The Eye of the Beholder Thread

[Don Peste]

GB Feature: Eye of the Beholder Content Overload

I hope you're ready for a heavy dose of CRPG nostalgia, as we've conjured up a new subsite dedicated to SSI and Westwood's original 1991 D&D-based dungeon crawler, Eye of the Beholder. Should the game be on your replay list for sometime in the not-too-distant future, you'll now have a place to find a detailed walkthrough with annotated maps for every puzzle-filled level, a summary of all magic items, a bestiary, breakdowns of all classes, races, spells, and more. As always, we hope you enjoy!

https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/124926-gb-feature-eye-of-the-beholder-content-overload.html

 

[Desiderius]

GB Feature: Eye of the Beholder Content Overload

I hope you're ready for a heavy dose of CRPG nostalgia, as we've conjured up a new subsite dedicated to SSI and Westwood's original 1991 D&D-based dungeon crawler, Eye of the Beholder. Should the game be on your replay list for sometime in the not-too-distant future, you'll now have a place to find a detailed walkthrough with annotated maps for every puzzle-filled level, a summary of all magic items, a bestiary, breakdowns of all classes, races, spells, and more. As always, we hope you enjoy!

https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/124926-gb-feature-eye-of-the-beholder-content-overload.html

Been waiting literally 30 years for this.

 

[Ethaliel]

Been waiting literally 30 years for this.

Yeah, that's my motivation to finally finish playthrough of EOB started couple of years ago

 

[Desiderius]

I finished it a couple times way back when and it felt super-satisfying doing it all on my own but it was obvious there were all kinds of things I missed and no easy way to find out what they were.

 

[anvi]

I've completed all of the games years ago but I could never get the party transfer thing to work. I am looking forward to playing through them all again someday but with the same party. I like to binge watch good TV, I also like to binge play good games!

 

[Nixheb]

Ok.
Yesterday, I was crawling this page :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_available_source_code

I almost had an hearth attack when I saw the line :

Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon 1991 2021 Role-playing game Westwood Associates The source code was released on archive.org in 2021.[122]

I downloaded the zip, mascara tears rolling on my cheeks, my body ready to enjoy the SOURCES of a game that defined WHO I AM today...

To discover a bunch of junk hastly stuffed inside. Some bits of EOB3 aesop source code, dump from rpgcodex pages, aso...

Can anybody confirm that I'm not totally nuts and this is really some junk and we need to have it removed from here and there ?

 

[Joonas]

Yeah, that's just stuff and threads to get EOB3 running with the AESOP/32-engine.

 

[Eisen]

What the hell, why they put "EOB 2" in the title?

 

[Infinitron]

Eye of the Beholder 2 also: https://www.gamebanshee.com/eyeofthebeholderii/

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Eye of the Beholder 2 also: https://www.gamebanshee.com/eyeofthebeholderii/

"Content Overload"

It has everything needed to beat the game, but little else.

 

[DaveO]

Don't make the mistake of installing the third game in the series. End on the second one and pretend the third does not exist. #3 is just bad design on many levels.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I tried out the GBA version of EOTB on emulator recently. I have a secret enjoyment of trying ports of games just to see how it stacks up to the main one.

The whole battle system is overhauled to be turn-based, you see monsters in first person and then get sent into an isometric battle screen where you see these miniatures/figurines of your guys and the enemies. It's actually not bad at all, on the surface. You can move about, positioning matters more than ever, and sometimes you can get really slammed when you're randomly set up to where two guys are surrounding your wizard.

But the big thing is this isn't AD&D like the original, it uses 3E. I would use the word "uses" very loosely because this implementation is botched, actually tons of things in this game are. A majority of skills are useless or don't work. Some spells are also mysterious or wrong in their application. For example, Cure Moderate Wounds uses d8 while Cure Serious Wounds uses d6. It's not exactly what you'd call an upgrade, is it? I'm also confident that Poison only affects Fortitude saving throws and doesn't actually apply proper Constitution damage, you'll never actually put a living target to death.

You're also never really told how certain skills actually work in the game itself. "Hide" is one of these. You are never given any sort of in-game indication through UI or visual that the beginning of every fight if your Rogue has high enough Hide then they can't be targeted by the enemy until they make any action. I don't even know if what I'm saying is true, I just noticed when skipping turns to use my Cleric the enemies would always avoid the Rogue despite being right there around him.

