Darklands

Darklands
Developer: MicroProse Publisher: MicroProse Platform: DOS Released internationally: 1992 This game has a hidden developer message. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused text. This game has revisional differences. This game has anti-piracy features. This game has a prerelease article

To do: War texts. Version differences. More unused images and animations, if any.

Darklands is a sandbox RPG for MS-DOS. It is set in 15th-Century Germany, with every legend and superstiton being true. Alchemists sell philosopher's stones and create gold, kobolds and dwarves infest mines, a horned god hunts schrats and holtzfraus, witches steal unbaptized babies, dragons ravage the countryside, and demon worshippers plot something sinister.

The game was one of the earliest examples of "real time with pause" combat system later made famous by the Infinity Engine games — the player gives orders that are then clumsily executed by the AI in a real time environment with internal turn counter. Also it had one of the first computer-exclusive RPG mechanics not burdened with limitations of pen-and-paper games — half a decade before Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

Sub-Page

Prerelease Info

Texts

To do: The file is huge. There's gotta be more.

MSGFILES is an uncompressed "catalog" archive with the majority of in-game texts (about 1 megabyte). The encoding for extended Latin characters doesn't match any standards, for example, "ä" has the code 1fH ("▼"), "ö" has the code 7bH ("{"), "ü" has the code 7cH ("|").

This section lists the texts not intended to be seen by player in the last released version.

Sub-Pages

The game designer Arnold Hendrick mentioned in interviews disabling several half-finished buggy subplots due to time constraints. Looks like a lot of text was left from large plots about wars between German states and a city revolt.

Rumours Notices and Orders

Revolution Storyline

City Politics

War

Other Texts

Copy Protection

Copy protection for this game varies. Some versions let you enter a city, only to hit you with a copy protection screen, quizzing you on alchemical symbols found in the manual, when you attempt to leave.

Others use a day counter, displaying the quiz after a number of in-game days elapsed.

These measures still exist in digital versions, like those on GOG and Steam.

Unused Graphics

In at least one interview, the chief designer, Arnold Hendrick, states that they tried not to remove any unused content from the game, out of fear it was accessed by still-used code. Instead, they opted to recycle and reuse cut content, as not to waste space.

Hall of Fame Leftovers

The manual states that the game has a hall of fame, but README.TXT states it does not. Here are some leftovers from when it did.

There is an unused 320x200 image PICS\FAME.PIC, similar in style to the title screen:

The purple color looks out of place, but this is the palette inside the FAME.PIC file. It may have been a glitch or it may have been intended for some visual effect like a palette swap animation. PICS\STARTSCR.PIC has similar purple lines, but the game displays it with a different palette, rendering them black.

PICS\STARTSCR.PIC is used for the main menu. It has 3 buttons: "Quickstart", "Create a New World" and "The Story Continues". The pressed state of those buttons is in files PICS\BUTTON1.PIC, PICS\BUTTON2.PIC and PICS\BUTTON4.PIC. But there's also unused PICS\BUTTON4.PIC:

This PIC file has no palette. The uploaded PNG uses the palette from STARTSCR.PIC, which isn't exactly how the game displays the starting screen.

To do: Try experimenting with other palettes.

Wilderness Tiles Legend

The tiles for wilderness are stored in PICS\MAPICONS.PIC and PICS\MAPICON2.PIC. However, there's some text outside the displayed tiles: