Out of curiosity, anyone here try Majesty? It's kind of a weird game, since it's a mix of genres. I guess I would say it is primarily an RTS, with one huge catch, you don't get to directly control your units! This turns it sorta into a sim, since you gotta motivate your heroes to go kill something, rather than just ordering them to. It's also sorta like an rpg, since your heroes get to level up, can go to the marketplaces and buy healing potions, or upgrade their equipment at the blacksmith. Anyways, I just thought it was an interesting game. If anyone is interested, there is a demo available.

• I saw the ads ...,Llevram, 11:44 AM, Apr-03-00
  • RE: I saw the ads ...,elrond, 05:18 PM, Apr-03-00
• RE: Majesty,analander, 05:22 AM, Apr-12-00
  • RE: Majesty,elrond, 11:00 AM, Apr-12-00

And they looked good, but after reading the description (and not finding a demo) I lost interest. I too thought it seemed like a Sim, which mixing with RPG just didn't sound right. It sounded like they asked themselves "what genres haven't been crossed yet?" and made that game, rather than coming up with a game and it ending up fitting in this mixed genre.

So, where is the demo?

Tools for your Wizardry(r) toolkit

There's a link for downloading the demo on this page:
http://www.cyberlore.com/Majesty/index.htm

Well, there is some truth to what you say, but I think they did a good job of blending in the rpg elements with everything else. If you look back at Warcraft 2, the units did have different 'levels', although this was always fixed dependent on the upgrades you had for those guys. In Majesty, your hero wanders around gaining experience for taking out monsters. Wizards learn more spells as they get higher levels. They also have this guild system in order to limit the number of guys you have wandering around. Each guild can only house four heroes, and each new guild of the same type costs more and more. I guess this is to help it so that it doesn't become Starcraft where you have 200 units going at it. I dunno if you're going to like it, but for me, when every game is basically just a cookie-cutter copy of another type, having a game that was mixed like this was a nice touch.

Not bad, kinda works for me. One of my big beefs with {Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, the list seems endless} is the real-time difficulties I have with keeping up in micromanaging all the people - especially considering how dumb they are without directions. SimCity has a pause feature, but I guess these games are built more for Internet play where such features don't work. Warlords III tried a turn-based fix for this, but that didn't work for me either.

Majesty is a commendable effort to have your people function a little better without your direct control, but again, the real-time aspect made me at times wish for the olde pause feature to keep up.

On the RPG front the new buzzword seems to be "phased" - whatever that means (if its just turn based with more agile characters getting more turns, that's as old as Ultima V) - which looks the way to go for me.

- John
http://www.tk421.net/wizardry/

Yah, I found it interesting and entertaining, without getting too serious. One of the problems I have with Star/War/etc. Craft is that people start taking the games too seriously and it ceases to be fun, but instead turns into a my ego is bigger than yours contest.

Actually there is a significant difference between turn-based and phased. It is this: in turn based, as soon as you make a decision, your character acts it out. In phased, you make the decisions for all of the characters at the beginning, and then they roll to see what order they will execute the decisions in. Kinda like one of the other posts about characters casting spells at groups of monsters that are already dead and such. If Wizardry was turn based, then you'd have one character come up with an option, he'd attack, maybe a monster would attack, maybe not, then probably another character would get an option to do something. If you ever played the old gold-box AD&D games (Pools of Radiance,etc.) those were turn based.