Introduction

Betrayal In Antara

So you might be thinking: Hang on, this sounds awfully similar to "Betrayal at Krondor," and you'd be right, it is! Intentionally! And made by many of the same people, too! See, Betrayal at Krondor sold poorly during its floppy launch, prompting Dynamix to sell the Midkemia license back to Feist and move on. But then when Betrayal got its CD launch, it sold well enough that they were suddenly nostalgic for making a game that made them money, so they straight up went: "what is the most Betrayal-esque game we can make, that feels really Betrayal-y, but uses an original license?"

And so we got Betrayal in Antara four years later, and oh how the world had moved on during that time. We'd progressed from the wilderlands of DOS to the civilization of... Windows 3.1? What the fuck? It absolutely makes this a huge mess to get running properly compared to BaK, every cutscene WILL crash the game unless set to an un-recordable resolution, but barring finding a solution to that, I believe all the cutscenes should be on YouTube for me to steal. Other improvements include something like 80% of the game's narration and dialogue now being voiced, which means I won't have to transcribe those parts! Instead you suckers are going to get stuck listening to it.

There's also the graphics and general interface...

Behold! Playing the game is no longer like piloting a tank. Now instead it's like piloting a tank with the hatch popped so you can enjoy the wind in your hair, because inexplicably the controls are now much jankier and prone to ignoring input, even during basic stuff like typing save game names. And, of course, you can always return the interface to classic BaK style if you want to...

Revealing that we're no longer stuck with developers and their acquaintances in random Ren Faire finery but instead actual art. It's... somewhat bland art, not filled with a lot of stylistic flourishes, but it's a lot easier to take seriously than Pug's fucking wig. The game world also looks more detailed and colourful but at the same time less crisp, everything about it looks kind of grimy and muddy. Still, it looks a lot more like a place than BaK did, and screenshots will be less infinitely repeating green corridors differentiated only by their amount of corpses lying around.

Interactivity

Another little complicating thing is that while Return to Krondor is almost completely linear, and Betrayal at Krondor is exhaustively documented even to an extent that I wouldn't have believed, no one gives a fuck about Betrayal in Antara. Even the best FAQ's are threadbare and read like someone scribbled them on a sticky note, and none of them ever really engage with the game mechanics or explain when it's worth your time to go off-roading so, uh, I guess we're on a journey of discovery here, folks. This also contributes to this probably being a less interactive playthrough since frankly I'll have almost no idea what the fuck I'm doing aside from barely-remembered tidbits from playing it when I was a kid where I seem to recall there were some absolutely busted spells you could whip out, so I can't really offer the thread many valuable choices to make since I have no idea what those choices are.

Spoiler Policy

lol as if any of you have ever played this fucking game and remember it well enough to spoil anything.

The Let's Play Archive

Betrayal in Antara

by PurpleXVI

Introduction

Table of Contents