Greyhawk Chat at Adrenaline Vault

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(Originally posted by Mollusken)

The Adrenaline Vault have arranged a forum chat with Tim Cain, the man in charge of the development of Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil. Readers posted their questions in the AVault forums, and Cain answered them over a three days period. Here's a couple of the questions:

Is this possible because you're reusing the engine from Arcanum? How is development coming?

We are using a heavily modified version of that engine, which now uses 3D characters and particle effects. We began modifications after Arcanum was completed, and when Infogrames came asking about the possibility of doing D&D, we showed them a demo of the new engine's capabilities, and they really liked it. Without having such an engine available, we would never have agreed to such a tight schedule (18 months to make an RPG!). So we have spent that time primarily making content and encoding the D&D rules into the game layer, but we did continue to add new features like cloth rendering, so we could do robes and capes, and procedural spell effects, so spells like Chain Lightning can behave as they are supposed to, in this case leaping from one enemy to the next.

I was wondering if you could tell us a little more about ToEE, what kind of peripheral type activities we can expect considering the source material is a dungeon crawl?

Well, D&D is a combat-intensive game, but we have tried to make a lot of non-combat solutions to quests. I don't think it's possible to finish the game with no combat at all (although please feel free to prove me wrong), but there are low combat paths and ways to finish the game that avoid combat at the end.