Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance
Encyclopedia
Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance is a 1997 strategy computer game developed by Synergistic Software
and distributed by Sierra On-Line. The game is based on the Birthright
campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons
and is available for DOS
and Windows
.
In order to accomplish this objective, the player has many options at his disposal. These include warfare, diplomacy, magic, manipulation of holdings such as guilds and temples, the establishment of trade routes, et cetera. All of these actions take place in a turn based fashion on the world map, with the exception of the adventuring, which is done in real time 3D
.
The adventure game engine was a Doom II
engine clone: a 2D/3D engine which has essentially a flat layout map. The innovations at the time were the use of three resolutions of avatars which were hot swapped in depending on the distance from the viewer and the amount of memory on the hardware. Also there were flying wyverns and spiders which crawled on the ceilings as well as the floors. Due to the nature of the game engine it was not possible to get them to crawl on the walls. For the time period of this game's development the textures and avatars were significantly higher resolution than other games using similar graphics engines. However a slow CD drive coupled with a medium amount of memory could cause the game to pause as it swapped in and out higher resolution graphics. There were resolution settings that could be adjusted to tune those features.
The adventure game play suffered from difficult to control avatars and that the art was not made with contact points. That is to say no one piece of an avatar's art could be communicated to the game engine just what it was. For instance, to have good looking sword play, it is necessary for each avatar to know where the opposing avatar's sword and shield are. There were sounds of steel on steel, steel on leather and they were used for the strike foley but the art being center spaced looked clumsy as the swords either passed through each other, or missed entirely.
If the player failed to equip their spell caster with the necessary spells before adventuring those spells were unavailable to them and forced the player to leave and re equip.
In order to win the game, a certain amount (depending on difficulty level) of (game) points were required to be collected, for example by taking controle of territories allied to or belonging to the Gorgon. There were a number of successful ways to win this game which made for a high replayability.
Synergistic Software
Northwest Synergistic Software is a contract software developer and a former video game developer. Founded in 1978 under the name Synergistic Software, the company published some of the earliest available games and applications for the Apple II family of computers...
and distributed by Sierra On-Line. The game is based on the Birthright
Birthright (campaign setting)
Birthright is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting that was first released by TSR in 1995. The setting based on the world of Aebrynis on the continent of Cerilia, in which the players take on the role of the divinely-empowered rulers, with emphasis on the political rulership level of gameplay...
campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. . The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997...
and is available for DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
and Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
.
Gameplay
Players take on the role of ruler, or regent as they are called in Birthright, of a nation in the Land of Anuire on the continent of Cerilia. The objective of the game is to gather power and influence while the other regents try the same.In order to accomplish this objective, the player has many options at his disposal. These include warfare, diplomacy, magic, manipulation of holdings such as guilds and temples, the establishment of trade routes, et cetera. All of these actions take place in a turn based fashion on the world map, with the exception of the adventuring, which is done in real time 3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
.
The adventure game engine was a Doom II
Doom II
Doom II: Hell on Earth is an award winning first-person shooter video game and second title of id Software's Doom franchise. Unlike Doom which was initially only available through shareware and mail order, Doom II was a commercial release sold in stores...
engine clone: a 2D/3D engine which has essentially a flat layout map. The innovations at the time were the use of three resolutions of avatars which were hot swapped in depending on the distance from the viewer and the amount of memory on the hardware. Also there were flying wyverns and spiders which crawled on the ceilings as well as the floors. Due to the nature of the game engine it was not possible to get them to crawl on the walls. For the time period of this game's development the textures and avatars were significantly higher resolution than other games using similar graphics engines. However a slow CD drive coupled with a medium amount of memory could cause the game to pause as it swapped in and out higher resolution graphics. There were resolution settings that could be adjusted to tune those features.
The adventure game play suffered from difficult to control avatars and that the art was not made with contact points. That is to say no one piece of an avatar's art could be communicated to the game engine just what it was. For instance, to have good looking sword play, it is necessary for each avatar to know where the opposing avatar's sword and shield are. There were sounds of steel on steel, steel on leather and they were used for the strike foley but the art being center spaced looked clumsy as the swords either passed through each other, or missed entirely.
If the player failed to equip their spell caster with the necessary spells before adventuring those spells were unavailable to them and forced the player to leave and re equip.
Battle system
There was also a battle component to the game. When armies met on the world map the player could select to let the computer do dice rolls and determine the outcome based on the character attributes. Or the player could enter a battlefield. The battles were turn-based and fought on a grid that was copied from the paper game. The game engine used the same engine as the adventure game. This made for some difficulties as Doom II engines have difficult time rendering worlds which do not have intermediate walls. The battlefield being essentially one large room. The avatars were used to represent the unit's health. As the unit was wounded the avatars were "killed" off until it was destroyed or a dice roll forced them to flee the field. The defending army would get to pick the terrain type. There were fields, marshes, woods and a mountainous terrain. An elf army would get a bonus for fighting in woods, dwarves get a bonus for the mountains. There were some obstacles like water or trees through which the army could not advance or lost its charge bonus. In general though as with all D&D games ranged weapons win the day. Archers who run and shoot and wizards who cast and shoot could nearly always defeat the computer armies. This advantage is not translated to the dice rolling choice so players in general would elect to fight their own battles. A small graphical innovation was that the avatars had a random percentage of scaling applied so identical soldier art would not appear identical. Thus there were short, short fat, tall, tall fat and medium sized troops. Although their hit points and defense were based on their unit's strength the same way that the paper game battles were fought.In order to win the game, a certain amount (depending on difficulty level) of (game) points were required to be collected, for example by taking controle of territories allied to or belonging to the Gorgon. There were a number of successful ways to win this game which made for a high replayability.
Reception
Sales did not exceed 50,000 units, so Synergenic scrapped production of all expansion packs.Trivia
- To promote the game, there is a hidden room with an image of a sword floating in it. After a period of time, all players who found the room were placed in a pool and an actual sword was presented to one of them.
External links
- Wizards of the Coast, the firm that inherited the rights on the world of Birthright from TSR
- A History of D&D Video Games - Part IV at GameSpyGameSpyGameSpy Industries, Inc., known simply as GameSpy, is a division of IGN Entertainment, which operates a network of game websites and provides online video game-related services and software. GameSpy dates back to the 1996 release of an internet Quake server search program named QSpy. The current...
- Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance - Video Introduction at YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
- Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance at GameFAQsGameFAQsGameFAQs is a website that hosts FAQs and walkthroughs for video games. It was created in November 1995 by Jeff "CJayC" Veasey and was bought by CNET Networks in May 2003. It is currently owned by CBS Interactive. The site has a database of video game information, cheat codes, reviews, game saves,...