The Temple of Elemental Evil

The Temple of Elemental Evil is one of the first games I bought from GOG back in 2010, and my initial attempt at playing it determined that I was not yet ready for such an excellent, hardcore game. 

I found this game extremely confusing when I first tried to play it about 2 years ago.  First of all, I was more or less unfamiliar with the D&D 3.x ruleset.  In the intervening time, I've played both Neverwinter Nights games and pen and paper Pathfinder, so now I have a much better idea of what I'm doing.

Another stumbling block was that I had no idea where I should go or what I should do first.  I made the mistake of heading straight for the moat house after delivering news to the head priest at the local temple, since it seemed like that's where I was supposed to go next.  When the head priest told me about this moat house quest, the dialogue included an option to head out to the moat house immediately, and so naturally I thought that it would be designed for a level 1 party.

In this first attempt, on the way to the moat house, my party was ambushed by two giant frogs.  Aside from the opening vignette, this was my first taste of combat in ToEE.  I did my best with the unfamiliar controls and the inadequate gear, but things clearly weren't going well, and I knew we were doomed when I saw two more giant frogs join the fray.  I couldn't do anything but watch helplessly as, one by one, the whole party was grappled by the tongues of the giant frogs and then swallowed.  TPK.

Let me tell you, this party was in no position to be going to the moat house.  After trying a few in-town quests instead, I learned just how pathetic and vulnerable we were.  There's a quest to find out who's poisoning a farmer's sheep.  I found the person doing it (he was just standing around out there for hours all night, so it wasn't hard), but I couldn't get any information out of him, so I tried pickpocketing him to see if I could get some evidence that way.  Apparently that doesn't work at all, because I was successful multiple times, but never found anything new in my inventory, but when he spotted me and entered combat, this somehow aggroed the sheep on the farm, and they attacked.  My party was then wiped by sheep.

I checked online for some advice on where to begin, and a couple of places recommended going to Deklo Grove (which required finding someone in town to give me the quest, which I don't think I ever would have found) and just grinding on random spawns there until level 2.  Not very fun.  I did get to level 2 that way, but it took a while.  When I did, I ended up taking the Toughness feat on several of my characters, which in retrospect was an unwise choice.  It grants you a meagre 3 extra hit points, which seemed like a lot at the time, when the health of all of us could be measured in single digits, but after just a few more levels, 3 HP is rather insignificant, as I discovered when I hit level 2, and saw my HP nearly double!  Really, when I made this first attempt about 2 years ago, I didn't even understand that each level added another die's worth of HP.

Anyway, I checked the Circle of Eight site, and saw that they had released a new version of their mod since I last checked.  It wasn't compatible with the previous one, but it had some new content that I wanted, so I had to start over.  But maybe that wasn't so unfortunate, because with my new understanding of the D&D rules, I could now understand that some of the pregenerated characters I was using were not very well suited to their roles.  For instance, I had a wizard whose intelligence was rather average, but who had very high dexterity, which wasn't doing her any good.  I had just assumed that the pregenerated characters that came with the game would have been ideal characters, but now I believe they were made with intentionally random ability scores, just to make it that much more hardcore.

So I started again with a new party of six members (the mod pack allows party sizes up to 7), some of whom were custom made, to use in the Co8 mod pack version 7.0, which includes several new areas, including one designed for level 1 characters.  Perfect!  I went through the process of obtaining the quest, which was rather verbose but well-written, and ironically played up as something extremely dangerous, when it was in fact the most level-appropriate thing I could be doing, unless you count the social quests in town.  When I got to the new place, Welkwood Bog, the first creatures I encountered were...kobolds!  Whew!  After giant frogs and giant spiders, I found the kobolds quite reassuring.

The Welkwood quest was fairly short, but gave my party a much-needed level increase and gave me some spell scrolls and some better starting gear.  It had an interesting story behind it, too.  Ordinarily I like social quests, but I think the awkward interface in this game, as well as the dull, low-saturation art design contributes to the lack of fun in that regard.  I was happy to take this alternate route.

Interface and game information

The Temple of Elemental Evil has the most detailed, in-depth set of options for a player's actions in any computer RPG I've ever seen.  Stances, grappling, trips, attacks of opportunity and more!  Unfortunately, these are arranged inside a horrible radial menu with layers within layers of flyout "spokes".  Remember me complaining about the inscrutable icons in the NWN radial menu, and how I wished for a simple text menu?  This has text, but it rotates it to match the angle of the item on the menu, making it unnecessarily awkward.  Please, please, give me my spells in a nice simple list where I can get to them without having to delve through multiple levels of flyouts on a radial menu!  I liked the way NWN2 did this, with all of my spells available at a glance, with descriptions, grouped by spell level, with the touch of a single key.  I did eventually get used to the interface, but I would never call it a "good design", and I really wish I could change it.

One thing that partially mitigates the awkwardness of the radial menu is the ability to assign shortcut keys to individual commands (for instance, I assigned keys for Coup de Grace, 5-foot Step, and Charge Attack), though many of the keys I wanted to use were reserved.

The font they chose for all of the in-game text is a boldfaced sans-serif font like Helvetica or Arial, and is rather small.  Sans-serif is not as readable at small sizes as serif fonts, because the serifs aid the eye in interpreting the letters.  (Likewise, mixed-case is easier to read than all-caps, due to the relative distinctiveness of the letterforms, but fortunately this game used mixed-case.)  The font cannot be changed, nor increased in size -- at least not easily.  I saw a hack out there somewhere that was supposed to increase it, but I think it said I'd have to start the game over again, and I wasn't ready for that.  Instead, I settled on playing at a lower resolution than I prefer, since the text doesn't scale.  This means poor-quality screenshots, I'm afraid.

The game contains a wealth of information on game rules, rolls and modifiers, and what things do.  If you open the combat log, it describes the actions of each turn, with highlighted words that can be clicked on for more detail.  There, you can see exactly what number you rolled for your attack/save, what items, effects, or feats may be modifying that roll and by how much, and what number you had to beat in order to succeed.

I used this information screen in one of the few instances I've come across where picking a lock was necessary: in this case it was a chest added by the Circle of 8 mod.  Of course, my wizard knows the Knock spell, but this chest turned out to be spell resistant.  I no longer had a rogue in my party, and my ranger wasn't able to pick a lock even though she had some points in the open lock skill.  (Due to the level caps on skill point distribution, I sometimes had extra points left over, and spent them on cross-class skills.)  So I temporarily hired Furnok, a rogue NPC staying at the nearby tavern, and had him try to pick the lock.  He failed several times, so I checked the log, and saw that even though it was awarding him rolls of 20 (the maximum), the modifiers weren't high enough for him ever to succeed.  So I lent him the Gloves of Dexterity I had crafted, which I saw added a little to his modifiers, but still not enough.  I had my druid cast Cat's Grace on him, and tried again.  Almost there, but 1 point shy!  Finally, I had one of my clerics cast Prayer on the party, which added 1 more point, and he was then able to pick the lock. 

