lackblogger
SasqWatch
- Joined
- November 1, 2014
- Messages
- 4,778
Have you ever wondered why The Temple of Elemental Evil caused/causes so much controversy? Why it is both very playable and at the same time so very unplayable? So familiar and yet so alien to its Infinity Engine predecessors?
Well, it's all the little things.
This game came out in 2003, but I didn't give it a play until 2011, though I didn't use any community mods, just the out-the-box version.
I didn't particularly enjoy it, though I did have enough interest to stick around until the end-boss battle, such is the unique appeal of D&D. I never completed that final battle and I think the reason for that was that I'd missed 50% of the temple and somehow just stumbled on the end-boss to early. Whatever, it felt like an end and I haven't played it since.
So this year's run through is kind-of like playing a new game. This time I'm going to try and be meticulous. But I'm still going to avoid the community mods and just go with the version GoG is selling, at least for the first run.
With 10 years added RPG experience I should be able to appreciate it more for what it is than what it wasn't.
So I'm about 12 hours in now… and I'm only just finishing up the first introduction village and a couple of very small combat zones Though, to be fair, about 4 hours of that was the tutorial and character creation, which this game does excellently.
But then the game starts:
And oh bejezuz, that fucking village of Hommlet, it's sooo fuckiiiing teeediosoooo.
It's essentially an extremely large map of just NPCs. The only addition to a large map of purely NPCs is the fact that the developers decided to give every single one of them their own house. Well, to be fair, some houses have 2 or 3 NPCs in them.
There's the elders, the bosses, the woodcutter, the spinster, the milliners, the wainwrights, the brewers, the blacksmiths, the weavers, the tailors, numerous farmers, the carpenter, the priest, the hires, the innkeeper, the druid, the labourers, the teamster (oh yes, D&D pseudo-medieval fantasy land has… teamsters? That is so modern American so oddly out of place), traders, spies, randoms.
And they still found room on the map to put not only empty buildings, but buildings that have zero game function that you can't even go in. And you have to walk round all of it. Just hour after hour of walking in and out of houses talking to people. Once every half an hour a convo offers a skill-check dialogue option, just to make you feel like you're actually playing an RPG.
Only after you've carefully investigated the entire kitchen sink of every NPCs can you finally start working through the dozen quests they've given you… All of which revolve around going back to various NPCs houses and talking to everyone AGAIN. And AGAIN. OMG, my will to go on living is quickly ebbing away!
And this is made even more tedious by the fact that there is literally nothing else to do in this village. Of all these properties I counted a grand total of 2 interactable chests and one lootable bookcase. Nothing else. Nada. Zip. Not even lore titbits. No cellars with rats. No secret passages or rooms. Press TAB to highlight interactable items the hints said, TAB nothing, TAB nothing, TAB nothing, TAB nothing, the entire fucking village. Tell a lie, there's one goblin you kill at one point. Well, that's… something different?
And the real tell that something went drastically wrong in the development of this game comes when one uses the map-flags to try and keep some kind of track of all these gazillion houses and NPCs. I only used one flag for each house and I'd run out of flags before I'd even started exploring the last third of the settlement. Christ, even the game itself is sweating under the pressure of so much filler dialogue.
To make matters even worse, the satisfaction of completing these dozen 'chatty' quests is a whopping… 850 XP… not even enough XP to get a small team of five characters their first level-up of a measly 1000 XP. So much for getting a level before going monster hunting. I had to go monster hunting to get a level. And when I did go monster hunting I one-shot four skeletons with Turn Undead in about 10 seconds for 230 XP. I mean, FFS, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!
The myriad dialogues are made even more unsettling by the fact that they seem to adhere to no set rules on what dialogue options stick around and which ones vanish into the either when you decide which reply to give. Some NPC's options just vanish as soon as you've said hi and made your first reply, others you can constantly cycle the same options. The joy of sweat beads in trying to decide what is the most important dialogue option to pick first… just in case.
