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While I'd kill for a worthy sequel, I would honestly pay with a big smile on my face even for a modest revamp of the original (i.e. exact same game with a slightly improved UI/mouse integration and higher resolution art here and there).
Assuming no official project of that sort could be funded, I wonder if Nightdive may ever consider releasing the source code to the community.
I bet modders would gladly do the rest.
(A) HISTORY & GAME DESIGN
Regarding research, I already knew a great deal about military history due to (a) my academic background (European history, specialty in military), and (b) being heavily involved in the paper game industry during the 70s and early 80s (RPGs, wargames, miniatures). It would have been impossible to build the character creation and combat systems without a detailed background in both fields. After all good designers, like good historians, stand the shoulders of their predecessors.
I had only general knowledge of late medieval Germany. Of all the books quoted in the game's bibliography (pages 100-103 in the manual), about a dozen were constant companions as I constructed the map, economy, quests, saints, enemies, etc. All books I either already had, purchased, or got through interlibrary loan. To do decent research like this, you need one or two good histories (like Du Boulay's "Germany in the Later Middle Ages") with a good bibliography, and follow the book-sized breadcrumbs. It took a about three or four months of reading to get a good feel for the history and fit it to the game. Then there was constant referencing as I designed this and that for the game. People were used to seeing piles of books in my office. I also had access to Sandy Petersen's library, which was second to none when it came to mythology and creatures (Sandy was/is the designer of Call of Cthulhu). I think (and hope!) I returned all his stuff afterward.
In short, if you're going to do a game based on a historical period, academic training in history is incredibly helpful. It takes a practiced eye to scan dozens and dozens of books for the bits that will be useful. You also need to not get lost in the details. For example, the game info about German cities is very much "once over lightly." The art of "realistic" game design is knowing what details to include, and what to not bother about.
(B) SEQUEL, REVISTED
In short, there is no such thing as a "simple remake" for a game from 1992. The concept and a lot of basic design thinking can be taken from the original, especially from the cluebook charts. After that, everything from code to art is just too old, and too hard to extract, and pretty worthless anyway. You have to redo the art and rewrite the code. It would be faster in the long run.
I have tried to explain this multiple times earlier in the thread, and how the cost ends up being roughly equal to building a new game. Furthermore, if you want the game user mod-able, you absolutely must rework code and art from scratch to permit that. If anyone can put together a strong, professional team for this purpose, I'd be happy to help. However, the usual problem with volunteer virtual game dev teams is that they lack the depth needed in "skill positions:" programming and the more technical art aspects, such as building, rigging, and animating characters, building the battlefield terrain, then texturing and lighting everything. And that doesn't even start to talk about UI, sfx, music, unit and automated testing, much less PR and marketing.
@ Tuco -
Working with the code will be extremely difficult. It's all C++ compiled code, deliberately obfuscated in multiple ways (for copy protection). The C++ compiler package, and its libraries, was from the 1988-90 DOS era. It allowed inline C code, which was used in a few places. The compiler turned out to be poor with memory allocation and deallocation, a classic C++ problem. No self-respecting engineer would touch it today with a 20 parsec pole.
The original art was created by a legion of artists using Deluxe Paint (published by EA), a pixel-by-pixel painting program. Some art was nothing more than scanned-in sketches, with or without DPaint retouching. All characters were laboriously created and animated in eight cardinal directions, as pixel by pixel sprites. Creating anything of higher resolution from that is well neigh hopeless.
Of course, if somebody CAN work with this, that would be great. I would love to be proved wrong, because I enjoy playing historical sandbox RPGs. Seeing other people's take on history is fun.
I remember when I first bought this game, I couldn't finish it do to a game stopping bug. It would freeze up when fighting a specific boss/enemy (think it was red, with goat legs and horns....). And at the time patches were unheard of. Wasn't until about 5 years later when I finally was able to contact a PR guy on AOL's forums, and completely by accident (who knows it may have even been you...) and was snail mailed a patch on a 3-1/2 floppy that I was finally able to continue playing this game. I later asked for patches on other Microprose games and received those as well (think I owned just about all of them, in that if Microprose's name was on the box, I'd generally would just buy it)... and they sent them all free, of charge) Soon after, internet took over and I was able to download patches from their site... then AOL and all the others died out.
