Review ToEE swooned over by Khabal

[Saint_Proverbius]

Tags: Temple of Elemental Evil; Troika Games

The boys over at <A href="http://www.khabal.com/">Khabal</a> have <A href="http://www.khabal.com/articles/showarticle.php?id=553">written up their review</a> of <a href="http://www.troikagames.com">Troika</a>'s <A href="http://www.greyhawkgame.com">Temple of Elemental Evil</a>. They liked it a lot, even though they did a bit of con weighing(Which is nice to see in reviews). Here's a snip:
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<blockquote>One of the things I like about Temple is the fact that the developers managed to give some importance to the interaction-related skills like "bluff" or "gather information". I find these skills often neglected, especially in role-playing games that are combat intensive. It adds an additional dimension to the game and gives you real reason to buff up skills in charming the pants off non-player characters and lying through your teeth. It also makes Temple feel more like a role-playing game rather than just a huge dungeon crawl.</blockquote>
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I tend to agree. So far, I've played to the <i>Temple</i> part with three different parties, with different leader classes, alignments, and diplomacy skills, and it's rather interesting what you can and can't do based on these differences.
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Spotted this at <A href="http://www.bluesnews.com">Blue's News</a>.

 

[Sol Invictus]

I particularly like this part of the review:

Cloaks flap majestically and patterns printed on the 2D clothes in your inventory show up on the figures running around. After all, part of the fun about being an adventurer is in looking good when you get nifty items. I know this sounds rather shallow, but I don?t get as much of a kick playing games where the hero or heroes look bad or have awful balding hairlines and badly-kept beards.

I totally agree. There's really no point in having a beefy character with tons of nifty magical items if he looks just the same as he did when the only thing he had was a wooden sword.

Part of bringing RPGs to the computer, especially ones with large budgets, is to give the player a better experience when it comes to visual and aural immersion.

 

[Chadeo]

I can have fun with a game even when my only representation is an @ symbol.

Even so, the more eye candy a game has, the easier I can become immersed in it. So while I would never criticize a game for poor or lacking graphics, I think it is fair to note them as a positive aspect.

ToEE is the best-looking rpg I have played in a long time (no the FF games don’t count). I suspect that NWN would also look good, but never having played it I can’t comment.

The textures and models in games seem to be advancing in quality very nicely, and it looks like the next generations of 3-d engines (HL2 and D3) have lots of support for interaction with the environment. I hope that multiple new rpg’s take full advantage of this (though they also need to not lose track of the story. I suspect that so much effort will be spent on the window into the world though, that the actual world will suffer. After all the vast majority of gamers seem more than happy with the very worn out linear story arch with side quests that have no affect on anything, leaving the rest of us a minor audience to target).

When the tables in the room catch on fire from my fireball, causing the roof of the inn to collapse a few rounds later, and limiting vision with all the smoke, then I will have my expectations satisfied. Compared to that, cloaks are a minor thing.

Which brings up a rhetorical question, good old x-com was able to pull off that level of interaction with the environment, why the hell is it taking so long for modern developers to understand how cool that makes a game?

After all it is all about the interactivness and the responsiveness of the world. THAT is what makes a quality RPG, the rest is just window dressing.

 

[Seven]

I can have fun with a game even when my only representation is an @ symbol.

Even so, the more eye candy a game has, the easier I can become immersed in it. So while I would never criticize a game for poor or lacking graphics, I think it is fair to note them as a positive aspect.

ToEE is the best-looking rpg I have played in a long time (no the FF games don’t count). I suspect that NWN would also look good, but never having played it I can’t comment.

The textures and models in games seem to be advancing in quality very nicely, and it looks like the next generations of 3-d engines (HL2 and D3) have lots of support for interaction with the environment. I hope that multiple new rpg’s take full advantage of this (though they also need to not lose track of the story. I suspect that so much effort will be spent on the window into the world though, that the actual world will suffer. After all the vast majority of gamers seem more than happy with the very worn out linear story arch with side quests that have no affect on anything, leaving the rest of us a minor audience to target).

When the tables in the room catch on fire from my fireball, causing the roof of the inn to collapse a few rounds later, and limiting vision with all the smoke, then I will have my expectations satisfied. Compared to that, cloaks are a minor thing.

Which brings up a rhetorical question, good old x-com was able to pull off that level of interaction with the environment, why the hell is it taking so long for modern developers to understand how cool that makes a game?

After all it is all about the interactivness and the responsiveness of the world. THAT is what makes a quality RPG, the rest is just window dressing.

I'm curioud, how long did it take to develope Xcom? You can do any thing given enough time, so it would be interesting to find out how much time it had.

 

[Spazmo]

What's more relevant there is the technology they had. X-Com was a 2D game, so when they let you destroy stuff, that meant animations and sprites and stuff. It's much easier and less resource consuming to have objects in 3D games that dynamically can be destroyed, moved, etc.

 

[Chadeo]

I'm curioud, how long did it take to develope Xcom? You can do any thing given enough time, so it would be interesting to find out how much time it had.

