Betrayal at Krondor Pack

Some old games have an interface that is clunky and uncomfortable to use. This is not one of those games. Some old games have graphics that not only look atrocious but also fail to fulfill their essential purpose of providing both atmosphere and easily accesible information about the environment by visual cues. Despite its age, this is not one of those games either. A tree may be a bunch of pixels, but you will still see it as a tree, and when standing in a bunch of them you'll feel like you're surrounded by trees. Some old games have an excellent quality of storytelling and a well-defined atmosphere. This is most definitely one of those games. Betrayal at Krondor tells many stories at once, and most importantly it does so with subtlety. Modern games display too much of the fear that a big part of the audience will fail to "get it", causing sales to suffer, and consequently approach their stories and content too crudely, with too stark a spotlight, causing even the best storytelling to still feel forced, engineered, artificial and out-of-place. This hidden gem originates in a time still free of that dependancy. This is a world in which its multi-faceted story unfolds. It is a linear story, and ultimately things happen the way they happen - no playing god for you. But your freedom lies in being able to choose what kind of story you want it to be. The characterisation is not in-your-face; if you want to find out what sort of people the main characters are, you'll need to interact with the world, watch events unfold and uncover tidbits here and there. There are many things happening around the world, but as part of that world, you may or may not bump into them and get a more complete picture. Perhaps the core of this game's appeal is the balance, the lack of pushing out any particular part into attention - it's all there, but it's your own call how much of it you wish to see. As for emotional impact... well, I'll just say this - I first encountered this game when I was little. Afterwards, I could vividly remember a scene towards the end animated in the game's usual way. Years later, when I played it myself, I was startled to realise that that had only been my imagination and the scene was shown in the form of prose as so many others. That's how vivid and real it seemed to me. False memories, heh. This is the game worth spending your time on. it's everything an RPG should be.

I'm sure everybody has heard of Betrayal at Krondor - it's a well-loved classic, for good reason. But I'd like to say how happy I am to see ANTARA included along with it! This unofficial sequel has never gotten the same love - probably because the world was different, Sierra having lost the rights to Feist's creations. I can understand how fans might have felt cheated, and resentful of this similar-but-not continuation. However, Antara is a truly beautiful creation all on its own. The music alone is wonderful, the voice acting is great (just don't mind the static 'talking' portraits!), and the art style is nostalgic without being hard on the eyes. Especially the painterly city backgrounds and character art. One part that really stands out are the graphic-novel cutscenes. Fully voiced with a gorgeous soundtrack, these are effective and entertaining vignettes... and I might still have the entire opening narration memorized, after many, many playthroughs over 17 years.

A good classic. A tough game that is not only based on power but also on strategy. The story is nice too and is loyal to the novel's universe. Worth buying if you are an action/adventure game fan. Character progression is slow though, don't expect to bring down asteroids from space to smash your enemies, that won't happen. But, magic is quite interesting in this game and in that universe.

I remember all the development and licensing issues with the series and how Betrayal in Antara had to create its own world to exist. I played it as a kid, and wanted to revisit it. If you run any kind of computer with a processor with more than one core (so anything), Betrayal in Antara will crash during cutscenes. It will crash if you skip the cutscenes at the wrong time. It will crash in the spots that it usually crashed in when I ran it on my old XP machine in high school. The forum members were generally trying to be helpful, but ultimately any game that requires one to download extraneous codices and extraneous random throttling software to get the game to run--and that still didn't work--is awful. The reason this review was not 1-star and a refund is that the (admittedly better) game, Betrayal at Krondor, does work.

As the title implies I played Betrayal at Krondor back when it first released. In fact, the game brought to my attention the book series from which it is based; The Riftwar Saga, which I also thoroughly enjoyed. The graphics, while dated, are still good enough to immerse yourself in. The point of view is similar to the dungeon crawlers of the day. That of your party's either first person view or overhead map view. The story is what keeps you interested even on subsequent playthroughs. You can miss huge chunks of the story if you simply run to the finish without exploring and wow is there a lot of exploring to be done even in the first Chapter! So take heed, don't just run to Krondor go explore every location you can and build up your skills. This logic applies to all chapters and if you are clever you can stash items of use that you can later come to with a different group of characters to help them out. Return to Krondor improved the graphics portion of the series. Originally Return was supposed to be Betrayal at Antara but licensing issues arose as they often do. Return was released at the end of the 90's and featured a robust storyline as well. I've only played Betrayal at Antara through once or twice but it is a solid title and definitely has a great story and the system and graphics are improved over Krondor the first. So give it a go! You won't regret it. And if you've played these long ago you will wile away even more hours on it again.