By comparison, Neverwinter Nights 2 shows the rolls right in the main window, and tells you if success is possible, but doesn't break down exactly where your modifiers are coming from like ToEE does.

Similar to these skill check reports, you can also get a detailed breakdown of your character's attack bonus or armour bonus, which is immensely helpful in intelligently building and outfitting a character, so that you know which feats, enhancements, and other bonuses are in effect, and which don't stack, and why.

Other aspects of the game and interface are quite unhelpful by comparison.  There are signs outside the buildings, but they're just decoration, and aren't readable like in other games, where you might hover the mouse over them to see what they are.  At least the map screen allows you to place notes on it.  Also, there's a key to highlight usable objects on screen like in Baldur's Gate, but most of the time it doesn't highlight anything!  I couldn't find anything highlighted in Hommlet, and only a few things (dead bodies with loot and doors) highlighted in one of the interiors.  The quest journal is also extremely terse and lacking in detail, and it doesn't change to reflect new information, so you may need to take your own notes.

Spell descriptions are likewise laconic, including none of the flavour text from the sourcebooks which the other D&D CRPGs included.  They also occasionally omit very relevant information.  For instance, near the end of the game, I had been using the Raise Dead spell several times, but at some point it told me that I couldn't use it, because I didn't have enough gold.  I checked, and sure enough, it had drained my party funds dry!  I checked the spell description again, and it said nothing about costing gold to cast it, whereas other spells like stoneskin and identify did mention that.  I checked the manual, and in the manual it mentions that Raise Dead requires 5000 gp's worth of diamonds as material components.  That's something that it really should have mentioned in the game itself.  I shouldn't have to consult the manual before casting a spell to see if it has requirements not listed in the game itself.

This is not a complaint about the spell being expensive, though.  I really like that some spells, especially powerful ones like this, require expensive material components.  It raises the stakes in fights, unlike in other D&D-based games, where raising the dead is free or even automatic.  The only complaint is that I wasn't warned about the expense in-game.

Other nice inclusions are such things as a druid's Reincarnation spell being mentioned as not being guaranteed to bring the character back as their original race, and the fact that paladins can fall from grace due to their actions.  Fallen paladins must seek atonement, which is prohibitively expensive to discourage casual out-of-character behaviour.  However, my paladin fell from grace unexpectedly when I spared the drow priest when he begged for mercy, and accepted his offer to escort me to a back entrance of the Temple of Elemental Evil.  It was not adequately telegraphed that this would entail the chaotic evil drow joining my party.  My solution was to kick the paladin out of the party and roll up a dwarven fighter.

Also nice is the inclusion of nonlethal damage in addition to the normal sort.  Things like fistfights and drinking contests involve nonlethal damage on a separate health bar.  When your nonlethal hit points run out, you fall unconscious.  This provides an alternate way of dealing with trolls, incidentally, who can normally only be hurt with fire or acid damage.  Everything else deals nonlethal damage for them, but the interesting thing is that once they fall unconscious, you can choose a coup de grace attack which kills them instantly.

I also appreciated the pop-up boxes of DM-text that appear when you enter significant new areas, describing the area to set the mood, much as a dungeon master would do in a pen & paper game.

The crafting menu has its pros and cons.  On the pro side, it gives you a full list of crafting recipes, and shows you what is required to craft them, such as level, spell, items, gold, and XP cost for Craft Wondrous Items.  You can easily add effects to items with Craft Magic Arms and Armour, and rename your items.  On the minus side, it's sometimes unclear why some of the effects can't be added (it doesn't tell you which condition isn't met), and many of the wondrous items are missing descriptions, or have inadequate descriptions, so I can't tell what they're supposed to do!  The game manual is excellent and extensive, but doesn't include descriptions of these wondrous items either.  I have to look them up in the online d20 System Reference Document to find out.

Speaking of recipes, this is the second Troika game I've seen that includes an actual food recipe in the manual, at the end.  Arcanum has "Grandma Cookhill's Three Bowl Bread", a halfling's banana bread.  This one has a recipe for "Chocolate Chip Cookies of the Gods", whose description indicates it also probably came from a halfling, though it was stolen by an orc.  I especially like the bit where it stresses the importance of waiting for the dough to chill thoroughly, saying "If you cannot wait, do not expect cookies of the gods."

Bugs

I've heard that the game was very buggy when it was released, as per usual for a Troika game.  The Circle of 8 mod pack appears to have fixed most of those bugs, and provided workarounds for most of the few that remained.  I only encountered three, myself.

One was when one of my characters walked across the Spike Growth I had cast, and acquired it as a permanent effect.  Even after resting more than 24 hours and performing heals on her, she still had the debuff, and the timer countdown never changed.  Periodically she would get hit as if she were still walking across the spikes.  I found this addressed in the Co8 guide, which said to go to the druid Jaroo in Hommlet, and ask to be healed of permanent spell effects.  This fixed the problem.

Another bug was inside the moathouse dungeon.  When fighting the big crowd of fighters, I ran into a game-breaking problem where there were two foes that didn't seem to actually exist, but they were in the queue for combat turns.  The game paused for a while when reaching one of them, and moved on to the next one, but it just never recovered from the second one, leaving me stuck in combat forever.  I tried fixing it with some console commands, which seemed like it might help at first, but just led to more problems.  I reloaded to a save before fighting the group, and tried again, and this time there was no trouble.

Lastly, there was a game-breaking bug on exiting the Welcome Wench tavern in South Hommlet, in which the party (and all NPCs) would be frozen once we got outside.  Effects like smoke from chimneys still functioned, and I could toggle in and out of combat, but none of us could move.  This bug occured twice from that saved game (when I did the same thing both times).  I evaded it somehow when I instead did a tavern brawl quest and then rested some more before leaving the tavern.  The Co8 guide says that freezes like this become more common in South Hommlet as the game progresses, and that players should avoid that area when possible.  I got through the rest of the game without any more such freezes, though, although there were other, unrelated freezes that were fortunately temporary in some places.

Storm of Zehir inspiration

I noticed that there were some elements in this game that I also noticed in the later-released Storm of Zehir, the NWN2 expansion.  One was the use of the Survival skill allowing the party to detect and avoid random encounters on the overland map.

Sometimes there were friendly encounters, such as when I encountered messengers who wanted to reward me for rescuing some of the people I found in the titular Temple of Elemental Evil, and sometimes there were encounters which were ambiguous.  One of them listed the encounter participants as "a party of adventurers", with their names and portraits in the list, so I was curious enough to hail them.  Sure enough, it was just a party of adventurers like mine, who at first mistook us for "another bandit encounter", to comedic effect.

There were some others like that, and it's nice when a game that includes random encounters takes the care to make them diverse, and not all about combat.

Speaking of which, it was interesting how sociable the denizens of the temple were.  Although the majority of monsters attacked us on sight, there was a significant number of characters who were willing to negotiate, join up with me, or allow to join up with their factions.  Some even offered quests!  There were numerous factions within the temple, working against each other even as they seemed to be working toward a common goal.