Worse still, the quests that don't involve you being a chatty busybody and actually require you to go adventuring all have this dialogue option that states [go there immediately]. "Can you go kill these spiders for me", "sure", "cool, I'll give you 10 XP, no gold and no items soon then [go there immediately]". Holy crap, imagine the many poor unsuspecting sods that chose that option the first time they played it! Have you ever seen that in a game before? Who would choose that option? Why would anyone choose that option? Why is it an option?
On top of this, Goddamn but the game's dark. I'm literally squinting at the screen. I turn the brightness up to maximum and it's just about bearable. Ohhhh, the game has day and night cycles. Because a game where you're going to be spending most of it in a big dungeon really needs that day and night cycle to be authentic and interesting, right? I mean, there must be a whole 300 XPs worth of quests that utilise the fact that people might be in different places at night time. Totally worth the hours of headache inducing squinting.
To make matters worse, the fog of war clears at a size disproportional to my screen. Even after I changed the resolution from 800 to 1200 the FoW was still clearing off-screen. It's always so great clearing FoW that you can't see, really helps you keep track of the areas you haven't seen yet. But wait, I can always pan the camera around, because it's so fun moving 10 inches, stopping, panning round 360, stopping, moving 10 inches, panning round 360, moving 10 inches, stopping, panning around 360.
And I'm sure I didn't notice it, but there doesn't seem to be a 'fix-camera-on-party' option, you know, that always keeps the party in the centre of the screen. Nope, you have to constantly walk your guy to the edge of the screen, pan across, walk, pan, walk, pan, walk, pan, walk, pan. Which also makes combat area wandering a tactical nightmare, especially combined with the over-extended FoW clearing as anything between 1 and 6 enemies are heard triggering somewhere off-screen.
Now imagine doing all these hours and hours of boring NPC busywork and technical frustration to the tune of:
Which is some amazingly great ambient music. But chronically sleep inducing. In fact, the music is something no-one really talks about and something that not even the many fixes and mods change. ToEE just has the wrong music for the genre. It sounds very much like the modern Shadowrun games. It's ambient, electronic, industrial sounds. It no doubt works for some people, probably people that love sci-fi and post-apoc stylistics. But for fantasy D&D? Whoops. It sounds wrong. Again, don't get me wrong, it's superb music, it's just in the wrong place.
The above sound is one you'd use for that weird quirky place where you're not sure if everyone's alright and you later discover the town's had a twilight zone alteration or is under the influence of a secret cult. It's not the sound of a bustling central hub of gazillions of hard working NPCs, trader, adventurers and etc etc etc. It's like they thought "how can we make it EVEN MORE boring, I know, let's make the music dull as dishwater as well, it'll match the turd-brown aesthetic perfectly". And oh boy, is the village all just soooo… brown. Even when there's no brown!
And finally just about just the village, all the traders you meet? Most of them have a gazillion items of clothing that has zero value, either financially or statistically. Aside from the spell-seller, there's literally nothing to inspire you to go out and find some gold. I'm just talking about at this stage of the game here, I'm aware that most good loot comes from adventuring, at least in this game, but most games usually have at least a few teaser items in the shops to wet your appetite!
And on the topic of itemisation, are they for real that the leather boots have exactly the same stats as the chain boots? That can't be real. The descriptions for both say AC: 0. Nope, this has to be a glitch. The descriptions for all the items are piss poor. Assuming you can even find the item descriptions. Right clicking on an item doesn't provide an item description. Hovering over an item doesn't provide an item description. Using the help button provides an encyclopaedia that tells you about loads of stuff, but even that doesn't want to tell me about boots.
So in order to get the full details of a spell you have to click into the help page, click the link to spells, scroll for the spell you want to know about, click the spell. Instead of just, you know, clicking on the spell.
To make itemisation even worse they went with the 100gp to identify items route. And I mean just casting the identify spell, not even the shop-identify route. Sure, thems the rules of p&p 3.5ed but then the computer game versions don't tend to include every rule. They went with keeping this one sadly, which is not a problem later but at the start of the game is painfully tedious. Especially when you realise you have to cast identify just to know what a purple potion is, let alone a nice quest reward set of magic boots. "Thanks for doing my quest, here's your reward: -100gp and a mediocre magical item".
