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The Temple of Elementary Design Mistakes
|  | | | | There is no way in Hell
I’d ever take this clown if I hadn’t gotten an inside tip from one of the Troika developers that he’s the best NPC fighter. Would you? | |
ToEE isn’t entirely devoid of fun – there will be times that
you’ll feel that same ol’ thrill when you win a tough battle and look greedily
on all the loot laying about. The combat and character options present in this game show
its massive potential, almost heartbreakingly so. Troika could have taken lessons from BIS
in regards to what worked and what didn’t in their best effort D&D rules-wise, Baldur’s
Gate 2, and started there. Make combat turn-based and tighten up some of the looser
rules interpretations and BINGO there’s your D&D gaming goodness you were
striving so hard for. However, there are far too many reinventing-the-wheel design choices
evident in this game.
Let’s start with the piss-poor interface. How does having no way
to access the save/load screen with the mouse grab you? Only by hitting the Esc key –
conveniently located as far away from your right-handed mouse as possible – can you
bring it up. As a bonus, there is no pause feature, either – including the
save/load screen. The game manual claims the save/load screen is a pause screen. Lies! I
hit Esc, took a leak, "unpaused" and checked the game clock to see 3 minutes had
passed. Walking NPCs will stroll on by when you’re in that screen; attacking enemies
will still attack. You’ll have to go all the way to the actual saved game screen to
get something resembling a pause. The radial character menu is clunky and overbearing
(although the variety of options is interesting) and adds an unexpected tactical element
when you accidentally click whatever was under the radial memory on screen, and your
fighter suddenly runs to the other side of the room in the middle of a large battle. If a
character is encumbered, a warning icon will be on their portrait; if you click it, it
will give a detailed explanation of encumbrance. This is typical of ToEE’s design:
the developers insist on having a pop-up explanation for encumbrance (which is not only in
the manual, but anyone who has ever played an RPG knows what encumbrance is) which
ultimately only ends up serving as a distraction and barrier to smooth play, meanwhile
they ignored putting in a pause feature. I can’t tell you how many times I was buying
items from a merchant and hit the encumbrance icon by mistake, which unceremoniously
kicked me out of the merchant screen. Dropping or using an item in your inventory is
entirely unintuitive: you pick up the object and move it over the Use or Drop tab to do
either instead of clicking the tab (it looks like a button) and then clicking the item,
which is how every other part of the interface works. Speaking of drag and drop, the spell
selection menu forces you to pick up a spell and drop it just so in the active
spell slot. If it isn’t exactly in the box, it won’t drop there and you’ll
have to pick it up and try again. It’s hard enough to do in 800x600, forget higher
resolutions. Why can’t I just double-click the fucker? Remember all the fun you had
in BIS’ games, simply clicking things and letting the interface do the work for you?
Remember when you could hit the game clock icon, the Space Bar or Esc to pause, and
the game actually paused? Good times.
Upon finishing a battle, NPCs will immediately and automatically take
their cut – gold, weapons, scrolls, whatever. Some will even complain about only
getting half the loot. Just go to a merchant who doesn’t buy scrolls and take
everything out of those jerkoffs’ inventory (except for stuff they had when they
joined your party). Take it all – you only have to leave them with 1 coin of each
type. Taking an NPC early on is advisable in order to tackle some of the tougher battles.
You can give them stuff that you want to sell anyway and they’ll automatically sell
it. You also have near-complete control over them, but there are limitations. You
don’t know their stats or alignment, so they may have their own agenda (so Troika
claims; the NPCs you’re likely to use won’t do anything special, unless you
consider banal remarks upon entering new areas special). The game caps your original
character limit at five so at least one NPC is advisable (especially early on). True to
Troika’s antagonistic form, the most useful NPCs are the most annoying ones. A sot
shambles up to you and drunkenly tries to bum a job? Naturally, he’s the best NPC
fighter in the game.
Applying Mascara During a Gang-Bang: the Troika Credo
|  | | | | Count the gay. Let’s
start with that portrait, move on to the clashing weapon combo tags, and finally the items. The sword I obviously can’t use, but the scrolls of healing I secretly can’t use either. | |
Other game design choices suck in ToEE. The town map often fails to
center on your party when you switch to it (there’s a tab for that, but it should be
automatic); it just appears wherever the hell it was the last time you looked. Single
characters may not enter a building (or upper/lower floor thereof) alone, so while your
thief attempts to raid someone’s bedroom, your paladin has to stand a few feet away
and pretend not to notice. Environments are depressingly non-interactive; dozens of chests
and barrels and such, standing flat like so much backdrop. Conversely, dead enemies will
remain searchable even after they have been looted, which only serves to hamper movement.
Characters will give a verbal acknowledgement when you click something in their radial
menu but not if you simply click on them or their portrait, and they often fail to be
selected. Although party formations are fully customizable, characters in the rear will
frequently be shoved to the front upon entering an area. Often, the formation will not be
maintained for any apparent reason at all, either during movement in the same area or upon
entering a new one, with no predictable way to adjust. Resting must occur in designated
outdoor areas or inns. Attempting to rest in most outdoor areas will almost always result
in something waking you up and attacking you anyway. Even if your whole party is selected,
whoever is closest to a door or person will be used for the interaction (which means you
would have to abide by that character’s CHA or INT for the exchange) instead of the
party leader. Additionally, I’m not digging the stupid blue icons that indicate a
doorway, staircase, or searchable area. They’re distracting and entirely obtrusive.