End game

The game got much, much easier as I gained levels and added enchantments to my weapons and armour with crafting.  I noticed that my dwarven fighter tended to score a lot more hits than my human barbarian, who missed against higher level enemies much more frequently, despite having near-identical enchantments and appropriate weapon focuses.  Encounters were almost always of the "tank & spank" variety, except that in this case, this tank was also the one dishing out the most damage.

There were two really tough fights, though.  Well, only one was really tough (others, like the group of beholder-kin on the ice plane and the group of fireball-flinging noble salamanders on the fire plane were tough, but not really tough), and that was the Balor on the fire plane (the D&D equivalent of the Balrog from LotR).  I had to retry that fight maybe 10 times, and most of the fights ended with the Balor having taken no damage at all.  By contrast, Zuggtmoy was only average!

I even sought tips online for beating the Balor, but they mostly didn't work with the Co8 mod.  Several posts recommended using Cloudkill against him, but when I tried it, it said "Target is immune!" so I guess the Co8 team figured the Balor wasn't hard enough.

Summoning the bosses from the other elemental nodes didn't seem to help either, aside from providing more targets to distract the boss.  More often than not, these summons cast AoE effects that resulted in friendly fire, dispelling my buffs, sickening my fighters, causing my party members to flee in terror, etc.

The fear was the biggest problem.  I read that "circle of protection against evil" is supposed to make party members immune to fear, but it didn't.  They were all within the protective circle, and they all ran away.  I had a bit better luck with the individual (non-circle) "protection from evil" spell, though, and I think that was instrumental to my eventual victory.  My fighter resisted fear the entire time, though my barbarian succumbed a couple of times, and had a problem with missing the enemy.  Regardless, the rest of my party (who were mostly useless against the Balor except to help cast buffs) dealt with the trash spawns while my dwarven fighter steadily whittled down the Balor's HP until finally, finally, it was dead.  After that, I went to face Zuggtmoy.

As stated, Zuggtmoy was much easier than the Balor, though I thought the rendering of her character was beautiful, as was the surrounding area of the lower temple.  Again, it was mainly my fighter who beat her up, while the others dealt with buffs and summons (and fear).  Great Cleave and weapons of Mighty Cleaving were a great help against these spawns.  Hasted, my fighter dealt four attacks each turn, at around 25 HP each, when she didn't miss.

Zuggy interrupted the fight at some point to try to make a deal, and I took my time in answering, but while I was considering it, I was surprised when one of the spawns started moving again, and the dialogue box disappeared before I had a chance to choose anything!  I wasn't going to make any deal, but I still wanted to see what she had to say about it.

This level of the temple has many rooms, but is empty except for one room of mushrooms.  Word has it that Troika ran out of time and couldn't put any of the encounters in that location that they had planned.  I haven't seen the original P&P module, so I don't know what was supposed to be there.  I'm surprised the Co8 pack didn't put anything in there.

Co8 does hold off the game from ending with the death of Zuggtmoy, so that you can go on to play some higher-level content in a new town.  I haven't done that yet, but I will eventually.  To end the game with the Co8 mod, you have to choose it specifically from the dialogue of Brother Smyth, so I went and did that to see the ending slides that I would have seen after killing Zuggtmoy originally.  The ending slides were better done than the ones in the NWN2 OC -- I can say that much.

Conclusion

The game is intimidating to a new player, and very tough and unforgiving at low levels.  It also includes many pre-generated characters with poorly-assigned ability scores for their classes, which can cripple a player unfamiliar with the rules.  Its art design is adequate, but bland, at least until you get to the Temple, and also very dark, requiring me to turn up the gamma to see.  It could have been improved with a larger number of interesting characters and interactions, because the ones that were there were quite fun.

Despite this, once I got through the first few levels, I found it to be an extremely fun game with rewarding challenges, plenty of quests, and a variety of environment styles.  Once I started playing it, I didn't play any other games until I finished it.  I think it's the best turn-based RPG engine available, despite the non-optimal interface.

Extra screenshot gallery

• Detected pickpocketing attempt
• Undercover construction site quest
• Fancy sailboat in Nulb
• Fight with a gelatinous cube
• Large pile of monster bodies
• Rescued gnome notices gnome-friend ring
• Priest in the water temple
• Another room of the water temple
• Big trouble with a supreme commander
• Lost sorceress in the Fire Node
• Moathouse
• Moathouse basement
• Enemy requests mercy
• Swampy Nulb houses
• Dead end

Neverwinter Nights 2: Dark Waters, chapter 1

A few days ago, I started playing Dark Waters, a module in 3 chapters for Neverwinter Nights 2 by Adam Miller. It was one of the ones that has been in my priority queue since I started playing NWN2 and heard much about it, but I chose now to play it because I'm planning to have some ocean material in my own upcoming module, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't unknowingly rehashing old ground.

"Set sail on the high seas for this grand piratey adventure. From humor to horror this epic story spans dozens of islands, contains new powers and weapons, and countless voice actors. Grab your flintlock and raise your Jolly Roger today!"

--description of Dark Waters on its download page

Even before I got started, though, I had read an interview with Adam Miller, and he said that the nautical theme doesn't really show up until after the first chapter. Still, I expected there would be some in the first chapter, considering the title and the above description. Unfortunately, the entire first chapter (aside from the intro and the flashbacks) took place inside a mountain "clanhome", which seems to be the kind of undermountain city I tend to associate with dwarves, and tells the story of some youths growing up in a tiny village in the aftermath of some kind of war between the psionically "Gifted" and the "Normals" -- a war that left the world's ocean level permanently risen, with only the mountains remaining, as islands in the global ocean.

Following are my thoughts that I wrote out as I was playing through the module, with all the ups and downs and changes of opinion left intact.

The beginning

So far this is the most unconventional module I've played yet. It appears to be told in an omniscient narrative, because the point of view is constantly changing. I've barely had 5 minutes of free roaming gameplay, with the rest made up of jumping around into different characters' heads and roleplaying their parts in conversations. And just when I thought it had basically settled into a cast of characters, I was suddenly sent into a dream vision, in which I took the role of yet another character in another group of strangers!

Roleplaying one of my companions' parts

Once my party of three got into the mysterious sealed complex, though, everything got much more interesting. The story seems to have stablised, as well. No more jumping around from character to character. Now, the backstory is unfolding gradually through notes and museum plaques, and I'm being introduced to some of the interesting features of this module. First is the gem socket system, which I think is a substitute for the enchanting/crafting system in the vanilla game. The other is a nice little achievement tracking panel which displays various accomplishments and statistics.

The banter between the characters is also fun, and well-written. It's not only well-written in terms of believable and enjoyable dialogue, but it has proper spelling and punctuation, as well!

Throughout the module, you can also have chats with your companions. They have different things to say as the story progresses.

Beginning forgiven

Once the story progressed to the "war" flashback, the purpose of the flashbacks became clear. This is a kind of reincarnation story. It's a good one, too. I can forgive the rocky start now, though it would have benefited mightily from better pacing in that area. We players should have been given more time to play as this set of characters to ground us before introducing the flashbacks.

