King’s Bounty and the HOMM Series: The Past and Future of Game Design
Ryan “Hambone” Fritsch
HOMMV for OSX
February 28, 2006
Endtroducing…
Behold my friends, and wonder! I present the fabled King’s Bounty, Jon van Caneghem’s 1990 masterpiece that would launch the Heroes of Might and Magic series and inspire many others. Entombed in dead computers and locked behind inoperable operating systems, it was lost to me forever! But then, like finding Scotty digitally preserved in a looping transporter buffer, I discovered that its twin brother survives in emulation on the Sega Genesis. You know, the one I have at the back of my closet. And look! There’s the King’s Bounty cartridge too! I knew it was there somewhere. How perfectly legal of me.
This article is less of a review or description of an old game than it is a contribution to the history of game design. If you’ve never played King’s Bounty, you will likely be surprised at how the fundamentals of the HOMM series changed very little since it was first imagined in 1989-90. For those more generally interested in video game design, a peek into the mind of van Caneghem provides a lot of insight into the way one conceives of and executes on fundamental gameplay concepts over time and in iteration, and hence how to bypass that long, laborious and expensive process. King’s Bounty is also a great game in its own right, and deserves a little more love than it received when it was first released! The most amazing thing about playing King’s Bounty is that it remains an interesting and enjoyable game 16 years after its release. I honestly suggest that you find an old copy and give it a play because it is still a lot of fun, and quite unique to this day.
KB was also a genre-bender ahead of its time, which might have something to do with its lukewarm sales. When KB was released in 1990, only a few recognizable and memorable graphical strategy games existed: Romance of Three Kingdoms II, Nobunaga’s Ambition II, and the original Warlords. The original Master of Orion was still two years away, Ogre Battle and Jagged Alliance wouldn’t be out until 1994, and the real-time strategy genre wouldn’t be invented until 1992 when Dune 2 was released. Yet as we will see, KB shared elements from all these games. So when we are talking KB, we are talking invention, not derivation.
Gameplay: The Strange, Familiar and Unique
The game opens with a plea from dying King Maximus. It seems that his Scepter of Order has been stolen by a usurper and buried somewhere on one of four continents. If the scepter is not returned within a set period of time (determined by difficulty level and counted by player turns taken), the king will die and his kingdom will fall. The thief drew a map to the burial spot, but shredded it into 25 pieces while awaiting the demise of the king. He gave one piece of the map to each of his 16 villainous nobles, placed the other eight pieces with artifacts strewn about the land, and kept one to himself. The hero is charged with defeating the rebellious nobles, recovering the artifacts, and piecing together the scepter map before time runs out and the king perishes.
Naturally, you begin the game not knowing where the noble’s castles are or what their relative strength is. So, much like HOMM, the player purchases some troops from their castle and begins exploring the overworld map. The player only ever controls one hero in KB, so the map has to be explored intelligently. To provide some guidance as to where to go, the king offers the hero contracts on the head of each noble that are roughly sequenced in order of difficulty, and rewards each victory with gold to buy troops and experience to gain rank (level up). To claim the bounty, the player has to search one of four continents for the castle of the enemy force, which is made from pre-determined forces that do not change over time or leave their fortresses. This is a key difference from HOMM: whereas in KB pressure on the player comes from the amount of time consumed to complete an objective, HOMM pressured the player with the need to control territory strategically and fend off an attacking AI. The objective of KB essentially becomes a puzzle within a puzzle: not only does the player have to recover pieces of the scepter map, but they have to explore the overworld map as efficiently as possible to find the nobles that hold them. To our modern sensibilities the concept might seem contrived, but it works well in practice and provides some intriguing possibilities for the strategy genre.
You have no skills, your army sucks, you don’t know where you are, and your king will soon be dead. Good luck, “hero”
Replayability is made possible through randomly generated overworld maps with each new game. There are also four difficulty settings which gradually decrease the amount of time available to the player, but correspondingly increase the rate of experience gained for completing a contract (and hence hero leveling). The result is a much faster paced game.
