Game 228: Moraff's World (1991)

    

Moraff's World

United States

Moraffware (developer and publisher)

Released as shareware 1991 for DOS; updated several times over the next few years

Date Started: 4 September 2016
Date Ended: 6 September 2016

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: 24

Ranking at Time of Posting: 91/227 (40%)

Again, we come to the age-old question of whether it's worth spending any significant amount of time on a game that has no story or objective other than to "become more powerful and survive." We faced it with most of the PLATO games, with Telengard, with the Empire series, with some of the Quest variants, and with Alternate Reality: The City. Naturally, I'm going to have a different perspective than a 15-year-old player in 1990. That 15-year-old player doesn't have a list of 1,000 games he's trying to complete. Moraff's World might be the only game he'll buy all year. Because it's new, he might have friends who also buy the game, and they can compete with each other to see who gets the highest character level. Certain graphical elements will seem new and exciting to him; every new monster portrait is its own reward. And, of course, this 15-year-old has not yet learned how fundamentally precious time is. When school breaks in June, the summer that stretches before him seems like an eternity.

I, of course, am the opposite of all of these things. And writing from my own perspective, I can only see Moraff's World as an somewhat pointless, ugly dungeon crawler. It boasts the size and length of Fate: Gates of Dawn but with no story or quest, while offering very little in mechanics that we haven't seen in 100 other first-person games. Even in 1991, I can't imagine giving priority to this game over the Gold Box titles or Might & Magic III unless I just didn't know about them.
    

The in-game documentation admits that there's no real "point."

    
Moraff's World is an update of 1988's Moraff's Revenge, which I played more than 5 years ago. Back then, I noted that Steve Moraff's company, Software Diversions, was still selling CDs for the entire Moraff series. Since then, they seem to have taken down the RPGs and are only selling the mahjong variants. The unregistered version I downloaded might be capped at a certain number of levels, but it was enough for me to get a sense of the game.

The extensive in-game documentation boasts that it contains 5 continents, multiple dungeons per continent, and 200 enormous levels per dungeon. Each dungeon has a town level on the top with multiple ladders down, creating mazes that are both vertical and horizontal. But all this size and space is mostly wasted. No encounters occur at fixed locations, so actually "exploring" the dungeons--not to mention the wilderness and continents--makes no more sense than just popping up and down ladders and letting the monsters come to you.
   

Frequent chutes screw up your attempts to explore systematically.

   
You play a single character, chosen from 8 races--human, elf, dwarf, hobbit, gnome, ogre, sprite, and imp--each with his own averages among six attributes: strength, constitution, intuition, dexterity, wisdom, and luck. The game makes random rolls around these averages and also randomly rolls sex, age, height, and weight, though you can modify these settings manually.
    

Creating a new character.

    
There is some originality in the 7 classes: fighter, worshipper, monk, wizard, priest, sage, and mage. The names are a bit weird. Fighters are what you expect, and wizards and worshippers are the "pure" versions of arcane and divine spellcasters, respectively. "Priests" are kind of fighter/worshippers--more like paladins in the typical RPG. Similarly, "mages" are more like fighter/wizards. Monks can't have any inventory, but they come with all the game's spells already memorized (the rest of the classes have to find them, one-by-one, after successful combats), and they excel at unarmed attacks. I tried a monk for a while and they really do work quite well.

Also original to the game is the "sage" class, which the game tags as "poor fighter, poor spell caster. Good for exploring without being noticed. Gains experience just for exploring." This would be a cool mechanic if actually implemented--and if there was anything to do in the game other than fight monsters--but it's either broken or I couldn't figure it out. In 30-40 minutes of playing a sage (who wasn't notably worse at combat than other characters, despite the warning), he didn't seem to gain any experience "just for exploring."
   

Exploring the town level.

     
The game recommends an ogre fighter for first-time players but I went with an elf mage for my main character. I ultimately tried 5 different race/class combinations, and overall the game was pretty easy no matter what. The manual warns of all kinds of difficulty and danger, but that really only seems to apply if you're stupid and try to descend too many levels too quickly. Staying on a dungeon level at or lower then your character is eminently survivable. You level up and find treasure and spells quite fast. The only trouble I had was when some monster gave me a disease and I had to suffer it--losing 2 constitution points in the process--while I gathered enough money to pay a healer to cure it.