There was a "ghost" level, which reminded me of some of the good parts in Thief: Deadly Shadows (notably the note from Widow Moira, and the ghost of Laurel). It loses some points, however, for being dark. There were no lights, and it was a very large level with a lot of running around without my companions. My candle, when I tried equipping it, cast no light. I don't know if it was burnt out from all the use in the previous level where it did work, or if there was something specific to this level that was preventing it from working, but it was annoying. It is my position that function must take precedence over form when it comes to playing a game. That means being able to see, even if in the real world, a place would be pitch black.

It's possible that the game expects me to be able to use one of the two Gems of the Morning to provide light, since that is one of their properties, but that property only works on weapons, and as a druid, I had not yet found any weapons with gem sockets that I was capable of wielding. (I found a socketed dagger after this part.) Fortunately, as a druid, I did have the light cantrip, and resting was permitted, so I was able to keep casting that spell, and resting every time I ran out of uses.

Eventually, I was reunited with the party, power was restored, and I found two weapons that various party members could use to generate light. When it rains, it pours.

I think these levels could have been a lot smaller. As it stands, it felt a bit artificially padded out due to the size of the maps compared to the running speed. I noticed many rooms were very sparsely furnished, and occasionally completely unfurnished. Exploration seems to have been the intended design of this place, and a reduction in scale would have made that exploration more enjoyable.

Puzzles

Scattered throughout this module are unique gameplay elements, especially in the puzzles, though some others seem to have been included just as novelties, with no clear purpose in the game itself (such as the magic hockey game). One of the puzzles made no sense to me (the one needed to turn on the fan), but an alternative was kindly provided to bypass it.

Another of the puzzles was frustratingly designed -- the combination lock based on a girl's birthday. First of all, it was unclear which date-writing format the author was using (was the year at the beginning, or at the end?) I couldn't tell, since the numbers were 1 and 2 digits, and I have no idea in what year system this story was supposed to be set anyway. It was especially frustrating, since one of the numbers was a single digit on one side, but it expected a leading zero on the other part of the answer. I conclude that puzzles are quite a risk to include in a module, since the potential frustrations are rather high compared to the potential player delight. I don't think I'll include any puzzles in my module.

I did like the crafting of molotov cocktails, though.

Puzzles again

Well, once again this module has made me change my mind. It turns out that the next level was almost all puzzles, and it was the most fun section yet. The choice of music contributed to the sense of fun, as well.

The party was greeted at the stairs by a phantom academy proctor, who explained that he (and the ghost girl from the previous level) were bound to the earth as ghosts by the main character's prior incarnation, as a favour. At the base of the stairs was also a dead body carrying a gem that acted as an academic record, presenting me with the goals for the level -- pass a series of exams. Now, why my character would hang around playing these mini-games and working on the exams was a question I couldn't answer. I just assumed it was a prerequisite for advancing through the game. I eventually learned that I was correct, but I didn't get that confirmation until after I had finished all of the exams and made my way toward the exit. I think the proctor should have made some reference to the exit being off-limits to anyone who hadn't passed the exams when he appeared at the beginning of the level.

This was also the first level outside of the flashback sequences that had any substantial combat. A good thing, too, since combat is rather tedious at level 1, and the party had just reached level 2 before this section of the game. As has been the case throughout, gear continued to be slowly doled out, until most of us were comfortably outfitted. I'm glad to say that the combat was provided in small, manageable chunks between going from mini-game to mini-game.

Some of these mini-games were fun in their own right, like the dice game, and I wanted to play them more than once, but the proctor usually told me that I didn't need to do it again since I'd already passed. There was one instance where I actually had the option to go again, "just for fun", and that was the tank battle.

The climax and end

After the puzzle level, there was an underwater level in a flooded room that required breath management, and then an even more massive level to explore than the previous ones. This one was broken up into several sections, all radiating out from the ultimate destination in the centre of the complex. Here, there were yet more new gameplay mechanics to try, in the form of psionic power crystals that temporarily allowed my characters to cast some spell-like abilities. It seemed to be little more than a novelty, though, because the crystals only lasted a few minutes before disappearing, whether I used them or not.

There was a strange, unexplained item as well -- a focus crystal that allowed me to summon the ghost of Lucy, the little girl from earlier. I tried it several times, in many locations, but the result was always the same. She would appear, say "Hi!" and wave, and then stand there for a few seconds before disappearing again. I wasn't able to talk to her or anything. I thought maybe if I summoned her in a special location, it might open up a special dialogue or event, but it never happened.

Another unexplained mystery involved one of my party members. On entering a particular room, I think on the same level, Daniel disappeared from the party after a brief fade to black. When he reappeared, he was not in the party, and when I talked to him, it said "Daniel simply smiles". After visiting another room, I came back to that hallway and found his dead body, which didn't respond to anything. Ultimately, he returned, good as new, with nothing to say on the matter.

There was also the matter of locked doors. The game addresses the frequent use of locked doors, but there were some that I was never able to open. It's possible that I was meant to go back throughout the earlier levels with the late-added party member who seems to have a talent for opening secret doors, but I really didn't want to run through those massive levels yet another time.

I have to say I didn't like the bit where I had to take control of a lizardman to open a door from the other side. It seemed like I was supposed to sneak through it with stealth, but the enemies always detected me. I had to fight through a large number of enemies on that side, who regarded me as hostile even though I was one of their own, and every time I died, whatever weapons I had picked up to fight with disappeared. I was eventually reduced to a tedious series of kamikaze attacks, trying to get in at least one bare-handed attack before I was killed in one strike and had to respawn. This was probably the worst part of the whole module.

The final showdown was well done. The enemies seemed fairly organised and fought intelligently. One shortcoming was that the "villain" of the final big confrontation was a bit...vague. Although we started getting hints and information about him early on, the information came from an unreliable source, and I wasn't sure he was the villain at all. We also never actually saw him or any hint of his presence until that final confrontation.

Epilogue

It all ended with a very nice epilogue, with the party members saying farewell to their families and going off on an ocean adventure, where the second chapter of the series will pick up. I wish more games ended this well. Some stories (such as my earlier reviewed Witch's Wake) just end with poor cliffhangers, leaving everything unresolved, or ending with more questions than answers. I hate those endings. This module did it in the best way -- a solid ending, with the primary conflicts resolved, with the beginnings of what is clearly the start of a new story showing up as a preview. The old friends set off to follow the map onto the wide open seas, unsure of what they would find there. It was a bittersweet ending, full of regrets for things lost, and uncertainty of what was gained, but with the promise of each others' company along the way.

Not to mention an optional final joke. Self-aware jokes like this are scattered throughout the dialogue, and I personally appreciate them.

What few bugs I encountered weren't major, though the game did crash a scant few times while playing it. There was a very minor bug during a dream sequence, in which my normal PC was present on the level and selectable in the portrait list. She was stuck in a no-walk zone, though, so there was no trouble with her accompanying me where she shouldn't have been. The bit with Daniel's mysterious smile may have been a bug as well.