In effect, the death counter on the king’s life serves as a form of resource management in the game. In later HOMM games the availability of troops is limited by the economic resources that the player collects and controls, and the progression of time merely regularizes the rate of development that a player could hope to achieve. Conversely in KB, the need to economize a finite amount of time renders time itself a resource, while player development is governed by the completion of contracts. By turning time into a commodity, KB can change its pacing without breaking any fundamental gameplay. This is fundamentally different from the constant pacing common to all games of HOMM. If the designers of HOMM were to change the rate at which resources were collected and troops produced, it would completely unbalance the game.
As a source of fun and strategy, the KB time mechanic is questionable in the turn-based PC version of the game because it turns it into a micro-management exercise of maximizing efficiency in moving from point A to B (while easily navigating around purely reactive wandering monster stacks). But the Sega Genesis version released a year later (and with much improved graphics) instead uses a real-time clock that never stops ticking down. The real-time race against the clock is actually pretty fun because it gives a certain urgency to every action you take. Also, wandering monster stacks can chase you down and whittle away at your army, making the game more difficult than a simple search and destroy. But in either the PC or Genesis versions, time is the only real source of strategic choice in a game in which the AI waits for the player instead of actively attacking. This flavors KB as something of a squad-based adventure game that would later be the hallmark of Jagged Alliance and X-Com. Yes, those games are fun, and so is KB. The real challenge for a designer would be to combine the differential pacing and “temporal economics” in KB with the resource collection, territorial control, and infrastructural development of HOMM. If you can figure out a way to balance both, I think you will have invented a new and extremely compelling videogame genre that successfully mixes RPG, real-time, puzzle, adventure, and strategy elements in a novel way. (Note: I did not just describe WarCraft III in case you are thinking of it).
The status bar at right shows (from top to bottom): time remaining; current contract target; siege weapon; spell power; puzzle pieces recovered; treasury
Heroes: The Strange, Familiar and Unique
In addition to obviating a non-existent AI, the timer mechanic also covers for a minimalist economic model. The simplistic weekly pay system in KB makes amassing troops quite easy even though you have to pay summoned troops a weekly maintenance salary. To counter-balance this, the player hero has a “leadership” attribute that caps the number of troops a hero can command. A hero’s leadership score directly corresponds to the maximum number of hit points that a stack of mobs under their command may have in total. The higher the leadership skill, the higher the total number of hit points the troop stacks can have. This means more troops and troops of higher calibre can be commanded. If the combined hit points of a troop stack is greater than the hero’s leadership ability, the troops might rebel and attack friendly forces on the battlefield. Leadership can be increased by choosing it instead of gold as the reward for finding treasure chests on the overworld map, or through increasing the rank (level) of the hero by completing the contracts to beat the nobles. There is no other way to gain a hero “experience” (such as by killing wandering monster stacks).
Otherwise, heroes are quite similar to their HOMM counterparts. KB begins with the selection of a hero archetype: sorcerer, barbarian, paladin or knight. These archetypes are assigned differing attributes that are now well known, including troop morale levels, spell power, and a set weekly income and starting troops. A key difference is that troops stacks can’t be split, so you can only have one stack of a particular kind of troop in your army at once (in the Genesis version anyway). Much of this is probably limited because of a need to keep the menu-driven user interface minimal and accessible.
The rest of the game plays out pretty much the same too: collect artifacts to improve hero attributes, learn and memorize spells that can be cast in combat and on the overworld map, beat up on wandering monsters (some of whom will join your army and some of whom will flee), find treasure, and renew the army every week. KB even includes many much-loved HOMM aspects, such as the “Astrologer’s Week of the X” to boost troop production, piecing together a puzzle to find a great artifact, monster dens with recruitable troops, warp portals, “Bridge” and “Town Portal” spells, the ability to hire boats to travel around or between land masses, and the display of monster stack sizes in relative terms like “many”, “a lot”, or “a horde”. Despite the significant strategic differences in gameplay, the fundamentals that make KB are also those that continue to make HOMM great in form and content. Van Caneghem was truly a visionary even if the execution of KB was a little muddled.