Luckily things start to improve once the combat starts. Well, for five minutes at least. Even the second combat area seems to have been made in a surreal twilight zone development office. Maybe it was in the original module and I'm blaming the wrong people? But, whoa, that escalated quickly. on a small grass map that has zero interesting features beyond small grey rocks, the player is presented with a couple of small groups of skeletons, then, 10 inches further on, zombies and skeletal gnolls, then, 10 inches on, a freaking bear and a hill giant.
In the space of one small starter map you go from easy pickings to really quite challenging to freakin impossible OMG there must be a way to cheese this. And I nearly did get the bear, but then the game's reputation for crap rolls came into action. The bear, while it hits like a truck, is very weak at defence with just a paltry 14 AC. I have a Halfling using a sling who's to-hit is already +6 at level 2, so the dude just needs to roll a 8 or above for a hit… going for the bear he rolls a 3 and a 6 and a 4 in the three turns before I give up and reload again. And I can't actually remember a single time so far in the entire game when a bullet has caused damage, and yet the rogue's bullet stock has dwindled from 40 to 12 somehow.
A few more reloads later and… sod it, I'll come back for the bear and the giant later. And all the combat so far has been of the awkwardly disappointing kind. Nothing I can really get my teeth into if you know what I mean. 1 Goblin, pointlessly easy, batches of skeletons, pointlessly easy due to turn undead, then almost too hard with the zombies and gnolls where it was more a matter of attrition, like 20 rounds with everyone waiting for a 15+ roll and then hoping that the landed hit actually did some damage, really tedious and unsatisfying semi-cheese type stuff, and then the impossible reloading.
None of these combats have made me really feel like I'm making full use of my characters. Perhaps this will change when I get back on the main questline.
As an additional note that really shows the age of the game: in this game the money is divided up between copper, silver, gold and platinum coins. 10 gold is worth one platinum. Which is funny because currently gold is worth twice as much as platinum. Now there's a hold-over from 70s d&d that no-one bothered to update
And it all makes me wonder, did I not like it back in 2011 because I was unfairly comparing it to better games? Or am I still going to end-up with the exact same experience I had last time: disliking everything except the core beauty of some fantasy d&d.
Well, it's all the little things.
This game came out in 2003, but I didn't give it a play until 2011, though I didn't use any community mods, just the out-the-box version.
I didn't particularly enjoy it, though I did have enough interest to stick around until the end-boss battle, such is the unique appeal of D&D. I never completed that final battle and I think the reason for that was that I'd missed 50% of the temple and somehow just stumbled on the end-boss to early. Whatever, it felt like an end and I haven't played it since.
So this year's run through is kind-of like playing a new game. This time I'm going to try and be meticulous. But I'm still going to avoid the community mods and just go with the version GoG is selling, at least for the first run.
With 10 years added RPG experience I should be able to appreciate it more for what it is than what it wasn't.
So I'm about 12 hours in now… and I'm only just finishing up the first introduction village and a couple of very small combat zones Though, to be fair, about 4 hours of that was the tutorial and character creation, which this game does excellently.
But then the game starts:
And oh bejezuz, that fucking village of Hommlet, it's sooo fuckiiiing teeediosoooo.
It's essentially an extremely large map of just NPCs. The only addition to a large map of purely NPCs is the fact that the developers decided to give every single one of them their own house. Well, to be fair, some houses have 2 or 3 NPCs in them.
There's the elders, the bosses, the woodcutter, the spinster, the milliners, the wainwrights, the brewers, the blacksmiths, the weavers, the tailors, numerous farmers, the carpenter, the priest, the hires, the innkeeper, the druid, the labourers, the teamster (oh yes, D&D pseudo-medieval fantasy land has… teamsters? That is so modern American so oddly out of place), traders, spies, randoms.
And they still found room on the map to put not only empty buildings, but buildings that have zero game function that you can't even go in. And you have to walk round all of it. Just hour after hour of walking in and out of houses talking to people. Once every half an hour a convo offers a skill-check dialogue option, just to make you feel like you're actually playing an RPG.
