Prince of Destruction is a shareware role playing game for either a single player on their own PC or up to four players over a local network for which the game uses M.A.R.S (the Multiplayer Animated Role-Playing System).
The story behind the game begins with archmage Nestar founding a kingdom where people could live in peace. Time passes and Nestar has both a son, Grishnák, and a daughter, Imiria. The son is expected to follow his father and become ruler but he is a bad sort and Nestar decides that Imiria should rule as queen. As Nestar is putting together plans for his succession he dies in mysterious circumstances and Grishnák ascends to the throne. His father’s fears were realized, rumours Grishnák‘s involvement in dark deeds, black magic and sacrifices abound. Only one of Nestar’s followers remains in office, he is ‘The Keeper’ and he maintains the bridges between Nestaria and the rest of the world. The Keeper issues a summons to four of Nestaria’s heroes The Barbarian, The Assassin, The Elf and The Macician who are abroad in other lands to return home to save Nestaria and defeat Grishnák aka ‘The Prince Of Destruction’.
The game is keyboard controlled. It starts on the top of a monolith in the mountains of northern Nesteria where the character(s) meet with The Keeper, ask questions, and set off on their quest through a game with a claimed fifteen hundred locations. The game is viewed a top down window, there is a full screen option which uses a slightly larger window and fills the remainder of the screen with a black border. The game has magic spells, combat and requires that the player look for clues and read a lot in order to progress through the levels - as the manual says Okay, so it’s not very realistic – but it’s more realistic than getting better at picking locks by killing
monsters.
Talking to characters is a little different, there are no dialogue trees, no preset questions to ask, instead the player presses ‘T’ to open a talk window and types in their question. The game installs two .exe files, one is Marsmstr.exe which the player uses to play the game on their own machine, the other is Marsplyr.exe which is used to connect to a game on the local network.In the shareware game the save/load function is disabled and saving the game is essential because the player’s character can die.
