Majesty is a fantasy kingdom simulation game where players build, tax, and manage their kingdom, but the units control themselves.
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"Your highness, if our kingdom is to prosper, it needs more heroes."
In the infancy of my PC gaming experience, I was naturally drawn to the then-booming genre of Real-Time Strategy. Little me was a tyrant who wanted nothing more than to command little guys around and build bases forever and ever. Perhaps it was my way of going on a personal power trip. Do my bidding my make-believe armies of death! Do what I say, or it's off to the dungeon for yee! Bwahahahah.
However, this one in particular would give a bit of a shock to my system. What if? The units...did stuff on their own? Units....have feelings and their own agendas? Impossible, it's my kingdom and they do my bidding! Alas, in Majesty I could not command my heroes directly, instead I had to...ugh....offer a bounty or some sort to convince them to do what I wanted. The only control you have over these heroes is where their home is located. You could be nice and put it next to a pretty pond on the map, or have a nice morbid chuckle to yourself by throwing those Gnome Hovels next to the graveyard. As with every kind of hero unit, came a specialty or a likelihood to do whatever. Need the map explored? Build a Ranger's Guild. Need a crack squad of hitmen who always risk their necks for cheap? Get a ton of Rogues. Getting mauled by wild animals a lot? Get yourself some Cultists, and start exchanging hugs and kisses with their god Fervus.
There's a nice setup for everything.
Majesty itself found it's way into my heart very quickly with more of it's focus on kingdom management. No longer do I need to worry about rounding up troops with Starcraft's 12-unit limit per selection, I can just trust and hope my heroes will make the right decisions and serve my kingdom well. Sure, the Rogues will be assholes and loot some poor guy's gravestone as soon as it appeared after said person got split in two by a minotaur, and sometimes you'll just have friendly skeletons wandering all over town since you decided to ally with the Krypta worshipers, but hey, things will never be dull.
If there is absolutely one thing that made sure Majesty would make a lasting impression on me until the end of my days, it's the sheer force of character and presentation. Everything said by every hero, NPC and enemy unit is entrenched deep within my memory. Your trusted Royal Advisor Sean Connery who speaks to you at all times and in every mission introduction, and the absolutely wonderful music that ratchets from ever-so peaceful to epic and booming to go along with the growth of my kingdom.
"Your majesty, a new building is complete!!"
"A new hero has arrived at the Embassy my liege!"
"Majesty! A building has been upgraded!!"
"A new hero has arrived at the Embassy my liege!"
"Keep it comin'." ~ Rogue badass after hitting level ten
I love it. Things are constantly happening, especially once I put the game at Super Hard mode speed.
It feels like once every month I find myself coming back to Majesty. As if I must come back to my kingdom and set forth to adventure once more with my heroes. After all, what is a queen without a queendom? It's a comforting return home. Whether it's to pass thirty minutes of time or to put my mind at ease after a bad day at work, I'll always be up to build up another happy and prosperous city along the mountainside...next to some dragon nests with....wandering vampires....It's gonna be one of those days.
A perfect re-release was given to this by Paradox many moons ago, and was no joke probably one of the first games I ever purchased on my Steam account. The only way you should re-release your old PC games is just upping the resolution, optimizing it for modern operating systems, and make it mod friendly. That's all ya gotta do, thank you so much Paradox for keeping my childhood accessible for a low sale cost of 1.99.
Forevermore, the ruler of my heart.
Hammers the shift and comma/quote keys to make the cartoon banana peel sound effect go off on the graveyard
Never gets old.
In the infancy of my PC gaming experience, I was naturally drawn to the then-booming genre of Real-Time Strategy. Little me was a tyrant who wanted nothing more than to command little guys around and build bases forever and ever. Perhaps it was my way of going on a personal power trip. Do my bidding my make-believe armies of death! Do what I say, or it's off to the dungeon for yee! Bwahahahah.
