It was an example of an early open world game. The most interesting part of the game is the first chapter. The game very directly makes you go south towards Krondor, and the path north contains some large enemy packs. But if you manage to defeat the two large enemy packs, it gets much easier later on and you can take a very long detour around the entire map. This means you can access some high level equipment and spells early on in the game. The game designers actually planned for this possibility, because there are some quests in those areas that can only be completed in the first chapter (normally you'd explore these areas around the third chapter at least).
I forked an open source reversed engineered implementation of that game some time ago, you can see it in here: https://github.com/canassa/betrayal-at-krondor
My hope was to get it working and eventualy update some of its graphics but I never had the time to properly work on it.
Betrayal at Krondor uses written descriptions of events and environments a lot. It felt natural, at least to me, perhaps partially because the graphics didn't really allow for showing a lot of detail visually. Extensive voice acting wasn't really a thing in the floppy era either.
Nowadays, with the incredibly detailed graphics and professionally voice-acted spoken dialogue of AAA games, it might seem a lot more weird if what the characters saw were described in writing.
I always enjoyed the political fantasy spin-off series Daughter of the Empire by Janny Wurts more, though. :D
And yeah, the Empire trilogy is probably the best of his (co-)work.
Also, I consistently think about art (music, games, movies, books, etc), that while you may not have massive international fame, your work might still be somebody's favorite.
I remember this site too and am saddened to learn of the author's passing.
It's heartwarming to see a relic such as this preserved, when so many similar things are left to disappear with the communities that made them.
This website is serious nostalgia for me.
The Mordhel wordlocks from this game are a mechanic I desperately wish other games would pick up (who doesn't like riddles?).
