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Classic Dungeon Crawler ‘QuestLord’ Brought Back from the Dead with First Update in Six Years

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One of my favorite mobile originals over the years has been Eric Kinkead’s first-person dungeon crawler QuestLord ($5.99). A 30+ year veteran of the games industry, Kinkead decided to strike out on his own and create the type of game that he grew up playing, but made for this magical new pocket computer called the iPhone that was proving to be a pretty big deal. Thus QuestLord was born and released to iOS in early 2013. We enjoyed it a lot in our review and took a deeper dive into it in an RPG Reload feature in 2015, and in general QuestLord stuck out for being an incredibly approachable entry in a genre that is notoriously difficult and complex. It’s a breezy experience, but not a dull one. It also exudes personality and plays wonderfully in portrait mode with one hand. It’s like the friendly little RPG mascot to the iPhone, and all of us were quite fond of QuestLord for many years.

Unfortunately, QuestLord would fall victim to the 32-bit Appocalypse when iOS 11 arrived in the fall of 2017. Being just one person with a full life outside of game development, and also being knee-deep in working on a sequel to QuestLord, there just wasn’t any time or resources for updating the original game to be 64-bit compliant. Our little pal QuestLord has been unplayable on any iOS 11 and later devices ever since. However! All good tales have a dramatic climax followed by a happy ending, and QuestLord is no different. Today Eric Kinkead has released a full compatibility update for QuestLord on iOS, Android, and even Amazon Kindle. It’s not just a compatibility update though, as there’s also 6 brand new cutscenes and a new cutscene viewer, a new “encountered NPC" viewer, more gold and loot, a Settings menu, and a lot more.

So, uh, the elephant in the room: What about QuestLord 2? You might remember that exactly a year ago today QuestLord 2 was scheduled to release on December 18th, but when that day came around Kinkead discovered a show-stopping bug in the final version of the game and had to delay the release to the spring of 2019. Well obviously spring has come and gone and now we’re smack dab in the middle of winter, and still no QuestLord 2. It turns out that the show-stopping bug necessitated rewriting the original QuestLord from the ground up, giving the first game its long overdue compatibility update and also creating a strong foundation for QuestLord 2 to run on. That sort of thing can take, well, an entire year or more when you’re just one person, and that’s what has happened here.

There’s an FAQ in the updated version of QuestLord which addresses the situation with the sequel, and even throws out a date when it will be ready: December 22nd. Then right below that it is stated that that date is absolutely not guaranteed, and you can see on the most recent QuestLord Facebook update that another hardship in Kinkead’s personal life has all but guaranteed QuestLord 2 won’t be released this month. It would be silly to try and even guess a release date at this point, but it seems that the past year of relative silence about the situation was Kinkead trying to prepare the one-two punch of an updated original QuestLord followed by the sequel a couple of weeks later. While that’s not happening, I feel confident this time around that QuestLord 2 will truly be right around the corner, and in the meantime being able to replay through the beloved original game is a gift I’m absolutely thankful for.

  • QuestLord

    The land known as the Shattered Realm falls into peril. Desperate people cling to stories and legends of old. It is rumo…
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    $5.99
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