Since I'm running the full campaign, it transitioned seamlessly into the second chapter, but I stopped and saved at the beginning of that for now. It's looking very exciting, though, and it seems to go fully into the nautical theme I was expecting at the beginning. According to the journal entry, I can expect a very developed seafaring system, complete with trading and tactical ship-to-ship combat with ship upgrades and strategy, sounding very much like the systems in Patrician 3. This should be fun!

Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, part 1

I bought Arcanum in early 2010, during a sale on GOG, based on user reviews. At the time, I had only briefly experimented with a single Infinity Engine game (Baldur's Gate 1), and had not yet touched any others of this sort. After trying it out as far as getting to the first town, I decided (wisely, I think) to postpone further exploration until I'd cut my teeth on Baldur's Gate first. Returning to it now with that experience under my belt, as well as Planescape: Torment and some Icewind Dale experience, and I find myself much better prepared to enjoy Arcanum.

This is my first Troika game, though I know some people might recommend I try the first two Fallout games first. Troika was also responsible for Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which also has my interest. I've seen some gameplay footage of it on Youtube, showing the different kinds of dialogue and other interactions available to the player depending on variables such as clan, which is most notable if you're playing as a Malkavian. Members of that clan have some kind of mental troubles, and often perceive that everyone is looking at them or talking to them, even people on TV, or inanimate objects.

Arcanum has a similar mechanic. NPCs speak to you differently based on your stats, what you're wearing, your race, and who you're traveling with, and your own dialogue is affected by things such as your intelligence or level of drunkenness (as in the Fallout games, there's an entire alternate script for all characters including the player if you choose to play a character with the intellect stats of a dullard). The replayability of this game looks very high.

Artistic design

The portraits of Arcanum are unique and interesting, made in a period style that I see numerous fans have attempted to replicate, but I'm afraid only a skilled painter could copy such a distinctive style. Almost all portraits display the typical sullen expression found in both paintings and photographs of the time, whether it was a social norm or a consequence of the long sitting times required to make them, during which an expression would be difficult to maintain.

The elves look like Vulcans, which is an appropriate look for such a proud race. Personally, I like the idea of proud, beautiful elves, and since the backlash against that idea as being too "generic" has led to everyone trying to make non-proud, non-beautiful elves these days, the result is that this kind of elf is becoming the more unique conception.

I do wish Troika hadn't opted for a square aspect ratio for the in-game portraits, however. There's a good reason why real-world portraits are taller than they are wide, and that is to reflect actual human proportions! The portraits in this game are all rather cropped on the top and bottoms, with too much white space on both sides for this reason. The portraits don't even show the tops of people's heads, and I expect they opted for such a low framing because part of the atmosphere of the setting would be lost if the picture weren't framed low enough so as to see at least the collars of the antique clothing. All would be mended with a 2:3 aspect ratio, such as in Baldur's Gate.

Uncropped versions of the portraits do exist outside of the game in a proper aspect ratio as shown here, which Crypton made available in a pack for download after finding them in another pack of beta content.

On a different subject than the portraits, the primary critique I have with the art design of the interface is that in the majority of the panels, the wood texture they used is an un-sanded, un-stained, un-polished wood, rough and weathered, and looks more like a piece of wood they found washed up on the beach than the kind of rich polished mahogany that begs to accompany those brass fittings. Wood and brass are indeed iconic materials for Victorian steampunk, but not that kind of wood! It's also a bit inconsistent, since certain select screens do have a better wood and brass texture, such as the main menu and several multiplayer menu screens. It's time for another mod, if I can deal with yet another proprietary image format.

Some linguistic notes

Like the Elder Scrolls games, Arcanum uses the word "fatigue" to mean the exact opposite of its actual meaning (fatigue means "weariness"), such that having "more fatigue" incorrectly means having more energy. They have "fatigue points", which show how much energy you have. They have a "fatigue restorer", which restores your energy. When you "run out of fatigue" in the game, you collapse in exhaustion. The strategy tips in Appendix 5 of the manual mention that a higher Constitution attribute gives you "extra fatigue". In reality, the more fatigue you have, the less energy you have. In reality, the only way to run out of fatigue is to get a good night's sleep. They should be using the word stamina, or endurance. Perhaps even vim, which would be an appropriate word for the Victorian setting.

They have a school of magic called "black necromancy," which is rather redundant, since the term "black magic" itself is thought to originate from "nigromancy", which is related to "necromancy" by folk etymology. On the other hand, the suffix -mancy is not even a generic "magic" word, but specifically refers to divination (the supernatural answering of questions). Necromancy, at its roots, means consulting the spirits of the dead for answers to questions, and nothing more, just as cartomancy means interpreting a hand of cards for answers to questions, and so on.

It is understood, of course, that the word has accumulated more connotations in modern fiction, but it would be nice if writers would coin a more accurate word for it instead of corrupting a word that means something else, even if it is related.

The manual

The Arcanum manual is extensive (187 pages), and largely written in a style reminiscent of Victorian-era literature and advertisements, as befitting the game's world setting.

It posits an explanation, in the form of a series of scientific lectures, for the clash between science and magic. In this world, the proximity of any magical device causes chaotic fluctuations in an electrical circuit, and even in such simple mechanical devices as inclined planes and pendulums, showing that magic somehow interferes with simple gravity or friction.

It does not attempt to explain the opposite case, of how the presence of technological devices might interfere with a magical spell, though I understand this is also the case within the game world.

It's nice that they tried to give an explanation, I suppose, but when one is as questionable as this, perhaps it would have been better left as a mystery. Absent some conscious guiding principle that would enable the "magic" to discriminate, any force that would interfere so badly with such elementary forces of nature as those used in mechanical or electrical constructs would also play havoc with living creatures, since our bodies and brains also function according to those same laws of physics, chemistry, and electricity.

Interface

Reading the manual has clarified some of the more confusing aspects of the interface that I'd been struggling with when trying to play it before. Turn-based mode is the best mode for this particular game, though I still wish there were a pause feature for times out of combat when I'm trying to click on a moving NPC to initiate conversation. In Baldur's Gate, I habitually pause in order to click on NPCs, especially since I have it running at twice normal speed. The best I've come up with is to temporarily toggle combat mode by hitting "R", which freezes everyone in place if you're in turn-based mode.

The manual has explained why I was often getting fatigued extremely quickly, and it was because I was always overextending myself on my turns. I was not aware that you should only take as many actions as are permitted by the green action-point indicators, and that using more that those would tire you out more quickly. To avoid that, I now click the "end turn" button when my green points are gone.

I was also having trouble with ending combat, because even after a fight was over and I had clicked the "toggle combat" button, my character was still frozen in place, and I couldn't take any actions. I had discovered that entering and exiting the inventory would free me to move, and I had been doing it that way for a while, until I noticed that right-clicking changed the colour of the cursor from blue to its usual orange, and once that had happened, I was free to move again. The blue cursor, I believe, is for selecting a target for spells, and since I'm a spellcaster, my combat usually involves hitting my enemies with spells. I would have thought that ending combat would also tell it I was finished casting spells, but apparently it needs the right-click to cancel casting mode as well. As a matter of fact, I've now found that right-clicking also can cancel combat mode if there are no more nearby enemies, so two right-clicks are usually enough to get things moving again.

