Classic: Exile Trilogy, Blades of Exile

By: Paul Eres

On: June 7th, 2009

The Exile games are RPGs in the Ultima style: make a party, crawl through an enormous world, gain stats, talk with people, kill thousands of monsters, and so on. Very addictive. They were later remade as the Avernum series, although some don’t like the remade games as much as the original ones (especially the remade graphics perspective).

My absolute favorite part of the game is how detailed the world is, how each NPC has custom text and feels like a real person, with their own lives and backgrounds. The story is written in third person, like a fantasy novel, which is odd for a game but works well here.

Jeff Vogel released the first Exile game back in 1995, making him one of the most classic indie developers still actively making games (he’s still releasing new ones, Geneforge 5 is the latest). The original shareware Exile trilogy was released between ’95 and ’97, and the free and open source Blades of Exile game (where users can create their own campaigns) was also released in ’97.

Of the original three, the first one is a bit dated, so I actually recommend beginning with the second or third one, or with the free Blades of Exile, since the GUI and so on are much improved on over the first one. For instance, to ask a character about a specific thing involves clicking on a word in the second and third game, but manually typing that word out in the first game. Even the demos of the shareware ones are quite lengthy, and offer at least 10-20 hours of gameplay each.

These were some of the first indie games I ever played, they existed before the term ‘indie game’ was even commonly in use. One of my fondest game-related memories is, back on Windows 3.1, noticing that the graphics to Exile 2 and 3 were stored in simple .bmp format, and going into MS Paint and manually editing the appearance of a few of the character sprites, customizing them for my characters, such as replacing a staff with a sword, or recoloring red clothes to blue.