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The Temple of Elemental Evil
PC
Come for the Combat, Leave for the Story.
3/5 stars
“The Temple of Elemental Evil” (“ToEE”) was released in 2003, a mere year after “Neverwinter Nights” and three years before the release of “Neverwinter Nights 2,” after which I abandoned PC gaming and fled into the arms of consoles 100% of the time. Yet somehow I managed to miss “ToEE” completely, never realizing it was released until it appeared on GOG.com a few years ago. Thinking I might have stumbled upon a hidden gem in the line of D&D-based PC RPGs that kept me awake until the wee hours of the morning, I eagerly added it to my digital collection. Yet, sadly, I realized too late that “ToEE” came from a time after Interplay had lost the D&D license to Atari (delenda est). During this time, a slew of developers were set to the task of making D&D-based RPGs for their evil publisher, with BioWare still holding up remarkably well, and Obsidian barely performing with adequacy. I had never played the only other game created by “ToEE” developer Troika, so my expectations for a great experience were high… yet “ToEE” failed to meet them multiple ways.
Presentation
Whereas “Neverwinter Nights” and its sequel tried to appeal to graphics whores by replacing the 2D isometric Infinity Engine of their predecessors with a 3D polygonal engine, complete with an option for a close-in, over-the-shoulder camera that would later return in the console versions of “Dragon Age: Origins,” “ToEE” is much more retro in its appearance. The environments are pre-rendered static images with a few particle effects like smoke and fire that only activate when a party member is nearby, leaving a semi-transparent ‘fog of war’ in distant, explored locations and solid blackout in unexplored locations. Characters and monsters, on the other hand, are incredibly simplistic polygon models. None of the options in the character creator allow for a truly iconic look for the player’s party members, and all of the NPCs look excruciatingly similar. The monsters, at least, look good, most are easily identifiable by appearance (though some small monsters, like stirges, are impossible to see on-screen), and are well-animated in both their movement and attacks.
The biggest problem I have with “ToEE’s” graphics is how small and spread-out everything is. The GUI is split between icons that rim the screen (and aren’t useful for much) and radial menus that pop-up in a fanlike pattern upon right-clicking on a party member. Combining already small icons and somewhat flaky menu selection with running the game at a high resolution makes everything tiny and the text unreadable. Even worse, since “ToEE” is an old game from 2003, ‘high resolution’ meant a whopping 1280x1024 at the most. I tried running the game at that resolution and couldn’t read anything because everything was too small AND too blurry because it wasn’t at the native resolution of my 1080p TV. I tried hacking the game’s config file and manually setting it to run at 1920x1080, which worked to remove the blurriness but made all polygonal characters/monsters invisible and everything that wasn’t invisible nano-scale. I had to settle for running the game in a rather blurry 1024x768. Someone on the technical team during the development of “ToEE” certainly wasn’t thinking ahead or about players running the game on high-end hardware, since the interface includes zero GUI scaling.
Unfortunately, the sometimes blurry, sometimes simplistic graphics in “ToEE” are the high point in the game’s presentation. While the soundtrack is adequate and generic for a fantasy RPG, the voiceacting stands out as some of the worst I’ve ever heard. When the lines don’t sound like they’re being read by an intern on the first take, they occasionally waver in recording quality as well, sometimes even when spoken by the same character! The abysmal quality of the voiceacting in “ToEE” made it painful for me to spend any time talking to NPCs in the game’s towns… which was already painful to begin with.
Story
“ToEE” is a digital recreation of a 1987 AD&D First Edition module written by Gary Gygax (the creator of D&D) and Frank Mentzer. As a connoisseur of D&D products dating back to the early 1990s, I have occasionally grabbed original Gygax and Mentzer material out of the used bins at my local gaming stores (before all of them closed). And while I have great respect for Gary Gygax as a creator and as the founder of THE iconic tabletop RPG, it saddens me to say that neither of these guys were particularly good writers.