Outside the Temple, for example, the outdoor areas are connected by those blue doors. They
float absurdly in space, nowhere near a map edge, looking ridiculous and would have
prompted me as a developer to try something else when making ToEE. The game has weapon
combo options that you can click to "quickly" change weapons. However, the combo
tabs are inside the inventory screen (thus eliminating most of their potential benefit)
and the weapons inelegantly drop into your common inventory when they switch out.
It’s a clumsy attempt to implement a feature that Icewind Dale 2 has, and IWD2
does it far better. It’s more confusing than helpful, and it doesn’t always work
properly. Since combat is turn-based, you can jerk around in your inventory all you want,
whenever you want. All you need to do is right-click anything to equip it (even some stuff
your character isn’t supposed to be able to use), so the combo tabs are another
instance of an unnecessary feature Troika spent too much time (improperly) implementing
while other parts of the game were left wanting. Plus, the tab colors are cyan,
lime, lavender, magenta, and canary. How gauche.
Publisher Atari wanted an All-Ages rating for ToEE so certain maps,
locations, quests and characters that Atari found objectionable were removed. Like
children, so evil characters couldn’t kill them. That’s funny, because critical
hits on characters causes them to spray blood all over the place, and death animations are
equally gory and dramatic. I wonder if any of the many quest bugs can be attributed to the
summary removal of things like brothels and (literally) characters named Dick – what
do you think? Better yet, Troika claims Atari shipped an earlier build than they had
anticipated, so the hard drives at Troika’s office may have a better version of the
game than the paying public does.
According to PnP experts who have played ToEE, there are dozens of
rules inconsistencies – certainly as many as the supposed looser BIS games have, if
not more (however, many of those experts still laud the game as being the closest thing to
the PnP experience yet produced, most likely due to the sophisticated combat tactical
options). As an aside, I think trying to rigidly simulate a PnP’s game rules in a
computer game is inherently self-defeating and rather fucking stupid. Additionally,
it’s difficult to tell if those differences and omissions are deliberate or a result
of the ToEE’s unfinished state. I have one potential problem: the game is based on a
module written using the 1st Edition AD&D rules draft decades ago, not the
contemporary 3.5 Edition or anything near it. That seems to me to be a pretty big
inconsistency. What rules that are there, many are annoying and seriously hamper game play
and most importantly, detract from the fun of playing. Identifying an item will only tell
you its name – you’ll have to figure out what an item does by equipping it and
searching your stats for any changes. This is a classic example of the inevitable
breakdown in a too-literal rules port from PnP to PC. The PnP rules allow for players to
equip unidentified items (unlike many D&D PC games, which do not), but the effects are
not mysterious to anyone who does a little digging and comparing, because the numbers
don’t lie. Other rules are just poorly implemented. A major bone of contention over
ToEE has been the predicating factors for a paladin becoming Fallen. Let’s play a
quick game:
Guess which of the following things will cause your paladin to become
Fallen:
A) Killing a traitorous merchant after he has surrendered.
B) Refraining from killing an evil guy per his pleas in exchange for him
showing you where the Temple of Elemental Evil is.
C) Plundering a friendly blacksmith’s supply.
The correct answer is B. It’s based on a technicality where, if an
evil NPC joins your party (which he temporarily does if you let him to show you where the
temple is), you automatically become Fallen. Since the game hides NPC alignments from you,
having a paladin is a great way to figure out if any NPC is evil or not: just add them to
your party and reload! Maybe it’s to prompt players to take full advantage of the
Least-Used D&D Spell Ever, Detect Evil. Why A and C aren’t I have no idea, except
that it’s further evidence that Troika plays it as loose with the PnP rules as
everyone else has, freely ignoring the concepts of "lawful" and "good"
seemingly at will.
The game gives few clues as to what quests you should attempt first, so
you will frequently find yourself outclassed and forced to reload at some point earlier.
Every accepted quest will be met with trepidation because so many are broken or
excessively and irrationally finicky. I cannot imagine playing this game in Ironman mode
with no reloads. I simply do not have the patience for that kind of shit, and I
simultaneously applaud and ridicule those who do. What difference does it make anyway when
encumbrance, weapon attributes, spells, magic items, quests, feats, skills, and weapon,
item, class and race restrictions are all bugged (often beyond repair) in some manner?
Mini Strat Guide
I take Troika’s d20-humping claims of ToEE’s virtual-PnP
gaming experience personally, so I had every intention of exploiting this game until the
CD bled tears of pure suffering. Wasn’t hard: I made sure to make a rogue and have
him rip off everything. The friendly blacksmith in Nulb? Please, he’s lucky I left
him his anvil. The temple in Hommlett? I’d have taken the statue of whatever Jesus
surrogate was there if I could. I’d have taken the motherfucker’s pews and made
his congregation sit on barrels if the game had let me. Enemies are arranged in the usual
mobs lurking in storerooms, all bunched up and begging for an area-effect spell. Thus,
fireball is the Hand of God in this game once you get it. Handle NPCs the way I suggested
and your frustration level will be seriously reduced as well.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Beta!