Overall an interesting "remake" of EOTB even if it does fuck up tons of stuff be it rules implementation or coding flaws. The turn-based figurine battle system is pretty cool and I know the original EOTB's real time first person blobber combat is something you either like, tolerate or despise.

 

[Desiderius]

I tried out the GBA version of EOTB on emulator recently. I have a secret enjoyment of trying ports of games just to see how it stacks up to the main one.

The whole battle system is overhauled to be turn-based, you see monsters in first person and then get sent into an isometric battle screen where you see these miniatures/figurines of your guys and the enemies. It's actually not bad at all, on the surface. You can move about, positioning matters more than ever, and sometimes you can get really slammed when you're randomly set up to where two guys are surrounding your wizard.

But the big thing is this isn't AD&D like the original, it uses 3E. I would use the word "uses" very loosely because this implementation is botched, actually tons of things in this game are. A majority of skills are useless or don't work. Some spells are also mysterious or wrong in their application. For example, Cure Moderate Wounds uses d8 while Cure Serious Wounds uses d6. It's not exactly what you'd call an upgrade, is it? I'm also confident that Poison only affects Fortitude saving throws and doesn't actually apply proper Constitution damage, you'll never actually put a living target to death.

You're also never really told how certain skills actually work in the game itself. "Hide" is one of these. You are never given any sort of in-game indication through UI or visual that the beginning of every fight if your Rogue has high enough Hide then they can't be targeted by the enemy until they make any action. I don't even know if what I'm saying is true, I just noticed when skipping turns to use my Cleric the enemies would always avoid the Rogue despite being right there around him.

Overall an interesting "remake" of EOTB even if it does fuck up tons of stuff be it rules implementation or coding flaws. The turn-based figurine battle system is pretty cool and I know the original EOTB's real time first person blobber combat is something you either like, tolerate or despise.

Sounds like Realms of Arkania.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I get that he has no background in Dungeons and Dragons (to the point that he mixes up the concepts of Dual-Classing and Multi-Classing) and he does bring up many good points of criticism at the game... it still doesn't justify ignorance on this level.

# "And perhaps one of the most pivotal 3D dungeon crawls ever to be produced, as it set numerous standards which other 3D crawls have mimicked since then" (Dungeon Master by FTL Software? Never heard of it!

)

# He doesn't think to try punching enemies.

# "Even though the game is pretty good at tracking stats, it doesn't allow you to see your exact Hit Points at any moment after character creation."

(Though he does mention that in the updated video description.)

# "Enemies are not capable of randomly spawning." (They start doing so on the second floor of the game, albeit via designated spawn points.

)

# Actually believes the manual is telling the truth all of the time (it isn't, though that's a recurring problem with AD&D games by SSI).

# "This isn't a very long game, in terms of actual content. I spent about eight hours getting about one-third through the game, but that only amounted to completing four maps, as there are only a total of twelve maps"

Twelve maps of which nine happen to be "massive" by his own description, and are intertwined with one another, bursting with secrets, traps and puzzles, all of which can and will stump even people like him.

So yeah, ADG gotta ADG.

On a small aside, this got me thinking about the game's actual release date. Those who know it seem reluctant to share it, and online sources aren't 100% reliable. What I've been able to piece together is that it was definetely out by February 1991, though it may have been released a little earlier, possibly in time for Christmas 1990. Most game mags didn't pick up the game for review until May or June '91, though. Wikipedia 'tards out by stating:

SSI sold 129,234 copies of Eye of the Beholder. By mid-1991, over 150,000 copies had been sold worldwide.

The former number comes from the SSI archives themselves, while the latter comes from an ad blurb for the game.

 

[Nixheb]

I don't know when the teaser demo where released exactly regarding the final release, but it was packed in the summer 1990 (judging by the timestamp of the files).

 

[Darth Canoli]

I don't like RT blobbers but still, EotB and Dungeon Master (i got my hand on a Amstrad pirated* cassette of the latter back when i was in high-school) are classics, millennials spreading their ignorance on videos should be put down, for the greater good.

Well, i never completed the game, it was interesting but the RT system wasn't for me.

Spoiler

*Before internet, we were making copies of original cassettes using a simple recorder and trading it in the black-market high-school just to play games we wouldn't have bought otherwise.

I tried out the GBA version of EOTB on emulator recently. I have a secret enjoyment of trying ports of games just to see how it stacks up to the main one.

The whole battle system is overhauled to be turn-based, you see monsters in first person and then get sent into an isometric battle screen where you see these miniatures/figurines of your guys and the enemies. It's actually not bad at all, on the surface. You can move about, positioning matters more than ever, and sometimes you can get really slammed when you're randomly set up to where two guys are surrounding your wizard.

