I made the grave mistake of playing Neverwinter Nights before I played Temple of Elemental Evil.
BioWare’s implementation of the radial menu is wonderful. Their graphics are sublime. The interface is so totally transparent that I can immerse with absolutely no nasty reality checks. The camera controls are beautiful. I haven’t had a hitch playing three times with different character classes. It’s a great experience and I’m still playing because of this.
Troika…doesn’t seem to understand the concept of immersion. Fog of war is great in a strategy battle game, not so much in a role-playing game. The radial menu is clunky. The graphics are cartoony. There are no camera controls (the view is overhead isometric from about 100 feet up…no zoom). The interface is mushy, with mouse control a real problem (I erased spells four times in a five minute period while trying to cast them). The experience totally defeated attempts to enter immersion in the story. I will not be playing this game again.
I’m angry. Temple of Elemental Evil is one of the classic epic D&D sagas. I want to play this game. Bad. But I can’t.
Troika sucks. Atari sucks for contracting them. I’m not a happy gamer…
I admit that I don’t know whether this goes in CS because it’s about gaming or the Pit because it’s a rant…mods feel free to put it where it really belongs.
I’ve played a bit of NWN and hung about a bit at the Bioware forums and apparently, if anyone, Atari’s the beast here. They’re doing all sorts of evil things (copy protection, paper CD booklets) and everyone hates them, but since they’re the only publisher allowed to dish out the D&D license, what they say is the law. Especially since they’re basically the same company that owns D&D itself (I think they’re both subsidiaries of Hasbro?) They caused the release of Elemental Evil to be way earlier than it should have been, and weren’t particularly interested in patching it, either.
I haven’t played the game, but I didn’t particularly enjoy Troika’s Arcanum (once I discovered I had to kill a guy to progress all semblence of continuation from the Fallout series was gone. Plus it looked so drab…) so my commenting here is basically useless. Hopefully they won’t screw up the Vampire game, though. The first one was flawed, but decent.
If TOEE had anything like the budget of a Baldur’s Gate or a Neverwinter Nights, the results probably would have been different.
Atari’s no relation of Hasbro, incidentally; they just have the rights to D&D computer games. Hasbro sold them to Atari when Hasbro got out of the video game business a few years back.
I guess I’ll be the first person posting here who kinda likes ToEE.
MattTheCroc’s right. Atari is more to blame than Troika, though I am, I hasten to add, no unconditional fan of Troika. ToEE has it’s flaws, and it was in no way finished when it was released, but I like it for what it is: a fantasy game of killing monsters and taking their stuff that’s more about tactics than roleplaying.
The biggie for me is that ToEE gives you nearly all the options that regular DnD gives you. Their rules implementation is better than NWN’s, especially since NWN had some rather clunky mechanics. They took power attack and made it much less useful by not allowing you to fine-tune it. They cut expertise altogether, and replaced the trip rules with the much more powerful, nigh-broken knockdown feat.
Of course, at the moment I’m greatly looking forward to being able to get Knights of the Old Republic, so go figure.
Maybe because I haven’t actually played pen&paper (A)D&D since 2nd Edition, I don’t really care whether they fully implement all of the combat strategy nigglings. I’m more interested in playability for someone who hasn’t read the entire 3rd ed Player’s Handbook backwards and forwards six times. NWN is smooth. It’s intuitive. It plays WELL. ToEE is clunky and requires you to have a thorough knowledge of the teeny-tiny details of 3rd Ed combat. I’ve NEVER been a combat wonk, not even when I was playing p&p D&D. Sure, it’s fun to hack at the bad guy, but I don’t want to have to calculate which of my 47 different combat feats will help me the most here…I want to solve puzzles and play FedEx courier and get this McGuffin to that temple so they can cure the Googleplex Plague. Combat is the icing, the thing you have to do to make sure there’s some conflict and allowance for the required amount of XP to be at the level you’re supposed to be at a certain point in the game.
Of course, I don’t particularly combat strategy wargame (real-world or fantasy-world or scifi-world) either.
Atari is the reason why in a game where landing a critical hit that kills your oponent makes them explode in a shower of blood guts and bones having a “kiss” emote was deemed too offensive. They are the reason why there can’t be any children in this games, and why any real evil options are severely toned down or outright taken out. That said i love both NWN and ToEE for completely different reasons, i agree with alot of the complains about ToEE but the turn based combat is just alot better than nwn’s. The new NWN campaign from hordes of the underdark is pretty much one of the best fanatasy rpgs i’ve played in a while.
Tremmie, my understanding of the matter is that the decision to remove the kids (I almost typed cut the kids, but that’s what they were trying to avoid ;)) and to remove a lot of the seriously evil options originated from the higher-ups at Hasbro, not Atari. Apparently, in the wake of a certain couple of licensed 3rd party publications, Hasbro decided that they wanted to keep certain subject matter out of future licensed publications.
And jayjay, different strokes, I guess. I do like both games, ToEE I enjoy for the combat, NWN for some fantastic player-created modules and a very well-implemented multiplayer capability. I agree that, for the most part, NWN is far more accessable to a non-gamer.
Tremmie, my understanding of the matter is that the decision to remove the kids (I almost typed cut the kids, but that’s what they were trying to avoid ;)) and to remove a lot of the seriously evil options originated from the higher-ups at Hasbro, not Atari. Apparently, in the wake of a certain couple of licensed 3rd party publications, Hasbro decided that they wanted to keep certain subject matter out of future licensed publications.
And jayjay, different strokes, I guess. I do like both games, ToEE I enjoy for the tactically deep combat, NWN for some fantastic player-created modules and a very well-implemented multiplayer capability. I agree that, for the most part, NWN is far more accessable to a non-gamer.
I agree with the OP, these two need to be played in the other order. My PC is pretty close to the minimum spec for both games; NWN played like a dream (except for the room full of moving walls) whereas ToEE is sloooooooow, and just stops outright for seconds at a time.
I too prefer turn-based games (eg X-Com) but everything else in ToEE is clunkiness personified.
I actually know all of the rules and so forth, and I STILL hate ToEE. The big things for me?
The controls are clunkier than hell and unintuitive.
They cheated. Enemies have much higher AC than they should.
That last one was the clincher. I struggled through learning the controls, and the teeny-tiny character graphics, but when I realized that my kick-ass Barbarian couldn’t hit that suposedly AC 15 Hobgoblin 3 times outta 4 I just quit. Look, PoR did this and it sucked. Why the hell did they even think about implementing this? The game is hard enough given the swarms they toss at you, which regularly includes being outnumbered 3 to 1 by well-equipped enemies.
Not to mention that apparently some of the later enemies are actually up to the level of Demon lords, despite being common, nameless monsters. And a level cap of 10.
Um, that’s a positively surreal post, smiling bandit.
I haven’t gone back to play ToEE since I patched it, but I do plan to. Right now I’m hooked on SW: KOTOR. God, this game is just awesome. And it really is that Troika needs to dump Atari; not the other way around.
BTW, has everyone heard the news that Interplay got rid of Black Isle Games (and the employees are out of jobs) and shelved–permanently–Fallout 3? Publishers are the bane of the gaming world.
