Suppose you’re among a group of players who attack and kill a band of marauding lions. But on order to encourage people to work together, you can opt to ‘share’ with others. For your character to grow in power (there are three types of character energy - health, spirit, and balance), you need to acquire experience points, which you get for killing monsters and so on.
This is partly due to other players' inherent good nature, and partly to the co-operation model on which Clan Lord is built. But here’s the strange thing: people are falling over themselves to help. As a newbie, you stick out like a sore thumb in your plain, tan clothing. Interactivity is the key to surviving in Clan Lord. But here even a few rats can do you in, so what you really need are some friends. To do this, you will, of course, need money, and the easiest way to do this is to kill some animals and sell their skins. Having selected your race (Human, Sylvan and so on) and colour you then step out into the village of Puddleby (which is on the Lok Groton island chain, where, so the plot goes, you’ve been exiled for your crimes), where you must survive with no money and just your trusty wooden club for protection. If you don’t walk away, then this is equivalent to selecting that choice, or accepting that service (for which money will be taken from your purse). Those that offer a service or choice will tell you what’s on offer. This is done using the standard Clan Lord trick of ‘bumping’ - walking up to another character, or in this case NPC, and bumping into them.
Clan lord register skin#
Your character starts in a series of rooms where you can choose your hair and skin colour and race. You then connect to the Clan Lord server. You can then fire up your copy of Clan Lord and create a character, which, unlike other RPG-type games, just means choose a name (hint: keep it short). Having installed Clan Lord from your CD (or downloaded the 25Mb file), you need to open your Web browser and register. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Clan Lord is persistent (see sidebar, left). This is the AOL factor that made Steve Case a rich man - the easiest way to give a computer game depth is to make the opponents human.
In fact, you can only play it online - there’s no standalone/single-player mode. Second, it’s online - that is, you interact with other human beings as well as the non-player characters (NPCs). There’s more than a touch of MacMoria to Clan Lord, but to say it was just hack and slash would be unfair. First, if you’ve ever played, say, Rogue, Hack or MacMoria, you’ll know that role-playing games of the hack-and-slash-the-horrible-monsters-in-a-dungeon kind can be quite addictive even with just ASCII graphics. The reasons it’s so addictive are three-fold. There’s a command-line interface for typing in arcane commands (well, actually, two-word phrases that are neither arcane nor difficult to learn) and to chat with other users (normal text appears in speech or thought bubbles above players' heads), and palettes for character and inventory lists. There’s a very simple 2D interface with cutesy 1980s-style colour icons you move around by clicking and dragging the mouse. At first sight you might wonder what all the fuss is about. The word addictive doesn’t really do Clan Lord justice - not unless you add at least adjectives like horribly, scarily, productivity-haltingly.