King's Quest III


King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human is the third installment in the King's Quest series of graphic adventure games developed and released by Sierra On-Line in 1986. The game was originally released for the Apple II and MS-DOS; it was later ported to several other computer systems. It was the first game in the series not to feature King Graham as the player character.

Gameplay

Most of the game's lands and locations in Llewdor appear on a magic map. Once the protagonist Gwydion reaches a new region, he can use the magic map to travel to a previous region.
A real-time clock is displayed at the top of the screen, with certain actions occurring based on the clock.
King's Quest III was markedly more difficult than its two predecessors. The player was required to type in magic spells line-by-line from a spell book that came with the game. The spells partially served as a form of copy protection, although the game already had disk-based protection.
All versions of the game use the AGI engine, with Gwydion's movements controlled by the player using cursor keys, and commands issued through a text parser. In the original release, Version 1.01, the escape button pauses the game and there are no menus. Commands are accessed through the F keys, "Ctrl-", or manually typing, and F1 displays a Help file listing all the commands. It has disk-based copy protection. Version 2.14 was included in many of the King's Quest collections over the years, with the disk based copy-protection removed. Pushing escape brings up a menu, and speed controls are included in the menu.

Plot

In King's Quest III, the story moves away from Daventry and King Graham to the land of Llewdor, where a boy named Gwydion is being kept by the wicked wizard Manannan. According to the introduction, for as long as he could remember, 17-year-old Gwydion has been held captive by Manannan as his servant, cooking and cleaning for him in his home atop a large mountain in Llewdor. From this vantage point, and with the help of a telescope, the seemingly all-knowing wizard watches the countryside, the shoreline and vast ocean to the east and an endless desert to the west.
Manannan takes a series of absences and Gwydion seizes his chance to escape. He breaks into the wizard's laboratory and reads Manannan's book of spells, then goes out into Llewdor to collect ingredients for them. After solving many puzzles to obtain the spell ingredients, Gwydion turns Manannan into a cat and is free. He also learns from an oracle that he is in fact the long-lost prince of Daventry, Prince Alexander, and that his sister Princess Rosella is going to be sacrificed to a horrible three-headed dragon that has been besieging the kingdom.
After defeating Manannan, Alexander attempts to buy passage on a ship, but is instead captured by pirates. After sailing to the coast of Daventry, he manages to use another spell to put the pirates to sleep and escape, stealing their treasure in the process. Alexander traverses a series of mountains before finally reaching the outskirts of Daventry, where he discovers Rosella about to be slain by the dragon. Using one of Manannan's spells, Alexander creates a thunderstorm and kills the dragon with lightning strikes. Alexander rescues his sister, and the two return to Daventry where they are joyously reunited with the king and queen. The Magic Mirror, which has been clouded by a mystical darkness since the night Prince Alexander was kidnapped, is restored, and King Graham decides to pass on his adventurer's cap to one of his children. As the game ends, King Graham tosses the cap to Alexander and Rosella, who reach out to catch it.
The game's title is a pun on the proverb "To err is human, to forgive divine" by Alexander Pope, whose namesake may have been given to the character Gwydion once it is later revealed who he really is in the game. The actions taken by Gwydion in this story lead directly to the events that begin King's Quest IV.

