KQ1 and 3D positional narration...

[BagginsKQ]

I was looking back at the original KQ1 and I noticed something interesting about the 'look' command, and how it functions compared to later games in the series. Mainly this has to do with perspective based descriptions, that change depending on where Graham is standing in the room.

The 'look' command cannot be used by itself, it must be paired with another word, such as 'look room' (for a general description of the room the player is in), or more specific commands based on objects on the screen such as 'look lake'. Some descriptions in the game can only be seen if Graham is standing next to the object. For example on screens with more than one tree, there is a generic default description if you type "look tree", but if you are standing next a tree, there may be an alternate description, specific to the tree. Move to another tree, and you may get yet another description for the same command of 'look tree'. KQ1SCI remake took this further, offering many descriptions on screen, but to access some of them you had to 'right click on an object to look at it'. Another example in the original is being close to an object may solicite a different description, than being far away from it. For example being close or on top of the clover patch would offer a different description than standing away from it elsewhere on the screen. The game's different descriptions based on Graham's physical perspective on the screen offered more descriptions that could be read by simply typing out general look commands.

The positional descriptions such as "You can't see that from this location" remind me of Connor's 'tis beyond my reach', or the positional converations one could receive in KQ8 ("come closer lad" type comments).

In some cases, there are random generic descriptions for the same object. So you have to type, "look object" multiple times to see the various descriptions.

[gamingafter40]

I always found the positionality of the 3-D Adventure Games a bit annoying -- there were always times when we had to be "close enough" to something for the animation to work, whereas in the text days we could just type OPEN DOOR without having to place Sir Graham's feet in exactly the right spot.

But I'd completely missed that the descriptions actually varied as well! Maybe everyone realized this was A) potentially annoying/confusing to players and B) a lot of extra writing, and so changed to the "you can see everything in the room" model.