[ATMachine]

I'd love to give you a savegame in return for the ones you gave me, but all my saves are from the final release of the game (ver 1.1) that I bought on eBay, not the nearly-final version from Christy Marx's site. Sorry.

[After a brisk nap]

Does this help you out?

[Ninth]

Finished it, got the best ending, 6915 points.

Great game, which doesn't live up completely to its premise. I could have used more days like day 5, where you have to actually do something adventurish, for example. It's like the game focuses a tad too much on storytelling (by the way, for some reason I really liked the picture of Robin and Marian waiting for Richard to come back in Robin's cave... very romantic and slightly erotic as the same time), and neglects the "game" part. Also, as Moriarty said, the secondary characters are barely skimmed over. Plus it's kinda short, and low on locations.
Still it's one of the very best Sierra games I've played, and I had lots of fun doing this playthrough. So, when's the next one?

[ATMachine]

Spoiler:

Besides the four endings, I thought I'd comment a bit about the other variations in the end sequence:

If you raised more than 50,000 marks, the Queen's Knight will be followed by two ponies bearing the ransom as he departs. If you failed to raise that much, he'll travel with only one horse.

If you saved Marian, she'll show up when the Knight departs, and later you get to see her and Robin in bed together in his cave during a rainstorm. Obviously neither happens if she dies.

At the trial, Fulk will mention the letter carried by the false Knight only if you gave it to the real Queen's Knight.

The people who may or may not be present at the trial are the peasant woman, the poacher, the one-eyed yeoman, the jeweler, and Marian. The peasant woman, the poacher, and Marian show up if you saved their lives, of course.

The yeoman shows up if you bought his clothing for 50 marks, but not if Little John did it for you. The jeweler shows up if you got his clothing with money or with the bow, praising Robin in the former case and cursing him in the latter. If you let him pass and tricked the Sheriff as Puck, he won't be there at all.

The beggar will always be there; he'll commend you if you bought his rags or had Little John do it, and insult you if you stole them at arrow-point.

[Junkface]

I fell behind for a while and just finished the game over the last week, so my thoughts for Day 8 onwards follow.

Originally Posted by After a brisk nap

Anyway, the fair is where it all falls apart for me. In a game that is otherwise somewhat lacking in character interaction (I would have liked to meet some of my other 25 or so merry men), here there are suddenly dozens, maybe a hundred people you could possibly interact with. As an obsessive-compulsive adventure gamer, this leaves me no choice other than to try to look, talk to and interact with every person on every screen. Which takes forever and is almost entirely pointless.

I felt exactly the same way, that's actually how I first fell behind in the playthrough. I think a lot of the problem is also how static and sparsely animated the scene is and how the quality of the interaction is so uneven. One hotspot might give a reaction that does a great job of enhancing the setting and enriches the experience, while the one next is some asinine anachronism or in-joke, completely defeating the effect of the last hotspot. I'm currently also at an impasse in Conquests of Camelot when you first reach Jersualem and similarly you get a huge sudden opening up of what previously had been a far more enclosed game. For me it's exhausting trying to decide what to do first.

The other thing that stopped me dead for a couple of days were the two changing into a tree parts. They feel very clumsy and it doesn't really seem very elegant game design for the player to have to walk to one of the groves and wander for a few screens until the sheriff's men show up, then go back to the grove. There's more a sense of irritation than tension. Another design decision that struck me as very unfair and irritating was having to

Spoiler:

put the fire ring on before even discussing Marian's rescue or be killed. There should have been an opportunity before Robin stupidly launches himself into the flames.

I also don't agree with ATMachine on it being a good thing that the wisp following part covered only one screen. It comes across as pointless and nowhere near fully realised. I would have preferred it to cover a couple of screens and involve some actual challenges to navigate or not be in there at all. That said, I find the Fens atmosphere much more effective this time; there's the eerie mysticism of the wisps, the dank ivy covered back wall of the monastery and actual militant monks seen on the parapets (the atmosphere was good enough that I initially thought there was a stealth puzzle here.) The wonderful music remains and there's also a lot more use of colour here, avoiding the generic dungeon feel.

A hell of a lot that had slipped my mind about the game, both good and bad (mainly the maze, the tree changing puzzle and some of the slightly contrived or repetitive situations), was brought back by this playthrough. I also agree with Ninth that a bit more traditional adventuring wouldn't have gone amiss (though not so much to unbalance the game) and that some characters are incredibly underutilised (the widow's pretty glaring here.) The malleability of the ending also wasn't as great as I had remembered (for instance, ATMachine's observation that the King may accuse you of killing Marian in some situations even when she's standing right there in the court, and at one point I threatened the bartender with my bow, leading him to tell me I'd live to regret it, then bugger off completely for the remainder of the game.)

Still, the game remains a masterpiece, with more significant good things I'd forgotten or didn't know about until now. Tricking the Sheriff as Puck is great, as are all the optional times you can visit the Sheriff or the abbot. A lot of the writing is brilliant, highlights being the comraderie of the merry men and the consequences if Marian dies. Robin's grief is really palpable and accomplished extremely economically. Of course, it peters out quite soon, but is a lot more impressive than I would have expected of what amounts to a "you messed up" path through the game. This playthrough was great (thanks to After a brisk nap for running it and ATMachine's insightful running commentary with minimum and maximum possible scores and the like) and I'm looking forward to the next one.

[christymarx]

Hey, all. I'm chiming in a bit late, but I've had a great time reading the pages and pages of comments about CONQUESTS OF THE LONGBOW. Some of it is nice egoboo and some of it is good food for thought should I ever get the chance to design another adventure game.

A couple of points:

The version of the game I zipped and put onto my website came off disks from a standard game box. Why that version would be different from any other version of the boxed game is a complete mystery to me.

It's true that I learned a lot from my first design experience with Camelot and applied those lessons to Longbow. Some of the differences also had to do with changing from a parser-based game to a point&click interface. Another big lesson I learned: never let your lead programmer make gameplay decisions. I rued the day I let my lead programmer talk me into making certain decisions on Camelot that must have been frustrating for anyone but a hard-core gamer like him.

Thanks again for the great feedback.

[Dale Baldwin]

Welcome to the forums, Christy

[Melanie68]

That's just cool. I think you are so going to make the thread participants day!

Welcome Christy!

[Kurufinwe]

Ooh, Christy Marx!!! Sierra's most talented designer (and I mean that)! What to say? Well, erm, thanks for having made such a great game, and having taken the time to read all our ramblings. Hopefully we'll see another adventure from you one day.

Rob, if this is another of your sick Samorost Day jokes, I swear you're deader than the adventure genre.

[Dale Baldwin]

Originally Posted by Kurufinwe

Rob, if this is another of your sick Samorost Day jokes, I swear you're deader than the adventure genre.

Hate to break it to you, but it's not Robsie

[ATMachine]

Sorry I'm late to the greeting party, but I was on vacation last week. Welcome to the forums, Christy!

As for the matter of the Longbow versions, there definitely are differences between my copy (version 1.1) and the freely available one (version 1.000). I guess the programmers forgot to fix a few bugs in the initial release and cleaned a few things up for later copies.

[Nawar]

I have technically been on the forums for a while but I finally have the time and schedule to prowl around on them. Then I discovered this thread and all I have to say is:
What a great idea! I'm too late to get in on Conquest of the Longbow but what's next? I'm so excited to get to play and game and actually discuss all the details.