Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[nwnmemes]

Still got my Gold Box copies of Secret of the Silver Blades/Savage Frontier

THAC0 was hard.

 

[Dominae]

Also: http://bladekeep.com/nwn/

Holy crap I just had chest pains and flashbacks to the '90s. Now I just feel old, and more depressive about the state of gaming. I don't know if I should thank you or loathe you.

 

[Dorateen]

I already asked on the TSI forums about the use of Kalistes instead of Lolth in what was an obvious Queen of the Demonweb Pits inspired questline in Pools of Darkness.

Lolth is a goddess. Slaughtering her sounds totally unlikely. She is also CE, and her having anything to do with LE Bane makes little sense (then again, I was always puzzled why would CE demons be Bane's henchmen in POD... but run of the mill balors and mariliths he could simply stomp into submission).

I think you shouldn't seek any deeper reasons than "drow bitches are hawt kinky sluts, how do we justify plugging them in? Ah, there are hawt demonbitch kinky sluts, one of them could be their master!".

Yeah, before Time of Troubles, gods and goddesses were immortal and unkillable in Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. Still doesn't explain why not have Lloth just cooperating temporarily with Bane - happens often enough in the shitty novels that LE/NE/CE work temporarily together and the players end up killing one of her handmaidens.

It would be awesome if Lolth did show up, capricious deity that she is, and confront Kalistes. "How dare you steal MY spider and drow portfolio, bitch!" And the party watches as the two go at one another.

 

[ProphetSword]

I know Lloth is a goddess and all, but Kalistes was awesomely bad-assed with those vorpal swords and multiple attacks. Sorry to say that I'd be rooting for her.

 

[Null Null]

Your party at the end of Pools of Darkness was 30th level or so. They should have been fighting gods.

Oh, and at the risk of sounding like even more of a sperg than I actually am: Kalistes didn't have the vorpal longswords, Gothmenes did. Kalistes had an assortment of +4 weapons.

 

[ProphetSword]

It's been a while. Either way, I still thought Kalistes was an awesome enemy.

 

[Null Null]

They did a nice job with it. I didn't think Thorne was set up all that well, the fight with Tanetal was kind of anticlimactic (why were the random encounters so hard?) even though the heart of Moander was really cool (timing your exploration around the cardiac cycle? hadn't seen that one before), and Gothmenes' dimension should have been bigger.

 

[Monstrous Bat]

Finished Death Knights of Krynn. Contrary to Kodex Kommon Konsensus, I found this one less enjoyable than CoK.

The game felt too much like a high-level version of Pool of Radiance, with a big open world and lots of sidequests but pretty uninspired encounter design. The sidequests aren't that interesting either. The goofier ones are at least memorable, but most of them are bascially just "follow clear instructions, kill dudes, get loot". The encounters are fairly bland; up to the endgame, most battles are trivially easy (except the dragon fights, which were more of an initiative race than a tactical challenge). The difficulty spiked up drastically near the endgame, however, and I generally enjoyed the final battle with Soth. Haste is really overpowered though. I mean, I know there's a pretty big cost for casting it, but boy does it turn extremely tough battles into cakewalks. Surrounded by 3 spectral dragons? Hasted knight with a dragonlance can kill them all in a single turn. Facing iron golems? Hasted, enlarged, firetouched fighters can kill one each round. At least it felt pretty good.

I'm really disappointed to see that auraks are gone, they're among the coolest monsters I've fought in a CRPG. And I'm very butthurt that I can't

Spoiler

prevent Durfey from walking into Kitiara's obvious trap.

In the end, I couldn't bring myself to call DKK a bad game, but I was definitely disappointed by the game after CoK. According to octavius , DQK had much better encounter design than either DKK or CoK, but I'm kind of burnt out with those Goldbox games after playing through two of them in a row. I'm going to take a break. I predict I'll start DQK in a few months, hopefully this one will not turn out as disappointing as DKK.

 

[Null Null]

It's kind of funny you don't like it because it's too much like Pool of Radiance, as the poll at the top indicates that's everyone's favorite. Just goes to show how people like different things in video games.

 

[Sceptic]

Actually my problem with DKK is that it's an inferior POR. Tries to use some of the same design elements but doesn't do any of them as well. The open world isn't as interesting to explore and you can see it all in one go, the random world map encounter require you to trudge over the same spots over and over and over hoping to trigger them all, the sidequests aren't as interesting or varied, encounter design even for fixed encounters isn't as interesting (and IMO DQK is even worse here)... I don't think it's a bad game and I do like it, but I find POR vastly superior, and I do prefer COK over it as well.

 

[Dorateen]

The encounters are fairly bland; up to the endgame, most battles are trivially easy

I wonder if this is due to the open exploration nature of the adventure. If you go to certain areas first, and grow in power quickly, you might return to other locations that are too easy. I found there was quite a bit of "go here, come back later when you are high enough level" sort of thing, depending on when you visited the areas.

