Dragon Wars

Amazing Game far ahead of the times. Great replay value and once you understand the mechanics super fun

Retro game that brings back memories.

This is a 34 year old game. Would have been part of the Bard's Tale series. Company factors intervened. A well written satire of global politics in the G HW Bush administration.

👍

While the game itself is ancient but a little fun, what isn't fun is coming back to this after a few months to find out my save file was deleted. Can't recommend this game.

great game , map function don't work , but i'm ok with that

I have had to game since 1995? years or so. I have enjoyed every thing i saw in the game. that being said it would be cool if I could play it in a full color type like I could back in the 90's.

This is one of my favorite old school games - I used to play it on my Commodore 128 way back in the day!

Congratulations, you've managed to finally release the baseline version I got when the game originally shipped. Now, in order to justify the ten dollar price tag, you only have to sweep through the game for bugs (one of the 'Sun' spells that targets undead as a group didn't work on a group of skeletons that were within range) and replace the line to look up a paragraph with the actual paragraphs now that game size is no longer restricted by diskette room. Couldn't hurt to add the cut dungeon and help tips for the items and spells for ease of use if you're considering raising the price tag to fifteen through DLC.


Old review below:
I finally gave in to nostalgia and got this for $3 during a sale. I am reminded once again that they did shit all to bother with doing even a mediocre job in the process. You have no opportunity to set it to even the standard graphics grade it's capable of, and the commodore version (edit: fixed: I don't know if it''s the apple version or the commodore version that had the better graphics) still had relatively normal graphics compared to what this version provides.

I really have no words for this horse shit.

The sad thing is that I'm pretty sure I'd try to clean this thing up as a learning project if I had access to the source code. It was a great game, but it has not aged well in the least and even when it came out it had it's issues.

it plays in wrong colors

Truely old school wish they would remake this as they did Bards Tale

Brings back so many memories of my childhood. Have to love good ole MSDOS games.

Oh my ... it's quite hard :) It's also quite big and open to explore. Not taking you by hand. The story unfolds quite slow, same with side quests. You just come in to some new place and you have notes about something which may be important in other places. I have to say that I like M&M 1 and 2 or Goldboxes more than this game. However if you like to explore old games it's nice to collect and play this one too.

Two most annoying things:
1. the number of random fights is sometimes overwhelming and frankly really boring.
2. game runs slow. especialy fights are slow whith more than 5 enemies. In places like Dragon Valley with 25+ enemies ... oh my ... fights can take alot of time that you can even watch some short youtube clip. Dunno why even dosbox setting (even 30000 cycles) doesn't improve that.

Verdict: i will recommend it only for retrogamers. You will not find smooth gameplay like M&M from same era, Pools tetralogy or Krynn trilogy from SSI.

Similar to Wasteland and The Bard's Tale (and made by the same people), Dragon Wars was never as famous, but still a groundbreaking work in its time, and probably more playable than the older games, especially the original Bard's Tale games. (It also has the most ludicrous and memorable cover art of any of my childhood games.) For those a bit younger, Dragon Wars is probably most comparable to Fallout or Arcanum (but without the diplomatic opportunities). In my Commodore 64 gaming youth, this was one of my favorite games, alongside The Mars Saga, Ultima V, and the D&D "Gold Box" games.

The game takes place on a planet called Oceania, which orbits Polaris (AKA the North Star), and is basically Waterworld, with a few islands in a planet-wide ocean. The player characters, after sailing to the Dilmun archipelego, have their possessions stripped of them, and are dumped into a ghetto called Purgatory on accusations of being mages, which just became a crime thanks to the empire being taken over by Namtar, The Beast From The Pit (and Big Bad Guy, TM).

This is where Dragon Wars starts to show what sets it apart: You start trapped in (newbie zone) Purgatory, but there is not just one way, or two ways to leave, but five. This includes direct combat paths, like simply killing the guards stopping you, or winning in the arena, but also some less dignified and sneaky ways out, and even simply proving you have no magical talents to walk right back out the front door. (Although considering how necessary magic is, and how much it costs to gain magical talent, and how you'll probably want to gain the levels and combat skill you'd need to kill the guards and leave, anyway, it's not advisable... still, it's there, and an option most games of the era, or even this era, wouldn't offer you.)

A major focus is character building. There is no class system, you just buy attributes and skills with a single character point pool, and levels do nothing but give more character points. In spite of this freedom, however, specialization is still partly enforced by the high entry cost for gaining magic skills (first rank costs 5 times what the second does), and since spells are only learned from single-use scrolls, having more than two mages of anything but the entry-level low magic is inadvisable since only one or two scrolls can be found for the best spells. Also, someone has to stand up front and take hits!