The main game window is also very original (though we also saw it in Moraff's Revenge). I'm going to stop short of calling it "good." It takes some getting used to. At all times, you see the views in all four cardinal directions. It took me a while to realize that these views are literally north, south, east, and west--not forward, backward, right, and left. Similarly, when you move using the cursors, you're traveling in one of those cardinal directions, not moving forward, backwards, or turning. Basically, if you want to make sure you can see where you're going, you have to match the arrow key you're about to press to the relevant view.
   

A typical Moraff window. The four views show north, east, west, and south I'm fighting a dwarf to my west. The bottom right and left panels show character stats, the upper-right shows some common commands, and the upper-left is reserved for messages.

   
I remain woefully ignorant about how game graphics are written, so I'm deferring to the expertise of other sites when I tell you that the graphics in each window are rendered in layers using the "painter's algorithm." What this means functionally is that there's a notable pause as you move and the game has to re-render each view, one window at a time. This pause is here even on a modern system with the CPU cycles cranked up to 10 times the speed of an era-accurate machine. Slowed to a speed more representative of 1991, it takes about 8-10 seconds for the graphics to render in between steps, which would have been a dealbreaker. Fortunately, the game lets you switch to quicker, more primitive graphics modes, but even they aren't exactly "fast."
  

These colors are uglier, but they render faster.

   
I do like the interface, which allows you to click on commands and on the window panes to move in those directions, or to do everything by the keyboard, with almost every letter mapped to a command. The auto-map, still rare in 1991, is stable and detailed. You can do neat things like switch to a full-screen automap or switch to a full-screen view of one of the directions. The in-game documentation is brief but complete.

I zoom in to look more closely in one direction.

The full-screen map for one of the levels. The level potentially takes up all of the space on this screen.

   
The town level of the dungeon contains banks, shops, temples, and inns, all represented on the auto-map by different colors and represented on the screen by ladders (weirdly, you go "up" to enter shops). As you start, you might have enough money for a club or stick, but basically you just want to head right to the lower levels and start killing things with your hands. The game explicitly tells you the number of experience points you need for the next set of levels, as well as the number of experience points the current monster on the screen will deliver. When you gain enough, you return to the town, sleep at the inn, and level up, gaining some extra hit points, spell points, and attribute boosts in the process.
  

Visiting the equipment shop.

   
The dungeon levels are sprawling and enormous, with sections accessible from different ladders not necessarily interconnected. But there's very little point to "exploring," since your primary mission is just to find monsters to kill, loot, and level up. These monsters are mostly drawn from the D&D manual: orcs, ogres, werewolves, apes, kobolds, etc., although you occasionally fight weird things like colored balls that always seem to have far more hit points than their experience points are worth. Combat actions are basically just fight, cast a spell, use an item, or try to run by moving to a blank square. I found that the 30-40 hit points given to a Level 0 character were more than enough to keep me alive on the first two dungeon levels for around 10 combats.
   

As I fight an orc, I check out how much experience I need for the next level (11). The orc has 17 hit points left and will give me 42 experience points.

   
Leveling is pretty rapid. At least for the first 13 levels (as far as I played), you spend more time trying to get out of the dungeon when it's time to level up than you do fighting monsters to achieve those levels in the first place. Finding your way back to the surface is complicated by the maze-like nature of the ladders as well as frequent "chutes" that drop you back down a level or two.

Killing foes occasionally rewards you with a new spell, a special item like a Stone of Teleportation or a (sigh) Holy Hand Grenade, a healing potion (which you have to drink immediately), or one of several types of treasure. The treasure system is a bit needlessly complex, consisting of copper, silver, ivory, gold, platinum, and jewel "stones," all of which you convert at banks into "jewel pieces" before buying anything. Lower-value stones encumber you quickly, so the game offers shortcuts, when you're deciding whether to take the treasure, to only grab the higher-value items.
   

I learn the "Minor Explosion" spell after killing an ogre.

   
You spend only a little of this money on weapons and armor. I found that most of my expenditures went to the temple, to restore hit points without having to cast a dozen minor healing spells, to cure diseases or poison, or to purchase "Raise Dead Contracts" which will automatically return you to the surface if you die. You start the game with one of these already in place. This is particularly important because the game saves constantly as you move about, and death is permanent unless you periodically back up the saved game files.