Only after you've carefully investigated the entire kitchen sink of every NPCs can you finally start working through the dozen quests they've given you… All of which revolve around going back to various NPCs houses and talking to everyone AGAIN. And AGAIN. OMG, my will to go on living is quickly ebbing away!
And this is made even more tedious by the fact that there is literally nothing else to do in this village. Of all these properties I counted a grand total of 2 interactable chests and one lootable bookcase. Nothing else. Nada. Zip. Not even lore titbits. No cellars with rats. No secret passages or rooms. Press TAB to highlight interactable items the hints said, TAB nothing, TAB nothing, TAB nothing, TAB nothing, the entire fucking village. Tell a lie, there's one goblin you kill at one point. Well, that's… something different?
And the real tell that something went drastically wrong in the development of this game comes when one uses the map-flags to try and keep some kind of track of all these gazillion houses and NPCs. I only used one flag for each house and I'd run out of flags before I'd even started exploring the last third of the settlement. Christ, even the game itself is sweating under the pressure of so much filler dialogue.
To make matters even worse, the satisfaction of completing these dozen 'chatty' quests is a whopping… 850 XP… not even enough XP to get a small team of five characters their first level-up of a measly 1000 XP. So much for getting a level before going monster hunting. I had to go monster hunting to get a level. And when I did go monster hunting I one-shot four skeletons with Turn Undead in about 10 seconds for 230 XP. I mean, FFS, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!
The myriad dialogues are made even more unsettling by the fact that they seem to adhere to no set rules on what dialogue options stick around and which ones vanish into the either when you decide which reply to give. Some NPC's options just vanish as soon as you've said hi and made your first reply, others you can constantly cycle the same options. The joy of sweat beads in trying to decide what is the most important dialogue option to pick first… just in case.
Worse still, the quests that don't involve you being a chatty busybody and actually require you to go adventuring all have this dialogue option that states [go there immediately]. "Can you go kill these spiders for me", "sure", "cool, I'll give you 10 XP, no gold and no items soon then [go there immediately]". Holy crap, imagine the many poor unsuspecting sods that chose that option the first time they played it! Have you ever seen that in a game before? Who would choose that option? Why would anyone choose that option? Why is it an option?
On top of this, Goddamn but the game's dark. I'm literally squinting at the screen. I turn the brightness up to maximum and it's just about bearable. Ohhhh, the game has day and night cycles. Because a game where you're going to be spending most of it in a big dungeon really needs that day and night cycle to be authentic and interesting, right? I mean, there must be a whole 300 XPs worth of quests that utilise the fact that people might be in different places at night time. Totally worth the hours of headache inducing squinting.
To make matters worse, the fog of war clears at a size disproportional to my screen. Even after I changed the resolution from 800 to 1200 the FoW was still clearing off-screen. It's always so great clearing FoW that you can't see, really helps you keep track of the areas you haven't seen yet. But wait, I can always pan the camera around, because it's so fun moving 10 inches, stopping, panning round 360, stopping, moving 10 inches, panning round 360, moving 10 inches, stopping, panning around 360.
And I'm sure I didn't notice it, but there doesn't seem to be a 'fix-camera-on-party' option, you know, that always keeps the party in the centre of the screen. Nope, you have to constantly walk your guy to the edge of the screen, pan across, walk, pan, walk, pan, walk, pan, walk, pan. Which also makes combat area wandering a tactical nightmare, especially combined with the over-extended FoW clearing as anything between 1 and 6 enemies are heard triggering somewhere off-screen.
Now imagine doing all these hours and hours of boring NPC busywork and technical frustration to the tune of:
Which is some amazingly great ambient music. But chronically sleep inducing. In fact, the music is something no-one really talks about and something that not even the many fixes and mods change. ToEE just has the wrong music for the genre. It sounds very much like the modern Shadowrun games. It's ambient, electronic, industrial sounds. It no doubt works for some people, probably people that love sci-fi and post-apoc stylistics. But for fantasy D&D? Whoops. It sounds wrong. Again, don't get me wrong, it's superb music, it's just in the wrong place.