Another very useful bit of information that I got from the manual was that you can scroll up to read past status messages after they've disappeared, which they do almost instantly if you're hovering over something else when it appears. Placing the cursor in the upper area of the status message window turns it into an up arrow for reviewing what, exactly, that status sound effect you may have heard was trying to tell you.

Also useful to know, again from the manual, is that the map interface changes depending on your location. When I was near the bridge outside Shrouded Hills, for instance, the local map worked fine, but the world map was zoomed out to show the entire map, with its coloured dots almost invisible at that size, and it wasn't possible to set waypoints. I was concerned that there was something wrong with my game, but the manual assured me that I just needed to be far enough outside of town for the world map to be enabled. At that point it became zoomed in to a more local view, and I was able to set waypoints and initiate fast travel.

I'm using Drog's high resolution mod, which provides a nice compact alternate interface, as well as an optional runtime parameter to allow me to scroll across the local map as far as I like, which is a virtual necessity for navigating through town. Without the parameter, scrolling is restricted to a rather small window, and so it "stutters" as your character slowly expands the scrolling border in the direction she's walking.

Character creation

I started out by creating the kind of character I usually play -- an elf mage. I was thinking I might dabble a bit in technology as well, though the game is designed to make that difficult. In retrospect, perhaps I should have taken more advantage of the unique setting of this game and made a more steampunk-oriented character instead.

Still, the magic system is slightly different here than in other games, since magic does not use "mana" per se, even though the meter is coloured blue as mana usually is. Performing magic instead draws from your stamina, which I suppose is a natural result of the sheer freedom Troika gave us with this game. Any character can learn any kind of skill, whether it be magic, technological, or other, since there is no class system, and so it makes sense to combine stamina and mana into a single bar. In most games they serve the same purpose for different classes, both being an "energy reserve" that the different classes can call on for their various skills. In lieu of classes, you can instead select a character background, which comes with a colourful little story describing you and explaining why you have bonuses in some areas and penalties in others. There are some surprising variables included in these backgrounds, such as those that give you bonuses to spellcasting during the day and penalties at night, or vice versa.

Although stamina and hit points are separate bars, it's still a near certain death if you run out of stamina during combat, since you'll fall to the ground unconscious, and will probably be beaten to death before you can recover. That's why I can see the mages of Arcanum to be similar to the warlocks of WoW, which rely on high amounts of stamina to use as a mana well, by converting their own life force into spellcasting mana. I'm going to see how well it works to play it that way, by investing points into my constitution stat and seeking items that improve it as well, and investing fully into the spell school of summoning, to provide me with summoned minions.

There seem to be a total of 80 spells that can be learned in the game, which are all visible from the beginning in the character screen. They're broken up into 16 specific colleges of study, of 5 spells each, and they're all learned by using the stat points you earn from leveling up. Each of these 5-spell colleges is a kind of "tree" in the sense that in order to learn the more powerful spells in that college, one must first invest points to learn the simpler ones. Very different from the D&D games, where most mages learn spells from scrolls that are either found or purchased with money, but vaguely similar to the sorcerer class I've been playing. Spells have minimum requirements both for character level and the willpower stat. I wish I'd read that bit in the manual before I started using my stat points, but I'm not going back now.

The technological and non-aligned skills use the same kind of tree structure, though there are fewer of each of those. Tech is supplemented by the ability to find or purchase schematics and recipes, unlike spells. All kinds of crafting are considered "technological", however, which is pretty arbitrary in the case of disciplines like herbalism. I have one point invested in a technological discipline (explosives), which allows me to make cheap molotov cocktails. Very useful for a fledgling mage with only one offensive spell and not very much stamina.

With 80 spells available, I'm quickly going to run out of room on the paltry shortcut bar, which has only 10 slots. I already have several slots occupied by health and stamina potions, as well as the molotov cocktails.

I'm very excited by the promise of this game! I can tell already that I'll be enjoying this game for a long time, and I have much more to write about.

Arx Fatalis

I finished one of my holiday gifts recently (well, finished enough -- more on that later). Arx Fatalis (Fatal Fortress or Fortress of Fate in Latin) is a game which was inspired by the Ultima Underworld series, and was the predecessor to Arkane Studios' more recent Dark Messiah of Might and Magic -- which is a better-looking, but severely stripped down spiritual successor (aren't they all?)

Arx Fatalis is a rather linear RPG-like game. You play as a single predefined character -- a voiced, male-only "chosen one" figure (with a choice of 4 possible faces) who was sent to save the world from an ancient evil (the story isn't one of its strong points). The RPG elements include the ability to put stat points into various attributes upon gaining new levels, optional side-quests, inventory management with buying and selling at vendors, crafting, character specialisations, and a good amount of freedom in your approach to solving various problems. Although you don't get any choices of dialogue during conversations, you do get to make various decisions through your actions, and there are usually multiple choice paths with different advantages.

There are numerous puzzle challenges throughout the game, which I consider one of the strengths of the game. These were almost all enjoyable and challenging, with just the right amount of clues to keep you from getting stuck, but difficult enough to make you think for a while.

Buggy as hell

Of all of my GOG games, this was the only one that gave me significant trouble in getting it to run properly. I was plagued by crashes, bugs, and graphical glitches that made the game unplayable, but eventually, through stubborn perseverance and experimentation with various settings and patches, I got it into a playable state. I wish I could report exactly what combination fixed all the problems, but I tried so many things I can't say for sure.

First, there was the rendering problem. This was noticeable immediately on starting the game, from the first cutscene to the game itself. The frames flickered and stuttered, and although camera freelook view and the movement of my character seemed unaffected, all animated textures stuttered as well, and jumping and crouching were jerky and strange as well. The last official patch from Arkane Studios itself, posted around the time they released the source code (around the holidays of 2010) has an option to "enable rendering fix" which for some reason didn't solve this problem for me at first, but it's working now, and I'm not sure which tweaks did it.

Then, there was the crashing problem. This happened mostly during the transitions from the interior of the king's castle to the city of Arx. Why, I don't know, but the fix was to lower the texture resolution to "low".

Finally, the running speed problem. This one was identified by user Nuky on the GOG forum as being related to the amount of time your computer has been running since startup. Apparently, the speed starts out fairly normal if you're playing the game after recently having reset your computer, but for those of us who keep their computers running for long periods of time without resets, the running speed increases until you shoot down the corridors like The Flash. Thanks to the source code for the game having been released, Nuky posted a fix for this problem, which solved it for me. His fix also improved the speed of the unnecessarily sliding menus (personally, I don't see why they kept that sliding in there when it performed so poorly) at the expense of the font's antialiasing.