The spell system is fairly original. Whether you're skilled in wizard or priest magic, you have three types of spells: those that you can cast immediately in battle ("Sleep," "Lightning," "Minor Protection," "Magic Missile"), those that take 3 minutes to cast, so you have to do it outside of battle ("Detect Level," "Cure," "Detect Position"), and those "permanent" spells that take a month to cast, so you can only cast them in town, but they allow you to do things like create magic wands and scrolls and add permanent enchantments to weapons--things that you assume someone must be able to do in the D&D universe, but never the player character.
   

Some of the "battle" spells. I have a lot more to find.

   
Other reviews note the persistent humor in the game, but really there isn't that much of it. Some of the manual instructions are funny, such as the frank admission that there's no point in going outside. If you select the option to rob the bank, the developer asks, "Come on! Do you really think I'd let you rob my own bank?" There's an option under "Use Item" to "win game," with sub-options to "win life," "become rich," "rule the world," and "live forever," all of which instruct you to "send one million zillion dollars" to a fictional address. Beyond that, there's not much obvious humor, but Moraff does pop up with tips frequently, reminding you that it's time to level up, suggesting that you purchase another resurrection contract, encouraging you to get healed if your hit points are low, and so forth.
   

As I explore, the game strongly recommends that I go buy another "Raise Dead Contract."

   
For the really dedicated player who does make it down dozens of dungeon levels, there are occasional trap doors that allow you to skip many levels at once. To use these, you have to find a "level drainer" and kill it to get its key. I didn't go anywhere near that far.

I said earlier that there are no special encounters in the dungeon, but this isn't quite true. Every 4 levels or so is some special "shadow" creature. I fought a "shadow dragonfly" on Level 4 and a "shadow mini-dragon" on Level 8. Both took a while to find, though the game gives you hints as to the direction you should go when you're in their areas. Both rewarded me with a special item: "body armor" that, independently of my regular armor, increased my armor class by 9 points; and a magic gauntlet that increased my attack accuracy and damage. A note told me to expect the "shadow major dragon" on Level 12.

Alerting me to the presence of a special monster on Level 4.

My reward after killing the "shadow mini-dragon" on Level 8.

   
The outdoor area is just baffling. The documentation boasts of "impressive fractal-based landscapes," but I honestly have no idea what the graphics are trying to depict. Trying to walk across the landscape does not move you reliably or consistently in the direction that you push. When I reached a body of water that looked like a small pond, text informed me that I would need 10,001 jewel pieces for a boat, or at least 3-4 times what I had at my best moment in the game. Since the text promised simply identical dungeons on other continents, it didn't seem worth taking the time.
   

No idea what's going on here.

    
In a GIMLET, Moraff's World earns:

• 0 points for the game world. Sorry, but you don't even get a name for the place or the barest excuse for why you're there and what you're doing.

• 4 points for character creation and development. As noted, the game does some original things with classes, and leveling is reasonably quick and rewarding. If only there were more role-playing options tied to the character races and classes.

   

My final retired character.

   

• 0 points for NPC interaction. There are no NPCs in the game. No, the developer giving hints doesn't count.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The foes are standard fantasy stock, albeit with the types of strengths, weaknesses, and special attacks you find in similar RPGs. The only "encounters" are with the special monsters every 4 levels.

• 4 points for magic and combat. Combat is nothing special, but there is some promise to the magic system and the large number and variety of spells.

   

Blasting a "kobald" with a "Zap" spell.

   

• 3 points for equipment. There aren't that many weapon and armor types, or equipment slots, but there are some fun special items.

    

Finding a unique equipment item.

    

• 4 point for the economy. Though "needlessly complex," monetary rewards are somewhat stingy, and there are always things to buy.

  

Some of the purchasing options in a temple.

   

• 0 points for no quests.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. No sound except an occasional beep. The graphics are often goofy, but they're serviceable overall. I don't care for the view windows, but the commands are easy to memorize. It deserves an extra point for interface innovations like zooming and the automap.

• 2 points for gameplay. I guess it's somewhat non-linear, but in a game with no quest, what's the point? Mildly replayable with different classes. It's fundamentally too easy, though.

That gives us a final score of 24, well below what I'd consider "recommended," and not much better than the 20 that I gave to Moraff's Revenge. There are some promising things here, but I wish Steve Moraff had realized that content is just as important as mechanics. It sounds like the third and final RPG in the triology--Moraff's Dungeons of the Unforgiven (1993)--does have a story and plot, so I look forward to trying it out in a couple of years.

I'll get back to Fate eventually, but when I see that the next game is only going to require one post, it's just too tempting. We'll see if that's the case with Elfhelm's Bane.