The Temple of Elemental Evil

Troika Games, whose core personnel was responsible for games such as Fallout, Fallout II and Arcanum take a shot at recreating the classic Gygax module for AD&D, The Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE) with the D&D 3.5 rules set.

ToEE delivers is as tightly crafted CRPG as I have ever played.  It is also has some noteworthy imperfections that blemish it.  Some of that may be by design, some may not.

The Dungeon Crawl

ToEE is primarily a dungeon crawl, though inside of that context there is a fair amount of role playing with personas that you encounter.  Most of these characters are ones you meet along the way to fill out your party.  Some are welcome additions (such as a sorceress with an interesting twist or a wandering bard) and some are fairly useless (1^st level orcs or a sailor, woo hoo..).  This also means that many of the role playing oriented skills such as intimidate or bluff, are very downplayed in this game. 

Another problem of ToEE is the issue of loot.  There are a fair amount of goodies to pick up in the course of the game and there are a few merchants whom you can sell too.  A neat option in that is merchants that specialize in an item (say gems) will pay you more for their specialty than for something that is not.  Unfortunately while there are a number of merchants, there comes a point where you will have more money than items available to buy.  Luckily there is an option in feats that none of the other 3^rd editions CRPG’s have used, or used well, to make items.  There is a good selection of items to make and like the PNP version experience points and gold are spent to make them.  It would have been nice to see the merchants have a better selection, especially of masterwork items that your mage or sorcerer could use to make magic weapons.  You have far more gold than the ability to spend it at the end of ToEE.

Given that your spell casting types give up experience points to make items, it is good that the level of the party tops out at 10, though this happens at the very end of the game.  This is not a gripe either, this is a tightly scripted and designed game.  It also gives your party a chance to boost themselves for that final push as they have experience points to burn.  That +3 cloak of resistance you might not have made a few levels ago is a great fit now.

Your party can only advance to tenth level, which seems like a limitation.  I was looking forward to more.  But ToEE does a good job of keeping your character level in match with the game for the most part.  Because the game is open ended for exploration some areas might be close to imposable should you try to explore them too early.  Where as others I found were very easy as my party had advanced to the point where it was fairly easy. 

The end game was a little tedious for character building.  The first is a level or two more advancement might have been rewarding because a few hours of game time is spent at the max level.  In hind sight with the ability to make items, this buffer of experience points made it a guilt free process to load up the party.  Secondly the feats while generally well done, became

TOEE sort of ends on something of a down note.  Not that the scripting was bad, but the final conflict with the evil behind the temple is something of a letdown given the creatures you have to fight to get there.  It only took me two tries to win, where as it took dozens of tries to get the demons who were in the way.  The end game is interesting, because like Fallout, the various side quests are explained in the game’s continuity.

3.5

While there have been a number of attempts to bring the 3^rd edition rules set into the realm of CRPG’s, ToEE delivers a much more faithful attempt than the great Neverwinter Nights (NwN) or the terrible Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Dranor?  ToEE, specifically, uses the 3.5 edition rules set and does it very well.  All the core elements are there, but there are certainly a few missing feats and skills that might have been difficult to program or were not needed in the context of ToEE.  I view this as a rule zero, the GM setting the character options and choosing to omit features form the PNP game. 

NwN and ToEE are decidedly different takes on putting third edition into a CRPG format.  Where NwN relies on lots of game play courtesy of player built modules and multiplayer capabilities, it always lacked a great single player game.   ToEE has a great single player game and a much better implementation of the third edition version of D&D thanks in no small part to being turn based on not real time like NwN. 

ToEE might lack the versatility of NwN, but it is also more fun.  When playing a game, that is more important to me.

Alignment

A nifty feature in ToEE is that alignment plays a very deep role in your experience.  This could be directly related to your party being able to interact or having to fight the various denizens of the Temple, Hommet or Nulb.  As well your followers can effect this too, for example if you have one of the more monstrous followers, some people will flat out not deal with your party (even if they had dealt with them previously).  Some of your dealings with contrary aligned NPC’s can lead to violence as well, which took some getting used to as I was left wondering what the heck I did wrong.

It is alignment that makes the replay value of this game.  The RPG elements are on the light side, so being able to fight for good, evil or both is a neat option, one that I am going to play through once a patch has been released.

