Fate: Gates of Dawn
A first-person RPG with a vast world and hundreds of NPCs.
Fate: Gates of Dawn, a first-person role-playing game from reLINE Software, hit the Amiga in 1991 and the Atari ST in 1992. Its enormous world takes hours to cross and months to finish, featuring an overworld with towns, wilderness, and over 200 islands, plus an underworld of nine dungeons.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- reLINE Software
- Released
- 1991: Amiga; 1992: Atari ST
- Genre
- Role-playing video game
- Modes
- Single-player
- Platforms
- Amiga, Atari ST
Facts from the source article.
Features
The game uses a first-person view and is known for its enormous world, where crossing from one side to the other takes hours and finishing the game can take months. The overworld has four towns, smaller villages, a wilderness divided by a mountain range, and over 200 islands. Below ground, nine dungeons each have up to seven levels. Players manage up to four parties, totaling 28 characters, and some quests require teamwork. Characters must be invited rather than created, and hundreds of NPCs have unique personalities and AI. There are 32 classes, 11 races, and over 200 spells and potions. A realistic day-night cycle and weather affect characters.
Background
Work on Fate: Gates of Dawn started in 1986. The manual mentioned a PC version, but the developer went bankrupt before it could come out. For the same reason, only a small number of original English copies were sold, yet pirated versions ended up everywhere. The creator has since allowed the game to be distributed as freeware, and it can be legally downloaded from places like RuneTek98's site and Mightandmagicboard.de. Those copies have the copy protection stripped out, but the password protection remains. Passwords are demanded at random points during play, not just at the start. Ignoring them or typing the wrong code doesn't crash the game; instead, it slowly makes the game worse until it becomes unplayable. So you still need a copy of the manual to get the right codes. The Amiga version has better audio and 32 colors, while the Atari ST version has 16. A strong compression algorithm squeezed the game onto just two 880-kilobyte floppy disks. The English release censored nudity that was present in the German version.
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