Majesty
- April 03, 2000 00:00 AM PST
It's good to be the king. Read our review of the fantasy real-time strategy game that takes the emphasis off of micro-management to find out if Majesty lives up to its illustrious name.
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Majesty is a comparative novelty: a strategy game in which you don't control your people. Like Bullfrog's first two Populous games and Blue Byte's The Settlers, this real-time fantasy sets you up as more of a facilitator. You rule rather than direct (what monarch has time to micro-manage?) and the resultant freedom from detail gives the game its charm.
In Majesty, you don't erect houses. The houses spring up spontaneously on the angled-down map as the community expands. The resources all come down to gold pieces, and the tax collector who collects them from installations, the peasants that put up buildings and make repairs, and the guards who walk the streets all kick in automatically. You don't order your heroes to attack or explore, but inspire them to do so by flagging targets with rewards. (If you don't offer incentives, they'll go out and explore on their own.) You don't equip them-recruited heroes will visit the blacksmith to improve their weapons and the marketplace for healing potions.
Basically, your people make their own ways in this medieval world. Your job in each of the 19 quests-many of which can be selected in any order from the scrolling map of Ardania-is to shape your world by building and upgrading a range of guilds, shops and temples. As you move from "beginner" level quests into "advanced" and "expert" ones, the objectives and monsters grow more numerous and aggressive (not to mention bigger) and the tasks more time-sensitive.
It's not the first game to try on this conceit, but Majesty isn't quite like anything else on the gaming map right now, and the player's distance from the people lends the game realism. True, the absence of direct control can lead to frustration with the occasionally clumsy tactics your heroes adopt. But, in general, the artificial intelligence sustains your people nicely, and it's a relief to be able to focus on the Big Picture without constantly having to monitor combats or the whereabouts of such-and-such a unit. To be sure, you do have to recruit heroes in 16 character classes-although, arguably, this could have been turned over to the AI as well-and you can edit the route your tax collector follows, but the few hands-on tasks don't carry many burdens. Majesty's design exhibits a sweet balance.
On the other hand, the game could be a bit more varied, with the actual challenges of ruling maturing as the game progresses. Even with a wide variety of mission objectives, I felt as though I was performing variations on a theme throughout Majesty, and had the sense that success in the tougher missions was dictated by how assiduously I could follow the appropriate branch of the game's technology tree. Whether you're ruling or controlling, that's not much fun.
But the governing idea behind it is delightful. More fully exploited, Majesty is a game that could be king.
