Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace

A few things will help you when playing this: - Don't enter anything at the copy protection prompt. Hit "OK" - You can get jobs at pubs ("Inquire about work") -- Only accept transport jobs at first. Don't accept jobs about destroying ships. - To get rewarded for a job, go to the government building and "Collect Reward" - Always pay your taxes at the government building (preferably after getting a reward) - If you run into an enemy ship encounter, turn and run - Cargo prices are all the same, so you can't make money from buying and selling cargo. - You can Pick Up and Drop Off cargo for a reward of 1000 gold per drop - Transport passengers and make cargo runs until you have enough money to upgrade your ship and buy magical weapons. -- Your starting ship is actually one of the better ships in the game. - By the time you have made enough money to upgrade, you'll stumble upon the main plot. Someone in a cloak will offer you a quest. Now's a good time to get into some fights! - It's usually easier to kill the crew of a ship with your weapons than while boarding. - If you kill all the crew on a ship and board it, you can take the ship for free. - There are a lot of bugs in this game, and a lot of things that simply don't work. It's not a great translation of the D&D rules to the videogame format, and even at the time of it's release it was a poor adaptation. But it has its charm and evokes the feel of an 'open world,' in an extremely small way. If you have nostalgia for this type of game, give it a shot. But if you don't, skip it.

The difficulty of games from 1992 is not to be ignored. I played for an hour and had 3 complete party wipes. On the other hand, authentic '92 gaming experience.

I love this game to death, but be aware that it is hard, even on the easiest difficulty the beginning can be brutal. If you don't like hard games, this may not be for you. You can get missions pitting you against Neogi ships, which technically can be destroyed in space from the start, albeit with some difficult maneuvering and a bit of luck. They will constantly attempt to board you (and they have umber hulks in their crew), at which point your chances are slim with the beginner squad. It would be best to decline those missions until you build up your ship and team. Doing some cargo deliveries or passenger transports is far less lucrative, but other than random encounters (which you can run from) there is very little risk to damage the ship and the repairs in this game are really expensive (too expensive if you ask me). The game also features some design typical of other SSI (or 90s RPGs in general) games, inventory management takes A LOT of effort in here, since you need to manage spells and equipment for every crew member (and you have a lot of them), which is my biggest gripe with this game. The other issue is that the game is buggy, can crash sometimes, though this release has far less bugs than I remember from the original DOS game. The most jarring bug I encountered was that despite I saved the game in many different slots, it replaced all my slots with the most recent save, which may be an issue with the cloud saves, since this release features it. I hope the team fixes it in the future. Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace was niche even when it came out, but it is remarkable in its atmosphere, bizarre visuals of the Spelljammer setting, portraying D&D combat in space with both ship-to-ship and boarding elements. I also love the music, even though it does get repetitive after some time. It Is a sandbox game, where you are pretty much left to your own devices from the very beginning. You can haul cargo, do various types of missions, hunt pirates or search for hidden stuff in Wildspace, with the goal being upgrading your ship, buying a new one, leveling and buying gear for your crew, gaining notoriety and reputation and maybe eventually doing the main quest, which is pretty simple, but it is there for you to find. Overall, as I said in the beginning, I really love this game, but it is what it is - a niche, bizarre product. One I recommend though, since the game gave me many hours of enjoyment.

I was having nostalgic fun, but the story is unplayable for me. Every time a zombie attacks one of my crew members the game freezes making it impossible to complete the first story mission. Quick tip if you are struggling to get money: spam and decline transport missions until they give you a 6000ish mission to transport plate mail. Sell the plate mail cargo at a port for 60,000 instead. When you visit the port where you were supposed to deliver it, give your money to a different crew member before you "turn in the cargo". They will fine you for losing it, but your captain doesn't technically have any money so you lose nothing. After being fined, you can safely trade the money back to your captain character. I was able to build up half a mil pretty easy this way. I was really enjoying it, but thumbs down because I cant even start the story let alone finish it.

Game freezes as soon as you land a hit on an enemy monster.

I grew up on the AD&D Masterpiece Collection CD-ROMs and I always wondered why this game wasn't part of that collection. I remember seeing this intriguing Spelljammer computer game advertised in Dragon Magazine and always wanted to give it a try but never could track down a copy back in the day. Eventually I forgot it even existed until about twenty-five years later when I randomly saw it here on Steam... like you do. Now, after finally trying out Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace for a few hours... yeah, I can see why this game was left mostly for the dustbin of history. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of retro charm that I love here. And the 2nd edition D&D rules are my favorite right alongside the old Basic/Expert rules. There's also a hint of open world to this game that I can appreciate too. But overall the game feels too ambitious for its own good. The main thrust of the game is the space sim aspect, which doesn't work nearly as well as other space sims of this era. Ship to ship combat is a chore to slog through. Even after slapping some upgrades onto your ship it's still not much fun. And the hand to hand combat isn't much better in this game either. On the other end of the spectrum, playing the role of an honest space merchant isn't much fun either because you quickly notice the cargo prices are exactly the same in every port on every planet you land on, so there's no profit to be made from a fluctuating economy. You're basically stuck doing the same random cargo drop-off missions for the same amount of gold every time. You'll pick up missions from taverns too, but these are also limited in their variety and usually boil down to your magical spacefaring ship being a glorified taxi. There is a main 'plot' to the game, but it doesn't show up until you're a couple hours into what you might be thinking is just an open-ended space sim, which seems like an odd design decision to me. Overall, I'm glad I got to finally give Pirates of Realmspace a whirl, but I see the reasons why this one isn't remembered as much as some of the other oldie D&D games like Eye of the Beholder or the Gold Box series.

we needs a full remake in the vane of bulders gate and neverwinter nights

Interesting concept in a magical Ptolemy inspired space setting that mechanically works even if clunky... the real issue is dealing with bugs and crashes. The only way to truly mitigate this is to play with a dosbox version that allows for save states otherwise I wouldn't recommend it unless you got a lot of time to spare for these type of puerile pursuits.

It has the usual copy protection where you need to enter a certain word from the manual to start the game, but the issue is.. it just doesn't work. Whatever I enter, it's apparently never correct, so I can't even start the game Whelps, guess people were correct in saying that game was a mess; it was a meme back in the day, and it still is

The game belongs in the trash. It doesn't work at all well. If you like games which cannot be played because of too many errors this is the one. I don't even know why steam gave it their seal of approval. It crashes way too frequently. I have to say it is a waste of time. I would take it back but I mean it. It is a waste of time and money. I printed out the manual think I could learn to play the game. it took up several sheets of paper and quite a bit of ink. Save yourself time and don't buy it.