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by skocznymroczny 1493 days ago
Wish the game was remade, it has many interesting concepts, especially for its time, but the visual presentation and some gameplay elements hadn't aged well.

It was an example of an early open world game. The most interesting part of the game is the first chapter. The game very directly makes you go south towards Krondor, and the path north contains some large enemy packs. But if you manage to defeat the two large enemy packs, it gets much easier later on and you can take a very long detour around the entire map. This means you can access some high level equipment and spells early on in the game. The game designers actually planned for this possibility, because there are some quests in those areas that can only be completed in the first chapter (normally you'd explore these areas around the third chapter at least).

7 comments

While the game itself is not getting remade, there is an “inspired by” game in the works: https://www.callofsaregnar.com/
Damn! They managed to update the graphics while keeping the "feel" of the original game, that's quite an impresive feat.
Indeed. I'm a fan of both Daggerfall and Might and Magic, so this looks seriously good.
Yes, I also think that the art didn't age very well, the 3D world being quite confusing to navigate IMO.

I forked an open source reversed engineered implementation of that game some time ago, you can see it in here: https://github.com/canassa/betrayal-at-krondor

My hope was to get it working and eventualy update some of its graphics but I never had the time to properly work on it.

This is a pretty rare game for that time that didn't have much of any pixel art... it was either scanned images or rudimentary 3d. I had no idea what it was when I downloaded it off a BBS and was pleasantly surprised by the visuals. It's funny how our perspectives change over time.
On the other hand, I think one of the unique(?) elements of the game was perhaps because of the rather limited visual presentation.

Betrayal at Krondor uses written descriptions of events and environments a lot. It felt natural, at least to me, perhaps partially because the graphics didn't really allow for showing a lot of detail visually. Extensive voice acting wasn't really a thing in the floppy era either.

Nowadays, with the incredibly detailed graphics and professionally voice-acted spoken dialogue of AAA games, it might seem a lot more weird if what the characters saw were described in writing.

I've been playing through the remaster of Nier recently and there's one segment of the game where it transitions from 3d action RPG to text adventure. It's very bizarre, but you should go into any Yoko Taro game expecting bizarreness so it actually works out pretty well.
What I don't understand is why I loved Krondor but couldn't stand Daggerfall (or any of the later Elder Scrolls games). Maybe it's just that Krondor was more focused? The chapter system certainly made it easier to know what the next "primary goal" was without restricting you too from exploring the world (at least in most of the early chapters; the last 3ish chapters were certainly more railroaded).
The original is on GOG, though I haven't played it and I don't know how well it is emulated.
I played BaK several times and never knew that.