That said, it also falls into that early, experimental-era pitfall of making some skills just plain better than others. Fistfighting is a total waste of skill points, and there aren't any good magic axes while you can find several great swords and magic staves (which use mace, but since you use them for spells, you don't need a weapon skill, anyway...). You don't really even need weapon skills, since you functionally gain attack bonus with every two points of dexterity, which also raises evasion. The game does do an unusually good job of making sure the lore skills are useful, even if you only need a couple points.

Also, combat can start at range, which gives a real advantage to ranged attackers like bow-users (which are otherwise weak unless using rare ammo) and magic users, while different spells have different ranges. Hitting the enemy with debilitating spells before a large mob can reach melee range is always fun.

The game world is fairly large and featured a then-revolutionary auto-mapping feature. Like Fallout, it's open-world and basically everything but the starting area, final boss, and a few quests you need to do to access the final boss are optional and open to player exploration. Different non-combat skills are used to access events or areas in the game that are otherwise inaccessable, and you can do things like bypass difficult fights by just pickpocketing a key, or access areas that lead to spells you couldn't otherwise get with skills like climb or tracking.

You will NEED a lot of side-questing, however, as Namtar is a truly epic final boss sequence that is much more than just a bigger monster with more HP that many other games have as a final boss, and is basically like a text-based version of the more "cinematic" ending sequences punctuated with boss battles games would try much later.

With that said, there are some definite complaints: The game can be grindy, especially if you make bad choices with skill points, and need to keep leveling up to get more to make up for deficiencies, since high levels mean nothing unless you spent the character points wisely. Worse, like most of the Wizardry-style games, many of the battles can wind up being fairly similar. You'll be hitting the same basic "fight" command and casting the same spells over and over. The interface, like Wasteland, is annoying, since hotkeys are all over the keyboard based upon first letter of the command, and for a game where you need to use so many skills manually, it's annoying to have to through 5 button presses to use each skill. (Make a macro for the "bandage" skill, you'll use it after every fight.) That said, for as repetitive as it is, it can also be fairly fast - the game runs at the speed of your keypresses, so if you just get into the habit of slapping the "a" button a lot (or make a macro to do the same attacks), you can ram through the common trash mob battles at warp speed.

Also, the first time you play, you need to change the graphics for some annoying reason. Go to your game folder (right click it in the library -> local files -> browse local files) and open dosboxDragonWars_single.conf in notepad, adding "CONFIG" onto the line that says "DRAGON". You can then change the graphics to 16-color mode (woohoo), instead of 4-color CGA, then hit "S" to save. You can go back and take the "CONFIG" out, now, and skip that config screen whenever you play.

Further, you want to hit Ctrl-S whenever you start. It shuts off the sound, which is terrible quality. Supply your own music.

With all that said, this is a game you can still enjoy, even a quarter century on from its creation, but I would still have to say it's a niche genre of those who really did like the more deliberate, slow-paced exploration games like Wizardry, with a focus upon skill use. If you were born after the era of experimental CRPGs like this, it's one of the more interesting and creative 'experimental' games that came before everything started to be 'streamlined', and you can see some of the ideas that were sacrificed upon the alter of 'competitive balance'. If you balk at turn-based combat in RPGs, reading the manual for an hour before you play a game because there's no tutorial, or the need to run back to fountains for more MP after a tough fight, however, turn back now.

I definitely recommend waiting for a sale, however. I'll indulge pure nostalia and buy a game I already own (even if in a format I can't run it in) again only for $5 or less.

A fun, old-school RPG. Very similar to the original Bard's Tale trilogy, Wasteland, Wizardry, etc. of the late 80s/early 90s era. It is, compared to others of its time, actually well developed, well balanced, and, engaging. Why pay for it on Steam - IDK, convenience, perhaps? If you play classic RPG, then, it will have a lot for you, but, it will have nothing for anyone who dislikes that particular genre.

Steam has been begging me to buy this game. It has been up on my front page feed for at least 3 weeks everyday under Recommended. It's been in my Explore que a few times. It's just non-stop! And I did not want to buy this game. It looked like an old RPG that time forgot. Those types of games are good for nostalgia, but rarely warrant jumping in blindly and playing without that air of familiarity. However, the game was on sale for $6 and Steam just wouldn’t leave me alone; so I finally made the purchase and dove in with no prior knowledge of the game. Well, Dragon Wars is the type of game that needs nostalgia for you to play it and it's exactly why I am requesting a refund.

