Quest for Glory Series Appreciation

(This is another of my articles from before 2010 that I thought needed a significant rework in order to post here, but I never did that. Now in June 2026 I decided to post it largely unedited from the original. Hopefully this does an at least okay job of representing one of my nostalgic favorite series.)

There was a thread that was spent some time discussing this series recently (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=274725), so I decided to finish my Quest for Glory Series Appreciation thread I started a few months ago. I think it was worth it.

Sierra’s Quest for Glory series is one of the greatest RPG serieses of all time. The series was developed by Sierra and designed by Corey and Lori Cole. The series’ basic concept was to mix a classic Sierra adventure game with a somewhat action-styled RPG. The first four games games all run on heavily modified standard Sierra interpreter engines, while the fifth game has its own engine. As a result, the games have plenty of Sierra adventure game style inventory puzzles, long conversations with a variety of characters with whom you have a great variety of things to talk about, and other traditional adventure game elements, as well as fighting enemies, using magic, building up your stats, equipping weapons and armor, checking the time, eating food, sleeping at night, and more. This mixture of RPG and adventure game elements makes the games unique and interesting. The series’ uniqueness goes beyond that, however, as that list suggests. You also can import your hero from one game to the next, as when you finish one of the first four Quest for Glory games, the game offers to make a special ‘finished save’ that you can then import into the next game in the series. This way you can truly take your hero through his whole adventure. As much as it was inspired by other games, the Quest for Glory series is unlike any other.

There are five Quest for Glory games, though there are two versions of the first title. Originally there were only going to be four games, but as they wanted to extend the series, after Trial By Fire a new chapter was added in the middle, Wages of War.

Quest for Glory: So You Want To Be A Hero (DOS EGA) – 1989 (aka Hero’s Quest: So You Want To Be A Hero), text-box command input.

Quest for Glory II: Trial By Fire (DOS EGA) – 1990, text-box command input.

Quest for Glory: So You Want To Be A Hero (DOS VGA) – 1992, remake with better graphics and a fully graphical interface.

Quest for Glory III: Wages of War (DOS VGA) – 1992, same interface as QFGI VGA.

Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness (DOS & Win3.1 VGA) – 1993 on floppy disk, 1994 on CD, same interface as the previous two games.

Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire (Win9x) – 1998, has new game engine, 3d character models with drawn backgrounds, and more.

Settings: The settings of the games are unique and varied. Each game is set in one specific area that you stay in. You do not travel the world each time and save it over and over from various random ancient evils bent on destroying the world. Instead, the stories involve more traditional fantasy and fairy-tale themes, twisted with the Coles’ unique sense of humor.

The first game, Quest for Glory: So You Want To Be A Hero, is set in a small German town and its surrounding forest. Baba Yaga, the old fairy tale villain, also makes an appearance. QFGII: Trial by Fire is set in the Arabian desert (inhabited by cat people as well as by humans), focusing on two cities (and their ancient rivalry) and the desert between them. In QFGIII: Wages of War, the hero travels to an African-style location, starting in a city (run by intelligent lion-people) and then moving to the savannah and then lastly the jungle. QFGIV: Shadows of Darkness is set in an Eastern European-themed location, and returns to the original game’s style of focusing exclusively on one small town and the forests surrounding it. Fitting with its more serious, horror-style theme, you meet vampires and other undead. QFGV: Dragon Fire, the final game, has a Greek Islands setting, so characters from Greek myth make an appearance. There is a main island with a central city and some other islands around it that you also visit. Many characters from every game in the series return here, to make an appearance at the end of the adventure. In all of the titles, the various influences that helped shape the series, from traditional fairy tales to classic RPG elements, the occasional anachronism, and more, somehow all fit in together perfectly. In each place you help the people of the region in question and become a hero of that land. The focus of each quest is just on the problems of that area, though. There are also major themes tying the games all together, however. These vary from evil forces that tie some games together in overarching plots that take several games to unravel to recurring characters both good and evil. Every title can be played, and enjoyed, on its own, thanks to the largely independent stories each game tells, but anyone who follows the series will quickly see that the games are also closely tied together. Overall, this design works very well, allowing for both a series of interesting stories in varied places and a continuing story of the adventures of the hero and his various friends and opponents. This is a better design than your average JRPG, where you travel to every country in the world for two hours each in your quest to save the world from whatever the new ultimate evil is. I’m perfectly happy just saving one nation at a time… 🙂 This design allows you to get to know the characters in each area better, and through that, you care for them more and are likely more motivated to want to save them than in your average “tour the world in twenty days” RPG. Every character is interesting and unique, and it shows in character designs, art, and speech. This greatly helps with your immersion into the world, and keeps you interested in meeting all of the other characters you will run across in the future in the series. But this is better suited for the later story section.

