History VideoGame / FATE

All four games are available on [=WildTangent=]'s website, as well as UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} and Website/GOGDotCom.

No relation whatsoever to anything starting with "''Fate/''" in the Franchise/{{Nasuverse}}, the [[UsefulNotes/{{Fate}} setting-neutral tabletop game]] based on ''UsefulNotes/{{FUDGE}}'', ''TabletopGame/{{FATAL}}'', ''VideoGame/ExitFate'', or a character from ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha''.

No relation whatsoever to anything starting with "''Fate/''" in the Franchise/{{Nasuverse}}, a character from ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha'', the [[UsefulNotes/{{Fate}} setting-neutral tabletop game]] based on ''UsefulNotes/{{FUDGE}}'', ''TabletopGame/{{FATAL}}'', or ''VideoGame/ExitFate''.

Story aside, the basic mechanics of the game has remained the same throughout the series. The PlayerCharacter arrives in town to undertake a quest to defeat a [[BigBad dangerous monster]] down at the bottom of the nearby dungeon...aaaaand [[ExcusePlot that's it]], [[RetiredBadass retire]] and [[AncestralWeapon pass down a heirloom]] to a [[NewGamePlus descendant]], or [[WideOpenSandbox go dungeon-plunging]]. Point-and-click hack-and-slash gameplay, SocketedEquipment created by the RandomNumberGod, so on and so forth. It wasn't really anything new, but it ''did'' refine the formula by adding some new features.

No relation whatsoever to anything starting with "''Fate/''" in the Franchise/{{Nasuverse}}, a character from ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha'', the [[{{TabletopGame/Fate}} setting-neutral tabletop game]] based on ''TabletopGame/{{FUDGE}}'', ''TabletopGame/{{FATAL}}'', or ''VideoGame/ExitFate''.

* ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: For a price, you can get a minstrel to increase your Renown by one level, which translates into 4 skill points.

First off, your character gets a pet. Its main function is to multiply the size of your GridInventory, but it also serves as a convenient StoneWall ([[GameplayAllyImmortality it cannot die]], though it will flee battle for a while if it bottoms out on HitPoints) and can be sent back to town with its load of ShopFodder, which it will ([[FridgeLogic somehow]]) sell to local merchants before reporting back with the spoils. This pet could also be fed various types of fish to transmogrify it into [[PetMonstrosity various types of enemy monsters]] for varying amounts of time. Fishes are obtained by fishing in water bodies positioned below clouds of fireflies, though the activity itself mostly consists of staring at the screen until an exclamation mark pops up, and then clicking a button with the mouse button on time. Yields include fish, new gear, or sometimes nothing at all. All equipment is randomly generated, except for a few, rarely-appearing "Artifact" weapons with pre-determined stats. These can become outclassed by the weapons given enhancements through the RandomNumberGod, but they still sell for a ton. That's important in a game where vendors buy stuff for one-eighth of their selling price.

** Perhaps the single best item to get at the beginning of the game is the humble fishing pole, because with a little patience and some luck, a fisher can hook fish containing artifacts out of ''any'' body of water with a group of fireflies hovering above it, including the ones in all the towns; most of the artifacts that the player usually fishes up in town or the first few levels of the dungeons will sell for five-digit figures once they are identified, which provides a ''very'' significant return on investment in the early game. Even without taking into consideration the chance of fishing out artifacts, some of the fishes that can be pulled out in the early game will (temporarily) transform your pet into creatures that are just plain overpowered.

First off, your character gets a pet. Its main function is to multiply the size of your GridInventory, but it also serves as a convenient StoneWall ([[GameplayAllyImmortality it cannot die]], though it will flee battle for a while if it bottoms out on HitPoints) and can be sent back to town with its load of VendorTrash, which it will ([[FridgeLogic somehow]]) sell to local merchants before reporting back with the spoils. This pet could also be fed various types of fish to transmogrify it into [[PetMonstrosity various types of enemy monsters]] for varying amounts of time. Fishes are obtained by fishing in water bodies positioned below clouds of fireflies, though the activity itself mostly consists of staring at the screen until an exclamation mark pops up, and then clicking a button with the mouse button on time. Yields include fish, new gear, or sometimes nothing at all. All equipment is randomly generated, except for a few, rarely-appearing "Artifact" weapons with pre-determined stats. These can become outclassed by the weapons given enhancements through the RandomNumberGod, but they still sell for a ton. That's important in a game where vendors buy stuff for one-eighth of their selling price.

