With the Wikipedia rumors of an official addition to the KQ franchise now solid fact and only a matter of time before it happens, I wondered if any of you had played the fan-made The Silver Lining. It takes place after Mask of Eternity.

I personally found this game to be absolutely brilliant. It really came back to the roots of the entire series and connected each game together to make incredible plot twists that still remained faithful to the foundation of the original series. The first four episodes are available for download. They're supposedly still working on episode 5 to be released who knows when. I urge you all to give it a try. It's free and completely worth it. The music is stunning, the story rich, and if anything major could be improved on, it's the graphics. And that's only because they're a little choppy. But, it's a fan-made game for crying out loud. It could be infinitely worse.

To those who have played it already, what did you think? It's a shame to me that this game won't be considered official canon to Activision (for more information on that, check out the game's website for details on how Activision responded to this game) since that means this new one coming out from Odd Gentleman will likely totally ignore the worthy story that Phoenix Online created with The Silver Lining.

Check it out here: http://www.postudios.com/company/games/thesilverlining/index.php

ETA: Forgot a huge point. Roberta Williams herself has played this and loved it. She says, "The game is very true to the original series and features many of the storylines and characters, especially, of King’s Quest VI. I found it beautiful to play. I, too, like many other fans, would like to see how this story unfolds!”

It's ok.I'm not really all that big of a fan. It's fun, but I have issues with the storyline. It takes way to many 'coicidences' with the continuity in its attempt to try to tie every thing together in a convoluted way, while missing some other obvious details from the games themselves. It actually breaks some of the official and canon information.

It suffers from some silly ideas like making Valanice the daughter of Manannan, and Alexander and Rosella the grandchildren of Manannan. Mordack is their uncle... and Valanice is a member of the Black CLoak race herself. This alone along with the overuse of the Black Cloak society (a regurgitated unoriginal idea that every KQ fan game and fan fiction has been using since King's Quest 6 came out years ago) is a reason I'm glad its not considered canon.

Like I said I didn't find the plot twists to be 'incredible' I found them to be convoluted and defies suspension of disbelief.

Also a correction Roberta Williams only played the first chapter, nothing beyond that. The first chapter is pretty compelling actually if a bit short.

Roberta Williams also said the same thing about the new game without actually playing much of it, and only going by what she was shown, and maybe played. So its unclear if her word is all that valuable or not, even in the case of the new game. On a side note I don't know if the new game will follow canon at all either, at most might be 'mixed-canon', as it seems to be retelling some of the earlier stories in a completely different way

The AGDI remakes I think are better, and did many of the same ideas first, but not as 'forced'. But I prefer the originals. The AGDI games, also break canon in many ways. But are closer to the originals in gameplay in a lot of ways, and in theme. Yes it over uses the clichéd Black Cloak Society meme as well.

I haven't fully played the Silver Lining. I've been waiting for episode 5. Now thinking it may never be released, I'll probably start playing it. I loved the AGDI remake of KQ2. I've replayed it several times, making sure to get all the points. So far, I'd say that's my favorite remake. KQ3 wasn't bad either, but obviously, doesn't compare to what they did to KQ2. To me, if it's just a vga remake, with no additional content, I tend to prefer the originals. Even though I do respect what they've done. But I feel like, if you're going to give the game a face lift, you should add additional content, and put some twists in it, to keep the game entertaining and challenging to those who've played them before

Ya as much as I prefer the Sierra originals (for the purity of the original storylines, as originally intended):

I've played the AGDI remakes several times. They are a lot of fun. They just don't' replace the originals in my eyes! I wouldn't want them to. But I will play game through again in the future because they are fun.

I didn't get the same sense out of TSL, it was blander to me in some ways. Not as interesting. But I did have some fun out of it.

I think Infamous Quests, King's Quest is closest to the feel of the original game, its also a good game to play.

I don't know how things will be in the new official King's Quest and its attempt at 'retelling' the stories, in a different way, with different characters, etc. People are probably going to compare them with AGDI's stories, as well as the originals.


Also I agree, TSL episode 5 has become all but vaporware. Phoenix Online has more or less removed most of the forums related o it, and they haven't been releasing any updates about its development, they stopped making more For Winds issues, etc...

They are still working on it from what I saw in the forum just a couple weeks ago. They said less than a month ago that they are creating they episode still and will announce a release date when they have one.

That's good to hear. I might have to play through the entire game again to remember all their story again heh.

Ken William's newest comments concerning the upcoming game and his opinion of the 'fan games' (if you read between the lines, more praise for the games that are made for money than those that are made for nothing).


"What’s your reaction to the fan-made KQ projects, like remakes and sequels?"

"The days of a great product being built in a garage are pretty much behind us. There might be some opportunity on mobile devices, which are gutless, but generally speaking, it takes many millions of dollars to build a world-class game. Anything less than that is a waste of time and effort. It is flattering, but … it is not likely to make anyone money. I always supported the fan products, and thought they were cool, but .. I also typically encouraged people to put their energy into something that had a chance to make money."