But the big thing is this isn't AD&D like the original, it uses 3E. I would use the word "uses" very loosely because this implementation is botched, actually tons of things in this game are. A majority of skills are useless or don't work. Some spells are also mysterious or wrong in their application. For example, Cure Moderate Wounds uses d8 while Cure Serious Wounds uses d6. It's not exactly what you'd call an upgrade, is it? I'm also confident that Poison only affects Fortitude saving throws and doesn't actually apply proper Constitution damage, you'll never actually put a living target to death.

A real remake/fix of this version would be amazing EotB with a good and polished TB combat system would be a real marvel.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Good point Nixheb I went and checked my disk images (v1.6, which was preceded by at least one other version).

The oldest date I could find there was February 18th 1991, and the newest date was April 29th.

So it looks like the first version (v1.4?) was sent out to the masters in February, but reviewers got v1.6 or even v1.7.

 

[Elwro]

The narration for the ADG video is just sad. Why would you go make videos about an old game you're ignorant about?

 

[octavius]

I couldn't get further than "And perhaps one of the most pivotal 3D dungeon crawls ever to be produced, as it set numerous standards which other 3D crawls have mimicked since then".

 

[Nixheb]

Good point Nixheb I went and checked my disk images (v1.6, which was preceded by at least one other version).

The oldest date I could find there was February 18th 1991, and the newest date was April 29th.

So it looks like the first version (v1.4?) was sent out to the masters in February, but reviewers got v1.6 or even v1.7.

Talking about those versions, I can't remember if there is any playable beta version floating somewhere - below 1.4 ?

 

[Jarpie]

I get that he has no background in Dungeons and Dragons (to the point that he mixes up the concepts of Dual-Classing and Multi-Classing) and he does bring up many good points of criticism at the game... it still doesn't justify ignorance on this level.

# "And perhaps one of the most pivotal 3D dungeon crawls ever to be produced, as it set numerous standards which other 3D crawls have mimicked since then" (Dungeon Master by FTL Software? Never heard of it!

)

# He doesn't think to try punching enemies.

# "Even though the game is pretty good at tracking stats, it doesn't allow you to see your exact Hit Points at any moment after character creation."

(Though he does mention that in the updated video description.)

# "Enemies are not capable of randomly spawning." (They start doing so on the second floor of the game, albeit via designated spawn points.

)

# Actually believes the manual is telling the truth all of the time (it isn't, though that's a recurring problem with AD&D games by SSI).

# "This isn't a very long game, in terms of actual content. I spent about eight hours getting about one-third through the game, but that only amounted to completing four maps, as there are only a total of twelve maps"

Twelve maps of which nine happen to be "massive" by his own description, and are intertwined with one another, bursting with secrets, traps and puzzles, all of which can and will stump even people like him.

So yeah, ADG gotta ADG.

On a small aside, this got me thinking about the game's actual release date. Those who know it seem reluctant to share it, and online sources aren't 100% reliable. What I've been able to piece together is that it was definetely out by February 1991, though it may have been released a little earlier, possibly in time for Christmas 1990. Most game mags didn't pick up the game for review until May or June '91, though. Wikipedia 'tards out by stating:

SSI sold 129,234 copies of Eye of the Beholder. By mid-1991, over 150,000 copies had been sold worldwide.

The former number comes from the SSI archives themselves, while the latter comes from an ad blurb for the game.

Sadly, I think Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back is largely forgotten outside of our circles, even though they were fucking big hits back in the day, and they still look great graphically despite being from 1987-88.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Dude, Dungeon Master was massive.

It dared to try to portray with graphics what had up to that point been portrayed with numerical tables (and it succeeded). It caught people's eyes early in its three-year development. It is the single-biggest selling title on the Atari ST, and it forced thousands of envious Amiga-owners to purchase memory upgrades (to the point that retailers started lumping the game with the memory upgrade in a package deal) and it is "the most pivotal 3D dungeon crawls ever to be produced, as it set numerous standards which other 3D crawls have mimicked since then."

 

[octavius]

And yet it's mostly forgotten today, while the inferior Eye of the Beholder is not.

Part of the problem is of course that it's not available on Steam or GOG, and not for sale if out of mind for most people, even though free remakes exist.

 

[Infinitron]

And Eye of the Beholder 3: https://www.gamebanshee.com/eyeofthebeholderiii/walkthrough.php