Pool of Radiance: RoMD Board Bits

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(Originally posted by Nazgul)

From Garrett Graham
Producer, Pool of Radiance

Concerning Interactive environment
We dropped many of the interactive objects because, quite frankly, they had no effect on gameplay. Pushing tables was neat to watch, but didn't do anything for combat strategy. We still would have left it in, but it was causing a lot of problems for the AI and pathfinding. If it did something for the game, we would have fixed the bugs and left it in, but it was really nothing more than eye candy. The Stormfront programming team came up with a system for a more interactive environment - an innovation that seemed really cool at the time. We played with it for months, and tried many things with it, but eventually came to the realization that it would just be eye candy. The biggest problem is that moving around a table takes X effort and pushing a table to try to block someone in takes 2X effort (if that makes sense). Especially since anyone can break a table. BTW, I don't know if its been made clear, but we only took out pushing objects, most things (tables, beds, barrels, etc.) can still be smashed.

We tried a variety of things, but nothing worked out well. For example, I would have my barbarian push a table to block a doorway. The orc on the other side of the door smashes the table. We each used our turn for an overall zero effect. My ranger pushes a table in front of my sorcerer as a roadblock for the Drow pouring into the room. The Drow movement rate is more than enough to go around the table. The idea of movable objects as tactical barriers was consistently stymied by enemies' movement rates and the fact that they could simply be smashed.

What sets the game apart? It has an outstanding story and lots of interesting NPCs. But I guess most RPGs have that Outside of that, my favorite aspects are the turn based combat (IMO, the most true to D&D combat system in the current batch of D&D games), the non-linear story and the beautiful look and movement of the characters. I become very immersed in this game. Oh yeah, the turn based combat also makes it much easier to use spells of mass destruction like fireball, lightning bolt, cone of cold, inferno and flamestrike.

Concerning the Delays
However, if we din't have those delays we wouldn't have had Paladins, Monks or Halflings, which were added in at the cost of time and money. If we were to add in Wizards, Bards, Druids and Gnomes, we would have to delay the game yet again and find more money to pay the guys at Stormfront. Also, if we'd shipped PoR a few months ago, we would have been shipping a buggy game. The small loss in sales due to delays is nothing compared to the loss we would have suffered if we had shipped with lots of bugs. I think most people will agree that a delay is worth it if it results in a better game. I guess I should clarify, we added Paladins, Monks, Half Elves, and we created skins for Halfling. This was done a year before I started working on the game, so my information could be a bit spotty. Thanks for the heads up.

On Pathfinding
Since the initial press release, we've greatly improved the pathfinding (Stormfront brought in an expert who revamped the entire system), we've greatly improved the performance on low end machines, balanced and re-balanced the game and fixed a few thousand bugs. The last thing we're working on is balance for multi-player. Its been tough since we have random dungeons where the monsters scale up to your party's average level.

Concerning the view of the party
Its an isometric view of your entire party. Its real time until you hit combat and then its turn based.