** Whenever you send your pet to town, regardless of the amount of time left before they return, you will immediately meet up with your pet if you go back to town yourself, whereupon they would always have already sold whatever unequipped items they were carrying at the time. Considering the amount of VendorTrash you will get in the dungeon, and your pet taking up to 2 minutes to return to you, you can {{Sequence Break|ing}} by sending your pet to town, then immediately spawning a town portal to get yourself back to town to meet up with your pet, which has already sold all its inventory in the handful of seconds it takes for your computer to load the town.

* HardModePerks: Unless you play on Legend or Hardcore difficulty, the easier difficulty levels restrict your chances of encountering graded items and, due to the way the game's item spawn mechanics work, generally require you to dive deeper into the dungeon to get better drops. On Page difficulty, equipment that RandomlyDrops is never graded.

The game runs on a PointBuildSystem, rather than expecting you to choose a {{Splat}} at the beginning of the game. By putting stat points into Strength, Dexterity, Magic and Vitality, you can customize and hybridize your character into anything you desire. The game also takes TechPoints to its obvious extreme by giving you an entire second layer of levels, Renown, to gain experience points, called "Fame", in. Having higher Renown levels not only unlocks the use of some gear (e.g. "Requires Renown of Distinguished"), but gives you extra points to put into various skills & aptitudes, such as [[CriticalHit Critical Strike]], [[DualWielding Dual-Wielding]] or the three flavors of magic (Attack, Defense, and Charm, with the latter encompassing SummonMagic). Fame points are primarily gained by defeating boss characters and by handling {{Side Quest}}s for {{Non Player Character}}s, but there are also minstrels you can pay to praise your name, instantly raising you to the next Renown level. This takes a ''ton'' of money, but—as the game itself points out—you are essentially [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney purchasing skill points]].

With each new game in the series comes new features and equipment. ''Undiscovered Realms'' raised the player's level {{Cap}} to 199, gave the player the ability to import their characters from the first game and introduced two new towns, each with their own dungeons, with the defeat of Kaos and retrieval of the Book of Fate only possible once these two dungeons are purged of their evil influences. ''The Traitor Soul'' introduced a CharacterClassSystem by giving the player the option to start off new games as an individual from another species, added an additional dungeon, brought back the town of Grove and its dungeon, removed the player's level cap, increased the player pet's inventory size, and introduced LimitBreak and RealTimeWeaponChange. ''The Cursed King'' features a FreeRotatingCamera and introduces an {{NPC}} party system and online features, allowing players to trade items and connect to each other through Website/{{Facebook}}.

* GameplayAllyImmortality: Your pet can ''never'' die, but it will stop fighting for you once its HitPoints is down to 1. In ''The Cursed King'', {{NPC}}s you recruit will faint, not die, if their health drops to 0 and can be revived with the right potions or spell; otherwise, they will automatically revive themselves over time.

** Fainted {{NPC}}s in ''The Cursed King'' will eventually revive themselves, recovering a small chunk of their health in the process, over a period of time.

No relation whatsoever to anything starting with "''Fate/''" in the Franchise/{{Nasuverse}}, a character from ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha'', the TabletopGame based on ''TabletopGame/{{FUDGE}}'', ''TabletopGame/{{FATAL}}'', or ''VideoGame/ExitFate''.

* HealingFactor: The most obvious example of this trope is any equipment socketed with either an Amethyst or Peridot. Amethysts increase the speed of you automatically recovering HitPoints over time, while the Peridot recovers a certain percentage point of your maximum health each time you hit an enemy. Fainted {{NPC}}s in ''The Cursed King'' will eventually revive themselves, recovering a small chunk of their health in the process, over a period of time.
** Your pet also has a ''very'' slow version of this, which can be sped up via the above methods.
* HitPoints

* JokeItem: Peronto's Cheesehead of the Emerald Bay, a rare and unique helmet obtainable only through fishing, which has a whopping one defense and a 75 percent Vitality penalty.
** The Gem of False Hopes, a gem with a whopping zero enchantments.

