My story: Why I stall care about LOM! Now; lets hear yours!
Jan 7, 2015 21:36:05 GMT -6
orzie likes this
Post by mummra on Jan 7, 2015 21:36:05 GMT -6
I don’t post much these on message boards these days, but I recently started playing Lords of Magic again in my free time so I thought I'd drop by and say hello! This game has always been REALLY special to me, and the mere existence of this forum suggests that it means a great deal to many of you as well!
I thought I'd take a few moments and talk about why I still enjoy getting lost in the world of Urak from time to time:
Some of you know that I've been around the LOM community for a long time. It’s hard to believe, but I was only 17 when I first sat down to play Lords of Magic! In fact, I actually remember picking up the original Lords of Magic on the day it came out in 1997 (a really long time ago!) I had toyed with the interactive demo that came with Lords of the Realm II, so I was stoked and eager to play!
I remember the game taking FOREVER to install. My dad, who rarely bothered with computer games, was also excited after hearing all of the hype I had fed him about the game over the last several weeks. He hung the monsters and champions poster up for me that came in the game box (it was awesome!) while I waited for the installation to finish. After waiting for what felt like hours (it was probably only about 30-40 minutes) the game installation was complete!
We sat in silence as we watched the intro to the game which told the story of Balkoth's return and the struggle of Urak’s people to free the land from Golgoth’s darkness.
After a great deal of consideration, I started my first game with an Elven Warrior Lord. My father and I took turns at the computer desk every few minutes so that we could both get a feel for the games mechanics. At the time, they seemed rather extensive and even over-whelming. Combat was tough for us at first, and we had to resort to constant pausing as we struggled to avoid having fragile units getting sniped by the cheap combat AI.
There were far worse problems with game though, and to be honest it ran like total CRAP on our Pentium 75 MHZ computer. It was horrible; the initial loading of save games, the time to enter and exit dungeons, and time it took to get through each faith’s turn was horrendous! Sometimes it took five minutes or MUCH more to get to our next turn!
Despite the bugs, the game had a way of drawing us in; the music, the graphics (which were impressive at the time), and the overall epic scope and nature of the game just kept us going! Thanks to what was then considered a huge game world, Lords of Magic had a way of giving me a sense of great exploration that no other game had ever managed to do. It was awesome!
My father would always get home after midnight because he worked late, but that did not stop him from logging a couple hours on Lords of Magic most nights. A few days after we got the game I remember my dad coming into my room to wake me up in the VERY early hours of the morning. It was our first sighting of the dark lord; Balkoth!
Our Elven Warrior Lord had gotten leveled-up pretty high with a formidable escort of unicorns, Pegasus riders, and archers. But Balkoth had found him on neutral ground, and had his own nightmarish army of dark elves and other horrible things in tow…
After many failed attempts to take down the arch-demon, we finally prevailed by attacking with only a small portion of the party first so that Balkoth would exhaust his mana pool and be far less fearsome when the more formidable portion of the army followed up. It was an awesome victory, and we eagerly started a new game as the Lord of Death himself!
Sierra eventually released several patches for the original game. I remember we requested that a “patch disc” be mailed to us because we didn’t have good internet service at the time, and the phone bill for calling Sierra’s support BBS to download the files would have been horrible! Sierra kept their word, and actually ended up sending us two updates.
Later came the “Special Editon” with the Legends of Urak quest pack. It was even better than the original, but the sense of wonder that came with a fresh, new experience had faded.
I don’t know if it is just that our skill at the game had gotten so much better or something else, but looking back I almost want to say the AI was better in the original LOM. At the very least, Balkoth sure seemed a lot better and hunting down and killing the other lords, and always seemed to have a nastier escort backing him up. Perhaps this assumption is just me being nostalgic, or perhaps the AI was adjusted in other ways that made it better overall but noticeably worse in more noticeable ways.
After playing Special Edition for countless hours, a few friends and I tried to use our limited programming and coding experience to help the AI cheat; We thought if it had unlimited resources it would be far more dangerous. (You can actually read about this effort here) It actually seemed rather promising at first, but that theory, at least in my eyes, was soon proved false. With greater skill and more dedication than I could muster, others also began to crack the games blizzard MPQ archives and tinker with the overall structure of the game.
It soon became apparent to me that more resources only served to allow the AI to make dopey decisions at a higher frequency. It would do things like hire 3 full armies of level one mercenaries from its barracks just to chase away a few stray enemy units in the vicinity of its city. These tactics are not efficient at all and are easily exploited.