ToEE has more things wrong with it than an octogenarian with
Down’s Syndrome. The comprehensive bug list for this game is as long as my dick, and
it’s still growing. The bug list I mean, not my dick. I’m not one to harp on
bugs so much; few games are released anymore without them (although ToEE has far more than
average). However, I cannot abide a game that is sent out the door with a bug that
corrupts save games beyond usability; that’s worse than frequent crashes to the
desktop, and ToEE has both. Additionally, none of the available patches fix those issues,
so the only advice I have is to save often, and under different slots.
Most of the other bugs can be fixed with the patch (the list of
fixes for the first patch is hilariously long, and it’s sad that the fans had to make
one first), but there are other issues beyond that.
Pathfinding is even worse than it is in BIS’ games.
Characters often fail to move and will stand utterly still while the rest of the party
moves. They’ll even acknowledge a movement command and still do nothing. Characters
routinely fail to go where you try to send them due to the flatlined pathfinding. Clicking
on a place where your party cannot get to will result in a temporary freeze as the idiot
pathfinding script picks its nose and eats it. There is no way to be sure that wherever
you’re trying to move a character to is allowed or is where they will actually go, as
the cursor never changes to show you that you can’t. Zones of selection for
characters and doors are way too big; you’ll be accidentally selecting characters
left and right in this game. The selection zones are so large they prohibit movement in
relatively confined areas (one character can block a hallway that ought to let three walk
abreast) and artificially increase radii for area-effect spells (which is why the zone
that is shown for the spell pre-cast isn’t accurate, since the game counts where your
character’s entire body is and not just its feet – your feet can be safe but if
your head overlaps the area, the game ignores the third dimension and treats your
character as if you are standing in the area). This ignorance of 3D space (especially when
your characters are rendered in 3D) is a horrible design flaw, and it’s one that
BIS’ 2D sprite-based games managed to avoid. Zones of selection for doors and dead
bodies are off-kilter as well. The game is too dark, and the only way to gamma correct is
by going into the game’s files and changing it manually.
|  | | | | What’s the Golden Rule, kids? Altering game files = your game sucks, please retry. | |
The SecuROM CD protection will cause loading errors where your CD-ROM
times out trying to read the game CD. It takes several seconds to boot up the game even
when it does work right, and half the time it doesn’t. The Reputation Log
doesn’t work very well either – after essentially ridding Hommlet of all
potential threats and garnering the praise and gratitude of the head cleric, the head
druid and the retired heroes who help protect the town (sort of; few people ever act like
they’ve spoken to you previously in subsequent dialogues), my Rep Log only showed
that one guy (not any of those mentioned) liked me because I killed some spiders. What the
fuck do I have to do to get a little credit over here? Hitting the Tab key to highlight
searchable locations doesn’t work at all, which is horribly frustrating since very
little of the background is searchable in the game. Who’s up for Hunt the Pixel?
The Shocking Twist
Playing this game in its unpatched state makes me feel guilty that I
was so harsh on BIS’ games, especially IWD2 (which, for all its quixotic design
choices, was still more or less playable out of the box). Witty dialogue and
somewhat-creative quest design doesn’t cut the mustard if those facets are drowned in
other brain-dead design elements. Does the patch help? Sure, much in the same way being
trapped on a cruise liner full of drunken gay overweight mimes and having the deck
railings reinforced helps. I personally feel that the members of Troika are assholes or at
best terribly misdirected, deluded geeks. These guys insist on making games with the
absolute worst NPCs (both in-game type and the handling thereof) in any modern RPG, they
add stuff and then remove it without proper playtesting or QA, and they focus on
unnecessary design elements while ignoring fundamentally important ones. I often get the
impression while playing their games that they think annoying gamers is funny or, at best,
they just have a terrible sense of humor. The NPC controls in Fallout 1 and 2,
marriage in Fallout 2 (and ToEE), random encounters and save limitations in Arcanum,
and dozens of things in ToEE (especially the Roll Count Tracker for stats generation),
these all add up to a design team that needs to get its fucking priorities straight.
Nobody wants to play games that have to be heavily patched to be bearable, and are a
bogged-down miasma of confusing suck regardless.
Which is why Troika has, without a doubt, made the most accurate
depiction of PnP D&D yet!
Let’s see: we’ve got a convoluted mess of a playing system,
lots of undue attention to pointless detail while the bigger picture of streamlined game
play suffers (despite efforts to repair the problems), utter ignorance of similar games
that are better made, poorly-handled NPCs, unnecessarily long combat, a herky-jerky and
overly-simplistic story, and a gaming experience that is by turns pretty cool and horribly
annoying. Let me speak for all the PnP players who have been clamoring for an authentic
D&D experience: thanks, Troika!
 Bill Dungsroman
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