Gameplay: Initially, you pick your class, Warrior, Magic-User, or Thief, and then set your stats. Later in the series there is a fourth class you can switch to if you do certain quests, the Paladin, if you do specific quests (enough good deeds) in certain games and then choose to change class. You can never create a Paladin naturally from the start screen; instead, it must be imported from a previous game. Classes are truly different, and your choice, as well as which additional skills you have, will greatly affect many aspects of the games, from how often you fight to how you solve the puzzles to class-specific things such as the Thieves’ Guild or Mages’ Game. Instead of having a traditional levelling system, the Quest for Glory series uses skill stats. There are many skills, each with its own stat, in categories including strength, throwing, climbing, magic power, dodging, parry, and many more. You have a limited number of points to add to the starting defaults, and these settings are vitally important because you can only improve stats that you start with points in. Any stat that you put a starting value into (in QFG1, for instance, it takes 15 points to add the default minimum 5 to a skill that the class you chose starts with zero in) you can improve with effort, but ones that are zero cannot be improved. Many skills overlap, so you only need one — so magic can often replace throwing or climbing, parry, dodge, and block are somewhat mutually exclusive, etc. This allows you to design your character the way you want. The real key to the system, though, is that skills improve with use. Run around more to improve your running skill. Sneak around to improve stealth. Fight things to improve strength. Try to climb a tree to improve climbing. As you do things, your skills slowly increase silently in the background. This does mean that at times you will have to repeatedly attempt something (repeatedly trying to climb a tree until your skill in climbing is good enough to do it reliably, for instance), but that’s not so bad. It doesn’t take long for skills to go up, and because they go up steadily instead of just jumping hugely at random points as they would with a level system, it’s rewarding.

The only major restriction in character creation is graphical: the only character you can play, in any of the five games, is the default one, a blond young European-looking man who is a recent graduate of the Famous Adventurer’s Correspondence School and who wants to be a hero. You name him, as there is no default name (though in strategy guide screenshots and such he is called Devon Aidendale, that isn’t his official name, just the name they used there.), but there aren’t alternate playable characters. This is kind of too bad, but everything else more than makes up for it. It’s also worth noting here that the original design for QFG5 had two other playable characters, but having to rush the game to finish it in time for release, and then the closure of the studio and cancellation of the expansion pack, left them to only be playable in a in a pre-release demo, not in the final game.

Within each game, the majority of the time you spend your time exploring, wandering around from place to place, picking up items, talking with people (always making sure to ask everything you can!), and solving puzzles of both the dialog and inventory object kinds. You don’t need to do everything in order to complete each game; instead, only a few basic quests are required, while many other things are optional. While adventuring in the wilderness, you will run across monsters sometimes, which you can choose to either fight or try to run away from. The games have a day-night system, and night is MUCH more dangerous than day. In fact, it is often a very bad idea to be out at night. Towns shut their gates at night, shops close, and many people go home (disappear) until the next morning. You also need to sleep regularly, or you will get tired. If you are stuck out at night, your best hope is to go to the safe place. Most QFG games have a safe place in the wilderness where you can go and rest without any fears of being attacked by the strong night-dwelling monsters you would face if you tried to rest in the wilderness at night. This is one of many reasons why having a map of the overworld is vital for the first and fourth games; the worlds are confusing and most screens look very similar, and there is no ingame map, so downloading or making one is necessary. Fortunately, the overworlds are small, so this is not a great task. There is also no ingame questlog or chatlog, though, so in any of the first four games, though, don’t take a break from the game for too long! You’ll completely forget what you’re supposed to be doing and probably spend a long time aimlessly wandering before you remember what it was. You also need to eat to avoid starvation, so always keep a store of food in your inventory. Food is cheap though, so this isn’t a major issue, it just builds realism. Your ultimate goal in each game, as I said earlier, is to solve that area’s problems, escalating from relatively simple things in the first game to a great challenge in the last.

Combat: The series changes combat systems multiple times, but all of them are simple and action-focused. In the first four games, enemies are visible in the gameworld, but when you run into them you go into a separate battle screen. In the first three games, this battle screen is a simple screen with the hero and monster facing eachother, with your view facing the monster as the hero’s is. You can’t move, but can try to block with your shield, or alternately dodge or parry the enemy attacks either left or right. Your goal is to avoid enemy attacks until their guard is down, when you hit them with your dagger, sword, or spell. It is a simple system, but it works well enough considering the infrequency of combat. If you face multiple enemies, such as a band of goblins or brigands, they simply line up and you fight them one after another. The battle system evolves slightly from game to game, but the basics are the same.

In QFG4, however, an all-new battle system was introduced, and it is the best one in the series. This time the battles are side-scrolling fights between you and your enemy. There are two combat modes, one more actionish and one a bit more strategic. You can move back and forth, jump, block, dodge, parry, attack with your weapon and use magic, all while appreciating the nice graphics and style of the battle mode. Battles still are not complex, but they’re great fun. The new perspective and faster-paced battles help the series a lot. Battle frequency is about the same here as in the first three games — that is, rare. The focus of the game is on adventuring, not battle. You can always go out and fight something if you want, but through the first four games, it is never the entire point. The combat systems reflect that.