First off, the game defaults to crappy graphics. This was a game from back in the day when you had to tell the game what type of monitor you had and what type of graphics it could display. I guess they wanted to play it safe for the Steam release and kept the graphics to default at CGA. That means a color palette of white, purple, and cyan. 3 whole colors!

To fix this: Go to the game directory. Open dosboxDragonWars_single.conf and the 3rd from last line that says "DRAGON" change it to "DRAGON CONFIG". Save the file and run the game. At the config screen select option E, Press S to save and RETURN to start the game in all it's 16 color glory! (Hopefully you are one of the lucky players that have a 16 color capable monitor ;)

The sound is midi and not good midi! The loading screen's music is jarring for today's standards. In-game there was pretty much no sound for me. There is a weird beep that plays every time I move. It sounds more like an error sound than a move sound; so there's probably some work that needs to be done to DOSBox to get the sound to play right. I tried searching on the web but the only thing I could find was that the Amiga version was 10x better in sound and graphics and that it's shameful they didn't put that version up for sale. Since I've never played this game I really don't know what the differences are.

The manual to the game is included in the install folder. You're going to need it. I also recommend going to gameFAQS.com and reading up as well. I've spent nearly 2 hours on this game, just reading and getting ready to play. Eventually I decided, enough reading, just get in there and get some game time. You can import Bard's Tale players into this game, but the manual warns they will be stripped down versions. I do have Bard's Tale, but did not try to create a character in it. I just started the game with the 4 default players.

The game itself looks similar to Might and Magic 2, but feels like a NES version of that type of game. Walls are 2D, meaning there is no depth. When looking at a wall from the side it looks like a paper's edge. Controls are basic, but not bad. Not like some older DOS games that had terrible controls, at least this game gets by pretty good with a mouse and a few key presses. However, you may want to edit the DOSBox config file to lower the mouse sensitivity as my mouse was darting back and forth way too quickly to really play.

I'm pretty sure the default toons had magic, but no spells were known; so I had only attack to use. The gameFAQS walkthrough suggested using toons that I did not have access to as starting characters. I'm guessing they meant me to delete and create new players, but I did not take the time. I wanted to get into the game and see if it was any good before I continued to invest time and effort into it.

The lack of sound makes the game feel sterile while playing. You just keep clicking attack and the bottom of the screen tells you if you hit, but there's no oomph, no way to feel your attacks. Also distance is a feature/issue. Mobs are displayed as: 5 DRUNKS 40'. That means they are 40 feet away. Unfortunately the graphics don't represent this as mobs are only ever one size and position. That's right in front of you taking up half the navigation window. Also mobs are not singled out. There could be 5 drunks, but you only see one. It further distances your engagement with the game. I’m guessing mobs are random encounters because you never see anything in the distance. They just show up on the screen ready to attack. This adds to the NES feel and less of a PC game. Also draw distance of walls are only 3 or 4 tiles away. Expect to look at barren nothingness most of the game.

The story element was sparse as well. You get a quick text window that says you're in purgatory and that's about it. From there I suppose you're to find the story. Also, one cool feature of the game is occasionally you're asked to go to a page in the manual to read part of the description for a certain place. That was nice, but not a big enough saving factor.

Honestly, this game did not stand up well to the test of time. I'm sure there are players out there willing to defend this game and explain its greatness, but I am not one. I never played this game before and do not care to play it any further. It's sad the game requires you to set up its graphics and the sound is so poor. Perhaps I should look up the Amiga version.

The manual boasts that it took 2 years to create this game. I’ve played games older than this that felt much more feature rich and involved. I’m not certain why this game needed a 2 year dev cycle. One interesting note is the Bard’s Tale character import. I read on the web that Dragon Wars was to be a Bard’s Tale sequel, but it was changed near release. I’m guessing Interplay themselves realized the poor workmanship of this game and decided to save the Bard’s Tale brand from such a poor title.

For $10 USD this game is asking a fairly high price, especially considering it's not the best version of this game. I would only recommend to those who already played and enjoyed the game in the 90's. Or those players who thoroughly enjoyed Bard's Tale or Might and Magic. If you happened to play those titles and really liked them, I'm talking played them till the end, and did that in the last 5 years, not 20 years ago played them, then this game is for you. Hopefully, now that I bought this damn game and refunded it, Steam will stop recommending it to me.