The next part approximates about 20 hours of gameplay, as it includes a few hours from the last session where I got in a pickle in the Earth Temple and decided to start this session afresh and redo the beginnings of the Earth Temple. I also did a few more hours at the end of this session because chunking through combat is more engrossing generally than wafting around relatively inane NPCs and their mundane quests.
I wasn't initially going to go the pure combat route and my team are a variety of Lawful characters, both good, neutral and evil, and I was happy to go with the quests set by the Earth Temple cleric to see what happens. However, about half the rooms here have monsters in them that are hostile regardless of your intent and, on top of that, the quests were so bore inducing and, on top of that, the final quest was to kill another Temple cleric, I decided that I'd probably end up having to kill everyone anyway, so I just went hoover-mode.
So far I have cleared out literally everything in the main floor of the Earth Temple and everything on the first floor of the Fire Temple and am currently working my way through the second floor of the Fire Temple which, as far as I can tell, is joined to the Air Temple. I have the skull orb which allows me access to the main temple throne room, but that area is quite dead at the moment and I didn't want to trigger anything so just wandered around there for a bit before going back to the hoovering.
And, wow, but doing it this way is so combat intensive. I get the feeling I could have had more NPC convos in the temple generally but it seems my reputation is now preceding me and everything is essentially forced combat. So it doesn't look like I'll be getting any more temple quests and it's just a matter of killing everything in site now.
While I don't mind this as the combat system is so interesting and the monster variety is currently very intriguing, there is definitely a sense that there's something lacking other than combat, and it's not just NPC dialogues. Again, like the previous two sessions, there's not much else to this game as of yet besides either combat or NPC waffling. No puzzling, no chapter-defining plot-breaks, no interesting rooms with lots of things to interact with or things to read regarding game-lore. Literally nothing to break up the non-stop battle fatigue.
There are endless amounts of stair cases though, which likely explains why I got so lost the first time I played this game and likely why I stumbled on the end-boss way to early that time. Each map I've been on so far has about five staircases, most of which lead to places as yet unexplored, so a large number of hours in this session's total will be me doing a literal interpretation of an Escher painting, going round and round and round making sure I've got myself comfortable with where I am and trying to stay in the same bit of map without sidetracking.
For all this combat though, the loot has been generally disappointing. The best of the lot after killing about 200 monsters is that I'm only just starting to get all those +1 items, all of which were already out of date before I even entered the temple. The only notable upgrade so far has been my fighter getting a +3 longsword (I think by killing someone who would have been a quest NPC if my rep wasn't so bad) and finally he got a shield that's better than +2 AC.
All I can do really is loot everyone in order to buy the only decent items in the shops in Nulb, which I have almost completed by this point. Though even this has been a struggle because the game suddenly drops the 'inventory full' bombshell on you whereby you can no longer sell to a merchant because they have a full inventory. Well… that's aannoying. Do they not have a stockroom or anything? Lol. The wands have been cool finds though I will admit, though the game doesn't tell you how many charges they have left nor how many they start with, so most of those are all used up already as well.
I don't get any sense of AC progression as all of my characters are still loosely veering in and out of about 20-23 AC depending on what they're wearing for specific combat scenarios and this has been the case since forever. If my main fighter didn't take the Combat Expertise feat then I've no idea how one would ever hope to tank pretty much any encounter in the temple as pretty much all the monsters are of the big and big-hitting variety, to which, even then, the encounters are mostly unmanageable without webbing or the like.
I keep waiting for the armour loot to drop something better than +7+1 (regular full-plate is 8 plus 1 for the Dex allowance and is usually something a fighter should have bought at level 1/2 in any normal D&D game, so by this point I should be finding Full Plate +2, but, alas). And all the other AC items like Amulets, boots, rings and etc (though the game has at least provided a few Rings of Protection +1, it's more like a nominal bonus than a character builder).
A feat or two back my fighter also chose the Martial Weaponry - Bastard Sword feat, in the expectation of upgrading from the Longsword at some point, but, again, alas, not even a +1 BS has shown itself this entire time. I came across a friendly NPC who had an amazing BS, a genuinely exciting and awe-inspiring weapon, but when I experimented with killing him and taking the item is was one of those alignment locked items and so would have been mostly unexciting in the hands of my dude, not much better than a basic one. Grrr, what total BS! Lol
The bugs are also coming quite thick and fast now, something which I'm sure is more palatable in the Co8 and Temple+ like mods. So far I've seen: The game crash to desktop when I used my Chain Lightning Wand against the Werethingies, making me nervous about using the item for the next few fights; an enemy mage go into psycho mode and get unlimited attacks on prone members of my party, he just kept stabbing them in the same turn until they'd gone from full health to dead, nothing I could do (that was a tough battle to figure a work-around for);
… deep breath…
Item slots becoming inactive in chests, deleting stored items, only for them to reappear and start working again many game days later; incredibly slow frame rates where the screen would literally judder along for stretches of time suggesting a CTD was imminent, though thankfully that never happened; clearing the fog-of-war not showing a cleared area on the main map; NPCs telling me there's no clear way out and I couldn't tell them where to go to get out even though I've cleared all the way to that point from outside.
And then there's things that aren't bugs but are just annoying facets of the game, such as finishing off Trolls. The game shoots you out of combat mode when all the enemies are floored but not necessarily dead. This makes sense as it would be a pain to run round a battle field finishing off all the nearly dead unconscious mooks. However, for Trolls one really needs to do this in combat mode as when we are out of combat mode then time moves extremely quickly. In the time it takes to move a character next to the nearly dead Troll, then find the Coup De Grace option in the UI and then click on the Troll, the Troll will, in all likelihood, have had time to get back up again! Gah, it's so annoying.
Even though I've kind-of only scratched the surface of the Temple in this 20 hours, or that's what it feels like at least, my team is already up to level 8 and half way to level 9 and, from what I can gather from the info screens, the level cap is just 10, so I'm wondering if I'm going to have to spend a lot of the game with no progression and so a weakened motivation at a certain point, but I'll not pre-empt that at this point.
While there's loads of voice acting, adding an air of production values to the wider world, there doesn't seem to be any great sense of narrative progression generally. Even a combat heavy game like Icewind Dale has it's extremely memorable non-combat moments, lore dumps and characters: Hrothgar, Arundel, Oswald, Poquelin, Conlan, Larrel & Larrel's Tower, and etc etc etc, but ToEE just doesn't seem to have any landmark moments or people. There's the odd cut-scene, but that's about it.
But then I have chosen a path of maximum destruction. Though there doesn't seem to be anything much that I'm missing by doing so as of yet, everything feels 'as it should be' when hosing everything down.
However, everything is fine at the moment due to the fantastic monster variety, making each encounter at least feel fresh and interesting, as if one is playing a game of 'work your way through the D&D monster manual' kind of game, which has its own value, and one that still manages to rise above all the above somehow. At this point I am still very enthused to continue my journey, against all the known laws of logic and common-sense!
[BTW, none of the screenshots in any of the posts are mine, they are all taken off the web by random people, as I have no idea what I'll be talking about each Monday and I only use two save slots, the main one for the game on-going and the spare for any lock-ins]