“ToEE” takes place in Gygax’s World of Greyhawk, which was the original ‘generic on purpose’ campaign setting Gygax used while hammering out the rules of the game. While Greyhawk eventually got revisions both from Gygax and by other members of the TSR staff after he left the company, it never had a particularly compelling world history and the characters and events smelled strongly of the pulp-style cheesiness that made Golden Age and Silver Age comic books so laughable by today’s standard.
Instead of compelling stories and loveable characters, Gygax’s strength as a creative writer was in the creation of rules, ideas, and dungeons. “ToEE” reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of the original material, faithfully recreated in a PC game.
“ToEE” opens with the issuance of a minor quest to the player’s party of 5 custom-made (and personality-free) player characters. The actual introductory quest varies depending on the party’s alignment, but my Chaotic Good party received a rather boring and generic request from an elven councilman to search for a couple of missing elf nobles. My party was told that an elf-friend by the name of Black Jay living in the small town of Hommlet might know more.
Upon arriving in Hommlet, my party found itself not taking on epic quests or following the trail of missing elven nobility, but instead mediating a mind-numbing disputed between farmers over who was putting too much hay in their shared barn. Not exciting enough? How about jumping through hoops to help a member of the Church of St. Cuthbert convert to Druidism? Still not exciting enough? Well, one of those farmers whose barn is too full of hay is hot for the local widow, and she’s hot for him, but neither of them will make a move unless the player’s party completes an excruciating chain of fetch/talk quests by traipsing back and forth across Hommlet’s (unmarked and overly large) map half a dozen times.
The only real ‘adventure’ to be found in “ToEE’s” opening vignette is a vague mention that there might be some ‘evil’ bandits holed up in an abandoned moathouse, and that the wizard and fighter (who are insinuated as being gay lovers) who govern Hommlet would appreciate it if someone took care of the bandit problem while they worry about overseeing the construction of their new castle/lovenest. Getting to the titular Temple of Elemental Evil relies solely on the fact that the player will get so bored talking to the brain-dead citizens of Hommlet and helping them with their inconsequential problems that they will take their under-leveled party to the moathouse and kick off the chain of events that leads to the Temple’s discovery.
Of course, taking a party of 5 first-level characters into any kind of dungeon is asking for trouble, so “ToEE” conveniently makes a plethora of recruitable NPCs available… provided the player is willing to jump through a few hoops. NPCs, unfortunately, take a share of any loot found (including one-of-a-kind items, at times), auto-level how they want without regard to the player’s needs, and ultimately prove useless except as initial boosters for a brand new party. Fortunately, I discovered a glitch with a rogue NPC who could repeatedly fail to disarm a trap in Hommlet, but gave the party ~200 experience every time he did so. After reaching level 4, my party abandoned the use of NPCs altogether, and with the paper-thin personalities of these characters, I never missed out on anything, nor did I ever find myself wishing I had more manpower in my party.
All of the tedious story material in “ToEE” does ultimately affect the ending sequence, with additional scenes tacked-on for a number of ‘important’ quests. But the ending is so bland and generic that – like the rest of the game – I found it impossible to really care about anything besides clearing out the Temple and messing up its cultists’ plans. While I did encounter a number of named characters of ‘importance’ during my investigations of the Temple, I found that the early ones I talked to were so dull and pointless that my conversational opener rapidly changed from having my bard talk to them to having my wizard fireball them. The results were the same, though I’m sure an Evil party would be able to experience the entirety of the ‘story’ in a completely different way.
Gameplay
Where “ToEE” really shines is the same way in which Gary Gygax’s modules really shined: dungeon design. Originally, the World of Greyhawk was nothing more than a multi-level dungeon underneath a castle. The Temple of Elemental Evil is a multi-level dungeon underneath a temple devoted to the use of the four elements for the betterment of Evil (don’t think about it too much). As such, the maps and layouts in “ToEE” are incredibly faithful to the original source material, with only a few minor changes.
But exploring a dungeon, killing monsters, and waddling back to town overburdened with treasure is pretty passé, anymore. What does “ToEE” bring to the table that any old PC Hack ‘n Slash doesn’t? The answer to that question, and the sole thing that prevents “ToEE” from being irredeemable trash, is the implementation of the D&D 3.5 Edition rules.