The above sound is one you'd use for that weird quirky place where you're not sure if everyone's alright and you later discover the town's had a twilight zone alteration or is under the influence of a secret cult. It's not the sound of a bustling central hub of gazillions of hard working NPCs, trader, adventurers and etc etc etc. It's like they thought "how can we make it EVEN MORE boring, I know, let's make the music dull as dishwater as well, it'll match the turd-brown aesthetic perfectly". And oh boy, is the village all just soooo… brown. Even when there's no brown!
And finally just about just the village, all the traders you meet? Most of them have a gazillion items of clothing that has zero value, either financially or statistically. Aside from the spell-seller, there's literally nothing to inspire you to go out and find some gold. I'm just talking about at this stage of the game here, I'm aware that most good loot comes from adventuring, at least in this game, but most games usually have at least a few teaser items in the shops to wet your appetite!
And on the topic of itemisation, are they for real that the leather boots have exactly the same stats as the chain boots? That can't be real. The descriptions for both say AC: 0. Nope, this has to be a glitch. The descriptions for all the items are piss poor. Assuming you can even find the item descriptions. Right clicking on an item doesn't provide an item description. Hovering over an item doesn't provide an item description. Using the help button provides an encyclopaedia that tells you about loads of stuff, but even that doesn't want to tell me about boots.
So in order to get the full details of a spell you have to click into the help page, click the link to spells, scroll for the spell you want to know about, click the spell. Instead of just, you know, clicking on the spell.
To make itemisation even worse they went with the 100gp to identify items route. And I mean just casting the identify spell, not even the shop-identify route. Sure, thems the rules of p&p 3.5ed but then the computer game versions don't tend to include every rule. They went with keeping this one sadly, which is not a problem later but at the start of the game is painfully tedious. Especially when you realise you have to cast identify just to know what a purple potion is, let alone a nice quest reward set of magic boots. "Thanks for doing my quest, here's your reward: -100gp and a mediocre magical item".
Luckily things start to improve once the combat starts. Well, for five minutes at least. Even the second combat area seems to have been made in a surreal twilight zone development office. Maybe it was in the original module and I'm blaming the wrong people? But, whoa, that escalated quickly. on a small grass map that has zero interesting features beyond small grey rocks, the player is presented with a couple of small groups of skeletons, then, 10 inches further on, zombies and skeletal gnolls, then, 10 inches on, a freaking bear and a hill giant.
In the space of one small starter map you go from easy pickings to really quite challenging to freakin impossible OMG there must be a way to cheese this. And I nearly did get the bear, but then the game's reputation for crap rolls came into action. The bear, while it hits like a truck, is very weak at defence with just a paltry 14 AC. I have a Halfling using a sling who's to-hit is already +6 at level 2, so the dude just needs to roll a 8 or above for a hit… going for the bear he rolls a 3 and a 6 and a 4 in the three turns before I give up and reload again. And I can't actually remember a single time so far in the entire game when a bullet has caused damage, and yet the rogue's bullet stock has dwindled from 40 to 12 somehow.
A few more reloads later and… sod it, I'll come back for the bear and the giant later. And all the combat so far has been of the awkwardly disappointing kind. Nothing I can really get my teeth into if you know what I mean. 1 Goblin, pointlessly easy, batches of skeletons, pointlessly easy due to turn undead, then almost too hard with the zombies and gnolls where it was more a matter of attrition, like 20 rounds with everyone waiting for a 15+ roll and then hoping that the landed hit actually did some damage, really tedious and unsatisfying semi-cheese type stuff, and then the impossible reloading.
None of these combats have made me really feel like I'm making full use of my characters. Perhaps this will change when I get back on the main questline.
As an additional note that really shows the age of the game: in this game the money is divided up between copper, silver, gold and platinum coins. 10 gold is worth one platinum. Which is funny because currently gold is worth twice as much as platinum. Now there's a hold-over from 70s d&d that no-one bothered to update
And it all makes me wonder, did I not like it back in 2011 because I was unfairly comparing it to better games? Or am I still going to end-up with the exact same experience I had last time: disliking everything except the core beauty of some fantasy d&d.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2014
- Messages
- 4,778