Posted February 13, 2016
This game took for fucking EVER to get going! First of all, after a lot of deliberating and a few experimental starts, i decided to install the Circle of Eight mod pack. I generally don't like mods that add stuff or modify gameplay, at least not for a first play through. But the Co8 mod comes in two flavors, a basic pack that mostly fixes a lot of bugs (but by no means all of them!) and puts in a couple of small quests that were left out of the game by Troika. Then there's the "extra content" mod that adds in a lot of new content. I went with the basic mod pack and it installed and worked fine for me.
ToEE is now my favorite D&D based CRPG ever, though most people won't agree with me i know! But to put it in context all my top 10 favorite video games are all turn based strategy games and turn based tactical RPG's. And in that respect ToEE is awesome...it is exactly the sort of turn based combat micro management i love so much. Some of the battles are truly epic and require thought and tactics, taking 45 minutes just for some single encounters to be resolved. But i loved every minute of it.
Not much of a story. You spend the first few hours dicking around in the village wondering if the game is ever going to get going. You learn about this evil Temple and you set off to do something about it. Short on story, does NOT mean short on role play. What you do about the Temple is up to you and your parties alignment. A Lawful Good party would want to clear the place out of every last scap of evilness. On the other hand a Lawful Evil party may just think that this place is just awesome and want to join their choice of evil cult. Chaotic Evil may want it all for themselves. Hard to go into detail without spoilers, but this is one of the few RPG's that really allows completely different approaches based entirely on the players morals.
The graphics are excellent, even now. Better than the Infinity Engine games. So the game has awesome depth of combat, great graphics, surprising role play freedom of how to approach and what to do in the Temple, and light on story. Just my sort of game!
What's wrong with it? Well not everyone likes the combat- it is SLOW i admit. But the depth is worth it for me. There are lots of D&D 3.5 rules here that don't really have any place in a CRPG and will never be used in this game by anyone. The engine was hoped to be used to build other modules, maybe some with far less combat focus, and all those useless skills and feats may have then been of use...but none of that really came to be.
The game, even with all of the bug fixes, is still buggy. Crashes to desktop are rare, but other gameplay affecting bugs are still common. Saves can become corrupted. Save often. Back up the saves before each session. DO NOT save during combat (one of the biggest causes of corrupted save files). The game, considering how old it is, also has performance issues...bad frame rates, stuttering play during big battle etc.
But, despite all the games issues, i loved every minute of it. It's on the replay list for a Chaotic Evil play through sometime- maybe with the full extra content mod pack. But first i want to play The Keep on the Borderlands total conversion mod..another of the great old D&D modules from the old days!
EDIT: My party, for those interested in such things.
Dwarf Fighter for tanking.
Barbarian for DPS melee.
Human Sorcerer for AOE DPS, though really only took off after getting Fireballs well into the game.
Dwarf Cleric for healing maybe? Pretty useful for tanking as well.
Elf Thief/Wizard- Two levels of Thief intially then Wizard levels after that with left over cross class skill points into thief skills on each level up. Good for scouting in stealth- something that works well in ToEE.
My thief with bow was almost useless in the battles. I should have make him multi-class with wizard too. haha.
