Land of Devastation
Land of Devastation (LOD) is a classic multiplayer game originally written by Scott M. Baker in 1990 for BBS use. It was released under the shareware concept. It was the first door game to use a full graphical (non-ascii) interface which the player downloads and runs locally in order to play online. The game ceased ACTIVE development in mid-1996. The creator had commenced work on creating an internet compatible version of Land of Devastation but has instead decided to focus on a single-player game.
The game featured a full editor which allowed Sysops to completely customize the game, including the maps of all areas, conversations, items, quests and many other aspects.
Storyline
In this game, your goal as a human soldier is to be the first to retrieve the lost parts of the Puritron device, mankind's only hope of repairing the damage wrought by widespread nuclear war.
Gameplay
The wasteland is divided into zones based on how far the player wanders from the starting town, Sacre Base. This determines the strength of enemies encountered, and the price of the gear received for [...] them. (LOD has a 2D overworld like Arrowbridge I or Operation Overkill.)
Players can build fortresses in the wasteland. Teleport to another fortress (for a fee set by the owner), automatically build supplies or sell items near the fortress (during nightly maintenance), charge a toll for going near the fortress, on pain of being shot by the fort's weapon.
Competitive gameplay: leader board (levels, net worth), who retrieved a Puritron part. Soldiers can kill each other, and attempt to take over others' fortresses.
Sacre Base has a cloning facility. A soldier can pay to have a clone of themselves stored, backing up their level and statistics. If the soldier dies, the player can choose to activate their clone. This lets them keep playing without any statistic penalty from dying, though any experience gained after the last cloning is lost.
A warper item, while with limited charges, lets the player safely teleport away to a pre-determined location, even while fighting a monster; the EMWARP program (for a soldiers' laptop) does this automatically if the soldier loses a fight, saving them from actually dying.
In registered games, players can take their equipment to ACME Weapons. For a substantial fee, the weaponsmith can upgrade damage by 30%, give ranged weapons a three-round burst mode (where most ordinary weapons can only fire one round at a time).
Trivia
- Soldiers probably will use the GS-224 laptop; running a DOS, it has approximately 80 GB of hard-drive space, but only 640k RAM.