Dragon Wars
A Bard's Tale successor that became its own game.
Dragon Wars is a fantasy role-playing video game developed by Rebecca Heineman and published by Interplay Productions in 1989, with distribution by Activision. It was originally conceived as Bard's Tale IV but was retitled due to Electronic Arts holding the rights to the Bard's Tale name. The game is notable for blending the Bard's Tale engine with design ideas from Wasteland.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Interplay Productions; Kemco (NES)
- Publisher
- Activision
- Designer
- Rebecca Heineman
- Released
- 1989 (NA)
- 1989 (EU)
- August 9, 1991 (JP)
- Genre
- Role-playing
- Modes
- Single-player
- Platforms
- Amiga
- Apple II
- Apple IIGS
- Commodore 64
- MS-DOS
- Famicom
- NEC PC-98
- X68000
Facts from the source article.
Development
During the initial design process for Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate, one of the designers compiled a list of enhancements and improvements. Those design improvements were realized in Dragon Wars, which essentially fused the Bard's Tale engine with the design philosophy pioneered in Wasteland. Until a month before release, the game was developed as Bard's Tale IV, but since Electronic Arts still held the rights to that title, a new name and setting were required. The setting drew partly from the Sumerian legends of Gilgamesh, and the chief villain was named Namtar. Because the game up to that point contained no dragons, the new title forced Heineman to add one. Interplay advertisements used the slogan "Bard's Tale Fans Rejoice!" above the game's name and highlighted the ability to import Bard's Tale characters. The designers considered Dragon Wars a better game than Bard's Tale III and indeed superior to any entry in the Bard's Tale series, but without the established title or Electronic Arts' marketing support, it did not sell as well. To deter piracy, the manual included numbered paragraphs; players received in-game messages such as "Read paragraph 23" and had to consult the printed material, making the game very difficult without it. A sequel, Dragon Wars 2, was in concept development around the mid-1990s but was cancelled due to the original's tepid sales and the decline in popularity of RPGs at the time.
Reception
Dragon Wars earned a perfect five-star rating from the Lessers in Dragon #152's "The Role of Computers" column in 1989. That same year, Scorpia praised it in Computer Gaming World, highlighting its tighter design, balanced combat, and careful plot as clear steps forward from the Bard's Tale series, calling it a CRPG well worth playing. In 1993, she described it as a good pick for players wanting more than a standard dungeon crawler. According to Heineman, the game sold well but struggled because it was a blobber and couldn't use the Bard's Tale name, though it eventually broke even. It later appeared in Interplay's 10 Year Anthology Classic Collection, released in 1993.
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