Google is my hero, as are random people who dedicate sites to things that are of interest to very small groups of people.

http://home.c2i.net/w-257478/his.htm

I have no clue if that site is telling the truth, but it has a very authentic feel to it. So if it is taken as the truth, it looks like it took them about three years to make the first x-com.

I love the brain dead microprose in that article (it needs to be on earth, like rail road tycoon). Just goes to show you that producers and marketers never change. They want a blue widget not because of any intrinsic quality of blue, but just because the last widget they sold had blue in it and it did better than their red widget.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Yep, marketing never changes. Let's set an alien-fighting game on Earth 'cause people can relate to that :shock: Yeah, the idea of fighting aliens on Mars is totally freaking me out Rule #1: If the game sells well, let's follow up with a quick 6-month-in-development-sequel.

 

[Voss]

They removed the Men in Black?!?

LOL.

Because obviously MiB concepts sell like crap.

 

[Chadeo]

Because obviously MiB concepts sell like crap.

Well back in 1991-1994 I see no reason that anyone would know that there would be a movie made in 1997 that would generate a large amount of interest in the term "men in black". Still, it is a rather funny thing in hindsight.

 

[Barghest]

All this talk of XCOM...

I would recommend that you all stay away from the XCOM-lite UFO:Aftermath. I've just been playing it, and I can't believe how much of the game is bettered by the original XCOM! I mean, for ferks sake, you can't even blow the bloody houses up! ARGGGHHHHH....

At least Silent Storm is out next week in the UK. That has a decent destructable landscape, and plays a hell of a lot better then UFO!

 

[Deathy]

Destructible landscape really isn't that much of a big deal with regards to development time. Sure, if you want it to seem realistic, you might have to implement a physics engine. However, if you just want to have a tile based engine that has damageable walls and whatnot, all you need to do is refer to all of the walls as entities such as doors. As we've seen in games such as Fallout and NWN, there are such things as destructible doors. Now, what if you changed walls to act in the same way as doors (aside from the opening and closing thing)? Or even any other entity?
This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities, all of which would (possibly) work even in NWN as it is today, if some modder really wanted it.
Think of it. Moving and destructible walls. Hell, you could even have walls that attack you.

Hell, if I had NWN installed, I'd even think of trying it using that toolset.

Wouldn't that be interesting though? A maze of a dungeon that changed as you went through it. Get to the end, get the foozle, and then get lost on the way out, up until you got tired of the maze and hacked your way through to the exit.

Knowing BioWare, the engine probably couldn't handle it.
Well. Another fun idea to implement in my Ultimate RPG pipe dream project.

 

[Ausir]

Unless the game has pre-rendered backgrounds...

 

[dunduks]

When the tables in the room catch on fire from my fireball, causing the roof of the inn to collapse a few rounds later, and limiting vision with all the smoke, then I will have my expectations satisfied. Compared to that, cloaks are a minor thing.

Then you should look up Silent Storm, try the demo its awsome, great combat, destructable environment and so on.

 

[JanC]

One of the things I love about Nethack and Adom is the destructible scenery. I think we might see more of this in the future - after all, games are meant to appeal to young boys, and young boys do like breaking things!
The appeal of destructible scenery to me is that you can take different paths through a game, using your own intelligence to come up with solutions that the developer might not have even thought of.
The reason game designers don't like it is because it means that they can't keep the players 'on rails' as much. Designers like this because a limited number of options means less coding work and less testing work.
A typical example of this kind of design is the way thieves can pick all locks in an RPG except important ones - those are unopenable by any means except Plot. One good thing about Morrowind was that you could literally open any lock in the world if you were a good enough thief. You could stroll into the God-King Vivec's sanctum if you wanted to.
Red Faction had destructible scenery, and players loved that, but it was much criticised for marking some of the scenery as indestructible for game design reasons that were not always logical in the context of the world.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Red Faction was a poor game with a good engine that was never used for what it's worth. There should have been more opportunities to fire at roofs to cause them to collapse on people, or shoot at floor structures to make people fall through them.

As for games appealing to young boys - I would say that in these times, sales certainly show that most buyers of action games or games with violence in them are teenagers aged 16, to adults of 25 years of age. Not that this has to do with anything you've said.

Most kids just tend to download their games instead of buying them because thanks to regulations, most children in the US don't have access to M rated titles in stores and the media frenzy going on about violence in games drives most parents away.

 

[chiefnewo]

One of the things I love about Nethack and Adom is the destructible scenery. I think we might see more of this in the future - after all, games are meant to appeal to young boys, and young boys do like breaking things!

Getting a pickaxe in adom usually resulted in a routine similar to the one I follow in ToEE. Trying to get rid of all the fog on the map, or in adom's case, every single wall. Of course that often results in getting crushed by a stone giant...

 

[Elwro]

[Getting a pickaxe in adom usually resulted in a routine similar to the one I follow in ToEE. Trying to get rid of all the fog on the map, or in adom's case, every single wall. Of course that often results in getting crushed by a stone giant...

It takes some time, so on lower levels it's corrupting. But it's a great thing that you can mine for gems & ore, especially when you're a weaponsmith and can do something with the latter.