Fate: Gates of Dawn

Story

Winwood, a proud owner of a small record shop on fifth street is kidnapped by an evil wizard into a parallel medieval fantasy world and has to find his way back.

Features

The game is viewed from first-person perspective and notable for its huge game world. It takes hours for the player to travel from one end of the game world to the other and up to months to complete the game. It includes an overworld with 4 towns and some smaller villages, a wilderness split by a mountain range and over 200 islands. It features also an underworld with nine dungeons with up to seven levels.

The player can control up to 4 parties, 28 characters in total. Some quests are thereby only solvable by teamwork. Characters are not created by the player but have to be invited to join the group. There are hundreds of NPCs with own personality and AI. The game has 32 character-classes, 11 races and over 200 magic spells and potions. It features a realistic environment including day and night cycles and weather which affects the characters.

Background

The development of the game begun already in 1986. Although mentioned in the manual a PC version was never released because of the bankruptcy of the game company. Only a few original English versions being sold due the same reason. Copies nevertheless spread all over the world. Today the game is freeware with permission of the creator of the game. It can be downloaded legally, for example on RuneTek98's site or on Mightandmagicboard.de.

It is notable that from these copies of the game only the copy protection but not the password protection was removed. Password requests are not made at the start of the game but at intervals in the game repeated after some time. Just ignoring these requests or a wrong answer leads not to an abrupt end to the game, but gameplay deteriorating until it becomes unplayable. Therefore, a copy of the manual is still required for the right code.

The Amiga version of the game has better sound quality and 32 colors compared to the Atari ST version with 16 colors. The game makes use of a strong compression algorithm to fit on only two 880 Kilobyte floppy discs. Nudity of the German version was self-censored in the English release.

Reception

The game received awards e.g. an Amiga Joker but was not a commercial success, the company reLINE failing for the first time just when the English version was about to be published.