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2015/01/02/ken-williams-interview-kings-quest-sierra-game-informer.aspx

That always bugged me.
People who put money first, before pleasing their fans. Fans should ALWAYS come first, if not, this is why we get rushed pieces of crap only released because "Fans will buy it because we made it"

This is why I respect indie games, as they know they probably won't make that much money, (As they aren't big name companies, and are more or less unknown) but they do it "For the passion!" that is the true way to making games. Even then, they tend to get greedy and lose sight. Like two FiveNightsAtFreddy's Sequels within the course of a year.

Also it's rather ironic that statement, as TSL and the fan-remakes were much better than "Mask of Eternity" which was a big company product.

"Also it's rather ironic that statement, as TSL and the fan-remakes were much better than "Mask of Eternity" which was a big company product"

That's a matter of opinion. Actually I find Mask of Eternity to better than TSL. KQ6 is the best IMO though.

Fair enough. But I won't forgive it for more or less sending the entire adventure gaming industry down the crapper.

It's a whole set of circumstances that doomed adventure games.

The rise in popularity of the internet brought two things on the table, one a change of demographics, back in days, only nerds with a passion for solving puzzles owned computers, launching games through the DOS parser was a puzzle in itself for someone unfamiliar with it, let alone tweaking the .bat and config.sys to make the games run. Once the internet became a thing, and Windows made things more simple, everyone had computers but not everyone had the same passion for staring at the screen for hours trying to solve puzzles.

And the second thing the internet changed was multiplayer games, because it made finding players much easier now that you no longer needed to know someone IRL who also owned a computer and connect via phone line which made your phone number sound busy for hours, and you could now play with more than one player at the time. And then MMO cames.

The other genres were the second thing that helped finish the adventure games marketability. During the final years of the adventure heydays, many many genres grew pretty damn awesome seemingly overnight. First person shooters with Half-Life, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, RPGs with Baldur's Gates, Planescape Torment, Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout, Might & Magic 6, Revenant, Diablo, Final Fantasy 7, RTS with Red Alert 2, Dungeon Keeper, Starcraft, Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, stealth games popping out of nowhere with Thief, Metal Gear Solid, Hitman and Commandos, and then some more time sinkers of my youth like Carmageddon, Lord of the Realm 2, Homeworld, Ground Control, Midtown Madness, The Sims, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, and not to mention sport and racing games that got so much better when 3D got good enough. Back in the early nineties, adventure games was pretty much half of all the computer games my cousin and I played but around the late nineties, we played a handful of adventure games, and mostly the big ones from the biggest company like LucasArts or Revolution, the rest of the year we were too busy playing all those other genres that would keep us glued to the keyboard 'til 1AM during the week days and 5AM during the weekends.

Genres that up to that point were mostly pure gameplay with token plots began to borrow elements from adventure games and feature plots, twists and NPCs to talk to. So if you were into adventure games for the plots, you could now enjoy that aspect in other, more gameplay engaging games.

And finally, adventure games stopped being the tech pusher they used to be back in the early nineties. Back then, if you wanted to push a new sound card, a new graphical card, a CD ROM drive to your customers, you made an adventure game that was made specifically for the tech you wanted to introduce "See how good it looks, how fast it loads, how nice it sounds with our latest hardware!" Sierra was very good at that, and hardware adoption by players wouldn't have been as fast and successful without their help. But fast forward to the late nineties and FPS and sport games had stolen that from adventure games.

Now put all of those elements together, and have them happens at the same time, and there's no way adventure games could have survived that.

The unfortunate fact is even if Roberta had gone back and made The Princeless Bride 2, or a more traditional King's Quest game in the style of the older games, instead of the KQ8 we got, it still wouldn't have been marketable and would have been a failure. I.E. Grim Fandango's failure at huge sales (rumor has it even lost money).

Part of Roberta's legacy was she wanted to push technology with each of her games. A traditional KQ game just wouldn't have done that. Hence her move to 3D, perhaps a time when 3D was too limited to do what she wanted with it. She didn't have the engine she really wanted, that could handle most of her ideas (including swimming, water physics, wind physics, etc). Red Baron II the engine she wanted to utilize was behind schedule. Which put her game behind schedule. In the end they had to make their own engine which simply couldn't handle some of her more sophisticated ideas. So quite a bit of stuff had to be cut. Along with that possibly two worlds (the undersea world, and a fancier version of the sky realm, with outside areas).

It was Roberta's attempt to try to save a genre, that was a dead horse (already 'beaten' dead horse) at the time. It didn't work. But compared to the competition, in hindsight it was fairly admirable try.... The later Sierra Adventure games that came out later such as GK3 couldn't revive that horse either...

I understand now thanks :D I was being rather stupid and arrogant >_<

thank you
http://nhadattonghop.com