Agreed. The Quest For Glory series really was the best series Sierra ever put out. Hell, to this day, they remain amongst my favorite games. (Except for 3. That game can go to hell for all I care.) The humor hasn't aged all that well (the Hurricane Of Puns can get very distracting at times), but the general surreal nature of the world made it a lot of fun to explore and experiment in.
Also, last I checked, Thieves can't become Paladins, outside of changing your class when importing. They had to steal every important item in the second (robbing them of the required Honor score), and the third game only let Fighters become Paladins. Maybe I'm just remembering it wrong.
Yes, I speak of importing. Once you get to the importing stage of the game, if you started with a thief, you can do everything.
Plus, as far as honour goes, in Trial By Fire, you can donate money to the Katta in the fountain square before visiting Dinarzad to pump your honour score (you don't have any money - but the game lets you donate anyway). In Wages Of War you can do the same thing - buy about five hundred pieces of meat from the dog-boy and then give it to the disgraced thief at night. When your honour is capped early on it becomes a lot easier to maintain a high honour score.
That said, this is the remembered exploits of a fourteen year old boy.
I remember becoming a paladin as a thief, although I'm not sure exactly how I did it.
I love the Quest For Glory series. It is my favorite adventure game series, and also the first adventure game I ever played, which probably adds to the Nostalgia Filter. It's what got me into adventure games in the first place, and since then I've never been able to find one quite like it, as its incorporation of RPG elements makes for a unique breed of game.
I was about ten years old when I first got my hands on the series, in the mid nineties. I was rooting around on my dad's computer when I stumbled upon the VGA remake of Quest For Glory 1, and like most of the things I loved at that age, it was a bit beyond my age level. I just recently found my old copy of the anthology and can say that I am still as fond of the games today as I was when I first encountered them.
You can download the games for free, but I'd recommend getting the anthology CD, or at least buying a copy of the fourth game so that you can play it with the voice acting, which is actually quite good (John Rhys Davies narrates!) and humourous as well.
The only way to become a paladin as a thief is to play through the second game without ever stealing stuff. There are actions in that game that disqualify you for paladinhood permanently, regardless of your honor stat and breaking and entering is one of those. I'm not sure why anyone would do that though, since you're just depriving yourself of the unique thief-stuff while you can't do the unique fighter/mage stuff either. You can still "cheat" by changing your class upon importing, but that feature was only added to games because the export/import mechanism screwed over sometimes and heroes imported as the wrong class. Personally, since I like maxing my stats, I never play with hybrids...having to max EVERY stat in one play session just crosses the line from repetitive to extremely tedious.
But yeah, I agree, the games are quite good and while the puns can get a bit much at times, the antics of some of the quirkier characters are still highly amusing. The games also have less Guide Dang It moments than many other Sierra series. The only time you tend to get irreversably stuck is if you act like an idiot and drop important items. (which can still lead to humorous deaths) It's also one of those series where the total is really more than the sum of its parts. Playing through the entire series from start to finish with one character, importing/exporting from game to game and regularly meeting familiar faces in other games is a very unique experience.
Thieves can get every skill easily yes, witch is why I tend to start as them. But there are parts of the games, particularly 3 and 4, where your class alone determines things. Each class has a different way of dealing with the prisoner in QFG 3 for example, and Paladins and Magic Users each have a sidequest in QFG 4 (thieves do too, but theirs only depends on having the right skills to find the thieves guild, so any class can do it). I thing the endgame of QFG 2 also features branching paths for different classes but that may depend on skill too (the wizard test does).
In any case, I for one like the ability to play as a jack-of-all-trades character. The only unfortunate thing is there really is very little reason NOT to. Because of how the skill system works, having less skills gives you no advantage unless as noted above, your OCD about training them all to max. It may have been better if you learned skills faster the less skills you have. As is, your simply blocked from ever improving in skills you don't have. That's the biggest problem with tally based skill systems. But I still enjoy it loads better then most other RPG systems.
Now that Quest for Glory is available on GOG, I suggest removing the abandonia link.
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The Brightest Jewel in the Sierra Crown
Sierra's success was always despite Sierra being Sierra, not because of it. This truism is all the more evident when you consider how many of the games developers who worked for Sierra did so under the self-acknowledging perspective that Jesus Christ we're tossers. Sierra didn't seem to share this sense of humour, which is a bit of a shame, since it meant that they wound up butting heads with some of their best products.
The Quest For Glory was never an early adaptor of the technology that Sierra shared amongst its developers. Quest For Glory I came out about the same time as Space Quest 3 and Kings Quest 4 were being released, which meant it could take advantage of the more advanced engine (who knew pausing while the player typed would be such a huge QOL improvement?), and it really worked that advantage.
Full of RPG elements that you don't need to do, the QuestForGlory series has a wonderful plot, a very funny sense of humour, NPCs that you can like, nay, love, with the means to create your own story in the greater narrative. Every problem has multiple solutions - some you might simply not have considered - and every play through can show you exotic and interesting solutions to problems that you might not have considered. It's not all sunshine and roses, though - the games are buggy in places, the thief class can do everything (literally - fighters and wizards can't pick up all the thief's skills, and all of them can turn into paladins), and sometimes the fighter solution to problems conveys you as somewhat thick.
Still. I love these games, and bonus, for those of you who are cheap, they're now Abandonware, available here
. I really do hope that this review can bring the joy these games gave me in my childhood (holy christ I'm old) to someone who's never encountered them before.
Disclaimer: Simultaneous crushes on both Elsa Von Spielburg and Katerina Mordavia is probably the closest This Troper ever got to being in a Love Triangle.