July 2007 Archives

In 2001, Cyberlore Studios released Majesty: The Northern Expansion, obviously an expansion to my favorite game of all time, 2000's Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. The expansion addressed one of my major problems with the game: you had to manually attract heroes to your buildings. With the expansion, there's a new building, called the Embassy, where you can turn on automatic hero attraction. As long as you have the requisite amount of gold (around a thousand), the embassy will automatically attract heroes. As a bonus, the heroes are higher level (around three). The expansion also brought new (to me, much harder) scenarios, new player-castable spells and new monsters.

I enjoyed playing a random map until it was reasonably safe, then leaving the game to run overnight. With the expansion, I was able to make sure that my buildings stayed stocked with heroes to take care of the monsters wandering in from the edges of the screen.

The main reason for this post, besides that I got to talk more about Majesty is to share the news that Paradox Interactive bought the rights to Majesty and plan on releasing games using that IP, or so they say. All I can say is that they better. And soon. Majesty's gameplay was so unique that there are still people trying to play it while the rest of us just pine for it.

When the Gold Edition (including the base game and the expansion) came out in 2003, I bought it, even though I already owned everything included in it. A friend of mine who was new to Majesty bought it at my urging and we played cooperatively through every scenario while talking on the phone. Even though I've played a lot of multiplayer computer games, to this day, that was my best "online" gaming experience.

As before, I recommend downloading and playing the free Majesty demo from Majesty's site before buying the Gold Edition, because it may not run well (or at all) on your modern computer.