Strife: Quest for the Sigil

About Strife: Quest for the Sigil

Strife (1996) is Rogue Entertainment's first-person shooter RPG, the last commercial standalone Doom-engine game, in which a mercenary joins a resistance fighting a plague-born religious tyranny.

Strife: Quest for the Sigil in Depth

A comet impact brought a deadly virus to the planet. Millions died, and some survivors mutated and began hearing the voice of a malevolent deity, forming The Order and enslaving everyone else. An unnamed mercenary, captured by Order troops near the town of Tarnhill, kills his guards, escapes and is recruited by Rowan into the resistance, The Front. Kept in touch by radio with a Front operative codenamed Blackbird, who offers help and commentary throughout, he takes missions from the rebel leader Macil and joins the assault on the Order's castle, where he kills the Programmer and discovers that the weapon he wielded is one of five fragments of the Sigil, a powerful weapon the Order worships.

Combat against the Order's infantry and war robots is standard first-person shooting, starting with just a dagger and finding weapons such as a crossbow and flamethrower, with an inventory for first aid kits, armour and gold. What set it apart were role-playing elements: friendly and neutral characters to talk and trade with, who hand out missions; alarms that bring guards running if the player opens fire outside combat, though the dagger and poison crossbow bolts allow stealthy kills; and two attributes, accuracy and stamina, that improve at certain points. Instead of linear levels, Tarnhill serves as a hub linking areas that stay as the player left them, and later the player must decide whom to trust, starting with whether to follow Macil's order to kill the Oracle.

Making Strife: Quest for the Sigil

Cygnus Studios had been making The Second Sword on id's older ShadowCaster engine when id asked it to build a Doom-engine game instead and relocate to Texas; the studio dropped The Second Sword for Strife, but conflicts soon split it, founder Scott Host returned to Chicago and the project was effectively cancelled until the breakaway staff formed Rogue Entertainment. The shareware version came out on 23 February 1996 and the full game that May, published by Velocity in North America and Studio 3DO in Europe. Reviews praised its novel play, in which killing everyone in sight ends badly, and its voice acting, but criticised the obsolete engine next to Duke Nukem 3D and Quake and its single save slot. It was later seen as underappreciated and a precursor to games such as Deus Ex.