PoR Impressions at RPGVault

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Over at RPGVault, Jonric has posted his first impressions of The Ruins of Myth Drannor. The initial review is less than favorable, praising (of course) the graphics, but with less positive comments about the interface.

After trying various settings, I ended up either using the longest possible turn setting or turning the timer off entirely due in no small measure to the design of the interface, which requires multiple actions to do just about anything. The primary exceptions are movement, which requires only clicking on your intended destination, and attacking with your equipped weapon, which takes only a click on the intended target. On the other hand, an almost-basic action like casting a Magic Missile spell involves right-clicking to bring up a character menu, selecting the Arcane Spells entry, opening the Level 1 sub-menu, picking Magic Missile, then finally clicking on the target. In addition, the interface elements are small, and mis-clicking means starting all over again; this happened to me a few times, especially when the turn lengths were short. There is a shortcut key (A) to the Arcane Spells, and it's also possible to map commonly used spells and combat actions to the F2 to F10 hotkeys for each character. However, the former only cuts out one step while the latter would be more helpful if there were some on-screen indication of what's hot-keyed so you don't have to rely completely on your memory.