![]() You use the mouse for the majority of tasks from zooming and panning the camera to selecting and tagging locations, but there are plenty of keyboard complements and alternatives. The controls and user interface are introduced through the tutorial, but are immediately familiar to anyone who has played an RTS game in recent years. The visuals look great without the performance suffering – framerates are steady regardless of what is happening on screen, and doesn’t suffer as you zoom in or out to gain strategic or close-up views of units or battles or guilds. In a way it reminds me of other recent fantasy genre games such as Drakensang and King’s Bounty, as all of these eschew the currently-in-vogue ‘dark & gritty’ feel for a much more saturated and colorful world view. In terms of the technical details, this is clearly a 2009 game: the graphics are rich in color and detail, with a somewhat whimsical presentation style. Voice-overs from many other characters also provide a light feel throughout. It is not an attempted parody that falls flat like the 2004 Bard’s Tale, but rather a light-hearted game that has plenty of over-the-top elements and humorous asides from the cheeky narrator, who was also in the original game. The story itself will likely have you thinking “I hope they aren’t serious” in the opening cutscene, and soon enough you realize that this is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The game slowly unfolds as you progress and continue building up your fledgling kingdom and developing a style of ruling and developing your influence. As you start to build guilds and other buildings, and as you start to mark locations to explore or attack, the greater world map is slowly revealed to you. The game is centered around a large campaign mode, which starts with a small view of your low-level palace and some surrounding homes. As I just said, you will never have enough gold for everything, so it is crucial to think about your choices. Do you upgrade your palace and guilds, do you work to build temples to gain special Templar lords, do you work on gaining a multitude of lower level heroes, or building up your blacksmith so your heroes can gain more upgrades … and so on. This is important because the game is fairly stingy: you will never have enough gold to do everything you want to do, and will be faced with tough choices at every turn. You are no longer directly concerned about getting a certain set of units to take out a specific objective, only that you have made enough units of a variety of types available so that when you decide to open up a reward to accomplish something, those units will have a reasonable chance of success. What happens is that the emphasis changes to a larger world view. While it might seem like the removal of direct unit control would make the game simplistic, that is not true at all. On the other hand, you could offer stingy rewards to keep free cash for yourself, with the likely outcome that no one would ever take up your quests. Immediately the counter-balancing of resources and rewards becomes clear: you could just offer a huge award for a task, but then you would lack the resources to build new units and buildings to help you accomplish more difficult tasks. You need to prioritize the objectives you want accomplished, make sure resources are available, and offer financial rewards to get the tasks completed. So there are the two main strategic components: objective and financial management. Majesty is the only game where your heroes decide on their own what should be done and when, leaving you to try to control them through monetary incentives. At your service are your loyal and somewhat obnoxious subordinates, who have their own minds about how things should be done. In the world of Majesty, you are the ruler of the kingdom of Ardania. And I have to say I really was amazed and surprised at how some fairly simple changes to the strategy and simulation genres mixed successfully with RPG elements could result in a very enjoyable and different-feeling experience. After those other expansions were released I went back through the whole game once more. Since then, there have been two expansions I have played and enjoyed and a third about to release as I write this. So while fans of the game might have different thoughts based on comparisons with the original, I got to be amazed for the first time at this wonderful combination of city builder, RTS and RPG. While I had heard of the original Majesty, I never played it back in 2001 when it was released and never caught up with it.
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