also mages don't get to wear armor in this game for some reason

meanwhile James has an...... eight-shoulderblade?

but it all pales in comparison to these chickens. these chickens, man. the still image doesn't do the uncanny joint movements justice.

the entire bird swivels up and down on the legs like one of those water-drinking bob-up-and-down toys.

(also it's after midnight and they should be asleep)

Pfffffft

Betrayal at Krondor was state of the art for 1993. This one's from 1998 and it... tried.

The cinematic camera angle in this cut-scene

also I cannot with how the characters' hands are vague squares with vague finger outlines

why is this even here

I'm over here remembering how ~elite~ and ~magical~ we thought these graphics were

this is lovely

I mean, they WERE magical; a computer game was this

and then suddenly this???

RtK was just on the wrong end of how new the 3D modeling was

(unfortunately I'm also seeing a rush job in the writing; there are many items and their descriptions are much more boring than in BaK)

where BaK was something people had never seen before, RtK ended up being behind what they'd come to expect

(there was a studio switch and a bunch of shenanigans and ultimately the next few planned games didn't get made)

(Feist wrote novelizations for the first two and stuck another book between them but ended up scrapping a bunch of what was the studio had been planning for the sequel games and went off in his own direction)

dying is annoying because s h e looms out of the blue-flame-underworld every time and you have to wait for that animation to end before reloading the fight

(I'm pretty sure she's meant to be Lims-Kragma but that's not? confirmed?)

the sprites really just need to be less sad though.
A broadsword in BaK:
A broadsword in RtK:

especially since so many of the sprites are reused (e.g. many of the rapiers share a sprite, as do many of the broadswords, many of the daggers, many of the leather armors....) it's disappointing that the pixel artist didn't check what bits would actually be visible against a black background.

This guy in front of William is classified as "Short Ruffian".

Shhh. The Scribe is hiding until he's sure it's safe. This is the best hiding spot and nobody will ever find him there.

(to be clear, this room is not locked, there's an open stairwell on the right, the bad guys are behind a door offscreen to the left, and the party found this guy standing, with his hands tied, in front of the desk.

but now he's iNviZibUL~)

ahh classic gaming

the nostalgia~~~~

DID NOT expect this near-full-screen shot of whoever this is (apparently not a zombie, just a prisoner)

WILLIAM YOU ARE BLOCKING THE ENTIRE VIEW

There's just... things about this game. :/

Chapter 1 of BAK: you can visit almost every city/village in the Kingdom, talk to multiple NPCs in almost every location, pick up multiple optional subplots, get all kinds of flavor about the world, Bard or Gamble at all the taverns...

RTK: you spend the first two chapters in a few sectors of one city, do repetitive random encounters with very few shops open because day never arrives, have only one temple available for healing, and pick up one (1) optional subplot.

The flavor text is just bad a lot of the time too. In BAK, there'd be a misspelling maybe once in several dozen item descriptions, and the descriptions are written from the POV of the party members. In RTK, maybe two thirds of the items have missing commas and such, and the "descriptions" are stat-block one-liners.

Several items just repeat the item's name as the description.

There are way too many kinds of weapons for no reason. Every type of weapon has four varying-quality subtypes. For most of them, the advantages and disadvantages are miniscule. There aren't enough party members for it to be fun to test all this stuff.

Same situation with armor.

Jazhara starts Chapter 0 with some alchemy equipment and lots of alchemy ingredients are found in random encounters, but alchemy can't be done until the day-night cycle starts in Chapter 3 with the arrival of a new party member who has a full set of alchemy equipment, and this is not explained except in the manual.

I think all the party members are human too. At least BAK had one moredhel. Maybe they're counting The Woman as the one different party member.

It wouldn't have been as bad if RTK had been a standalone game, but it's based on a series of books and is the sequel of a game which was REALLY proud to be based on a series of books.

(Which was based on the tabletop world Feist and his friends came up with in college.)

I'm trying not to be too hard on it because they had to switch studios and there were shenanigans, but it's difficult. The game's text just doesn't hold up and the perpetual night is an inexplicable choice after the complaints that Betrayal in Antara was visually gloomier than BAK.