King's Quest III

Gameplay

Most of the game's various lands and locations appear in the magic map. Once the protagonist Gwydion reaches a new region, he can use the magic map to travel to a previous region.

King's Quest III was markedly more difficult than its two predecessors. The player was required to type in magic spells line-by-line from a spell book that came with the game. The spells partially served as a form of copy protection, although the game already had a disk-based protection (it ran on a self-booter required disks to play, and could not be copied easily).

Gwydion's movements are controlled by the player using cursor buttons. In the original release version 1.01 (1986-11-08), using the AGI engine, the escape button pauses the game and there are no menus. Commands are accessed through the F keys, "Ctrl-", or manually typing; F1 displays a Help file listing all the commands. It has disk-based copy protection. The version 2.14 (1988-3-15) was included in many of the King's Quest collections over the years, with the disk based self-booting copy-protection removed. Pushing escape brings up a menu (arrow keys can be used to choose options), and the speed controls are included in the menu.

Story

In King's Quest III, the story moves away from Daventry and King Graham to the land of Llewdor, where a boy named Gwydion is being kept by the wicked wizard Manannan. According to the introduction, for as long as he could remember, 17-year-old Gwydion has been held captive by Manannan as his servant, cooking and cleaning for him in his home atop a large mountain in Llewdor. From this vantage point, and with the help of a telescope, the seemingly all-knowing wizard watches the countryside, the shoreline and vast ocean to the east and an endless desert to the west.

Manannan takes a series of absences and Gwydion seizes his chance to escape. He breaks in to the wizard's laboratory and reads Manannan's book of spells, then goes out in to Llewdor to collect ingredients for them. After solving many puzzles to obtain the spell ingredients Gwydion turns Manannan into a cat and is free. His journey then takes him across the ocean to Daventry to rescue a beautiful princess from a dangerous three-headed dragon. It is eventually revealed that he is the son of King Graham, kidnapped from Daventry by the magician at a young age, and the princess he has rescued is his sister, Rosella.

The game's title is a pun on the proverb "To err is human, to forgive divine" by Alexander Pope, whose namesake may have been given to the character Gwydion once it is later revealed who he really is in the game. The actions taken by Gwydion in this story lead directly to the events that begin King's Quest V.

Characters

Development and release

King's Quest III was the biggest and most ambitious game Sierra made up to that point. The series' designer and writer Roberta Williams said, "My previous games, from Mystery House to King's Quest II, were all great. But they were essentially glorified treasure hunts...your object being to win the game by finding and collecting items. It was not possible to have bigger and more complex plots than that thanks to technical limitations." By the mid-1980s, the new generation computer platforms such as the IBM AT, Amiga, and Macintosh were faster and sported more memory as well as standard hard disks. Thus, it was now possible to develop games of greater complexity than had been possible on 8-bit machines.

Roberta Williams collaborated with a team consisting mainly of the same people that worked with her on the previous two games, but more people were involved in the production this time. Al Lowe, who made the music in King's Quest II, became the lead programmer of King's Quest III, while his wife Margaret made the music instead. This was the game on which Al Lowe cut his teeth before moving onto his own series, Leisure Suit Larry. Williams said, "Rosella was introduced toward the end of the game; seeing her on the screen for the first time, I suddenly saw her on her own adventures in a sequel."

King's Quest III was the first adventure game featuring auto-mapping, with a "magic map" found in the game that can be used to teleport to most locations that the player has visited before. This feature was unpopular among some fans who claim it made the game too easy; hence, magic maps in future Sierra On-line games were more limited in their teleporting ability. The developers also introduced a real-time clock, with actions based on the clock. The developers also introduced an automatic map; although it was panned by critics and was never used in future King's Quest games, it was later re-introduced in Mixed-Up Mother Goose. The game was released on five 5.25" floppy disks and three 3.5" disks, as Sierra's second largest game after Time Zone (six disks). It was almost 50% larger than King's Quest I or King's Quest II. KQ3 had 104 screens, whereas the first KQ had about 80 and KQII had about 92.

King's Quest III was the first Sierra game to be DOS-based instead of using a self-booting disk, as well as the first to feature EGA and Hercules graphics support. A year later, it was rereleased with the slightly improved AGI V3 engine. The Apple IIGS version had improved music and sound effects.

The game's manual contains a short prologue story by Annette Childs that tells of Manannan's previous slaves and their deaths. The book also contains spells from The Sorcery of Old, needed to cast the spells in the game (these are reprinted in The King's Quest Companion).

King's Quest III was the first game in which Sierra used a manual-based copy protection scheme (although technically not intended to be copy protection). Nearly all AGI games (including King's Quest III) have a disk-based copy protection, requiring the original game disk to be present in order to play the game. This was not entirely effective and unofficial versions were widespread. (This key-disk check was removed from the later-released "King's Quest Collection" versions.) However, to complete King's Quest III, the player needs to create a number of magic spells through alchemical formulas that are only available in the game's manual. Many considered the process slightly overdone; 140 of the 210 possible points in the game are obtained through simply doing what the manual says, leaving less room for real puzzles. Starting with King's Quest IV, later Sierra games would instead ask for but a few actions described in the manual. Most often it was a dialog window appearing once, requesting the player to enter word X from page Y of the manual. This was not a true form of copy protection and was actually considered a game feature (as most puzzles in the game are based on the spells), and thus the complete spell list was reprinted in many of the official guides at the time, including the Official Book of King's Quest: Coventry and Beyond and The King's Quest Companion.

A novelization of the game is included in The King's Quest Companion. The novelization is written in the form of an interview between Derek Karlavaegen ("Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles") and Alexander sometime after the events of the third game. This was written to be a novel-style walkthrough used to solve the game. The "Encyclopedia of Daventry" in the first and second edition offered a few more backstories and details about the various characters and objects from the game. The chapter "The World of Daventry" also included more details about the Land of Llewdor, and its inhabitants. The book also contains copies of the spells from The Sorcerery of Old, needed to beat the game.

Reception

Though for the most part well received, winning the Softsel Hot List Hottest Product Award in 1987, the release of this product in 1986 was quickly met with loud protests from gamers claiming that King's Quest III was not really a King's Quest. Because it focused on a young slave named Gwydion and his attempts to escape his evil master, players did not grasp the connection between Gwydion and King Graham of Daventry until they finished the game some months later.

A review in Computer Gaming World described the game as exceedingly frustrating, from the task of climbing stairs to identifying objects from their low-resolution graphics. The hint guide was highly recommended as a way to alleviate some of that frustration. The reviewer suggested gamers new to the series play King's Quest I instead, it being much easier.

The "automatic mapping feature" was widely promoted with King's Quest III; however, it was not included in later King's Quest games as player feedback indicated it reduced challenge. According to Roberta Williams, "KQ3 was very dark, and it utilized lots of magic and magic spells with the basic idea of finding ingredients for "black magic" spells and then casting those spells. Certain religious groups were upset with me over that one!"

In August 2016, King's Quest III placed 50th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list.

Fan remakes

There have been two unofficial fan remakes. Infamous Adventures created a remake, King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human in 2005. It is a slightly expanded remake offering new material, including new cutscenes, a few new characters, expanded narration or dialogue, full speech, new or modified locations, and easter eggs. Most of the original puzzles remain intact, although the spell system was streamlined. The game was made by the team because they wanted to see if they could do it, and prove they had the drive and ability to recreate the game with updated graphics and sounds. AGD Interactive released another remake, King's Quest III Redux in 2011.