Characters

  • Gwydion: Gwydion was a baby kidnapped from his cradle not long after his birth by the evil wizard Manannan. The wizard teleported into his homeland, cast a sleep spell on his family, and brought him to Llewdor as a slave. As he was kidnapped when he was very young, he does not remember his family. As is the tradition, Gwydion was to be killed on his eighteenth birthday; he learns this fact and decides to find a way to escape before that day comes. Using forbidden spells Gwydion learns how to understand animals and meets the Oracle, from whom he learns his true identity as Prince Alexander of Daventry. He learns he must save his sister from a three-headed dragon that is terrorizing Daventry, or lose his family forever. Gwydion finally escapes the evil wizard, crosses the ocean, defeats the dragon, and reunites with his family. Upon his return the magic mirror, which went dark upon his kidnapping, is restored.
  • Manannan: An old, evil wizard who had the custom of kidnapping infant boys and training them as his servants, only to kill them at age eighteen. He is member of the Magicians' Guild. For many years, he reigned as the absolute ruler of the land of Llewdor, and under his leadership brigands, thieves, and the like prospered. Manannan made a fatal error, however, in the choosing of his final servant, a baby boy whom he named Gwydion. Gwydion was able to escape the clutches of Manannan and, learning several magic spells, turned Manannan into a cat. He had kidnapped the boy in revenge for Graham's rescue of Valanice from his sister Hagatha. King Graham later encountered Manannan in Mordack's castle and captured him in a sack of peas. After the defeat of his brother Mordack at the hands of King Graham of Daventry, Manannan was never seen or heard from again, and his fate remains unknown. Manannan's name is based on a wizard of Welsh myth, Manannan Mac Lir.
  • Rosella: She is the princess of Daventry, and Alexander's sister. She was about to be sacrificed to the three headed dragon, when Alexander arrived, killed the dragon, and freed her. She is the main character of the next game.
  • Graham: He is the king of Daventry. Following Alexander's kidnapping, Daventry endured terrible hardship in the form of many devastating earthquakes that destroyed many landmarks. Soon after, a vile three-headed dragon laid waste to the kingdom and began to demand the sacrifice of maidens for its bounty. For some years the dragon ravaged the land. Graham's previously good judgment and wisdom had not recovered from the shock of Alexander's kidnapping. Choosing what he felt was best for Daventry, in an attempt to protect the land, he started sending innocent girls off to be sacrificed to the fire-breathing dragon, even consenting to the sacrifice of his only daughter, Rosella. The princess later forgave him for taking her to the dragon, but his memory of tying her to the stake still sometimes disturbs his dreams. That she was rescued and survived only eases the horror a little.
  • Valanice: She is the queen of Daventry. The kidnapping of her baby son Alexander from his cradle was a massive blow to her, not just because of the loss, but because it reopened memories of her own kidnapping. Valanice attempted to submerge her grief through hard work—first by studying the histories of the world, and then by opening a school to teach the brightest children of the kingdom. She spent much time teaching Rosella how to read and the histories of the world. When the three-headed dragon demanded the sacrifice of a young maiden, she fiercely fought against the decision to comply, and when it came time to offer her daughter to the beast she refused, standing guard by Rosella's room with a drawn sword. But it was not enough, and she was forced to watch as her child was taken up the mountain.

    Development

King's Quest III was the biggest and most ambitious game Sierra had made up to that point. The series's designer and writer Roberta Williams said: "My previous games, from Mystery House to King's Quest II, were all great. But they were essentially glorified treasure hunts... your object being to win the game by finding and collecting items. It was not possible to have bigger and more complex plots than that thanks to technical limitations". By the mid-1980s, the new generation computer platforms such as the IBM AT, Amiga, and Macintosh were faster and sported more memory as well as standard hard disks. Thus, it was now possible to develop games of greater complexity than had been possible on 8-bit machines.
Roberta Williams collaborated with a team consisting mainly of the same people that worked with her on the previous two games, but more people were involved in the production this time. Al Lowe, who made the music in King's Quest II, became the lead programmer of King's Quest III, while his wife Margaret made the music instead. Al Lowe later moved on to his own series, Leisure Suit Larry. Williams said: "Rosella was introduced toward the end of the game; seeing her on the screen for the first time, I suddenly saw her on her own adventures in a sequel".
King's Quest III was the first adventure game featuring auto-mapping, with a "magic map" found in the game that can be used to teleport to most locations that the player has visited before. This feature was unpopular among some fans who claim it made the game too easy. Hence, magic maps in future Sierra On-line games were more limited in their teleporting ability. The developers also introduced a real-time clock, with actions based on the clock.

Technical specifications

The game was released on five 5.25" floppy disks and three 3.5" disks, as Sierra's second largest game after Time Zone. It was almost 50% larger than King's Quest I or King's Quest II. KQ3 had 104 screens, whereas the first KQ had about 80 and KQII had about 92.
Alongside Space Quest I, King's Quest III was among the first Sierra games to be DOS-based instead of using a self-booting disk, and among the first to feature EGA and Hercules graphics support. A year later, it was rereleased with the slightly improved AGI 2.435 engine, followed by another release with the 2.936 engine in 1988. The Apple IIGS version had improved music and sound effects.