In case it had anything to do with the overall fixes, here are my nVidia card settings that I tweaked during the troubleshooting process (items that are set to "application-controlled" are not listed here):

• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: Off
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Off
• CUDA - GPUs: All
• Maximim pre-rendered frames: 3
• Multi-display/mied-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow
• Texture filtering - Quality: Quality
• Texture filtering - Trilinear optimisation: On
• Threaded optimisation: Auto
• Triple-buffering: Off

After I got all this taken care of, it became a relatively smooth playing experience, with only occasional hiccups.

Overall impressions

This game includes hunger, but no need to sleep, despite the wide availability of beds, and the fact that you obtain your own bedroom early in the game. I thought I would find hunger an annoying feature, but it turns out it just made cooking more enjoyable. Cooking is one of the two crafting disciplines you can practise (three if you count enchanting), the other being alchemy. The difference is that there are no skill requirements for cooking. All you need are the tools, ingredients, and a fire. Most food doesn't even need the tools. Just set some raw fish or rat ribs by a fire, and in a few seconds you have cooked food that'll satisfy your hunger. The fact that rats are the only creatures that regularly drop meat (sentient creatures like goblins or trolls might happen to be carrying some food, but you'll never get goblin meat) makes the many rat encounters in the game slightly less annoying (I daresay at least 50% of the combat in this game is against rats).

But once you've gotten your hands on some flour, water, apples, wine, and a rolling pin, you can make yourself probably the best food in the game: gourmet apple pie. It satisfies your hunger for longer than almost anything else, and it takes up the minimum space in your inventory, unlike the similarly satisfying large ribs.

Alchemy isn't as fun. There are only a few potions you can make (health, mana, poison, antidote, and invisibility), and your object knowledge skill only affects whether you can make them. You need bottles, a mortar and pestle (to powder your herbs), and access to a still to brew the potions. Empty bottles are fillable with water or wine, and drinking or using those items will leave you an empty bottle to use in alchemy, but if you drink a potion, the bottle seems to disappear.

You can also carve wood into wooden stakes (useful for zombies), enchant your weapons with a few possible reagents (and poison them as well), craft and repair weapons at a blacksmith's place (or just repair them at any anvil), go fishing, and mine gems and precious metals from the walls with a pick. These are all less developed than the previous crafts, and money isn't really a problem in this game, either, so you could just skip the mining.

Unfortunately, the world is hardly populated at all. The "city" of Arx has perhaps 20 people living in it, which includes the king, his servants, and the guards. There are 3 merchants (one for gems and jewelry, one for weapons and armour, and one for misc supplies), plus another merchant down in the lower caverns. It makes the slaughter of all the people at the first human outpost you find seem like a terrible loss, since they pretty much cut the human population in half. Not that it seems to matter to the people in the nearby tavern, who never seem to notice or care that there's a body-strewn battleground next door, even though they'd have to pass by it to leave the tavern.

Nearby that same tavern is a small alcove containing the wreckage of a teleporter, which I presume was destroyed by the Ylsides during their offscreen attack on the human outpost. This is the first such teleporter you're likely to find in the game, and it is explained at some point during the main quest how you can use them. "Let me show you how we travel", one of the naga/lamia women told me at that point, and she took me to one of the intact teleporters near the market area of the city of Arx, and showed me a spell to cast to activate the device. Each device must be activated in person before you can teleport there, much like meeting the flight masters in WoW in person before you can fly to their flight points.

I'll be generous and assume that by "activating" them, you're doing some kind of magical attunement to your body so that you can travel through them, and not that they've just all been sitting dormant all this time. But there's one thing I noticed about the teleporters. First of all, once you activate a portal, it'll show up on one of the sides of the device for the rest of the game, and there are a limited number of sides. I had assumed throughout most of the game that one of them would always be broken, because of that wreckage down by the tavern, until I actually did come across one final teleporter. Once I activated it, the final panel of the teleporter opened, with no space left for the broken teleporter. Either this is some kind of oversight on the developers' part, or else we're meant to assume that the wreckage was not the result of the recent attack, but had actually been there for a long time, and one of the teleporters that I had already activated had been its replacement.

The look and feel

It's a somewhat strange ambience in Arx Fatalis, with its goofy, cartoonish goblins and trolls, with quests to get a birthday present for the lonely troll and to sneak into a goblin's room by secretly giving him diarrhea, while on the other end of the spectrum there are copious dismembered bodies, scattered heads, arms, and torsoes, torture rooms, hanged prisoners, and human sacrifice (a woman and a child, who it's possible to rescue), with more sacrifices being referred to in the past.

Aside from the violence, there's also the unexpected but not unwelcome possibility for sex in the game, though it's handled in a very strange and bizarre way. If you return the magic rings to Alia after destroying the meteor, she's so pleased that she invites you to stay with her for a while. After a black screen, there's a very strange after-bed sequence that could be interpreted as a nightmare.

There is no followup or comment to the monster-face "premonition" either in conversation or in the quest log. My thought is that it might have been from a dropped alternate resolution to that part of the story, depending on how you may have handled things before. There are a couple of scenes in other places that play out slightly differently depending on your actions, after all. This might have originally led to a fight with a monster Alia. If there was such a plan that had to be dropped, they may have decided the scene was too good to waste, and so they put it in as a kind of fake-out "dream sequence" just before the "real" conversation.

Compared to Ultima Underworld

As written in game histories, Arx Fatalis was planned to be a third game in the Ultima Underworld series, but Arkane Studios couldn't get the license for it, and thus they retooled it into a similar but original setting. Since I have not yet played UU, I base what I write here on my readings of developer interviews and of gameplay videos.

Since Arx was based directly on it, I won't go into the similarity in setting, or the "chosen one" back story, which was a staple of the Ultima story anyway, in the form of the Avatar. Visually, there's little to compare, since UU was 2.5D like Doom, with 2D sprites moving in a 3D space, and Arx is fully 3D.

But in terms of content, for instance, Arx includes somewhere between 6-9 types of enemy, not counting 1-time bosses or humans, which is a fraction of the creatures in UU, whether or not I use UU1 or UU2 as a representative sample. Arx initiates dialogue only when it wants to, in the form of non-interactive cutscenes, while UU has proper branching dialogue with NPCs, with multiple response options. My only complaint there is that UU uses faux Elizabethan English, as it seems all Ultima games do.

Hunger is in both games, but UU also requires sleep, which I suspect (from the presence of the aforementioned beds and bedroom) was originally planned for Arx as well, but never implemented.

In UU2, not only can you make your own notes on your map, but you can enter your own text in character dialogue in some places, which is perhaps useful in cases where you know the answer to something that your character hasn't actually discovered. This does break the RPG elements, but the game already does that by having you do realtime, manual combat (which Arx also does).

I can't tell how the two games compare in terms of the number of NPCs and locations from what I've seen, unfortunately.

I'm not sure how many of the good UU elements would not have been cut out if Arkane had been able to call it Ultima Underworld 3 instead of making it a "spiritual successor", but the more cynical side of me suspects those things would have been cut for time and money reasons anyway.

