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Hypothetically, this ‘AI God’ would have tailored the experience for each player, beefing up quests to meet skill levels – a technology that was likely beyond reach at that time. Things were muddled even for Dave and Jamie though, who freely admit that they let themselves get a bit too ambitious to start with, revealing how the Fabled Lands MMO might have had an incredibly advanced AI that acted as a digital gamesmaster. One of the publishing guys, I think it was Jon Kavanagh, said to me, ‘We just don’t know if MMOs will make any money.’ I bet they wish they’d done it now.”
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“ But it was a leap in the dark for Eidos. So, our reasoning was that should get in early with a game of sufficient ambition to scare off the competition.” Once you’re level 20 in WoW, you have to have a good reason to switch games. “ We realized that the competition among major MMOs would not be just for the players’ monthly dollars but for their time too. “ I don’t think anybody at Eidos had even heard of MMOs!” Dave says. Instead, the hard part came from getting Eidos – then a UK-based publishing giant thanks to the success of Tomb Raider– to greenlight the project.
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Trying to base the game on the Fabled Lands series was an obvious and easy step, especially since the franchise already had a fanbase and much of the fiction and underlying systems had been developed. “ Eidos set us up as a kind of MMO kernel, researching some tech and working out what it would cost to do.” “ Everquest and Asheron’s Call had been released, or were about to be,” Jamie recalls. Nowadays, with World of Warcraft having proved how viable that market can be, fantasy MMOs are a dime a dozen – but in 1996 it was a different story altogether.Ĭoncept art and notes hint at the direction the MMO may have taken had things gone differently What is a bit more astounding though is that Eidos would take the two on and put them to work on creating an MMO based on the series. In many ways then it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the pair would try to adapt the unfinished Fabled Lands series to a computer game – after all, many of their original ideas and inspirations had been drawn from that same area and the idea of a sandbox RPG makes a lot more sense there than it does in a book. “ We got heavily into computer games right from the start with titles like Wizardry, Dungeon Master and Might & Magic.” “ We’re old-time gamers,” says Dave when it comes to his familiarity with computer games. As 1996 drew to a close both Jamie and Dave decided to use their experience with gamebooks to launch themselves into the computer games industry – taking the Fabled Lands series with them. Beyond the PageAs Dave rightly noted, by the time Fabled Lands had finally hit its stride the gamebook craze was coming to an end, with computer games becoming a more popular avenue for escapism.