Paid over 50 bucks for the game, back then and bought it mainly due to it's box art. I still have the box and all the material that came with it. Think the game is on 3-1/4" floppies or maybe 5-1/4"?
I'm glad you finally got the patch disks. During the first year after release, Darklands underwent at least nine revisions of patches before all the big game-stopping bugs were found and killed. I believe the Steam edition uses the final, best patch. I'm glad it also distributes both the manual and the hint book with the game.
The original game was shipped on ten 1.4 MB 3.5" "floppy" disks. In the early 1990s the old 5.25" floppy disks were obsolete. Virtually all PCs had converted to 3.5" drives. However, first generation CD ROM disks (the 600 MB version) and drives were not in common use (that didn't occur untl two or three years later).
I have worked on multiple game development projects using Unity since late 2009, and like it a lot, despite certain drawbacks. However, if you build a game with a significant number of assets, like an RPG, you run into the size limits in the "freebie" version of Unity. There are other good reasons to purchase Unity licenses for programmers, technical artists and designers in game development.
However, the overall cost of Unity licenses is TRIVIAL compared to the cost of the development talents's time to remake Darklands using Unity, or any other modern game development engine. Maybe you can get a dozen or so good programmers, artists and designer(s), supported by QA, music, production and marketing staff to work free of charge for 12-24 months. Unfortunately, I've never figured out how to do that!
I have gone through costs at some length in earlier replies to this thread, and don't want to rehash them in detail. Are my estimates realistic? Well...I have over three decades experience in the game dev industry, and maintained professional certifications in project management (PMP) and software development (CSM). I also have hands-on experience in designing and/or producing over two dozen published titles (and quite a few other ones that never saw the light of day), including responsibility for both estimating projects and tracking costs.
Indies can work wonders by cutting lots of corners while working 80+ hour weeks for peanuts. It's one way to get your foot into the door of this industry on a "first project." But I will not ask professional programmers/designs/artists/etc to grossly overwork and underpay themselves. A couple weeks of "crunch time" is undesireable and unpleasant, but once in a project its bearable. Months of crunch is something else. It represents inhumane exploitation of people who love game making by incompetent and/or unethical management.
I think my research was pretty up-to-date for when the game was released. However, there have been some advances in historiography since then. Most noteably Peter H. Wilson ("Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire" - a book truly for the professionals in the field), and Jonathan Sumption ("The Hundred Years War" - five volumes, four of which are now complete - will probably be the mostr detailed history of the period in English for the next hundred years). Of course, historians are constantly debating with each other and overturning past theories (just as John Beeler and R.C.Smail in the 1960's and 70's destroyed the previously well-regarded medieval military history of Charles Oman from the 1880-90s).
Oddly enough, the part of the game's "real" history that has best stood the test of time is the presentation of weapons, armor and combat. I've been surprised that more designers haven't picked up on the idea that heavily armored troops succumb to exhaustion, or morale loss, in far greater numbers than to their wounds. To my knowledge, Darklands is the only game that attempts to represent this on level of personal combat.
When it comes to games, I have not yet encountered anything that attempts an RPG with a strong historical setting and significant attention to historical research. Oddly enough, a great many designers in the computer game industry know about past games far better than world history. I think that's why fantasy is so commonly as an RPG topic, while historical settings are extremely rare. Of course, that was/is true of paper-and-pencil RPGs also.
The secret to putting history in a game is to not confuse the player too much with historical details. The players should NOT have to know any history to play. Instead, the more history they know, the better they will understand and appreciate the fine points of the game.
There are a number of games that I haven't tried yet, such as "Life is Feudal." Unfortunately, I don't think it's rooted in a real place or historical time period. I've been looking around Steam for them as well, but the only thing I've found that attracted my attention for its presentation of medieval history is Crusader Kings II. Although it's a grand strategy game, and has a few flaws with its map (marshes are missing), the game is an astounding tour de force of scholarship applied to gaming from the late 700s to the early 1400s AD.
Those were the days. We were much more patient then. We'd pick up tips over several months from Scorpia in Computer Gaming World, scream with delight at some newfound trick, fire up the game, and get engrossed in the world once again! Days later I'd come up for air when a CTD occured in one of the mines. I'd scream at the ceiling and reboot.
