King's Quest: Quest For The Crown - Gameplay

Gameplay

King's Quest featured interactive graphics that were an enormous leap over the mostly un-animated 'rooms' of previous graphical interactive fiction. Prior to King's Quest, the typical adventure game presented the player a pre-drawn scene, accompanied by a text description. The player's interaction with the game consisted entirely of typing commands into the game's parser, then reading the parser's response, as the on-screen graphics rarely changed (except when the player moved to a new location.) As the first adventure game to integrate graphical animation into the player's view of game world, King's Quest shifted the focus away from the static scenery, to the player's character, which was now animated on-screen. As the player used the keyboard to explore the game world, the on-screen character, Graham, was animated walking to the chosen destination. There were animation sequences for most player-world interactions reachable through the normal course of exploration. For example, there were different animation sequences showing Graham picking up objects from the ground, opening doors, and wading through water. Depth perspective was simulated as well; Graham could walk behind objects, causing his character to be 'hidden' from view, or walk in front of them, obscuring the object. This attention to graphical animation, while commonplace in arcade-action games, earned King's Quest the distinction as the first "3D-animated" adventure game.

King's Quest was innovative in its use of 16-color graphics on the PC, PCjr and Tandy 1000; even CGA owners could enjoy the 16-color graphics by using a composite color monitor or television, thanks to programmers exploiting the inaccuracies of composite NTSC chroma decoding. Selecting 'RGB mode' at the title screen would instead result in the usual CGA graphics mode limited to 4 colors. In this mode, dithering was employed to simulate extra colors.

Like previous static-screen Sierra adventures, King's Quest used vector graphics rather than pre-rendered bitmaps which would take far too much disk space. Each screen is drawn line-by-line and painted in. This technique was used on all Sierra adventure games up to King's Quest V.

The game relied primarily on textual input as its interface. Critics often say that this way of interacting with games is time-consuming and frustrating, however, others would argue that it requires more thought on the part of the player. The fantasy world of Daventry consists of an 8×6 cyclic array of screens (or rooms) that make up the outdoor world in which the player can navigate freely (except for the screen South of the East end of the castle, which must be reached by special means), plus thirty or so additional screens for indoor and underground places (as well as a smaller world in the clouds).