Oregon Trail 4th Edition

The most polished Trail

The 4th Edition is the technically most advanced of all the mainline releases, arriving only two years after the 3rd Edition and developing its ideas in nearly every direction. It is also, oddly, one of the rarest and least-discussed entries in the series.

The most obvious upgrade is graphical. The resolution is 800×600, and city locations are rendered as full 360° QuickTime panoramas rather than the discrete slideshows of the previous two editions. The character cast continues the 'fewer is better' policy. There are even fewer NPCs than in the 3rd Edition, but each one is voiced with a strong personality, optional topic selection, and a gleeful overacting that is the opposite of Oregon Trail II's amateur-hour delivery.

Recruitment, money, and the wagon

Where Oregon Trail II offered larger companion parties and the 3rd Edition four to six recruits, the 4th Edition asks for only two. The starting profession list is tightened to five, and not the most attractive five, and the era and starting city are fixed. What you get back for that focus is a much sharper sense of who is in the wagon with you: six candidates, a mountain man, a doctor, a farmer-woman, and others, each with strong professional traits.

Companions also bring money to the journey, which makes outfitting genuinely tight. Even a banker protagonist will struggle. The doctor, the most useful person to have along, brings only $100 to the pot, against $210 of the player's own funds, and a six-month bulk outfit costs $600. You can get by on a smaller budget, and the vast retail assortment is still there for the micro-managers. You'll also need a wagon pulled by 6, 8, or 10 oxen, which runs $150 to $190.

An isometric trail

The top two-thirds of the main screen, the part the original 1990 game used for landmark stills, now shows a detailed isometric 3D landscape with your wagon working its way across it. Weather shows up as a cloud or raindrops drifting above the wagon icon. If you miss the photographic landmarks of the 2nd and 3rd Editions, a spy-glass icon below opens a first-person, photo-realistic scenic view at each landmark.

The bottom panel finally puts the controls where they should always have been. The Guidebook arrives with a detailed three-zoom map. The kettle icon rests the party. The hunting and fishing tools open the three activities (foraging is back, though without the auto-opened plant page from the 3rd Edition). Companion portraits sit along the bottom with health bars. They comment on the weather and ask for your call at choice points, and the doctor will warn you that walking through rain is asking for pneumonia. Calendar, thermometer, pace and ration sliders, water and food gauges: all of it lives on the main screen.

Events, forks, and 3D crossings

The random-events catalogue still holds about a hundred entries. New additions include a birthday celebration (with the date entered alongside your character's name at the start) and 3D cutscenes for mountain ascents, river crossings, and raft journeys (separate graphics options for systems with 3D accelerators).

The big change is that the 4th Edition unties trail forks from difficulty. Forks are everywhere now: even on the single Oregon route, several paths will appear, and the three-zoom map turns map-reading into a real strategic activity. (You can also ask an experienced companion if you brought one along.) On arrival the land registrar weighs survivors' health, remaining supplies, money, and elapsed time, and grants a homestead matching the result. There is still no score and no leaderboard, but the new homestead image is a small consolation.

The audio is the one disappointing area. A single, slightly intrusive melody covers the entire trail, and it doesn't even play correctly on every modern hardware configuration. It's hard to see why three CDs of capacity couldn't fit a richer score.

Verdict

The 4th Edition is one of the best entries in the series. It falls short of Oregon Trail II in variety, but it makes up for it with attractive graphics, a generous and useful interface, and the most considered companion system of any mainline title. If you want a Trail that feels like a polished late-90s adventure rather than a 1990 simulation, this is the one.

Notable systems

• 800×600 resolution, with an isometric 3D travel screen and weather over the wagon
• 360° QuickTime panoramas for all city / fort locations
• First-person scenic spy-glass view at landmarks
• Two-companion parties chosen from six richly-drawn candidates
• Companions contribute money, so even bankers struggle to outfit
• Three wagon types differing by ox count (6, 8, or 10 oxen)
• Pace and ration sliders accessible from the main screen
• Trail forks always present, no longer tied to difficulty
• 3D cutscenes for mountain ascents, river crossings, and rafts