Fit for Purpose?

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | No Comments

I have been playing King Arthur the Role-playing War-game  on and off now for many months – it is an extremely long and time consuming game. Rather depressingly I have just hit a bug: one of the quests that needs to be completed to progress through the game is broken: some armies do not spawn that you need to kill, which means you cannot kill them. The specific quest is ironically called ‘The Never-ending Feast’  - ironic because it never ends. The game still continues: random quests spawn and crusader armies appear in Britain which you can beat up, but essentially the game will not progress.

The latest patch at time of writing (1.04) mentions this quest and says a bug has been fixed with it -but apparently not the this bug as I have the patch. Because I did not notice that the game had gone wrong, I do not have saves from before the quests triggered, so I cannot go back and see if the armies I need to kill will trigger if I try again.

I am guessing that I have played about forty hours so far (at a guess, it been spread over months). So say I am depressed is an understatement. Well, I was depressed, until I noticed that the company who made the game (Neocore) had released a load of downloadable content for the game just recently – at which point I just got angry. I would rather they had fixed the bug  -which I note has been reported for some time judging by the many forum posts from people in the same position as I am.

The experience is rather like buying the DVD of a film and finding the last twenty minutes are corrupted, being offered no solution, but simultaneously being offered a collector’s edition with extra features on it -which still has the end corrupted. It is just not acceptable. It is plain from the way the game progresses that a lot of late plot had a lot less attention lavished on it than the early plot –the material becomes a lot thinner later on and changes from making many small choices that add up to being significant to making one or two big choices (which, of course, is much easier to implement). Plainly, as well as less creative attention being paid to this later material, it had a lot less play testing also.

I will write something about the game in broader terms at a later date, as a lot of things about it are interesting. If you still fancy playing it, you can get it at gamersgate (my personal favourite digital game distributor). However, save often and keep permanent backup saves in case you need to go back.

Personally, though, I am giving up: I would need to start again and I just cannot bring myself to.

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