Turef, for example, could be challenging if your party is not strong enough. I recall taking three separate attempts to finish the village. And I thought it was great you could enter Dargaard Keep at pretty much any time, which at a low enough level should send the characters running for their lives!

 

[Null Null]

I wonder how much the design of each game was a reaction to the last one. It could be DKK's open-endedness was a reaction to people complaining about Secret's linearity, whereas Secret's linearity may have been a side effect of people wanting larger dungeons.

 

[Monstrous Bat]

Actually my problem with DKK is that it's an inferior POR. Tries to use some of the same design elements but doesn't do any of them as well. The open world isn't as interesting to explore and you can see it all in one go, the random world map encounter require you to trudge over the same spots over and over and over hoping to trigger them all, the sidequests aren't as interesting or varied, encounter design even for fixed encounters isn't as interesting (and IMO DQK is even worse here)... I don't think it's a bad game and I do like it, but I find POR vastly superior, and I do prefer COK over it as well.

Eh, I thought PoR and DKK are about on the same tier in quality. PoR's world is a bit more fun to explore and has marginally better dungeons, but DKK has more humor, more enemy spellcasters and a better story. The random world map encounter in DKK (AFAIK there's only one, why did you say "them"?) can be triggered reasonably easily IF you know where to look for, and I really have to disagree with you about DKK's encounter design for fixed encounters being inferior to PoR's.

I wonder if this is due to the open exploration nature of the adventure. If you go to certain areas first, and grow in power quickly, you might return to other locations that are too easy. I found there was quite a bit of "go here, come back later when you are high enough level" sort of thing, depending on when you visited the areas.

Turef, for example, could be challenging if your party is not strong enough. I recall taking three separate attempts to finish the village. And I thought it was great you could enter Dargaard Keep at pretty much any time, which at a low enough level should send the characters running for their lives!

That's a possiblity, but I think most of the sidequests can actually be done with a freshly imported party without too much trouble. The only tough encounters in Turef was the big ambush (which doesn't have to be fought) and the dragons (which is mostly initiative race to see if you can get some stinking clouds out fast enough). And I suppose it's technically possible to enter Dargaard Keep at any time, but you wouldn't know the password unless you've already completed the game before.

 

[Dorateen]

Speaking of sidequests, wasn't there one small area called the Father of Trees, or something like that? I have fond memories of getting thrashed by a windlass, and spending the remainder of encounters there in the back row with a ranged weapon.

 

[octavius]

Speaking of sidequests, wasn't there one small area called the Father of Trees, or something like that? I have fond memories of getting thrashed by a windlass, and spending the remainder of encounters there in the back row with a ranged weapon.

Yes, a small area with lots of Wraiths.
There was also a ghost ship, a mountain hut with a riddling dwarf where the prize was a Girdle of Giant Strength, and of course the infamous Kuo-Toa slaver ship. And probably more that I can't remember.

 

[Null Null]

Yup, Gluten the dwarf. The Father of Trees with the undead (the mage at the end kept getting baked by his own fire minions and never got a single spell off!). The Kuo-Toa slave ship with the mace +4 in the flames. The cursed village, also full of undead from an evil meteorite. Hey, it was DKK. There were a lot of undead. Fun thing about going back through Gold Box is you can see how they made minis with the existing monsters they used in other places. The bonus dungeons in Curse are each quite clearly populated with monsters from a specific area of the game.

 

[Zetor]

There were a lot of +4 maces in DKK for whatever reason. I guess they wanted to make it less about "all longswords, all the time"?

 

[octavius]

There were a lot of +4 maces in DKK for whatever reason. I guess they wanted to make it less about "all longswords, all the time"?

There were also lots of Skeletal Warriors, against which blunt magical weapons was just the only thing that worked.

 

[Dorateen]

Who needs a +4 mace when you've got a Mace of Disruption.

 

[octavius]

Who needs a +4 mace when you've got a Mace of Disruption.

The guys who weren't Mace of Disruption worthy.

 

[Null Null]

Don't they pinch the Mace of Disruption from you at the end of Champions?

 

[Monstrous Bat]

Yes but you get another in DKK.

 

[nwnmemes]

Gold Box Series... Oh hell yeah!

 

[Null Null]

Gloating over your new purchase? Even after these years, it's fun to pick up my old copies of the cluebooks, with all my silly notes in the back.

Hey, question for the Codexers; is there any way to make the offline NWN playable? It doesn't let you save your game.

 

[Luzur]

Gloating over your new purchase? Even after these years, it's fun to pick up my old copies of the cluebooks, with all my silly notes in the back.

Hey, question for the Codexers; is there any way to make the offline NWN playable? It doesn't let you save your game.

http://www.bladekeep.com/nwn/index2.htm?http://bladekeep.com/nwn/main.shtml

Now there have been rumblings about hacks that will save your characters, and ways to make this multiplayer - but I have not seen anything solid on ANY of these yet. Of course if anyone ever does figure something out, let me know, as I would love to have something listed here that would explain the process necessary to save a game, or to hack it where a few people could play at once.