Temple of Elemental Evil Forum Highlights

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(Originally posted by Gopher)

Here are recent Temple of Elemental Evil forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Huy Nguyen, Interface and Magic

Quote: They [Troika] have decided to limit the player's capability to create the party/character they want for no real reason. IMO. I never play any of the damn games until I can find a hack program to make the party up the way *I* want it to be.

IIRC, the gold box AD&D games allowed you to "modify" your characters, so you could create characters and modify them to all 18's, 18/100, or whatever (racial and gender limits not withstanding).

Btw, obviously it's not Troika's system per se; It's D&D 3.0/3.5 rules... but yes, we're actually "breaking rules" already by allowing unlimited rerolls (and yes, the DMG 25 point buy method is in). Rerolls and choice in generation method were considered enough flexibility for most gamers; anything else, well, you'd have to ask WoTC about their rules system.

As a design decision, you could argue if that we're already allowing multiple rerolls, why not just have 200+ point buy or whatever - if it makes you feel any better, I fought to get the different DMG point buy start values in the game (28, 32, etc - called "high-powered campaigns" or something?), but they didn't make it in in time, unfortunately, as other parts of the game were deemed more important to work on and get into the game.

We'll all have to live with it... I understand the frustration, despite the undertones of your first post, but what's implemented right now should be more than satisfactory (we hope).

Anyways, just like rolling the bones in PnP - there is some tactile feel (for some people) with rolling the character and finally getting the scores that you want... granted, if the rerolling is tedious, it just plain sucks. I hated rerolling characters in like wizardry, which required you to go thru the entire creation process before letting you reroll - god that was awful. Finally rewarding, but awful to go through (wiz6 and wiz7 i think).

Quote: Will corpses remaim on the ground after they are killed?

Slain enemies' bodies stay on the ground and decay over time once you leave the area. Items carried drop to the ground. NPC's do not pick items up off the ground either. It was ruled 'not fun' - play arcanum (again) and relive the frustration.

Quote: A fairly simple fix (I think) would be to just give a penalty to all creatures without low-light/darkvision in areas of near darkness or total darkness. Couldn't that be done? If so, it'd make half elves more of a viable option again.

Actually, the easiest fix to dynamic lighting and its effects on characters is to not worry about it at all ...which, unfortunately, are the kinds of design/implementation decisions that have to be made on this kind of game and its engine, given the time constraints of the schedule.

Trust me, there isn't anyone on the team who wouldn't enjoy at least another year or so to include all the features that we wanted, but couldn't include!

A design issue all in itself is the question of visibility when given that your viewpoint of the game world as a player, is from the entire party, not any particular character. I don't want to get into it too much, but i'm sure you can imagine the situations that arise when you have one character who cannot see, and others in the party who can - how do you properly relay that information to the player in the best way that best approaches gameplay and game-world immersion?

Definitely open to much discussion, probably with many examples from other games that successful/unsuccessfully handle this; so it was decided that this is the way it is. And the game doesn't suffer too terribly much at all because of it, in my opinion.

In-Game Tutorials Suck!

Our tutorial is "out of game" - i.e. You select tutorial from the main menu and it has no bearing on any games you start. And IIRC, all the NPC tutorial dialog is written in character. The actual tutorial aspect is handled by popup window prompts, and they are in terms of gameplay. For example:

An NPC you meet will tell you that she needs to memorize spells before continuing - she says it in dialog, something like "i must rest so i can recover and cast spells" (or something to that effect).

After the dialog is concluded, you will then get the popup that tells you how to do this in gameplay terms. And no, these tutorial popups do not occur in-game. Although you can always manually open the help screen to get D&D 3E and gameplay information.

Does Temple of Elemental Evil have Gary Gygax's approval?

Not necessarily "approval", but mistah Tim Cain and Gary Gygax talked over the phone and corresponded several times, mainly to go over the finer points of the module and clarify plotlines/ideas/characters/etc and to reaffirm some conclusions/assumptions that tim had made as a DM of the module (several times) in his own PnP campaigns, IIRC.

Mr. Gygax was quite amiable and gracious by all accounts. (This is from memory, so don't quote me) he said that he wasn't that much of a computer gamer, but that his nephews or sons (I think? Can't remember) are, and all were looking forward to play ToEE. Sounds like we have to send him a free copy of the game, hehe.

Steve Moret, Lead Programmer

Is it possible to make it so that the blood from enemies doesn't fade away?

I'm guessing o*ne could crack the .dat files, find the particle system associated with it, and mark the particles as perminent, but then performance would chug as every blood particle never expired and just stayed in the engine.

Chris Glenn, Concept Artist

ToEE's Portraits look poo! Can I use my own?

Visceris's original statement is true, alot of the portraits from the original screenshots are ass. They were portraits I did about 18 months ago when I didn't know what I was doing. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do new portraits until much much later, so alot of the screenshots always had the "old and busted" portraits. Rest assured they have all been redone and look much better and more consistent.

Also, when the game is o*n shelves, I will post o*n my website instructions o*n how to import your own portraits. Fear not people.