** Aside from the summon and Charm Monster spells, the rest of the Charm Magic spells are this, including Identify, Town Portal (which both provide the same function as the scrolls) and Mental Map (which reveals the entire dungeon layout).
* BreathWeapon: The Basilisk and its fire counterpart, the Salamander, release sound or fire waves from their mouths as one of their two attacks.

** Fame is capped at level 20 across all four games, but the final Renown (Unattainable) is purely a BraggingRightsReward as no Elite or Legendary item requires more than the 19th Renown level Demigod.

* HardModePerks: Unless you play on Legend or Hardcore difficulty, the easier difficulty levels restrict your chances of encountering graded items. On Page difficulty, equipment that RandomlyDrops is never graded.

** The Mimic masquerades as a Large Chest until you walk right up to it. Players who can spot the difference in size between a Mimic and a real Large Chest can blow its disguise from afar by using a ranged attack. Befitting this trope, a Mimic can cause serious trouble on its own for the inexperienced player in earlier parts of the game because it {{NoSell}}s all magic attacks and has a powerful bite attack.

** The Mimic masquerades as a Large Chest until you walk right up to it. Players who can spot the difference in size between a Mimic and a real Large Chest can blow its disguise from afar by using a ranged attack. Befitting this trope, a Mimic can cause serious trouble on its own for the inexperienced player in earlier parts of the game because it NoSells all magic attacks and has a powerful bite attack.

* ChestMonster: The Mimic masquerades as a Large Chest until you walk right up to it, and Cursed Swords may occasionally emerge from any chest that the player opens. Players who can spot the difference in size between a Mimic and a real Large Chest can blow its disguise from afar [[spoiler:by using a ranged attack]]. Befitting this trope, a Mimic can cause ''serious'' trouble on its own for the inexperienced player in earlier parts of the game because it is immune to all forms of elemental magic and attacks with a devastating bite. Cursed Swords can be found more often in treasure chests of any size and are also immune to magic attacks, but they are also much weaker than Mimics.

No relation whatsoever to the ''[[VisualNovel/FateStayNight Fate]]'' series, a character from ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha'', the TabletopGame based on TabletopGame/{{FUDGE}}, TabletopGame/{{FATAL}}, or ''VideoGame/ExitFate''.

* CastFromStamina: Your character from ''The Traitor Soul'' onwards, as well as allies in ''The Cursed King'', can perform a [[LimitBreak rage attack]] that consumes a large amount of stamina as well as a small amount of mana. The stamina consumed is typically a non-issue since stamina regeneration is quite fast

* DummiedOut:
** In the original release of ''The Traitor Soul'', the Town of Grove was an inaccessible realm...unless a single integer in its realms.dat file was changed from 0 to 1. The Steam and GOG.com re-releases avert this, with the Town of Grove accessible without having to modify any of the game's files.
** Examination of the races.dat file in ''The Cursed King'' shows that a sixth playable race, the Undead, was commented out. This race is fully coded, however, and can be made selectable during normal character creation by de-commenting the correct lines in races.dat using a text editor such as Notepad. [[spoiler:Among other things, the Undead share the same passive 5% Magic bonus as Humans, have points in the Spear and Charm Magic skills, and are also resistant to piercing, slashing and ice damage while being vulnerable to crushing damage. Undead also start off with a spear as their equipped weapon and a Summon Spiders Spell in their inventory.]]

* CastFromHitPoints: The enchanter will sometimes curse an equipment to either drain your health slowly over time or drain your health each time you hit an enemy.

* MonsterTown: Typhon and Druantia from games 2 and 3 are mostly inhabited by monsters, friendly monsters this time. Most of them are from the first game.

