D&D Tactics Comments

obediah · Aug 22, 2007

I opened my far-too-regular box from Amazon on monday, and found this guy in there. I got the immediate memory rush of vorpal hits, consulting the level-up table, hooking my C64 up to a 5" B&W tv, and no pussy that only a D&D title can bring.

So I spent three hours with it that evening. Most importantly, two of those hours were spent in the party management menus. It is the worst I've seen in a long long time.

- nice tactical combat
- old school 6 character party
- I didn't see anything even resembling 'role playing' or 'plot'
- I do think I have a choice between two combats though.

- enemies don't seem to drop loot. So there is no killing the shaman lord and finding his treasure trove.
- there are some chests which have not-great treasures in them scattered around, but you must open these before defeating the last enemy.
- In the great 3E tradition, you will buy most of your magic items rather than find them. This is incredibly lame and dull.
- Overall the implementation seems good. It is obvious the game could have spent more time in the oven though, after all the delays I'm sure much was left on the floor.
- The big thing missing is multi-classing. If you love building ueber-characters with prestige classes and feats/abililities from every splat book, this is not the game for you.
- For me, having 6 characters (and more you can swap in and out) pretty much makes up for this. You still have a lot of flexibility in developing your party.
- Thumbing though items, spells, abilities, etc, they all seem to have pretty good descriptions. So you can make informed decisions.
- Feedback is atrocious though. You can't see any rolls being made, and I haven't found a way to see my modified to-hit/damage or other post-bonus stats. It's hard to tell if an attack hits or misses, etc.
- Load times in gameplay seem good.
- The management interface more than makes up for any time saved by this though. Really, I can't stress how bad it is.

Texas Red · Aug 22, 2007

Do you have all of the 20 levels with 9 level spells, or did they think it unnecessesary and went with 7 or 10 or something?

Are there many of the skills and feats implented? What about the base and prestige classes and races?

How is the combat when compared to ToEE?

MetalCraze · Aug 22, 2007

sounds interesting. So is it worth checking, obediah with following conditions?

- I want a tactical game based on dnd rules

- eermm... that's all...

obediah · Aug 22, 2007

My characters are lvl 2 right now, so I'm not sure what the cap is.

There are a lot of feats, skills, and combat rules implemented. The non-combat stuff may be a complete waste, I don't know yet.

I think the base classes are there, plus two psionic classes. The base races as well. There is no multi-classing, so no prestige classes. This is the big issue.

Combat is much closer to ToEE than say NWN. The three fights I've played so far have been easy, but they were fun and felt like D&D.

It's too early to say for sure if I can recommend it. But purely based on DnD tactical combat, it's very promising. People are discussing what is there and what is missing in the atari forums, I recommend using that to judge if enough of the rules are implemented for your personal taste.

trystero · Aug 23, 2007

My thoughts...

Here are my thoughts about twelve hours in:

You move between locations via an overland map. At each location you can several of the following things: hire mercenaries, buy/sell, manage your party, adventure. All of the menus are terrible to navigate. After some hours, one gets better and faster at making inventory changes, equipping items, etc, but it still feels clunky.

As far as general accessibility, like most D&D games, the learning curve is pretty steep if you have never played the PnP version, or don't have a copy of the hardcover books/internet handy ( especially for figuring out feat prerequisites etc ).

The heart of the game is hopping from location to location ( directed by, at this point, a very simple plotline ) and undertaking adventures at these locations. This drops you into the tactical combat map. These maps can be decently large and the party will enter and exit combat several times as they travel toward whatever goal exists for that adventure.

As obediah says, the tactical combat can be nice. It did remind me of combat in TOEE ( which is a good thing in my opinion ). There is a recommended party level for each adventure. I found the earlier levels challenging, but the last two adventures with a level 6 party seemed to drop off a bit in difficulty. My hope is that it ramps up again.

I think a reasonable way to describe this game is to call it D&D meets D&D Miniatures. They implemented as much as they felt they could, but what is missing gives it a stripped down Miniatures-like feel ( which is not a bad thing ). I find the gameplay, about 12 hours in, deep and enjoyable. One just can't get hung up on every missing aspect of D&D.

- trystero