However, this one in particular would give a bit of a shock to my system. What if? The units...did stuff on their own? Units....have feelings and their own agendas? Impossible, it's my kingdom and they do my bidding! Alas, in Majesty I could not command my heroes directly, instead I had to...ugh....offer a bounty or some sort to convince them to do what I wanted. The only control you have over these heroes is where their home is located. You could be nice and put it next to a pretty pond on the map, or have a nice morbid chuckle to yourself by throwing those Gnome Hovels next to the graveyard. As with every kind of hero unit, came a specialty or a likelihood to do whatever. Need the map explored? Build a Ranger's Guild. Need a crack squad of hitmen who always risk their necks for cheap? Get a ton of Rogues. Getting mauled by wild animals a lot? Get yourself some Cultists, and start exchanging hugs and kisses with their god Fervus.
There's a nice setup for everything.
Majesty itself found it's way into my heart very quickly with more of it's focus on kingdom management. No longer do I need to worry about rounding up troops with Starcraft's 12-unit limit per selection, I can just trust and hope my heroes will make the right decisions and serve my kingdom well. Sure, the Rogues will be assholes and loot some poor guy's gravestone as soon as it appeared after said person got split in two by a minotaur, and sometimes you'll just have friendly skeletons wandering all over town since you decided to ally with the Krypta worshipers, but hey, things will never be dull.
If there is absolutely one thing that made sure Majesty would make a lasting impression on me until the end of my days, it's the sheer force of character and presentation. Everything said by every hero, NPC and enemy unit is entrenched deep within my memory. Your trusted Royal Advisor Sean Connery who speaks to you at all times and in every mission introduction, and the absolutely wonderful music that ratchets from ever-so peaceful to epic and booming to go along with the growth of my kingdom.
"Your majesty, a new building is complete!!"
"A new hero has arrived at the Embassy my liege!"
"Majesty! A building has been upgraded!!"
"A new hero has arrived at the Embassy my liege!"
"Keep it comin'." ~ Rogue badass after hitting level ten
I love it. Things are constantly happening, especially once I put the game at Super Hard mode speed.
It feels like once every month I find myself coming back to Majesty. As if I must come back to my kingdom and set forth to adventure once more with my heroes. After all, what is a queen without a queendom? It's a comforting return home. Whether it's to pass thirty minutes of time or to put my mind at ease after a bad day at work, I'll always be up to build up another happy and prosperous city along the mountainside...next to some dragon nests with....wandering vampires....It's gonna be one of those days.
A perfect re-release was given to this by Paradox many moons ago, and was no joke probably one of the first games I ever purchased on my Steam account. The only way you should re-release your old PC games is just upping the resolution, optimizing it for modern operating systems, and make it mod friendly. That's all ya gotta do, thank you so much Paradox for keeping my childhood accessible for a low sale cost of 1.99.
Forevermore, the ruler of my heart.
Hammers the shift and comma/quote keys to make the cartoon banana peel sound effect go off on the graveyard
Never gets old.
Played as part of CONQUERING MY CHILDHOOD
Today marks the 23rd birthday of Majesty, a single drop in the flooded sea of the early RTS market; a sea that would eventually dry out for any game not named Age of Empires or StarCraft. This era of games is incredibly intriguing to me as someone who grew up playing RTSes, but these weird off-brand ones in particular. Those that come to mind include Battle Realms, Impossible Creatures, and, of course, Majesty.
Majesty departs from typical RTS mechanics, and in doing so ends up becoming part RTS, part city-builder, part god-game and part Peter Molyneux fever dream. In lieu of typical RTS mechanics, Majesty does not give you direct control over your units; instead, it tasks you with building a kingdom that functions fairly autonomously. Your only resource is gold, and building a strong economy involves balancing the creation of a kingdom that produces enough taxable income with building enough defenses to where your kingdom doesn't crumble to the slightest ratman invasion. Marketplaces and Trading Posts bring in passive income, but your heroes can provide a boost by spending their hard-plundered gold on gear and consumables, if you give them the means to do so.
These heroes replace the typical units you'd find in most other RTSes, and act more as DnD heroes than foot soldiers. Each type of hero not only has their own set of stats and skills, but their own behaviours as well. Rangers spend their free times exploring the map, Cultists run around charming beasts and planting poison mushrooms, Warriors of Discord slowly and aimlessly wander around the map, attacking pretty much everything they see. They also react differently to bounties - gold rewards you can put on the map or on enemies to actually get your heroes to do what you want. The most notable example is how Rogues will chase after much smaller bounties than any other heroes, but are also some of the first to run away if they see it as remotely dangerous. It's all really sophisticated!