* BigBad: A monster between dungeon level 41 to 50 in the original. ''Undiscovered Realms'' gives us Kaos, ''The Traitor Soul'' has both Kaos and your Nemesis, and in ''The Cursed King'', T'Kala is this.

* The first game of the series, simply titled ''FATE'', was released in 2005, and follows an adventurer and his pet who had arrived at the town of Grove, a resting spot for travellers heading beyond, through the Dungeon Gate. The adventurer's arrival coincides with the emergence of a monster residing deep within the dungeon who threatens to envelop the town with its evil influence. The adventurer is thus given a task to travel down the dungeon and slay this monster.
* ''FATE: Undiscovered Realms'', released in 2007, continued the story of this adventurer who, after slaying the evil within the dungeon on the outskirts of the town of Grove, is hailed as a hero by the town's inhabitants. During the celebrations, an old man arrives, speaking of undiscovered realms and a temple located below the dungeon, containing the Book of Fate that he claims will save the town of Grove from a new evil. The adventurer escorts the old man to the temple, where it is revealed that the Book of Fate ''kept'' these realms safe from evil. The old man promptly reveals that ''he'' was this new evil and steals the book after knocking the adventurer unconscious. The old man's attack creates portals to two other realms, and both are now in danger of being overwhelmed by the influence of this new evil, Kaos. The adventurer is then tasked with recovering this book by defeating two of Kaos's minions before confronting Kaos itself and retrieving the Book of Fate.
* In ''FATE: The Traitor Soul'', released in 2009, the adventurer, now known as the Champion of Grove, retrieves the Book of Fate and returns it to where it originally belongs. Not too long after this, the Champion meets a Traveller who claims that within the Temple of Fate lies a Chamber of Trials to prove one's worth. The Champion decides to follow the Traveller back to the Temple of Fate and venture into the Chamber of Trials. ''Traitor Soul'' effectively serves as an UpdatedRerelease of the first two games, adding the Chamber of Trials and new equipment, on top of almost all of the content of the first two games.
* The fourth and final game of the series, ''FATE: The Cursed King'', was released on March 30, 2011, and takes place in a separate realm with a Middle-East theme. As a citizen of the city of Ekbatan, the PlayerCharacter grew up hearing great tales of good and evil, particularly [[ContinuityNod the heroic deeds of the Champion of Grove]], and resolves to eventually do great deeds worthy of the Champion's attention. One day, while adventuring just outside the city, the player enters a small cave and finds a chest. Unable to make out the writings on it, the player opens the chest, only to realise that it was the tomb of an evil necromancer, T'Kala, and that by opening the chest, T'Kala's evil spirit was unleashed upon Ekbatan. The player is unable to warn the King of Ekbatan fast enough, and the city is destroyed. Miraculously alive, Kurosh, the Beggar King of Ekbatan, now bestows upon the player the task of ridding the city of T'Kala's influence.

Story aside, the basic mechanics of the game has remained the same throughout the series. The PlayerCharacter arrives in town to undertake a quest to defeat a [[BigBad dangerous monster]] down at the bottom of the nearby dungeon...aaaaand [[ExcusePlot that's it]], [[RetiredBadass retire]] and [[AncestralWeapon pass down a heirloom]] to a [[NewGamePlus descendant]] or [[WideOpenSandbox go dungeon-plunging]]. Point-and-click hack-and-slash gameplay, SocketedEquipment created by the RandomNumberGod, so on and so forth. It wasn't really anything new, but it ''did'' refine the formula by adding some new features.

With each new game in the series comes new features and equipment. ''Undiscovered Realms'' raised the player's level {{Cap}} to 199, gave the player the ability to import their characters from the first game and introduced two new towns, each with their own dungeons, with the defeat of Kaos and retrieval of the Book of Fate only possible once these two dungeons are purged of their evil influences. ''The Traitor Soul'' introduced a CharacterClassSystem by giving the player the option to start off new games as an individual from another species, added an additional dungeon, brought back the town of Grove and its dungeon, removed the player's level cap and brought in RealTimeWeaponChange. ''The Cursed King'' features a FreeRotatingCamera and introduces an {{NPC}} party system and online features, allowing players to trade items and connect to each other through Website/{{Facebook}}.