Compared to the Elder Scrolls

Both Arx Fatalis and Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind came out in 2002, and are graphically very similar, so if you're familiar with the more popular Morrowind, you know what to expect graphically -- Good environmental structure and texturing (for the time), and rather ugly character models. Arx beats Morrowind in terms of character animation, though.

Having seen what I've seen of Ultima Underworld, I'm leaning toward the conclusion that Morrowind and Arx were both aiming for the same things, and went about it in similar, but not identical, ways. The first two Elder Scrolls games look a lot like the Ultima Underworld games, the first of which was released 2 years before the first Elder Scrolls game. Of course, Daggerfall deserves a post all on its own, and I'll get to that eventually. But the point for now is that the first two Elder Scrolls games owe much of their look and gameplay to UU, and Morrowind represents their move to full-blown 3D after the Doom-like 2.5D of the first two. That's why it's valid to compare Morrowind and Arx Fatalis, as both of them are basically 3D reimaginings of Ultima Underworld.

Arx Fatalis did not have an intermediate step as the Elder Scrolls did, and jumped directly from Ultima Underworld to full 3D, and I find it interesting that they arrived at such a similar destination as did Morrowind. A natural convergent evolution, or did the two studios influence each other during the design process?

At any rate, the biggest difference between the two is that Arx abandoned the character dialogue options that Morrowind retained, and chopped the character appearance customisation down to 1 race, 1 sex, and 4 faces (down from 10 possible face choices in UU, with 5 for each sex), where Morrowind continued the trend it had established in its previous games where it had expanded the character customisation to several races, with numerous faces for each race and sex. The second most striking difference is the linearity and lack of replayability, due to a much smaller game world with so few side quests.

Compared to Dark Messiah

From reading the TTLG forum, in the Arx forum that I never visited (I was always there for the Thief series), I see that people were anxiously expecting an Arx Fatalis 2 for years after the first one, but eventually it was revealed that Arkane Studios was instead working on Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which was released in 2006. I actually went and purchased that game while I was playing Arx, though I already knew from the forum posts and from the gameplay videos on Youtube that it was even more stripped down from Arx than Arx was from UU. From the gameplay videos, I could tell that it would be a pure FPS action game, and bought it with that in mind. It's a departure from the rest of the Might and Magic line, but I have no experience with those, and the fact that it is such a departure is what makes it worth comparing to Arx Fatalis.

It was, in fact, essentially an FPS compared to Arx, much like the difference between System Shock 2 and Bioshock. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was actually still an inventory and several trees of stats and abilities we could invest points in, but those things are not enough to call Dark Messiah an RPG. It's at best an FPS with a few RPG elements, and it's even more linear than Arx Fatalis. You can't even select an appearance, but it hardly matters since you never see your character.

I did notice quite a few elements from Arx returned in Dark Messiah, though. I'm strongly tempted to believe that this game actually began its life as Arx Fatalis 2, but was repurposed at some point during development when they got rights to a well-known title. Right on the title screen, in fact, one of the game's necromancers is staring menacingly at you, and he bears a resemblance to the Ylsides from Arx. Also making a return appearance are certain kinds of food, certain props, and a functional forge. But once in your inventory, every type of food magically turns into identical "food rations". And since there's no hunger in this game, the only thing food does is restore a tiny amount of health. As a wizard/thief, it takes more than a full stack of food to restore my health bar completely, and I would expect a warrior would get far less benefit from it. In addition, there are arbitrary item-type limits. "You can carry no more than 20 mana potions" (or anything else) no matter how many inventory slots you have free.

Speaking of inventory, I had been finding myself running out of room and getting impatient for the night to end so I could go to the nearest shop and sell off some junk, only to find that there are no shops in Dark Messiah! At one point we went to a tavern, and I thought that was going to be a shop of some kind (and my demon companion said "I think they sell more than just food here,") but the barmaid just walked off into the kitchen and stayed there, not responding to my attempts to speak to her except to yell at me for coming into the kitchen and threatening to call the guards if I didn't leave. No one in that tavern, in fact, appeared to do anything. So don't bother picking up anything you can't actually use, unless you want to be sure to have something on hand to throw at enemies.

The game also commits the exact same kind of offense as Arx did -- namely, introducing a boss fight weighted heavily against magic users. Here, an orc boss challenges me to single combat with the rules specifically prohibiting the use of magic. I'm a wizard with no points in mêlée combat at all, and he can kill me in 1 hit. If I even switch to casting mode, his half-dozen bodyguards immediately attack as well. I found that out by accidentally hitting a key nearby the "kick" key which put me in casting mode. I spent maybe 15-20 minutes reloading over and over, quick-saving as soon as I'd scored a couple of hits and was still in decent health. I have no idea how long it'll take to wear his hit points down, but I'm very sick of it by now. I was also sick of replaying his long speech before he attacked, until I realised you can save during cutscenes.

Dark Messiah is actually a change from my most recent trend of starting with the latest game in a series (even a series as loose as a thread of "spiritual successors"), and working my way backward to the earlier games, which traded graphics for better and more complex content. It is very pretty, with some nice characters, and even includes rope arrows like in the Thief series, but it lacks in depth.

End of Arx Fatalis

This is what I was talking about when I said I had "finished enough." As it turns out, I couldn't finish the game, and I don't plan to. The final boss fight appears to be unwinnable for me, as a non-warrior type, with the final boss' apparently huge health reserve and a tractor beam that forces you into close combat. And since this fight ends the game, I don't feel the need to keep trying. I watched the ending on Youtube for closure.

I tried numerous strategies that I read about, but nothing worked for me. The boss either just stood there and did nothing (after his transformation) while I kept hitting him over and over until giving up, or he wiped the floor with me despite me constantly chugging health potions, or he stood there confused when I levitated or climbed a pillar, but again simply refused to die no matter how many times I hit him with the special sword or threw fireballs at him. I played a combination thief-mage, with high casting skill that could kill an Ylside with 2 fireballs and a lich with 3, but nothing worked against this boss.

Since casters are heavily crippled in this game due to the gesture-recognition system they used, where you have to draw 3 or 4 runes in the air with your finger to cast a spell, and can only pre-cast and store up to 3 of them, it essentially amounts to a 3-spell-per-fight limit, since fumbling around in the inventory for scrolls with no ability to pause while doing so, and trying to draw runes with a mouse (and have them be recognised) are too clumsy for me to want to keep beating my head against that wall.

Nevertheless, despite the buggy beginning, small world, linear story, lack of freedom, anticlimactic ending, and reduced content from its predecessors, I consider Arx to have been fun and enjoyable. Though small in scope, Arkane did take care to make each area visually different and interesting. If you spend as little time in the city of Arx as possible, and spend most of your time exploring the different levels, the illusion of a larger world may persist (though you may end up backtracking a good deal due to getting lost, which is easy to do). On the other hand, what it really makes me want to do is try out its predecessor Ultima Underworld, which I suspect I'll enjoy all the more for what was left out of this one.