“ToEE” includes almost every facet of 3.5 Edition (warts and all, and I occasionally found myself longing for specific Feats and the infinite 0-level spells from the Pathfinder RPG system that succeeded 3.5 Ed.), with a few simplifications to Skills and the exclusion of the overwhelming number of extraneous Feats added in nearly every supplement published after the Core Rules being the only real edits. Combat, which makes up the core of the game, is untouched, and includes everything that makes tabletop D&D such an enjoyable not-quite-TRPG experience, from attacks of opportunity, to coup de graces, to 5-foot steps, to clerics spontaneously casting, to readied actions. Characters develop as any D&D player would expect, with full access to Multi-Classing and even Item Creation. While the original module was designed to take characters from level 1 to level 8, and “ToEE” originally capped at level 10, the GOG.com version of the game is fully-patched and allows characters to advance all the way from level 1 to level 20 (though getting past level 12 would take an egregious amount of grinding, and is completely unnecessary).
Essentially, “ToEE” provides an objective taste of how to play D&D 3.5 Edition combat scenarios, since the computerized Dungeon Master is completely heartless and never fudges rolls (though the player can take that aspect of game balance into their own hands, thanks to the ability to quicksave and quickload at ANY time). While the computer DM’s heartlessness sometimes causes trouble for players, it usually is more detrimental to itself, since it accepts critical successes and critical failures without question and auto-kills any unconscious-but-not-dead foes as soon as combat ends. One particularly memorable moment occurred when my party barged-in on a bugbear having a threesome with two female bugbears. He was unhappy with the interruption and charged my bard, only to critically fumble and fall prone at the bard’s feet, who proceeded to bash-in the bugbear’s skull, while my fighter and barbarian took out his girlfriends. It was an inglorious victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Really, the only thing preventing the “ToEE” engine from being the perfect scaffolding upon which to build digital conversions of every other classic D&D module is the number of ridiculous bugs and glitches. These aren’t really technical problems with the game, per se, but problems in the way some aspects of the rules actually turned out. For example, anyone under the effects of greater invisibility who gets an attack of opportunity will get INFINITE attacks of opportunity until the target is dead. Another example: Galeb Duhrs are a variety of Earth Elemental with a damage reduction stat of 15/+1. Not only does “ToEE” make them immune to the shatter spell, which is specifically harmful to crystalline creatures (like Earth Elementals), but I spent far too long beating on them with +2 and +3 magic weapons (it took waaaay longer than the final boss battle to kill 12 of these things at once) only to deal 0-7 points of damage instead of the 9-20 points of damage I SHOULD have been dealing if their damage reduction wasn’t borked. I have read of other players running into similar issues in other specific instances, such as silence never wearing off and protection from evil preventing any other buff spells from working. All of these issues are easy to work around, but it would be better if they weren’t issues in the first place. Of course, Troika has largely abandoned the game to modders (there is a “Circle of Eight” mod that fixes these issues, but I didn’t test it out), and the D&D license lies fallow and buried in 4th Edition rules, so there seems to be little chance of the “ToEE” engine ever being relevant or useful again.
Overall
“The Temple of Elemental Evil” is truly representative of early AD&D First Edition modules, with a horrible story tacked half-heartedly onto a really well-designed dungeon filled with perfectly-balanced enemy encounters. Replacing the obsolete AD&D rules set with the still-obsolete-but-significantly-better D&D 3.5 Edition rules set and keeping the combat as faithful as possible to the tabletop version of the game, however, brings an otherwise poor experience up to the level of mediocrity. Anyone seeking a “Baldur’s Gate” or “Torment” experience should look elsewhere, as those games nailed both story AND gameplay. “ToEE” only gets one of those categories right, but it gets it REALLY right. Anyone seeking to learn how to play tabletop D&D 3.5 should consider “ToEE,” as it’s a great tutor, if not a great game.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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