In 2005, an American game services company with the trade name of WildTangent, released the first of what would become a four game tetralogy labeled Fate. The first game in the series is the flagship title Fate; released in 2005. The following sequels were Fate: Undiscovered Realms released in 2007, Fate: The Traitor Soul released in 2009, and Fate: The Cursed King. All of these titles were single player dungeon crawlers, similar to the Diablo games, but with less gore and better graphics. The Player begins the game by picking what style of character they want to play, and then pick a pet to travel with them. They progress through varied and endless levels of the dungeon, finding loot, fighting monsters, and defeating bosses. Designer and programmer Travis Baldree intended Fate to combine elements from games like Diablo and NetHack, and make them accessible to a casual gaming audience, while also trying to maintain a level of appeal to the more hardcore gamers. He steered clear of a gritty and dark style, in favor of a more inviting atmosphere. Although Baldree had considered the idea for several years, production of the game began in October 2004, with a total development time of about five months. Because of the short development time, there is no multiplayer elements in the original Fate and even with the extra time for the successive sequels, no multiplayer functions were ever developed. Fate: The Cursed King in the original release did have a item marketplace supported by Facebook but in 2014, WildTangent released the all four games to Steam and opted to withhold the marketplace function.
I remember playing Fate: The Traitor Soul over 10 years ago after finding it in a bin of pc games at Office Max. I would regularly search the shelf of cheap games at stores like Walmart and Office Max to see if there was something that appealed to me. The Traitor Soul was a radical departure from the first person shooter genre that I usually would play. For some reason though, it appealed to me and I bought it. Over the years, through moving twice, starting a family, etc, I lost the disk. It wasn’t till a few weeks ago I caught a bee in my bonnet and went on a long google search to find the name of the game and to re-buy it. Since then, I have been playing through the nostalgia and having much more fun than the first time I played.
Stay tuned for more articles where I go through and give individual overviews of all four games!