Have you seen this game before? I think so
So as a strategy game, KB basically comes down to:
- Select and maintain the best mix of unit stacks given the leadership and rank cap
- Balance the risk in fighting enemies against the time it takes to raise troops
- Build an army whose weekly salary you can afford to maintain, yet which is strong enough to ensure victory
- Explore the overworld map as quickly and efficiently as possible, including finding artifacts
- Deduce the location of the Scepter Artifact before time runs out
Get a contract -> Explore the map -> Find the enemy -> Beat down -> Get promoted -> Repeat
Combat: The Familiar and… The Familiar!
Of all the parts that make up KB, the one least changed in the HOMM series is combat. From ranged attacks to melee damage to battlefield obstacles, automatic retaliations, and movement speed, combat is pretty much the same!
Each hero has a maximum of five stacks on the battlefield, which is a 6×5 square grid. Units are defined by morale, movement speed, hit points, attack power, rank and flying ability just as they continue to be. The player can order a stack to move, shoot, wait or attack, just as in the modern game. Similarly, ranged units can’t fire if an enemy stack is adjacent to them, so if playing defensively melee units will be arranged in front of them. Heroes get in on the action too by casting spells from the sidelines, so while you can’t actually see them, they are effectively omnipresent on the battlefield. This should all sound familiar because it is. Hell, there is even the system where any units a ghost kills gets turned into a new ghost! The biggest difference are castle sieges. In KB, an attack on a castle is basically the same as the regular combat grid but vertically aligned, and with the attacker being somewhat cramped because of the smaller 4×4(+2) grid size. The use of walls, drawbridges and line-of-sight in the the HOMM series is a substantial improvement.
King’s Bounty, 1990 and HOMMV, 2006: WTFPNWEDBBQ!!1!!11!
Conclusion: The Past and Future of Game Design
I said earlier that in context of the time it was released, KB has to be interpreted as a work of invention rather than derivation. With turn-based strategy, economic and role-playing games like Warlords, Nobunaga’s Ambition and Final Fantasy already in existence, KB clearly attempted to innovate by remixing different elements together under the added pressure of a clock. In this sense, KB was clearly something of a brilliant experiment by its creator. Van Caneghem’s genius was in sensing the untapped entertainment potential of the strategy, adventure, puzzle, real-time and role-playing genres before they had become the established and distinct categories we bemoan today as moribund. The result is a rather curious hybrid of a game best described — and pause to take a breath here — as a squad-based real-time adventure puzzle game with linear RPG and economic production aspects. Whoa! And on top of that there are many strange and novel ideas tacked on to this meuilleux that aren’t seen anywhere else, such as the puzzle aspect and digging around for world artifacts. Van Caneghem clearly had some ideas in his head from somewhere (where that place is I’m not to keen to see).
While KB is a lot of fun because it offers a wide variety of ways to play (and again, I encourage modern gamers to give it an honest try), it ends up being somewhat shallow. As the proverbial jack-of-all-trades but master of none, KB is made up of many aspects that are amusing but not deep, and which fail to add up to more than the sum of their parts. We often see very similar results from another brilliant game designer, Peter Molyneux, whose undeniable intuition for visionary gameplay mechanics can result in unfocused realizations. Games like Black and White or Fable are synonymous with capturing a gamers imagination, only to come up short in substance and long-term value.
KB is remarkable in part because it shows how genre-bending hybrid games can be a lot of fun and a source of experimentation that becomes inspiration for more focused and deep gameplay. It might be said that the transcendence of traditional game genres is the future of games because it allows the gamer a more natural and free-form gameplay experience (even when still in 2D!). Although lacking the sort of depth which would hallmark the turn-based strategy genre to come, KB remains extremely interesting as the source of most of the fundamental mechanics which make those games fun. In many ways in fact, following Heroes of Might and Magic games are simplified versions of KB, with all the fat stripped so as to leave a lean and engrossing game. But how many iterations can there be before sweeping change is needed? Where that question is finite, the answer will be found by going back to the roots of the series: King’s Bounty.