Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor
I was introduced to roleplaying games when I was about 8 years old. It was also about then I got my first computer, a Commodore 64. Some of the first games I bought was Ultima I and Pool of Radiance. Unfortunate I was much too young to understand the game then.
Move ahead a few years and I had grown into a enthusiastic gamer. I have moved from Commodore 64 to Amiga. One of the fondest memories I have of this period was of the Eye of the Beholder series, the 2nd game in particular. Like Pool of Radiance Eye of the Beholder was made by SSI and it was also an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game. This fully introduced me to the wonder of CRPGS. Unfortunally this was also the era in which the genré as we knew it would die out, or at least so it seemed. Even roleplaying itself had problems, TSR was dying, the Swedish RPG market was dying and everything seemed kind of bad for the hobby.
Until Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate almost singlehandely ressurected the genré, but now with a very different technology. There was real dialogue now, a long with great 2d and 3d graphics, deep storylines, moral questions and a very genuine RPG feel. For the next few years we experienced the pinnacle of this type, Baldur's Gate alone got several sequels, a long with it's sisters Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment. We also got to see the birth of Fallout as well as attempts from other companies who tried to make their version, with more or less success.
One of theese was Pool of Radiance Ruins of Myth Drannor, a sequel to the now ancient title with the same name. It was advertised as the first game that used the latest Dungeons & Dragons system and unlike Baldur's Gate it used 3d technology for characters and spell effects. However, the developers suffered from continous drawbacks and the team was replaced several times throughout it's production. When it was finally released it got mediocre ratings and I was one of those who started it just to let go of it after entering the very first dungeon. After all, at that time there were plenty of other great games to play.
9 years later, the CRPG genré is again suffering. Black Isle is dead. Troika is dead. Bethesda moved the market in the direct opposite direction of what I would have hoped for. Easy digested console games have replaced the hardcore "gotta have much brains" kind of games I used to like. At this stage I started to move back in time to see if there were titles I had forsaken and in the past years I have played plenty of theese, some great ones, some that should have remained forsaken.
I felt I had to make this introduction to give you the reasons why I play one of the longest CRPG's in ages that got always universally bad reviews. At the time I started it, neither Risen nor Divinity II nor Dragon Age had been released. Those titles are waiting for me now, so let's get onto my review.
Story
Since Baldur's Gate, storylines in CRPG's have been a deep affair. From the philosophical questions raised by Planescape Torment, Mask of the Betrayer or KOTOR2, to the epic games like Baldur's Gate 2 and Mass Effect.
It didn't used to be that way. In the eighties and early 90'ies AD&D had a lot of cheesy fantasy writing. It was about heroes and superevil villains who tried to destroy everything for no reason. It was about huge dungeons filled with monsters and traps.
The story of PoR:RoMD is like the latter kind. There's no real introduction more than "someone ressurected evil, we need heroes, game begins". In the game that follows you have very little buildup and it's first in the final maybe 15-20% you begin to see some story to it, which isn't different from what you are used to... the Big Bad Evil Person is Evil and you have to kill. I really cannot describe the story more than that.
What I will however, is to give the game a thumbs up for the fluff. Unlike most of the modern CRPG's, PoR:RoMD often present you with nice small text messages that give you info about your surroundings. Sometimes theese little messages give an extra depth on the otherwise generic dungeonwalls. There are plenty of stuff on the side that gives you the feeling that Myth Drannor was once a very living place that is now abandoned. There's plenty of ghosts, graves, remains of killed people etc.
Graphics, Engine & Sound
Much like Baldur's Gate the game is presented in top view looking down. The backgrounds is in 2d and the characters are rendered in 3d. Graphically it all looks what you would expect from a game of this age. It does look a lot like Planescape Torment or other early Black Isle games.
Overall the graphics in the dungeons are repetitive. Imagine spending 64 hours seeing the same walls and floors and you have PoR:RoMD. There's a bit of variation in the overland maps or in the final two dungeons, but mostly it's the same.