QFG5, coming some years after the fourth one, is even more different from the earlier titles. The game in general feels a bit more “RPG” than “RPG-Adventure”, though it is still a Quest for Glory game. Combat is simplistic — there is no separate battle screen time. Instead, you do simple Diablo-style “click on the enemies a lot to kill them”. There is a block button as well as attack, and magic of course, with a sizable spell list because of how each game adds a few new spells on top of the previous games’ library while bringing back all of the old ones, but the combat in the fifth game is still pretty lacking, and is less fun than combat in previous games. Even with QFG5’s stronger RPG feel, though, the puzzles are still the focus of the game, not the combat. There is more required combat than past games, though, and that difference does make itself felt, but there are still many puzzles to solve.

Puzzles: The Quest for Glory games are graphic adventures as well as RPGs, so in addition to the combat of a standard RPG, the games also have many puzzles. While they do have many of the Sierra-style adventure game puzzles you’d expect them to have, the Quest for Glory games do not just follow that straight formula. As I said earlier, puzzles have multiple solutions depending on your class, skills, and equipment. Generally, when puzzles have multiple solutions, there are three ways to solve problems, through might (Fighter type), wits (Thief type), or magic (Mage type). Fighters might solve a puzzle by simply fighting the guard, while a thief might try to sneak past and a mage might use magic to do either one of the above.

The puzzles are great, and and are often very well designed. Having multiple ways to solve the puzzles, depending on what your class is, is a great, and fairly original, idea. For another example, while the wizard gets a ring down from a tree with the Fetch spell, the warrior or thief build their climbing or throwing skills and get the ring down that way. There are also segments that require quick thinking, quickly figuring out how to get through the situation you find yourself in. Also, for once, unlike in any other Sierra adventure game, the fact that in some cases doing the wrong thing can kill you actually makes sense. This is an RPG after all! Some things should be dangerous. The QFG games do not have the cruel, random deaths of many other Sierra adventure games. When something kills you, it’s pretty obvious beforehand that that is something you shouldn’t have been doing.

Story and writing: The story and writing in the QFG games is exceptional. Corey and Lori Cole did a very good job with the story throughout the series. The sense of humor is great and shows through frequently; from the frequently humorous environmental descriptions that you get by clicking on things to many of the unique characters, they can be very funny games. They have a serious side too though, of course, and when they are they do it just as well as they do serious. The fourth and fifth ones have voice acting as well, and that voice acting is very good quality. Don’t bother with the floppy disk version of QFG4; the voices of the CD version made that version entirely obsolete. To further improve the sense of immersion and truly make you feel like you are the hero, Quest for Glory uses an interesting way of presenting conversation text: instead of either having your character directly speak and putting words in your character’s mouth that will harm your personal image of what kind of person the hero is, or simply not having the hero speak at all, the game has the narrator describe what you are saying in a way that asks your question without actually putting it in specific words. As a result, in QFGIV and V, the narrator says those parts describing what you are saying, not some voice actor playing “You”. It’s a great system that works well. Of course, the great writing helps too.

Finally, Quest for Glory also has a point system, like the Sierra adventure games it shares an engine with. You need to find everything and do every optional quest to get a perfect score. Each game has one real ending, but because of the varying quests depending on class and the optional elements, that doesn’t mean that they play through the same way each time or that on your first playthrough you’re going to get it all. Here, the last game is again different; there is one ending, with variations depending on character pairings (for your character alone or with several possible partners, as in QFG5 you can marry one of three women in the final game, all characters from the series). It’s the end of the series though, so that ending makes sense. The hero is an important person now, and your quest is over.

The first and fourth Quest for Glory games are my favorites. The first one was the only one I had for a long time, and it has great nostalgia value for me, but the fourth one was simply incredible and I eventually decided that it was just as good as the first one. I didn’t play QFG2 much, though, because the second game is only available in the old-style EGA engine with text input (QFG1 was originally that way, but then there was a VGA remake using the KQ5-style engine, which is the one we had), and in a game this complex I don’t find that fun. Trying to go through long, complicated conversation trees without specific lists of the words you can ask about? That’s no fun! I need to know what I can ask… Anyway, 1-VGA, 3, and 4 use that classic VGA Sierra engine. Of the three, QFG3 isn’t quite as good as the others — it’s good, but is a bit more linear, there isn’t much for thieves to do thieving-wise, the general design is a bit weaker than the remake or the fourth game. Still, QFG3 is it’s kind of rare in being an RPG that actually uses an African setting, and it is still a great game. QFG5 uses its own engine and looks a lot more like an RPG — a less adventure-style interface (though there is a Look function still), the screen scrolls instead of you moving between static screens, you fight in the overworld (and areas are as a result larger in scale), etc. It’s usually considered the weakest game in the series, though it does provide for a good, solid ending to the series at the end. Even so, I’d rank it last. I’m happy that it exists — after QFGIV Sierra was initially not planning on making the final game, until pressure from fans (or so it is said) convinced them to finally do it several years later — but it’s too bad that it couldn’t quite match up to the great Shadows of Darkness.

Pictures (QFG1 VGA)

(insert screenshots here sometime)