Hinterland / Videogame

That's you down in the corner.

Hinterland is 2008 High Fantasy RPG with City Builder Elements by Tilted Mills Entertainment.

You are tasked by the King to go out and settle a piece of wilderness in his name. Meaning that you are to recruit settlers to produce crops, fight off raids from hostile natives, and personally, go out and secure resources for your burgeoning town. Choosing between dozens of different starting character backgrounds that'll affect your game-play, ranging from an Undead Hero, with good fighting stats and equipment, but receives low fame from quests, to a Courtesan with good connections letting her start with more gold, and receiving more fame from request, to being an Orc with excellent fighting abilities and able to eat villagers for food!

---

Hinterlands contains examples of following tropes:

• Affably Evil: It's entirely possible to be a 'evil' character (for whatever that is worth in a game with no real moral choices) where you can have a church of evil installed and employ a necromancer to raise the souls of dead to fight for you, and still be a decent lord to your village, though to what ends this leads to after the game is up in the air, and up to personal interpretation of your character.
• Awesome, but Impractical: In theory, there are many different viable play-styles in Hinterland. In practice, there are two good stragetys to beat the game, one is to gather as many health potions as possible and grind your way through the map, and the second, is either a). get either a necromancer in your town and have them research undead, or b). upgrade your rancher with a semi-rare dragon egg, and then wait, until their the skeletons, or the dragon, are powerful enough to steamroll the map.
  • Building a party is certainly possible in the game, being able to recruit up to four villagers to assist you in clearing the map and acquiring resources, however this keeps them from doing their job, like producing food (which is very important, considering you will starve otherwise), making money (less important, but still important if you want to put down new buildings and hire more villagers), and producing gear (Of varying use, Potions from the herbalist are vital in the end game if you are going to clear the map by yourself, the weapons and armor? Best sold to the merchant, as the gear you find from enemy camps is almost always better, the only benefit being that you can equip followers with it, but even then your old gear is better to be used by them).
    • It also slows down your leveling (which levels up in Elder Scrolls way, of doing x increase x) and you can't control how your party levels either, leaving you all an under-leveled mess as your start to face enemies, that will give a well-made character a tough time, and die in mass, unless your will to chug potions, which will deplete rapidly.
    • Overall, your villagers should just be left to do their jobs.
  • Using any other weapon type other than a melee weapon. A ranged build is theoretically possible, but the game isn't build around this concept, as you never able to take advantage of what normally makes a bow so effective, that is attacking from range and killing power, by the time you've fired two arrows, a horde of enemies is already marched up to you and are in the process of ripping you apart.
• Early Game Hell: While it maybe somewhat mitigated depending on the start you choose and the level of difficulty you choose, this is felt on easier difficulties and when play with the stronger characters, but if you choose the harder difficulties it's in full display. As, at the start of the game, you don't have much, other than a map full of enemies and unclaimed resources, maybe enough gold to employ a farmer, a dagger, the clothes on your back, dwindling food supplies, a couple health potions, and stats that let you fight a spider mono e mono.
  • To go into further detail on the City builder side, you start with only your house with no income, a small supply gold, and enough food to keep you fed for a about a week. You need gold to build houses for your citizens, but at the start of the game, you can only host two potential citizens, and can only recruit farmers, trappers, and ranchers, due to your limited gold and town quality, as some citizens will only settle in your town if you have certain resources, like iron & herbs, and other buildings like an Inn. So, in  your early game, you have no real ability to generate gold other than going and adventuring, but adventuring is dangerous, and your loot random, and since you can't afford or host a merchant yet, any trash loot you get will sit in your inventory, unable to be sold, unless you want to throw it away. So, it's entirely possible to go out adventuring, return only slightly stronger, with the same gear, and less potions, no real games.
    • Even when you do get a merchant, while they do increase your daily revenue, and allow your other vendors to be sold to them for more money, it's not that great for you. As no matter how great, rare, or powerful your gear is, it can only be sold for a single gold coin. For reference, at the start of a game, a farmer, one of the cheapest villagers, costs around 8 gold.
  • Each time a new world is created, it's randomized, so powerful and useful resources like iron, water, and stone might be easily picked one game, they could be all the way across the map guarded by the highest level enemies, making it virtually impossible to get, unless you want to spend several hundred gold constructing a well, herb garden, or importing resources into your village.
    • Since the world is randomized, so are the enemies & their difficulty, meaning you could step our of your village, right into a camp full of enemies three to four times your level and be demolished, game over.
  • If you choose the option to take the request from the king, it can add to the difficulty, or just be very annoying, as the game as a reputation system. The higher your reputation, the more of a chance the king sends you something a good, like powerful armor, but mostly nothing, so it's only there to add to the difficulty. However, if you fail a request, it tanks your reputation with the king, this isn't a problem for the most part, as you can kill more monster to regain it, but if you fail it at the early game, when your rep is low, it can end your game, as if your rep goes into the negative for too long, you are disposed of by the king. But, that just in theory.
  • However, if you can make it through all that, they can become...
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The PC, depending on the start, but still mostly applies to all characters. You start out with a small house, poor equipment, no resources, barely any money to employ the cheapest farmers, weak stats, no villagers, a entire map of monsters, bandits, and worse, while being at the mercy of the King to fulfill whatever he desires from you, least you lose too much honor and lose the game. But, should you make it to the end, you'll have a personal Keep, the powerful equipment well beyond what any of your blacksmiths and warlocks can make, more money than you can actuall feasible use, stats along with gear that lets you clear entire wilderness of dragons, minotaurs, ogres, orc, giants, dark elves, dark dwarves, zombies, skeletons, and necromancers all by your lonesome, backed by a booming self-started economy, with a town full of motivated villagers armed with your powerful handy down gear, and most of all, enough respect and honor to be able to tell the King to shove off, if you don't feel like dealing with his demands.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Same old Dwarves here, excellent fighters or foremen, still short, but tend to suffer with starting resources.
  • Also included are Dark Dwarves, hostiles purple-grey skinned dwarves that will raids your camp, but overall are just palette-swapped Dwarves.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: One of the harder enemies types in the games, giants with purple-grey skin capable of one-handing two-handed weapons like halberds and greatsword, and love to raid your town.
• Stronger with Age: Implied; If you get your own dragon, by giving your rancher a dragon egg, it gets stronger every day, without any limits, potentially going beyond anything the PC can achieve, most due to the PC only being able to raise their stats via combat, which only raises meaningfully against opponents of equal, or preferably higher level, which can only get so high, about 15, due to having a limited map, while the dragon can get stronger by just existing. Interestingly, the other dragons on the map, while high level, between 7 - 13 usually, stay static in power, likely to keep the game playable.
  •  The Necormancer is another example, as long as he can research how to summon stronger undead, his undead's power can grow endlessly as well.