GCM: In reading over the reviews for The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure, are there any important features or gameplay elements that you feel have gone unmentioned / under explored? If so, please tell us a bit about what they are and what they add to the game.

Tim Cain: Overall, the reviews seem very fair. But several reviews have surprised me, in that it appears the reviewer did not spend much time with the game. For example, one review lamented the lack of user-definable hot keys, which the game has! And this fact is not buried in the manual - it's listed on page 1. Another reviewer said there were only a dozen NPC followers in the game, when in fact there are 35. And another reviewer complained that the dialogs had fewer options that he wanted, but he wasn't using characters that possessed dialog skills (like Diplomacy or Bluff). There are over a hundred dialog trees in the game, and more than 70 make use of at least one dialog skill, and some use three or four. If you talk to NPCs in the game using a character with no points in any dialog skill, yes, you will receive far fewer options than with a character that has these skills. ToEE is a complex game, and part of its richness is that it rewards those people who seek rewards. For anyone else, the game is a rich, tactical combat simulation.​