Followers

Followers are a key part of ToEE, they definitely fill the gaps in your party and often prove to turn the tide in encounters.  I tended to go with at least one if not two NPC tanks early on, as they were much more effective in combat than the innumerable rogues you can pick up along the way.  Once I ran into a bard I kept him and he more than proved his worth between heals, reach attacks with a pole arm and songs.  For most of the game I kept an NPC wizard in the party, because the magic artillery helps and his rate was cheap.  All followers have a price to be in the party along with taking an equal experience points share.  They take their share before you get to pick from the loot from a slain enemy, usually this is not a huge crisis but I had to reload after I saved from a combat to get the key lot I wanted.  Anyways, this added a fun twist to the usual followers schema used in many CRPG’s.

My Party

I chose a fairly standard party to run through ToEE.  My alignments were squared around a neutral good alignment, though there were no characters of that direct alignment.  I went with a balanced party with my flex character being a monk.  My run through ToEE consisted of a party as follows:

            Fighter (LG / Human)

Easily the most fun character to run in ToEE for me. I usually like rogues, wizards or bards, so I was surprised.

            Fighter/Rogue (TN / Human, tweaked for archery):

A great option for the social skills, traps and locked doors.  Wound up better with melee than the archery I optimized her for.  Matter of fact with as light as the role playing elements were…it would be tempting to not have a rogue at all and have a sorcerer or bard.   

            Monk (LG / Human)

I had misgivings about having a monk, given in my various 3^rd edition campaigns. They are good for a balanced campaign, but for a dungeon crawl they really fall behind the power curve in ToEE.  This was glaringly apparent in the end game where their martial arts attacks are not helpful except as a second tier fighter to protect the mages.   Also like in other 3^rd Edition CRPG’s, there is not enough equipment to keep the monk on the power curve.

Cleric (LG / Human)

An obvious choice, though it would be tempting to multiclass two of the ten levels with a paladin or better yet a fighter.

            Wizard (LG / Elf / Evocation)

Another must have, not only for item creation but artillery.  Even the lowly burning hands spell really helps out during those first few levels.

Technical Stuff

My system is running an AMD1800, nVidia 64MB video card with 512MB of RAM.  I did not generally experience much slowing in ToEE save when there were a lot of combatants or in some of the end game areas.  I literally had to sit and read some big swaths of KODT while the game figured things out on the maps.  It is obviously a programming bug and an irritating one as it really kills the pace of the game.

Another bug in the game is some of the item creation feats are broken in ToEE and at the time of this review a patch was not forthcoming.

The interface in ToEE favors a high resolution setting.  Archery is very effective in the game because of this, especially early on and being able to see the whole combat is something I feel is important.  Also the game is driven off of a radial menu that is clicked on for characters, npc’s or objects.  While a neat use of this set up, it takes up a lot of screen space.  Some of the interfacing with the environment could have been as slick as the above, but it was not very  flawed either.

Graphically ToEE is quite nice to look at.  The spell effects are very well done.  The monsters, people and equipment is represented nicely.  The monk animations, in particular, are hilarious and the best to date for any CRPG.  The other animations are well done and represent a melee combat well.  There are lots of creatures to see (and slay) and they are all animated well, the ones that are one shots.

The Ghost of Gygax

ToEE is a grand adventure that more than reminds me of the good old days of all night D&D games.  It lacks some of the pretension and polish of contemporary game plotting, but that doesn’t make it less interesting.  Troika translated a lot of Gygax’s style into ToEE, which might explain why it is a dungeon crawl rather than an immersive RPG experience.  Gygax logic and plotting, sometimes, defies common sense and a few of the traps and tricks belay his juvenile and pedestrian writing and don’t add much beyond an old school feel to ToEE.   Like many great writers his work could have used some editing before being published or in this case repackaged into a new product.

Synopsis

The Temple of Elemental Evil is my favorite of the third edition D&D CRPG’s to date.  The game play is tight, graphics well executed 3.5 rules.  It is not without its flaws: occasional bad coding, remnant Gygax goofiness, or classes being downplayed.  If you are looking for an old school campaign, this is a great deal of fun with some replay value thrown in too.