ToEE - Keep on the Borderlands Media

It's been a long while since we heard anything about Circle of Eight's Keep on the Borderlands mod for ToEE but a bunch of screens have recently been released and according to a quote at Sorcerer's Place, "the beta is charging towards completion".
Everything can be found in this thread at Co8 or head straight for the screens, interface shots, portraits and soundtrack.
More information.

I am really looking forward to this mod. I tried firing up TOEE again a few weeks ago and just couldn't bear facing the tedious adventure again, but I very much wanted to have another go with that game.
Those screens are pretty impressive, looking quite professional. It's a shame TOEE wasn't more mod-friendly, the engine, rule set and graphics have great potential for building upon.

Looks very polished. They also mention an upcoming demo. Looks like this could be a great extension of a lost classic.

looking good! Nice little torture chamber there ='.'=

I will be sure to check out the demo

Memories…

I vaguely remember the purplish cover of that classic tabletop D&D adventure, shipped with the basic rulebook. And all the multi-sided dice !

D&D, dice and Roleplaying, and a CLASSIC adventure. In glorious isometrics and the beautiful TOEE engine !!!

This does look excellent - haven't played much of ToEE in quite some time, last time I barely got into it before I got side-tracked with something.

Oh boy am I down for this. There was something about TOEE that captivated me even for all the shortcomings and bugs.

I took 5 different parties through mainly to see how they would do in the large set piece battles. I would play a battle over and over until it was a perfect piece of clockwork

I still have the game somewhere hoping that something like this would come out

I hate to bring this up but Keep on the Borderlands is a pretty blah campaign, too. I have a printed copy of it I picked up used and was not impressed. It appeared to be a bunch of disjointed encounters vaguely woven into a module.

A lot of module adventures weren't in themselves great, what made them fun was the interaction. TOEE could have been an absolute blast if they had put some roleplaying and character into it. Troika seemed to completely miss the point that what makes D&D adventures fun is the interactive aspect. I think it would've been a lot more fun if it had been set up like the Baldur's Gate games, with one PC and a team of NPCs that interact, and take that to the next level of interacting with the residents of the dungeon and it's environs.

I agree Troika could have done a lot more with ToEE — and perhaps Co8 will do so with KotB — but I'm with Bill that the source material is a dull choice, trekking from one encounter to another. A module with more than just a bunch of combat encounters would surely be a better starting point.

I still wish them luck and I'll take a good look when its ready.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
I'm with Bill that the source material is a dull choice, trekking from one encounter to another. A module with more than just a bunch of combat encounters would surely be a better starting point.

I'm the screeg credited with those first few interior shots. This mod is *not* going to be a bunch of combat encounters strung together. I created close to 40 interiors for the Keep, and everything inside is going to skew heavily towards roleplaying, seeing as it's a heavily defended fortress and all.

People haven't been slogging over this for going on two years just to produce D&D Diablo.

Good to hear.

So, tell us more about it. Why KotB? What sort of things are actually planned to promote the roleplaying?

Well I, for one, will not be disappointed if it is more of a dungeon crawl, combat focus. After all, that's the engine's biggest strength by far. And seriously, how much more can we get out of dialogue-tree-driven "roleplaying"? It might have been brilliant in BG2, but by now, it's just tired. And the ToEE engine is certainly not going to be able to support anything much more sophisticated than that.

A lot of the original Greyhawk modules were rather dry even compared to usual
ADnD standards (though I still have a warm spot in my heart not to mention
the original 2nd Edition books in my Library, it being my first PnP experience
Long before my first cRPG).

Generally You should treat them as setting/concept descriptions with a few
key encounters and NPCs not as complete step by step Adventures. Its up to
the DM to add Color (and the RPG part ) and the party to bring it to life
(provided that is that they want to roleplay and not simply throw dice around)…

Hey folks. Sorry KotB is taking so long, but its precisely because the game is being developed as a role-playing exercise, to what we hope is a high standard of quality, that it is taking a while. If it was just the hack-and-slash campaign that the Caves of Chaos were often used as, admittedly we could have just loaded Screegs' gorgeous maps up with monsters and released this a long time back. But we're focussing on quests and stories, and hopefully the wait will be worth it.

KotB was chosen for 3 basic reasons:

- its starting level, and can be a jumping off point for later modules such as GDQ (which at the moment we can't make, since we can't yet mod models and introduce totally new stuff like dryders - but as we make KotB, we are learning new stuff all the time)

- it consists almost exclusively of monsters already found in ToEE, so we can make it without having to worry about adding new stuff

- it is familiar to folks, so lots of people could get involved with making it.

Hope you'll all enjoy it.

How does this compare to the NWN2 mod of the same name?

I played some of the NWN versions of the KotB module, and couldn't really get into it (more because I despise NWN's D&D lite rule set than disliking the KotB module) I've been working with Co8 making mods for ToEE for years now, and I can tell you the roleplaying side of the engine is a lot more than just dialogue tree driven, I mean yes there are dialogue trees, and not all circumstances can be represented in them, but with the ToEE engine you can alter each factions reaction towards you depending on what the player has or hasn't done. Shiningted has written tutorials about his extensive research into this aspect of the engine, it is entirely possible to have vastly different outcomes from different styles of playing, just by assigning reaction adjustments to most of the dialogues, you could therefor build up a good relationship with the guards in the keep and gaining access to the inner bailey in one game, and annoy the guards to the point where they imprison you or worse in another game.

Originally Posted by Gallifrey
A lot of module adventures weren't in themselves great, what made them fun was the interaction. TOEE could have been an absolute blast if they had put some roleplaying and character into it. Troika seemed to completely miss the point that what makes D&D adventures fun is the interactive aspect. I think it would've been a lot more fun if it had been set up like the Baldur's Gate games, with one PC and a team of NPCs that interact, and take that to the next level of interacting with the residents of the dungeon and it's environs.

I just wanted to note quickly that I couldn't disagree more. You want the only big-budget, TB, full party creation game to come out in far, far, far too long to be more like every other game that allows more than one member? I can't disagree more. I love ToEE how it is, and I think people missed all the rolplaying opportunities the game offered. Their game mindset has been biowarized. Play it on ironman and don't try and force BG or Kotor as the games goal, and you'd see the the game is fantatsic as is and provides vast opportunity to role-play without forcing pre-generated spoon-fed nonsense down the players throat (and even better with the co8 patch).

Also, thank you Kotb guys. I love you and what you guys are doing.

It does offer good roleplaying opportunities in limited circumstances - there are few opportunities for a straight-up good party, for example. It definitely needed more story and character, although I agree not necessarily Bioware party-banter. It sounds like these guys understand that.

Ironman has absolutely nothing to do with roleplaying, by the way.

Originally Posted by roqua
I just wanted to note quickly that I couldn't disagree more. You want the only big-budget, TB, full party creation game to come out in far, far, far too long to be more like every other game that allows more than one member? I can't disagree more. I love ToEE how it is, and I think people missed all the rolplaying opportunities the game offered.

It was merely one small idea of how some more life could have been thrown into the game. Now, I loved the IWD games with the fully player-created parties without party chit-chat, and those were dungeon crawlers but had tons of life to them, I never found them lacking.
As for the RP opportunities, I did miss a lot of them because I played a good-aligned party. The majority of NPC interactions inside the dungeon seemed more appropriate for an evil party. And even then, I just didn't find the TOEE NPCs all that interesting.

Also, thank you Kotb guys. I love you and what you guys are doing.

Likewise. It's clear a lot of work is going into this mod, and that is massively appreciated!