They stole all the mushrooms, they must be stopped no matter the cost. The disorientation of having an “unrelated” start is offset by knowledge that the actual game is soon to come. The twist here is that, while the visions introduce the real story, you don’t act upon them until the first “mundane” events are dealt with and you’ve found your feet. Somewhere the player can get their wits, get used to the controls not a tutorial per se, but a less important sandbox. I’m always conscious of starting games with a kind of… slow zone. The main quest begins innocuously enough, but you are soon tasked with tracking down the source of your visions and then the game truly begins. Story-wise, it’s even more “classic” - immediately upon selecting your hero, you are hailed the Chosen One by a telepathic dream message. Do people still do wisp/circle of power hero selection these days? Warchasers has a lot to answer for. No surprises there - his unit model is TheCaptain. It begins with choosing your protagonist from the staples of Swordsman, Spellweaver and Ranger. Legends of Xenthis: Return of the Vampyres is a “classic” RPG in every sense of the word. (Sure, that’s not as far back as when I was salivating over Season of Uncertainty but it’s still donkeys ago.) We’re talking the heady days of 2006, here, when I was fairly well established in the singleplayer AoS genre but hadn’t yet blistered onto the full-scale SPRPG scene. I think this is possibly the first map to ever use a dummy hero as a backpack.

Legends of Xenthis: Return of the Vampyres Today: the oft-forgotten Legends of Xenthis: Return of the Vampyres by Tim Williams a.k.a. So in this series, I’m finally going to discuss some of those maps that had a big impact on the way I do things… Right from the beginning, I was all up in Warcraft III ‘s singleplayer RPG scene a combination of a pench ant for world-saving power-fantasies and limited internet access made it the natural choice.

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