RPGWatch Forums - Eye of the Beholder - D&D Hall of Fame Nominee @ Diehard GameFAN

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Eye of the Beholder - D&D Hall of Fame Nominee @ Diehard GameFAN

The third nominee for the D&D Hall of Fame at Diehard GameFAN is Eye of the Beholder, which is accepted in their hall of fame.

Quote:

Eye of the Beholder was the first real success for the Dungeons & Dragons license on the PC. It was the game that many tabletop gamers felt finally emulated what it would be like to be in a dungeon crawl and it was the first D&D game that you could play and enjoy even if you didn’t know anything about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in particular. For many video gamers it was their first trip to the Realms Forgotten, their first encounter with the city of Waterdeep, their first FPRPG (First Person RPG), their first encounter with a little Aberration known as a Beholder. Eye of the Beholder managed to capture the hearts and minds of gamers across the board and managed to receive critical praise not just for the original DOS version that could be played on a PC, but for the later ports to the Amiga, Sega-CD and SNES. Other incredibly successful PC RPGs like The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry and Ultima had all been ported to consoles, but they never reached the same level of success there as Eye of the Beholder.
For me personally, the Sega-CD version was my favorite as it not only came with a brand new (and vastly improved) soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro, but if you put the disc into a CD player, you could access every last bit of audio content in the game, including the major story bits, character introductions and the ending. This was wonderful if you didn’t want to replay the game and just wanted to reminisce on certain parts. It didn’t play as well as the PC version, but it did look and sound better.

More information.

Come on GOG this bitch already

The Eye of the Beholder trilogy is one of my favorites. I eventually made a complete playthrough on youtube.

Eye of the Beholder
Eye of the Beholder II: Legend of Darkmoon
Eye of the Beholder III: Ruins of Myth Drannor

I really enjoyed the first two games back in the day. I didn't quite like the third game as much though and struggled to really get into it to the point where I just lost interest and never finished it. Will have to have another crack at it one day…

I remember staring aghast at the three skeletal figures who walk down on your party fairly early on in the dungeon from the second game. They provided some genuinely sinister moments! And I'm sure I'm not the only one who cursed when that pesky little NPC thief steals your equipment, leaving your party and making off with it…

Good games, great memories as they say.

Recently have grown into an Eye of the Beholder 3 apologetic. The primary flaw with EoB3 is that it wasn't made by Westwood, so it faces the same challenge Fallout 3 did. If you can overlook this and only look to the game itself, the next problem comes from it's engine.

Eye of the Beholder 3 used an engine called the AESOP/16 engine that had strong performance problems. A patch was under development (AESOP/32) that fixed all performance issues but was never released. 2009 a fan got his hands on the sourcecode (legally through asking) and got the game running. With AESOP/16 EoB3 runs slow even on a modern PC with DOSBox. It have choppy/broken sound effects and lags all the time. With the updated/fixed version it's as fast as Eye of the Beholder I or II, making the experience much more enjoyable.

The third and real problem is that the story is a bit lacking. I made my own video that summarized the story in my EoB3 playthrough on youtube. After doing so I did not think the story was that bad, even if it was clearly insuperior to EoB2.

EoB3's advantage includes advanced foes. Neither EoB1 or 2 have monsters with obvious vulnerabilities. EoB3 does. Knowing what to use against a monster or not makes a drastic difference in your results. Look at my playthrough of EoB3 compared to the other playthroughs out there and you see what I am talking about. In many levels I run right over monsters, dishing out insane damage, where as others may take up to an hour to get through the same level. You need to know things like vulnerability against blunt weapons, that certain monsters melt metal but not stone etc.

EotB 2 is good, the other two were mediocre even at the time of their release imo.
I´ve played the first one shortly after I´ve finished Chaos Strikes Back and man, was that a downgrade :).