Canonfire!

Mon May 23, 2005 5:27 pm Atari's Temple of Elemental Evil

What are peoples opinions of this attempt at bring D&D to the computer?
I thought that the end was weak. My friends found it difficult. Overall I thought it was a fair first attempt.
I liked the the change over from real time to turn based. It made it more like the game.
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"Its a dangerous business going out your front door." JRR Tolkien
Unless you are a Greyhawk Heretic.

Wed May 25, 2005 1:45 am

The initial release, as with all releases by this now defunct company, was extremely buggy. While they had reasonable excuses, the fact remained that they had such excuses for all their products...

That said, I greatly enjoyed the game once it was patched to playable level (which required both official and unofficial patches). The game played like 3e was intended: with all the little nuances that are lost in most D&D computer games.

The storyline was a big weak overall. It more or less amounted to "whack the ToEE cuz its there". Granted the module did not give a lot more than that, but then early TSR theory was to leave that stuff to the DM since they'd have to modify it for local campaign anyway. They should have done a better job of that side of things.

The plethora of quests was okay, but they were mostly the "villager asks random stranger for help with his personal life" type, which is not very immersive. Also, many of them were so interwoven that all you needed was to be stumped on one and you'd have dozens of unfinishable quests. And given that one of those quests could only be solved by essentially robbing the Temple of St. Cuthbert....

The main downside for me was that it literally was the ToEE. You could use your paper copy of the mod as guide if you wanted to. As such, while I enjoyed the tactical gameplay, there was no real mystery about the game. I did finish the game once, nevertheless.

There are a number of endings, which ranged from weak to decent. I did not like that you could destroy Yellowskull without having to get the Elemental Gems. Made it rather too easy and you could skip the whole 4th lvl that way. Get Yellowskull, have it smashed by Burne's team, have an ale. You get better ending vignettes if you actually do the full job, but still...

Anyway, I would be quite pleased to play other D&D games built on this or a similar game engine. Just hopefully they'll be done by a company with a better sense of story and roleplaying (such as it is in a CRPG).