* ExcusePlot: With every instalment, this trope's presence diminishes a little. The first game's plot could be summed up as "go down to Level x, kill this monster and be a hero". From the second game onwards, a PlotDevice is added, be it the Book of Fate, the Chamber of Trials or a hermit called Awadji.

* GiantSpider: One of the most common monsters in the dungeons, it comes in both hairless and hairy variations. Both tend to be poisonous. You can turn your pet into one with one of the cheapest fish.

* HardModePerks: Unless you play on Legend difficulty, the easier difficulty levels restrict your chances of encountering graded items. On Page difficulty, equipment that RandomlyDrops is never graded.

** The original release of ''FATE'' {{averted|trope}} this trope by having verbatim copies of many ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' monsters, such as owlbears, beholders (called watchers), ettins (two-headed giants), gnolls, and myconids. However, most likely due to copyright issues, a free DLC for the game changed these monsters by giving them new names and/or minor differences to their model—owlbears became shrikes, beholders became abominations, and while ettins, gnolls, and myconids remained unchanged, they were renamed hill ogres, jackal fiends, and death caps respectively. These changes were carried over to subsequent games.

''[[http://games.wildtangent.com/fate/ [=FATE=]]]'' is a ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' clone developed and published by [=WildTangent=]. From its humble beginnings as a single game, ''[=FATE=]'' has since expanded into a series encompassing two different storylines across four games, including the original.

* The first game of the series, simply titled ''[=FATE=]'', was released in 2005, and follows an adventurer and his pet who had arrived at the town of Grove, a resting spot for travellers heading beyond, into the Dungeon Gate. The adventurer's arrival coincides with the rise of a monster residing deep within the dungeon who threatens to envelop the town with its evil influence. The adventurer is thus given a task to travel down the dungeon and slay this monster.
* ''[=FATE=]: Undiscovered Realms'', released in 2007, continued the story of this adventurer who, after slaying the evil within the dungeon on the outskirts of the town of Grove, is hailed as a hero by the town's inhabitants. During the celebrations, an old man arrives, speaking of undiscovered realms and a temple located below the dungeon, containing the Book of Fate that he claims will save the town of Grove from a new evil. The adventurer escorts the old man to the temple, where it is revealed that the Book of Fate ''kept'' these realms safe from evil. The old man promptly reveals that ''he'' was this new evil and steals the book after knocking the adventurer unconscious. The old man's attack creates portals to two other realms, and both are now in danger of being overwhelmed by the influence of this new evil, Kaos. The adventurer is then tasked with recovering this book by defeating two of Kaos' minions before confronting Kaos itself and retrieving the Book of Fate.
* In ''[=FATE=]: The Traitor Soul'', released in 2009, the adventurer, now called the Champion of Grove, retrieves the Book of Fate and returns it to where it originally belongs. Not too long after this, the Champion meets a Traveller who claims that within the Temple of Fate lies a Chamber of Trials to prove one's worth. The Champion decides to follow the Traveller back to the Temple of Fate and venture into the Chamber of Trials. ''Traitor Soul'' effectively serves as an UpdatedRerelease of the first two games, adding the Chamber of Trials and new equipment on top of the content of the first two games (no main quest for the Town of Grove though).
* The fourth and final game of the series, ''[=FATE=]: The Cursed King'', was released on March 30, 2011, and takes place in a separate realm with a Middle-East theme. As a citizen of the city of Ekbatan, the PlayerCharacter grew up hearing great tales of good and evil, particularly [[ContinuityNod the heroic deeds of the Champion of Grove]], and resolves to eventually do great deeds worthy of the Champion's attention. One day, while adventuring just outside the city, the player enters a small cave and finds a chest. Unable to make out the writings on it, the player opens the chest, only to realise that it was the tomb of an evil necromancer, T'Kala, and that by opening the chest, T'Kala's evil spirit was unleashed upon Ektaban. The player is unable to warn the King of Ektaban fast enough, and the city is destroyed. Miraculously alive, Kurosh, the Beggar King of Ektaban, now bestows upon the player the task of ridding the city of T'Kala's influence.