There were so many things that combined to make Darklands more than the sum of its parts. The beautiful map, the watercolor (?) drawings, the mannequin screens, arrows flying across the battlezone, random encounters with alchemists demanding your money, and the "holy" people fleecing you were just a part of the appeal. And there was also the coolest character creation system of all time! The bubbling red blood/essence vial was genius. I've spent many an hour just trying to get the character I want while looking at that screen. 25 years later, it's still on my hard drive. I have all the original everything. I've got so many notes and pages printed from early bulletin boards shoved into the box that the top won't even close all the way anymore. The box is thicker now than it was originally! I think I last fired up the game about 6 months ago. I've created a couple of Excel spreadsheets that help me keep track of where things can be found, etc.
I'll close with my favorite memory of Darklands ... My Brute character found a new brass gun. This was the first time I'd ever had any kind of gun. He shot it once to open the combat and missed completely. The robber kept advancing across the city square while my guy furiously pumped the ramrod into the gun. He was right in my face now. Any second and he'd be flailing away at me. At the last possible instant, my hero raised the gun, and blam...killed him with one shot to the face! I jumped out of my chair and let out a loud gutteral victory cry.
Very few games have ever given me that perfect mixture of frustration/fear/dread/elation within a few seconds. One of my favorite gaming moments of all time. Thanks again for the memories!
Anyway, while the attention to historical details sets Darklands apart from the pack, it is the way folklore winds its way through the facts that makes Darklands unique to me. Moby ♥♥♥♥ managed the same thing, to create a painstakingly detailed history but weave in legend so that the fact and fiction play off of and strengthen one another, and tell the story from a questionable but first hand perspective. The sum more than its parts, as others have already pointed out.
I will dig in to Crusader Kings, thank you for the recommendation and for responding and for Darlkands.
Looking through the game's data files, I found a lot of cut content. There were going to be wars between cities, Hussites, satanic infiltration of guilds and other organizations, and more buildings in cities like hospitals and barracks. It was even going to be possible to lead revolutionaries to overthrow a city's government. Do you remember anything about that? Did very much work go into that before it was cut? Was it just too ambitious, or were there other reasons for cutting it?
The game consumed WAY too many people, and too much budget at MicroProse. Some stuff you see snuck in from my text and data,. but got no further because the costly work (art and programming) was still struggling to just make the core gameplay work, and complete the core storyline. All available resources had already been used, 60-80 hrs per week, for months, to get the "must have" parts of the game finished. I'd already begged for nearly a year's worth of extra time (with all the associated costs). I was unable to beg for a week more. In fact, as many know, the game shipped with significant bugs that took over a half year after publication to track down and fix.
Most of the events and stories in Darklands were inspired mythology and history of Germany between the Rhine and Elbe - "western" Germany. The more eastern themes of persistant pagan religions and rituals, the unique place and culture of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), and the rich, sophisticated Germany of the upper Danube (Bavaria and Austria) into the northern slopes of the Alps, were barely touched. There were and are huge opportunities for new stories. The Hussities, as you point out, are just one of them.
The internal project management failures of this game taught me the difference between big dreams and competently leading a group of people to achieve something. It wasn't just my personal problem. The 1980s and 90s were the "dark ages" for software projects - where everything always seemed to be late and over budget. Thinking back to 1998-1999, when I used the advice of a NASA project manager to build a different game, at a different company, things only worked marginally better.
The first definitive guide to project management (from the accreditation organization PMI) didn't appear until 2000 ("A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge" 2nd Edition), and the seminal book on Scrum ("Agile Software Development with Scrum" by Schwaber & Beedle) appeared in 2001. This was a full decade after Darklands was created. The Seminal GDC talks by Clinton Keith didn't occur until 2005 or 2006. One of my big efforts from about 2004 was to learn how to properly lead game software projects. I am a stronger believer in PMI's principles and Scrum methodology.
Big game design dreams are worthless if you can't execute them in a competent fashion. It still amazes me how many game companies lack rudimentary skills in that field. Game developers still dream impossible dreams, grossly over-promise and are shocked to discover they can't deliver. Darklands was one of those fortunate few "big dream" games that managed to stagger out the door into the hands of the public.