Here’s the deal: you’re not the adventurer this time. You’re the king. The guy that hires the warriors, the rogues, priests and wizards, rewarding them for the risks they take in robbing tombs, killing evil wizards, defending your palace and other mundane tasks in the fantasy kingdom of Ardania. You stick the reward posters up and hireling adventurers will do their part if they want to earn a crust, while you get on with the business of managing your kingdom. As a gamer, this sounds like you’re getting a bum deal, but in practice getting other people to do the questing is surprisingly good fun.

The thrust of Majesty 2 is that you have no direct control over your subjects – all you can do is to provide financial incentives for performing four different types of task, either to attack, defend, explore or fear. The first three are fairly self-explanatory: nearby monster dens such as bear caves, haunted tombs and portals of hell need flagging with an Attack flag to destroy these generators, thus preventing their denizens from attacking you. You’ll use a Defend flag more often later in the game when your kingdom comes under threat, you’ll use Explore frequently at the start of each map when much of the land is under a fog of war, and a Fear flag will prevent your heroes from wandering into areas you don’t want them to.

Heroes will mass in groups to a flag (or not, in the case of the Fear flag) if you attribute enough gold to it, with more risky quests requiring bigger incentives. By upgrading your Inn, you can
gather specific heroes into parties of four that will stick together to provide safety in numbers and also improve each other’s stats. Being on the other side of an RPG is an unusual and pleasing experience, as is watching your brave subjects rally towards your flag and fight side-by-side – especially with the attention that 1c:Ino-Co has paid to the fine details.

Each hero has the innate abilities you’d expect from their class, so rogues are adept at poisoning and backstabbing, clerics heal other heroes and dispel undead, wizards are fragile but have an arsenal of offensive spells, warriors revel in melee and rangers have powerful ranged attack. But they also have intrinsic motivations. So rogues, for example, will be first to flee an overwhelming battle, rangers are first on the scene for exploration quests and warriors will rush bravely to attack or defend almost anything, often remaining until the job is done. Killing monsters and completing quests will reward your heroes with experience points too and you will benefit from having a large number of more robust, able and enthusiastic high-level heroes. Contrary to what we’d expected, we felt all the more attached to these industrious minions for having no direct control over them.

Sadly you can’t carry them all over to the next part of your campaign, but you can elect your best hero from each map to become a lord, including them in a pool to be summoned onto subsequent maps, at a price. Several maps into a campaign and you’ll be able to call upon some high-level heroes, who you’ll become rather fond of and whom you’ll rely
heavily upon to bolster the noobs hired from the guilds in later levels.

… continued