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“Just outside the gates of Avalon, a 12-year war realizes its climax... The uneasy alliance
of seven western kingdoms created the Citadel of Avalon as a mighty fortress. But in
the last eight months, the Citadel has become a city of refugees, a city under siege.
The Sha'ahoul, under the banner of the Shaman Warlord Mithras, are
waging a genocidal war against the Citadel. Avalon's garrison is depleted.
Now is the time for courage. For a hero.
Now is the time for the birth of a legend.”
What is Siege of Avalon?
It's like this.
Not clear from that? Well, Siege of Avalon is an episodic computer roleplaying game developed by Digital Tome. The gameplay consists of talking to the colorful cast, finding unique equipment to make yourself broken with, and fighting the invaders in Diablo-esque real-time isometric combat. It is well-written, with many memorable character, mechanics, and story beats that have stuck with me over the nearly two decades it has been since the game was released. That’s right. The final chapter was released way back in 2001.
This is just a nostalgia trip then?
Not completely. Certainly a lot of my appreciation for this game is nostalgia-based, but I don’t believe all of it is. The game was one of the first times I encountered a lot of awesome, unique elements, both in story and mechanics.
Like what?
The obvious one is the format. Digital Tome released the game in six episodes, each available as a digital download. In 2000. While they eventually had to go to a fully CD-based format due to the cost issues of trying to do that in the goddamn year 2000, resulting in the Anthology version I ended up playing, it still blew my young mind that it was possible to release a game in installments, without physical copies being necessary.
My love isn’t just for that though.
•Siege of Avalon has a paper doll based equipment layout… where every piece of equipment changes a character’s appearance!!! I remember playing Diablo 2 and thinking, why does only body armor change how I look, and only at set tiers? Then I found this game.
•Similarly, I played Baldur’s Gate and wondered why I could only progress in narrow classes with predefined abilities. Then I found this game where you can use any abilities as any specialization! You can be a fully-armored knight who slings fireballs, or you can be a mage with a massive sword, all depending on where you put your training points.
•But at the same time, the specialization you choose at the beginning does make you better at that class’s “thing”, and it changes how characters react to you, including the availability of certain quests. A squire can undertake a quest to be knighted, while a scout has the opportunity to join the legendary Rangers.
•The quests you do matter as well. If you don’t help someone in Chapter 1, you might not be able to do certain quests involving them in later Chapters. There is a surprising amount of reactivity in Siege of Avalon, which I hadn’t really seen before, and didn’t see after until like… Mass Effect came along.
•Not that there aren’t plenty of cliches too, but they feel like they were included more out of love for the genre than laziness.
Basically, if you’re familiar with the concept, this game is to western CRPGs what indie fantasy heartbreakers are to D&D, except pretty good, especially for its time.
http://rpgmuseum.wikia.com/wiki/Fantasy_heartbreaker
Sounds cool! Where can I get it to follow along!?
. It is currently not available on any digital platforms. You can buy the Anthology CD with all 6 chapters from Amazon or eBay, but even then… the game does not play nice with modern computers. It took a lot of trial and error to get this thing working on my Windows 10 PC, but I did it. If anyone is having trouble getting things running, I’ll be happy to share what I have learned, but this is definitely an instance of the strong suit of LPs: I’m playing this so you don’t have to.
There is perhaps another way though… one of the final decisions Digital Tome made before dissolving was to make the entire game open source. You can get all of the code here:
https://github.com/CartBlanche/Siege-of-Avalon-Open-Source
Only Chapter 1’s assets are included due to licensing issues, but that’s still pretty significant. If and when this project is finished, we could see this game up somewhere online.
What's with the title?
It's based on Digital Tome's marketing for the game. It's so earnestly silly that I can't help but love it.
Enough talk! Let us play… this game that has a lot of talking!
Characters: (updated as we go)
•Corvus: Our character’s Sad Bro, whom we have journeyed to Avalon to tell that our father is dead.
Updates list: