The Wheel of Time (computer game)

The plot of the game is built ahead of the book series and linear. The player controls Elayna, a sister of the Aes Sedai Mages Guild. These have dedicated themselves to the fight against the so-called Dark King, a powerful, malevolent entity living in magical exile and antipodes of the Creator God. Elayna lives as the keeper of the chronicles in the headquarters of the Aes Sedai, the White Castle. There she is attacked by an unknown intruder who is looking for the magical seals to the prison of the dark king. Although he does not manage to get the seal of the Aes Sedai into his possession, he loots a Ter'angreal, a powerful magical artifact. The head of the Aes Sedai, the Amyrlin, sends Elayna to pursue the intruder and bring the Ter'angreal back.

Elayna pursues the assassin and his Trolloc army as far as the ghost town of Shadar Logoth. there she can put him and learns that he was acting on behalf of the lost Ishmael. In return for his life, he gives Elayna the Ter'angreal, but is then attacked Mashadar, the personified evil of the city. Elayna returns to the White Castle, but finds it besieged by a Trolloc army. After the besiegers are repulsed, Elayna discovers that Ishmael has other assistants in the ranks of the Aes Sedai, including a certain Sephraem. Elayna reports to the Amyrlin and is informed by them that the recovered Ter'angreal could give Elayna, who actually only has a weak magical talent, great power. But before the Amyrlin can use the Ter'angreal on Elayna, she is killed by the well-known Assassin and Sephraem, who take both the Ter'angreal and the seal from her.

Elayna is named the new Amyrlin and pursues the Assassins again, but is captured by the Children of Light, a warlike order of priests. However, she manages to break out and travel over a portal stone near Ishmael's fortress in the Veiled Mountains. In their dungeons she finds some Aes Sedai, which she frees and sends back home with the help of the portal stone. She then searches the fortress for the Amyrlin's seal. She discovers notes about a ritual used to break the power of seals and free the Dark King from his prison. She finds the seal in the possession of Sephraem, from whom she can remove it after a fight, but is then captured by Ishmael. But even Ishmael is arrested surprisingly by the now known as the dog assassin with the help of Ter'angreal.

The dog reveals that he succumbed to the chaotic evil of Shadar Logoth and targeted Ishamael, the Aes Sedai and the White Coats (Children of Light) against each other to sow chaos. But Elayna and Ishamael manage to escape the dog. Elayna now begins to collect all the seals that she needs to carry out the ritual. On the Shayol Ghul mountain, o the ritual has to be performed, the dog meets her again and in return for the seal offers her the ter'angreal to release her magical powers. Elayna refuses, lets the dog and the Ter'angreal fall to its death and completes the ritual so that the Dark King cannot escape his prison.

Gameplay

The game combines the principles of a first-person shooter with strategy and role-playing elements. The player controls his character through the 3D world directly from the first person perspective . The maps are linear and mission-oriented, the majority of the game consists of fighting computer opponents. For combat, the player has around 40 magic spells available throughout the game in the form of Ter'angreal magic runes. These can be used in various ways, for example offensively to generate fireballs, chain lightning, earthquakes or hurricanes, as protective and healing spells, but also for more complex tactics such as swapping places with the enemy, transformation or levitation spells. Some of these must also be used to perform simpler tasks or to be able to enter otherwise inaccessible areas of the game.

In addition to the single player mode, there is a multiplayer function with two different game variants. The player can choose between Elayna, the leader of the Children of Light, a lost man or the dog. The Arena game variant corresponds to the classic deathmatch in which the player or team with the most kills wins. In the variant Citadel, similar to Capture the Flag , the seal of the opponent must be conquered. Everyone has a citadel that can be protected against opponents with various traps and computer-controlled guards.

development

Legend Entertainment used the first version of the Unreal Engine as in the previously released add-on Return to Na Pali to Unreal .

reception

The Wheel of Time received mostly good ratings ( GameRankings : 80.09%). Power Play praised the game's graphics performance with light and mirror effects, the level design and the plot. The level of difficulty was rated as quite high, even at the simple level, and the not very varied AI was slightly criticized. Gamespot compared the gameplay of The Wheel of Time with the action games Heretic and Hexen . The tester complained that the magic runes are often placed too obviously and thus make the solution of certain areas obvious. In the fight, the overall very large number of spells in connection with double assignments causes problems, since the player is forced in the middle of the fight to look for the appropriate entry from long lists. Here, too, the author praised the graphics as outstanding, but only in conjunction with a Voodoo 3 3D accelerator card . On competing models like Nvidia's TNT2 Ultra or Geforce 256 , neither Direct3D nor OpenGL achieved nearly similar results. The tester described the plot of the game as almost as complex as that of the novels and the quality of the dialogues contributed a lot to the immersion of the player.

In contrast, the IGN test was more critical . Above all, the tester complained that the overall design did not form a unit ( not cohesive ). The player spends too much time looking for switches or doors, the level design lacks highlights and the continuation of the narrative between level transitions is too far apart to keep the player interested. Ultimately, what remains is “an action game in which you press too many switches, have to look for way too many, way too small passages and spend too much time hurling weak spells at aggressive and powerful opponents”. The game captures the fascination of the book series in a successful way, but due to the careless handling of certain genre standards it does not meet market expectations either. The game has an unmistakably high quality, but it does not have enough playful magic to move up to the top titles.

In 2003, The Wheel of Time was listed as the 10th Most Undervalued Game of All Time by GameSpy .

Web links

Shadar Logoth
The Wheel of Time at MobyGames (English)
The Wheel of Time in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

↑ http://www.gamespy.com/articles/525/525439p1.html
↑ http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/142960-the-wheel-of-time1999/index.html
↑ http://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=7423&s=1
↑ Review ( English ) In: GameSpot . Retrieved March 9, 2014.
↑ IGN Review ( English ) In: IGN . Retrieved March 9, 2014.
↑ 25 most underrated games of all time . gamespy.com. Archived from the original on January 13, 2007. Retrieved March 9, 2014.

[1] ttp://www.gamespy.com/articles/525/525439p1.html

[2] ttp://www.gamerankings.com/pc/142960-the-wheel-of-time1999/index.html

[3] ttp://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=7423&s=1

[4] Review ( English ) In: GameSpot . Retrieved March 9, 2014.

[5] IGN Review ( English ) In: IGN . Retrieved March 9, 2014.

[Gamespys_25_most_underrated_games_of_all_time-6] 25 most underrated games of all time . gamespy.com. Archived from the original on January 13, 2007. Retrieved March 9, 2014.