.

Placing bounty on lairs always works for the greedy heroes

By putting a bounty on a particular monster or lair (regenerates monsters), heroes who hunt down the bounty get to share the bounty amount among themselves, which provides them money to upgrade themselves at the market or blacksmith. The money spent then gets collected as tax and returns back to your coffers

Remember to place your bounties carefully as that some heroes don’t care for bounties and money whereas others like the foolhardy warriors often try to hunt bounties more powerful than them and get slaughtered instead.

Overall, the game is quite fun but there’s isn’t any much left to do after you have upgraded everything (a common issue in most games of this genre). I enjoy watching my heroes battling monsters, levelling up and upgrading their equipment though.