A Beginning - Majesty 2: A Love/Hate Story.

I am told all tales have a beginning, middle and an end and that you have to start somewhere. So here begins my official journey through Games, Gaming, Game Design and the subculture which is permeated with these subjects.

Without further ado, here is my most recent incident with a lovely little game called Majesty 2:

Years ago I encountered the first Majesty game and had vague memories of it being somewhat fun if a bit slow, this spurred me into picking up Majesty 2 to see what had improved and refresh myself on the somewhat unique style of RTS gameplay the Majesty series employs.

Majesty 2 allows the player direct control over building placement, base upgrades and any affairs that would be the responsibility of a “sovereign” (the name the player is referred to in the game) just like all RTS games. The difference is that all actions involving unit control are under an indirect control system. For example, the player can build a Guild wherever they please which allows them to train Heroes, spend money to train said heroes and then in order to control the heroes they must place flags with rewards attached to them in order to entice the heroes to perform actions. This means if you want to explore and push back fog of war then you must place a flag in the middle of nowhere and apply an appropriate gold reward to the flag to cause the heroes to leave the comforts of your town to explore for you. The smaller the reward or further away the explore flag is, the less inclined heroes will be to do it. Additionally the player is able to place flags on friendly units and buildings in an attempt to have them guarded or on enemy units and buildings ...you get the idea.

All of this gives Majesty 2 a fun and different take on your generic RTS gameplay, I was having a fair bit of fun with it while playing through the campaign. Then came the dragon level.

Go to Google and type “Majesty 2 dr”, you’ll notice that one of the most searched for terms will be ‘Majesty 2 dragon level’. Basically the premise for this level is that there’s a big nasty dragon who wants to do the usual evil dragon stuff and you’re gonna stop it. Fine, fair call. Here’s where things get tricky:

This dragon, named Rafnir, periodically flies to your base, breathes fire all over a building you spent your hard earned money on and then gets the fuck out only to come back and do it all over again later . At the same time; your base is surrounded by flying snake assholes who love to fly from their bust-ass snake ghettos and basically swarm your town. Still, fine. The problem comes when this is the fifth level in the game (if you count the tutorial) and the player hasn’t seen waves of enemies anywhere near this big yet let alone throwing a pissed off dragon in the mix.

The player has been taught through tutorials and learning the hard way how to start a new level. Build a Guild and get some heroes out as fast as possible, build a marketplace for the tax collectors to keep gaining revenue and so the heroes can buy all the heroing gear they need, build a defensive tower or two to hold off any early enemies that stroll by and smell the awesome.

Even if the player surrounds their town with defensive towers (which get increasingly more expensive the more you have) they still can’t hold off all the flying snakes. Spending your starting money on a nice mix of guilds and towers results in you having no money to afford much else and it’s a struggling fight to break even when barely any money comes in, meaning you must spend your miniscule allowance in order can’t train heroes, build buildings and purchase upgrades. Any heroes you do train, usually die instantly due to waves of enemies that they can’t handle as fresh recruits, which in turn makes any hero upgrades you purchase practically useless. Not to mention good old Rafnir flying in every once in a while to rape one of your buildings into a smoldering pile of unrecognizable ash and other random monsters who also wander in every once in a while to join the general pillaging and plundering of your once happy little town.

Maybe it was just me, maybe I just suck at games. Fine, fair enough. I just don’t think it’s right to throw the player in the deep end like that with little to no prior experience in how to handle the fucking lizard-geddon.

One of the best tips I saw from random forums was to build a single, lonely building at the north side of your base and put all your important buildings on the south side. This at least causes Rafnir the hateful dragon to attack that one building and leave your others alone, you can keep rebuilding it as a sort of sacrifice to appease the thing. Seems a fair few players used this advice to get through the level. Good tip, although this feels like exploiting the game AI to complete a level as opposed to actually winning through the methods you’ve been taught thus far in the game. Plus it still doesn’t answer the problem of a tidal wave of pissed off flying snakes.

Any one of a few things would have greatly improved this level for me. More starting money, less flying snake assholes, no random extra monsters wandering in, snake ghettos placed further from the player base to increase their travel time, a longer delay between dragon visits. 

If I had a major lack in vision when playing something in this level and there was an easier way to do this then let me know. But after all my searching, it appears I wasn’t the only one to rage quit, uninstall and delete every trace of Majesty 2 from my system. It seems to me this was one seriously hard level which should have been scaled better to player experience. If it wasn’t for the notorious dragon level, I would still be playing Majesty 2 today.