I am very pleased with the efforts of many on this site to modify and improve the game. Many of you have done some great work, and I have high hopes that it will continue. I have long wished for a sequel, but after all of this time it's getting a little bit difficult to remain optimistic. This is my LOM story, thanks for reading it! I hope some of you will share your experiences with this amazing game as well!
I thought I'd take a few moments and talk about why I still enjoy getting lost in the world of Urak from time to time:
Some of you know that I've been around the LOM community for a long time. It’s hard to believe, but I was only 17 when I first sat down to play Lords of Magic! In fact, I actually remember picking up the original Lords of Magic on the day it came out in 1997 (a really long time ago!) I had toyed with the interactive demo that came with Lords of the Realm II, so I was stoked and eager to play!
I remember the game taking FOREVER to install. My dad, who rarely bothered with computer games, was also excited after hearing all of the hype I had fed him about the game over the last several weeks. He hung the monsters and champions poster up for me that came in the game box (it was awesome!) while I waited for the installation to finish. After waiting for what felt like hours (it was probably only about 30-40 minutes) the game installation was complete!
We sat in silence as we watched the intro to the game which told the story of Balkoth's return and the struggle of Urak’s people to free the land from Golgoth’s darkness.
After a great deal of consideration, I started my first game with an Elven Warrior Lord. My father and I took turns at the computer desk every few minutes so that we could both get a feel for the games mechanics. At the time, they seemed rather extensive and even over-whelming. Combat was tough for us at first, and we had to resort to constant pausing as we struggled to avoid having fragile units getting sniped by the cheap combat AI.
There were far worse problems with game though, and to be honest it ran like total CRAP on our Pentium 75 MHZ computer. It was horrible; the initial loading of save games, the time to enter and exit dungeons, and time it took to get through each faith’s turn was horrendous! Sometimes it took five minutes or MUCH more to get to our next turn!
Despite the bugs, the game had a way of drawing us in; the music, the graphics (which were impressive at the time), and the overall epic scope and nature of the game just kept us going! Thanks to what was then considered a huge game world, Lords of Magic had a way of giving me a sense of great exploration that no other game had ever managed to do. It was awesome!
My father would always get home after midnight because he worked late, but that did not stop him from logging a couple hours on Lords of Magic most nights. A few days after we got the game I remember my dad coming into my room to wake me up in the VERY early hours of the morning. It was our first sighting of the dark lord; Balkoth!
Our Elven Warrior Lord had gotten leveled-up pretty high with a formidable escort of unicorns, Pegasus riders, and archers. But Balkoth had found him on neutral ground, and had his own nightmarish army of dark elves and other horrible things in tow…
After many failed attempts to take down the arch-demon, we finally prevailed by attacking with only a small portion of the party first so that Balkoth would exhaust his mana pool and be far less fearsome when the more formidable portion of the army followed up. It was an awesome victory, and we eagerly started a new game as the Lord of Death himself!
Sierra eventually released several patches for the original game. I remember we requested that a “patch disc” be mailed to us because we didn’t have good internet service at the time, and the phone bill for calling Sierra’s support BBS to download the files would have been horrible! Sierra kept their word, and actually ended up sending us two updates.
Later came the “Special Editon” with the Legends of Urak quest pack. It was even better than the original, but the sense of wonder that came with a fresh, new experience had faded.
I don’t know if it is just that our skill at the game had gotten so much better or something else, but looking back I almost want to say the AI was better in the original LOM. At the very least, Balkoth sure seemed a lot better and hunting down and killing the other lords, and always seemed to have a nastier escort backing him up. Perhaps this assumption is just me being nostalgic, or perhaps the AI was adjusted in other ways that made it better overall but noticeably worse in more noticeable ways.
After playing Special Edition for countless hours, a few friends and I tried to use our limited programming and coding experience to help the AI cheat; We thought if it had unlimited resources it would be far more dangerous. (You can actually read about this effort here) It actually seemed rather promising at first, but that theory, at least in my eyes, was soon proved false. With greater skill and more dedication than I could muster, others also began to crack the games blizzard MPQ archives and tinker with the overall structure of the game.
It soon became apparent to me that more resources only served to allow the AI to make dopey decisions at a higher frequency. It would do things like hire 3 full armies of level one mercenaries from its barracks just to chase away a few stray enemy units in the vicinity of its city. These tactics are not efficient at all and are easily exploited.
I am very pleased with the efforts of many on this site to modify and improve the game. Many of you have done some great work, and I have high hopes that it will continue. I have long wished for a sequel, but after all of this time it's getting a little bit difficult to remain optimistic. This is my LOM story, thanks for reading it! I hope some of you will share your experiences with this amazing game as well!
The text message was still about the 2 freed prisoners though.
