Greyhawk Interview at HLF

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(Originally posted by Mollusken)

HomeLan Fed have asked Tim Cain from Troika Games a few questions about Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemtental Evil.

What are some of the difficulties in adapting this module to make it a fun and deep PC title?

At its heart, ToEE seems to be a standard dungeon crawl. But when you read it carefully, you realize that many of the NPC's have substantial histories, with explanations on why they came to the area and what they do there. Our job was to convert these hundreds of NPC stories into rich dialogs and quests, while keeping a strong storyline to carry the player character's through the main plot. In many ways, using 3E rules helped a lot, since we used the skills and feats as a guideline for converting the module. For example, we have the skill Sense MOtive, so we had to identify every NPC who would try to lie to the player and write their dialogs with checks against that skill, including determining the results of you exposing their lies. These myriad skill, feat and class ability checks make for very deep game play.

What can you tell us about the graphics engine that the game will use?

We are using our new graphics engine, with beautiful 3D characters set against wonderfully detailed pre-rendered backgrounds. 3D characters let us have a large number of animations to support different character actions while at the same time let us have a large number of armor and equipment variations. Likewise, the pre-rendered backgrounds let us capture all of the the detail of the original module locations. The combination of these techniques works perfectly for D&D 3E and ToEE.

There's more to read here.