With each new game in the series comes new features and equipment. ''Undiscovered Realms'' raised the player's level {{Cap}} to 199, gave the player the ability to import their characters from the first game and introduced two new towns, each with their own dungeons, with the defeat of Kaos and retrieval of the Book of Fate only possible once these two dungeons are purged of their evil influences. ''The Traitor Soul'' introduced a CharacterClassSystem by giving the player the option to start off new games as an individual from another species, added an additional dungeon, brought back the town of Grove and its dungeon, removed the player's level cap and brought in RealTimeWeaponChange. ''The Cursed King'' features a FreeRotatingCamera and introduces an {{NPC}} party system and online features, allowing players to trade items and connect to each other through Website/{{Facebook}}. All four games are available on UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} and Website/GOGDotCom, with a bundle purchase available on the latter.

!!The ''[=FATE=]'' series provides examples of:

* AbsurdlyHighLevelCap: Played with. The game's so-called "final boss" usually resides in the 50th floor or so, but according to the game's source code, the dungeon could go on to ''two billion'' levels, although trying to go that deep (using cheats) would likely crash your game, even then it's not a good idea to go past the hundreds since your actual character is capped at level 99, and the monsters would be far stronger than you beyond that point.

* AwesomeMomentOfCrowning: Once you rid Ektaban of T'Kala's influence, Kurosh the Beggar King regains his throne...and crowns you as a way of thanks.

* BigBad: A monster between dungeon level 41 to 50 in the original. ''Undiscovered Realms'' and ''The Traitor Soul'' gives us Kaos, and in ''The Cursed King'', T'Kala is this.

* BoringButPractical: Perhaps the single best item to get at the beginning of the game is the humble fishing pole, because with a little patience and some luck, a fisher can hook fish containing artifacts out of ''any'' body of water with a group of fireflies hovering above it, including the ones in all the towns; most of the artifacts that the player usually fishes up in town or the first few levels of the dungeons will sell for five-digit figures once they are identified, which provides a ''very'' significant return on investment in the early game. Even without taking into consideration the chance of fishing out artifacts, some of the fishes that can be pulled out in the early game will (temporarily) transform your pet into creatures that are just plain overpowered.

* CaptainErsatz: Because of copyright issues, a good deal of the monsters and beings in the games are obvious stand-ins for ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' creatures. Some examples include:
** The Nautiloids are basically Illithids (Mindflayers).
** The Scorpfeline, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a monstrous cat with a scorpion's stinger]] and two tentacles growing from its back, is modelled after the Displacer Beast.
** The shadow elf race from ''The Traitor Soul'' and ''The Cursed King'' are dead ringers for the drow, minus being AlwaysChaoticEvil.
** The very first game had a free DLC which added a handful of TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons creatures to it, such as the Owlbears, Beholders (called Watchers), Ettins (two-headed giants), and Gnolls. However, the DLC eventually received an update that changed all of these beings by giving them new names and minor differences to their model. Owlbears became Shrikes, Beholders became Abominations, and while Ettins and Gnolls remained unchanged, they were renamed as Hill Ogres and Jackal Fiends respectively.
** Interestingly, one of the basic mushroom-man enemies used to be called Myconid before being renamed "Death Cap" in an update.

* EmergencyWeapon: If your character has no weapons, punching the enemy is the only other option. In addition, assuming that you went into the dungeons with no weapons or armor, your character will automatically pick up and use the first weapon and the first of each armor type one finds if the criteria for using them are met.

* SealedEvilInACan: T'Kala, the BigBad of ''The Cursed King'', was once a necromancer who was executed by the King of Ektaban. His soul was sealed in a treasure chest buried in a small cave outside the city...[[NiceJobBreakingItHero until the player opened it]]. Cursed Swords also qualify, since they lie inert in some treasure chests until the player opens them.

* WatchingTroyBurn: This is the fate of the City of Ektaban as a direct result of the player unsealing T'Kala. Would have been AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs if the player reached the city before T'Kala did.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/wildtangent-fate_2742.jpg]]