Prologue

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I was thinking about detailing my experience with the Temple of Elemental Evil because I want to play a RPG but am finding it harder to stay involved in all the ones I've picked up. They all seem to quickly devolve into pointless wandering, and general monotony. I figure writing about it will give me incentive to continue on.

Just so you know, my cRPG experience is not by any means encompassing. I can count the number of RPGs I’ve played more than half way through on one hand, and two of those are Squaresoft creations. But another one is Arcanum, a little gem I picked up about five years ago and have played through twice since.

I'm no veteran, obviously.

One RPG that didn’t make it on the hand is Icewind Dale. I tried to get into it a bunch of times over the past few years mainly because the name was cool and I like snow levels. Snow levels with ice and frost are always cool. Needless to say, the furthest I’ve gotten is to the cave with the Trolls before quitting out of boredom. I don’t know why. It felt like it was missing that special something.

I recently picked up Troika’s Temple of Elemental Evil, an Icewind Dale style game by the guys who made Arcanum, a game that did have that special something but lacked in the combat, the area where Icewind Dale excelled.

The first thing that stuck out was the huge TUTORIAL button. The tutorial is not integrated into the beginning of the game, which is great. However, it is there. Tutorials suck. How about making your game to where the instructions can be explained in the manual? Arcanum and Icewind Dale were complex games that were not complicated. You knew how to swing your sword. The existence of a tutorial is a tell tale sign of a game that’s going to lessen the enjoyment. It also means the game won’t be complex. If you’re told how things need to be done, there’s no room for experiment, since from the outset you know exactly how the game works, and games these days, as we all know, don’t lend themselves to doing neat things in different ways.

Don’t get me wrong, now. There are good tutorials out there, but they don’t advertise themselves as such. The Kokiri Forest in Zelda: Ocarina of Time was an excellent tutorial level. It had a few pop-ups, but for the most part you were on your own to explore and discover in a relatively comfortable environment. Croft Manor in Tomb Raider Anniversary is another example of a great tutorial level. While you are explained how to use things, overall you’re only given a small nudge by the game in an area where you need to make a great leap. These two examples are real game levels, with nuances and interesting secrets of their own, which convince you to explore and totally ignore the fact that you’re running the beginner’s course. Both of these games also have very accessible controls where a tutorial isn’t vital – therefore they must be fun or else there’s no point in all to it.

The tutorial in Temple of Elemental Evil is the complete opposite. It is a generic waste of space, and the time spent on making it should have been put to use improving the system so a tutorial wouldn’t have been needed in the first place. Right click, open the radial menu, move the mouse over this option, move your mouse over one of the pop-up options, and then beat yourself with a splintered paddle. Talk to this person, click on one of the little phrases, open up this menu, look at this, look at that, and then stab yourself in the face with a rusty fork. I quit after some broad joined up with me and I read about the whole NPC thing (instead of, you know, finding this out for myself through the course of the game via the joy of discovery), and went off to play the real game. Talk about your bad omens. Fifteen minutes in and it already feels like a really boring job.

By now, I’ve restarted maybe ten times trying out different characters and party combinations. The whole thing reminds me of Neverwinter Nights II; a total waste of money seeing as how I barely played past the initial village attack (thankfully I bought it second hand and didn’t pay much). Anyways, it reminded me of this silly game because of the massive amount of character creation options it gives you. Another beef of mine with tutorials is that they provide a tutorial on the wrong things. If you give the player a hundred skills to choose from, you need to tell the player how they work – not how to click on the ground to move a character. Is Maximize Spell more important for a Druid than Weapon Proficiency? Do either one of them make a difference? Does a Half Orc sorcerer have an advantage over a Gnome wizard? Why do we need both Gnomes and Halflings?

A wizard and a sorcerer, as far as I can tell, are pretty similar, except for the fact that with a sorcerer you don’t have to choose two restricted spell types and you get a bonus to all your social skills. Why the hell would you choose a wizard? Why do we need both a barbarian and a fighter? Why is there a rogue instead of a thief? I thought bards were rogues. Oh, and apparently everybody can be a thief because thief skills aren't special. However, it's pointless to put points into the thief skills unless you're a rogue because you'll never have enough to actually open the complex stuff that makes the whole thing worthwhile. This is stupid - just like giving everybody an option to specialize in hammers and mauls. Something tells me that thieves don't carry around giant hammers.

I miss the times when you had a wizard, a specialized wizard, a fighter, a cleric, and a thief, with a paladin, bard, and ranger thrown in for good cross class measure. You had a few reasonable skills to choose from depending on your class, and weapon specialization or two, and perhaps a few spells. This method was simple and effective. The manual told you what you needed to know about each that wasn’t already self explanatory.

The ToEE manual is massive. And I do mean massive. It is 153 pages in Adobe Acrobat of pure, cold information. This really makes you step back and realize that you’re playing this game entirely by yourself. Dungeons and Dragons, based on what I know, is a multiplayer experience, and all these rules are gradually revealed because of the flexibility of playing with other people instead of against a computer. In ToEE, you need to know everything right now, or your character is royally screwed from the start. I can’t help but look at a bunch of these things such as Rebuke Undead, Inspire Competence, Shot on the Run, Silent Spell, Rage, Track, and the rest without thinking that they will make a token appearance maybe once or twice and never be used again beyond that. The huge amount of skills your given is overwhelming. There are major skills and minor skills; the only different being is that you don’t get to put points in the minor ones, and there’s no real convincing explanation for any of them, leaving you to wonder what the hell is going on and why you are wasting your time messing with this.

The major skills are no better. There are separate skills for Diplomacy, Gather Information, Search, Intimidate, Bluff, Appraise, Perform, Use Magic Device, Heal, Hide, Move Silently… you get the picture. I wonder how someone who can hide successfully cannot move silently, or how someone who can perform is not good at bluffing. I also wonder why there are so many different dialog skills in a hack and slash dungeon crawler (which gives me the impression that they’re pointless and maybe have one or two of those token uses). My favorite is Spellcraft, because it makes no sense whatsoever. In ToEE, a wizard can be inexperienced at spellcraft, while a barbarian can have a high skill in it. In Arcanum it was hard to pick out skills because they all looked so good, while in ToEE it’s hard to pick out skills because I’m trying to determine which one is less useless, and there are about a hundred more skills.

I tried out stealth and diplomacy and they don’t seem to really make a difference, so I’m going to forget about them, and ignore the nagging little feeling that I’ll miss something of minimal importance. I can’t see how you would want to avoid enemies anyways and flex your charisma in a game where the main attraction is a huge TEMPLE OF EVIL full of unapologetic bad guys that need to be exterminated.

After wasting so much time messing around with this character creation and testing different "builds" crap, I'm just going to make a fighter, mage, and a "rogue" (thief! Damnit! THIEF!) and see what happens. Again this is all just from my perspective and maybe to enjoy this game you need to be a real Dungeons and Dragons guy or something.

 

TOEE was definitely made for the true D&D fans out there, for as you pointed out the sheer scale of it is daunting.
I actually realy liked it but than i started in d&d back in '79 so i've been playing longer than a lot of the posters here have been alive.(man i feel old now)
Heck i even liked PoR:Ruins of Myth Drannor. talk about HUGE dungeon levels, they are like small cities all to themselves.