Two years in development, Legend of Narthan is a very large free roaming minecraft RPG adventure map. I played it, for science. Legend of Narthan takes many cues from the Elder Scrolls series, but is not an Oblivion, Morrowind or Skyrim knock-off. Attention has been paid to making several quest lines parodies of real world historical events, which is an idea I am in love with. I would have its babies, that’s how good of an idea I think it is.
NOTE: This map needs to be played in Minecraft 1.6 or in one of the snapshots for 1.6. It is broken in 1.5. (I also found it to be broken in 1.6, but more on that later.)
Upon spawning in Narthan, I spied an old man. His cheerful smile and the pressure plate placed in front of him made me trust him implicitly.
I would buy insurance from this man.
Standing on the aforementioned pressure plate started the first quest of the map: Ground Breaker. Little more was said about this quest other than the fact that it had been started, so I left my grinning friend and wandered off to see who else might be hanging around the spawning area. There was a map trader, who had little to say for himself, and this fisherman, grinning like a long loon at the end of a short pier.
There was also a fishmonger, who was prepared to sell fish in exchange for clay bricks. Clay bricks appear to be the currency of Narthan. People covet clay bricks – possibly because they all want to build themselves an outdoor BBQ pit.
So far, so good, right? Well, sort of. There are a few issues with Legend of Narthan.
Quests are handled VERY oddly in this map. Most people used to playing adventure maps will by now be used to finding quest text either being displayed by command block or written in books. Legend of Narthan appears to default to making you exit out of the game and open up individual quest .txt files. That was a bit of a bitter disappointment, as it ruins any attempt at immersion. External quest text made sense in the days before writeable books, but in a modern adventure map? It comes across little lazy.
Even more maddeningly, there’s no acknowledgement from the map per se that a quest is finished, you just run around until you see a sign that tells you have completed a quest. Which is really odd when you walk into a building and find a bunch of signs telling you that you’ve finished quests you weren’t on / didn’t know you were on.
The real pity is that the quests are actually pretty detailed and very well written, but in a so called “open world’ roaming RPG, you shouldn’t find yourself ending a quest before it has begun. Exploration shouldn’t be game breaking – and in this map as it currently stands, it very much is.
I also found that the map occasionally put itself into creative mode for no reason at all. This played havoc with the inventory and currency system – because you could take all the bricks you wanted out of creative mode and trade for never ending fish if you liked.
Legends of Narthan needs some fixing and updating before it can be properly considered a great adventure map.
Wordpuncher’s Rating: 5/10 Great Idea, Outdated Execution