A Generic Story For All Time
You started out by picking a character class - Fighter (which could be upgraded to Paladin), Thief, or Magic User/Wizard - and many of your abilities were based on stats that could be levelled up in the course of playing the game. You could import your old character at the start of each new game, watching them get tougher and tougher over the course of the decade the series ran.
So far, so good. Can’t climb a cliff? Try levitating up it. Or boosting your climbing skill. That’s about as complex as the core stats bit ever got. Luckily, that was only part of the story. Where the QFG games really scored was in providing different experiences, all in keeping with standard adventure controls and thinking, for each character class. As a Fighter, you might get a particular item by showing off your combat skills, whereas a thief would be given the mission to steal it. Thieves would get several burglary missions - proto stealth sequences geared around avoiding squeaky floorboards or being mugged by an old lady’s cat - to raise cash, while a mage might find himself (there wasn’t a gender choice, unfortunately) playing some magic focused strategy minigame.
The main story stayed the same, but the beats could be very different, to the point that you could play the games at least three times over and still have a very different adventure each time. That’s before hitting up the side-quests, finding alternate solutions to problems, or just plain poking round the world in search of jokes, Easter Eggs, and the other goodies that made Sierra games so much fun to explore.
Somewhere Over The Test Post
You started out by picking a character class - Fighter (which could be upgraded to Paladin), Thief, or Magic User/Wizard - and many of your abilities were based on stats that could be levelled up in the course of playing the game. You could import your old character at the start of each new game, watching them get tougher and tougher over the course of the decade the series ran.
So far, so good. Can’t climb a cliff? Try levitating up it. Or boosting your climbing skill. That’s about as complex as the core stats bit ever got. Luckily, that was only part of the story. Where the QFG games really scored was in providing different experiences, all in keeping with standard adventure controls and thinking, for each character class. As a Fighter, you might get a particular item by showing off your combat skills, whereas a thief would be given the mission to steal it. Thieves would get several burglary missions - proto stealth sequences geared around avoiding squeaky floorboards or being mugged by an old lady’s cat - to raise cash, while a mage might find himself (there wasn’t a gender choice, unfortunately) playing some magic focused strategy minigame.
This is a sub-heading
The main story stayed the same, but the beats could be very different, to the point that you could play the games at least three times over and still have a very different adventure each time. That’s before hitting up the side-quests, finding alternate solutions to problems, or just plain poking round the world in search of jokes, Easter Eggs, and the other goodies that made Sierra games so much fun to explore.
Forearmed Is Better Than Three
You started out by picking a character class - Fighter (which could be upgraded to Paladin), Thief, or Magic User/Wizard - and many of your abilities were based on stats that could be levelled up in the course of playing the game. You could import your old character at the start of each new game, watching them get tougher and tougher over the course of the decade the series ran.
So far, so good. Can’t climb a cliff? Try levitating up it. Or boosting your climbing skill. That’s about as complex as the core stats bit ever got. Luckily, that was only part of the story. Where the QFG games really scored was in providing different experiences, all in keeping with standard adventure controls and thinking, for each character class. As a Fighter, you might get a particular item by showing off your combat skills, whereas a thief would be given the mission to steal it. Thieves would get several burglary missions - proto stealth sequences geared around avoiding squeaky floorboards or being mugged by an old lady’s cat - to raise cash, while a mage might find himself (there wasn’t a gender choice, unfortunately) playing some magic focused strategy minigame.
This is a sub-heading
The main story stayed the same, but the beats could be very different, to the point that you could play the games at least three times over and still have a very different adventure each time. That’s before hitting up the side-quests, finding alternate solutions to problems, or just plain poking round the world in search of jokes, Easter Eggs, and the other goodies that made Sierra games so much fun to explore.
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