Darklands (video Game) - Reception

Reception

The game received 4 out of 5 stars in Dragon.

Darklands was released by MicroProse with a number of bugs, ranging from minor to major. These included many instances of what would now be called crash-to-desktop errors. Additionally, the "character colors bug" results in on-screen characters colors being replaced with random (often bright) colorings. The official readme said:

We very much regret that an extremely rare problem may cause a battlefield character to suffer some color changes in battle. However, you as a player won't notice the change until the next battle. The bad part is the change is stored in the saved game file. You can fix up your characters by returning to an old saved game. For example, in battle #3 you notice Gretch has green hair (yuck). If you return to a saved game prior to battle #2, Gretch will be fine again. We apologize for this work-around. We've tried all sorts of tools and traps for this condition, and spent hundreds of hours testing for it. We'd be delighted to publicize the name of the first person who can tell us how to make it occur upon demand.

Most of the bugs in the game were correctable by subsequently released patches. Before ubiquitous Internet connectivity, such patches were typically only available through BBS downloads by modem owners and informal person-to-person copying, and thus many gamers were only able to play the originally-released version. This gave Darklands a reputation as a buggy game.

However, this did not stop GameSpot from adding it to their list of "The Greatest Games of All Time".

Todd Howard cited the game as an influence on Bethesda Softworks' series The Elder Scrolls.

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