Another problem is that I think the game had less than 10 different variations of enemies. Sure, sometimes they change names which indicate a stronger foe, but the model is still the same. I could see saving space if you are using 2d graphics, but 3d models shouldn't have been that hard to produce. The old Baldur's Gate have a vast phleatoria of monsters in comparison to PoR:RoMD.
You will get used to the music. I filtered it out most of the time. However, there are plenty of songs in the game which is a nice touch. Theese songs sounds like ballads written specifically for the game.
The game isn't fully voiced, but there are some spoken sentences that is often pretty good. Sometimes lines are spoken prior to an encounter or in the beginning of a dialogue. There are voices that sounds really inhuman, especially from zombies, gargoyles, ghosts etc.
In the beginning the game was known to have a bug that would trash your windows. I avoided this one. However, the game doesn't work in Vista by default. I had to disable directdraw to get it work, a technique that unfortunally had a few consequences. Spell effects in particular doesn't look as good as they should, and they can slow down the game to a crawl, especially cloud spells and fire rains. Sometimes I reloaded the game because an enemy had thrown a cloud spell over my party, other times I specifically targeted that enemy just to get rid of the cloud. Very annoying.
The vanilla game is also TREMENDOUSLY slow. Even at highest speed battles take ages thanks to the turnbased combat. One solution for this is a speed hack that can increase the speed by pressing "8" and decrease it with "7". This made the game bearable.
I also had trouble with a sarcophagus emitted a green pulsewave. I saved next to it which made the game crash right after loading the save, so I had to replay from my autosave. It turned out that if I loaded the game in a stage in which the pulsewave was active, it would instantly crash when the pulsewave fired (which it does if you are nearby). Only way to circumvent this was to reload a save on another floor, run down the stairs, then run all the way to the room to resolve the battle there, then run back upstairs and save.
Gameplay
The game was developed with AD&D mechanics that was changed to 3.0 (or maybe 3.5). The implemention isn't complete as NWN or Temple of Elemental Evil. You do not get to select your feats or skills, the game select them for you automatically. Most skills, feats and spells are not in. Many classes are not presented, such as Druid and wizard. The game cap your level at 16 but allow you to multiclass to another class which allow you to get up to level 20 I think (my characters was level 19 when I finished the game).
The interface is decent. You have shortcuts but only F2-F10 which isn't enough to map all your spells. You have a rightclick menu which give you access to your skills, spells and inventory, and you can open your character screen to equip your character and rearrange your inventory. You can sell stuff but I only found like 2 items worth buying. The shops never restock and there are few of them. Money seems like a mechanic that wasn't fully thought through. I ended the game with 600k when the most expensive items costed only a couple of 10k.
Towards the end I found a combo that made my fighter into a killing machine. My other fighter could reasonably drop one opponent in a round as long as he could use his full-round action and rolled good with the dice. My first fighter almost never hit and almost always did 100+ sometimes 200+ damage per attack. I dunno how balanced that was.
Then you got potions, magic items, scrolls, keys, quest items and poisons. I missed the ability to poison my arrows though with my Rogue which felt quite useless in combat but was neccessary to open the tons of locked doors and disable tons of traps.
I noted that the game doesn't use proficiencies from the rpg. I couldn't use longbow with my elven Sorcerer, which in D&D 3.0 I can. I couldn't use wands with my rogue either.
You can divide PoR:RoMD into 9 large areas, the overland map and then two 4 floor dungeons. Each dungeon floor took me about 8 hours to play. Theese are the largest dungeons I have seen in a game ever and unfortunally they are also very repetitive and not that exciting.
Combats are turnbased. You might enjoy the tactical feel, and sometimes I did, but it ended up as slow, tedious and annoying to go several turns to chase down a foe that managed to initiate combat from far away.
Final Verdict
I played PoR:RoMD just because I wanted a partybased Dungeons & Dragons game, similar to Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. I would say that it's the only reason to play the game. You need nerves of steel to get through this very long game and endless turnbased combats, never changing walls and floors, with no real storyline on top of that. At least I have it done... Finally. Hey, maybe I should go back to play the original pool of radiance now...