The game doesn't have a straightforward structured campaign, instead it gives you a world map with a bunch of individual missions on it. Each mission gets to explore a different, weird idea. It's not all about making a strong band of heroes and going out and killing all the baddies. I've played tower defense missions, missions about earning enough money in a set time, even one where I had to gamble in order to beat it. Sometimes the weirdness can feel a little gimmicky, but that's much preferred to the alternative - falling into the RTS campaign curse where you're just doing the same thing over and over and it gets boring. Majesty manages to avoid that!
This is all backed by some of my favourite presentation of any game from around this time. From an audio-visual perspective it's very similar to Age of Empires 2, with these 2D isometric graphics that aged really well backed by a soundtrack that has no reason being as good as it is. Seriously, just listen to this! But it also has some of the best voice acting I've ever heard?? It's all incredibly hammy and over the top but not in a "so bad it's good" way that you might expect from a 2000s computer game. It's just good!
This game really surprised me with how sophisticated and engaging it is, especially considering its premise of "RTS but you can't actually control anything". A must-play for anyone into these weird old RTSes, or anyone interested in more strange and inspired games as a whole.
Today marks the 23rd birthday of Majesty, a single drop in the flooded sea of the early RTS market; a sea that would eventually dry out for any game not named Age of Empires or StarCraft. This era of games is incredibly intriguing to me as someone who grew up playing RTSes, but these weird off-brand ones in particular. Those that come to mind include Battle Realms, Impossible Creatures, and, of course, Majesty.
Majesty departs from typical RTS mechanics, and in doing so ends up becoming part RTS, part city-builder, part god-game and part Peter Molyneux fever dream. In lieu of typical RTS mechanics, Majesty does not give you direct control over your units; instead, it tasks you with building a kingdom that functions fairly autonomously. Your only resource is gold, and building a strong economy involves balancing the creation of a kingdom that produces enough taxable income with building enough defenses to where your kingdom doesn't crumble to the slightest ratman invasion. Marketplaces and Trading Posts bring in passive income, but your heroes can provide a boost by spending their hard-plundered gold on gear and consumables, if you give them the means to do so.
These heroes replace the typical units you'd find in most other RTSes, and act more as DnD heroes than foot soldiers. Each type of hero not only has their own set of stats and skills, but their own behaviours as well. Rangers spend their free times exploring the map, Cultists run around charming beasts and planting poison mushrooms, Warriors of Discord slowly and aimlessly wander around the map, attacking pretty much everything they see. They also react differently to bounties - gold rewards you can put on the map or on enemies to actually get your heroes to do what you want. The most notable example is how Rogues will chase after much smaller bounties than any other heroes, but are also some of the first to run away if they see it as remotely dangerous. It's all really sophisticated!
The game doesn't have a straightforward structured campaign, instead it gives you a world map with a bunch of individual missions on it. Each mission gets to explore a different, weird idea. It's not all about making a strong band of heroes and going out and killing all the baddies. I've played tower defense missions, missions about earning enough money in a set time, even one where I had to gamble in order to beat it. Sometimes the weirdness can feel a little gimmicky, but that's much preferred to the alternative - falling into the RTS campaign curse where you're just doing the same thing over and over and it gets boring. Majesty manages to avoid that!
This is all backed by some of my favourite presentation of any game from around this time. From an audio-visual perspective it's very similar to Age of Empires 2, with these 2D isometric graphics that aged really well backed by a soundtrack that has no reason being as good as it is. Seriously, just listen to this! But it also has some of the best voice acting I've ever heard?? It's all incredibly hammy and over the top but not in a "so bad it's good" way that you might expect from a 2000s computer game. It's just good!
This game really surprised me with how sophisticated and engaging it is, especially considering its premise of "RTS but you can't actually control anything". A must-play for anyone into these weird old RTSes, or anyone interested in more strange and inspired games as a whole.