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The next generation of fantasy CRPGs, despite some drawbacks

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: September 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I, like many computer fantasy role-playing gamers was disappointed by what news was released about the new Pool of Radiance, Ruins of Myth Drannor (RoMD). It has no bards, druids or wizards, no gnomes, no ability to wield dual weapons, pre-selected feats and skills-you can't choose your own, the game gives them to you, and no real-time combat. The latter was of no consequence, as I prefer turn-based combat, but it was unfair to limit player choices; taking away freedom of choice is a turn-off. The programmers/designers started making the game before 3rd Edition came, and they didn't want to start over. They worked to make a game that may not have had everything a CRPG fan wanted, but had enough elements to live up to D&D 3rd Edition standards and still be a satisfying game. They succeeded!

The game is awesome. The characters are extremely realistic in 3D and the interface is very seamless. You can right or left click to bring up menus and character sheets. Inventory is similar to Might & Magic 6 and its sequels with a graph to place the items, when moving items to it, you see a silhouette of the item before placing it so as not to place it incorrectly. The scenery is stunning and breathtaking, almost lifelike, weapons and armor nicely detailed, and all rendered in 3D. The music is captivating and alluring. You will quickly get into the spirit of the game after just a few minutes of playing. Installing is a treat; you'll be witness to some familiar scenes - I won't spoil the surprises! You can, as with previous CRPGs, use pregenerated characters or create your own party, which is recommended, but you don't roll scores, you distribute points to all six attributes each starting at 8. Not my favored method, but I am willing to adjust. You don't select male or female gender; if you want a male or female character, you must select a portrait that appears male or female. You can customize your party's formation without using automatic selections and the interface even tells you whether or not it is safe to rest in the area. A tutorial is handy for familiarizing yourself with the game, its controls and interacting with the environment and the movable/breakable dungeon dressing. It is worth the time spent learning the tutorial for complete enjoyment of the game. The Collector's edition comes with the POR RoMD instruction booklet, 2 CD game discs, a CD with the beautiful audio game soundtrack, the Myth Drannor novel, custom dice bag, a full set of gaming dice, and a full color folded map. The instruction book is a little too small for my tastes, considering how HUGE the box is they could have made it larger. Please dispose of your preconceptions about this game and give it a try. The game is wonderful despite what it doesn't have. I am completely hooked on this and want no more of Black Isle Studios. You will not be disappointed. Give the company and game designers your support; they may make a future sequel including all the characters, races and choices we want and expect in a 3rd Edition D&D computer game.

Wait for the Reviews

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: September 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I purchased this game even though I had some doubts about its quality owing to previous delays. The game was supposed to have shipped in the spring of 2000. I can respect a game company's desire to build a quality game even if it means moving ship dates up, but I also know that businesses frequently put pressure on their development staffs to ship at a certain point even if the game isn't ready so that they can begin recovering their costs. Initial reports indicate that this has happened in the case of PoR. Installation glitches, lock-ups, wipe and re-installs have affected some people. During my own installation, I noticed that it said game files were being installed to the Program Files folder even though I had pointed to a different directory. These small glitches indicate a game that has been rushed to shipment. SSI is already talking about patches for the poor victims of even more serious problems.

As for the game itself, I can only say that the initial play has been a little disappointing. The fact that an entire character class, the druid, is not an option in addition to the lack of customization for characters makes PoR pale when compared to Interplay's Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dales series. Graphically, I think PoR is not as good as the Interplay titles. Characters have jagged edges and there are no options for bumping up resolutions and setting anti-aliasing effects in the option menus (I'm running a GeForce 3 card). I think the default and only option is to run in 800 X 600, something I wish game companies would remove as a limitation given the current crop of high performance video cards like the GeForce 2/3 and Radeon. I would rather wait an extra two months for a game and know that I can run it in higher resolutions than get something where the graphics don't make use of the power of the newer video cards. Graphics engines must be able to render in 1024 X 768.

I like some of the menuing that they have done in PoR though. The right click menus enable players to quickly get at weapons, spells, and skills without having to go to a separate screen. In addition, the spell effects are pretty cool from what few spells I've used so far. The combat stays pretty faithful to the table top rules, although I don't there are anything like attacks of opportunity. It is turn based and makes use of an initiative system that should be familiar to pen and paper players. In addition, the character movement is more fluid, something I wish BG had done better.

I would suggest waiting for a thorough review of this title by GameSpot.com or one of the other sites. Resist the urge to go out and buy simply because you are a fantasy RPG nut like me until you've read some reviews by expert gamers. Normally, I follow this advice, but ...

I would have preferred that SSI and Ubi Soft and Storm Front had waited awhile before building PoR, until the 3E rules had been published. I think developers got stuck spending an inordinate amount of time changing the game mechanics as the 3E D&D rules went through their revisions. As a result, I think the dev team lost time modifying game rules instead of being able to continue work an providing for a wider set of features that were truer to the spirit of 3E.

How good is this game?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: October 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Not sure how good this game is. I haven't even been able to get it to install. I went to the message boards on Ubi softs site and have read nothing but bad post about installing, game play, bugs, and not to mention a post or two about Computers being damaged by uninstalling this game. I would stay away till these issues are resolved. Save yourself the headache.

Please spend your money on something else...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: October 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

...like Fallout Tactics or Arcanum. This game is terrible. The play control is miserable, and the graphics don't work right. Your characters, even with a fast computer, move across the screen at a crawl. The new d20 features are horribly twisted: you get skills and feats but the game picks them for you. There's no wizard class, a mainstay of DnD. The gameplay is unbalanced, you run into creatures that require magic weapons to kill before you have any magic weapons. This game is a laughable, stupid joke. I may send my copy to the people developing Neverwinter Nights with a clear warning to avoid every mistake SSI/Ubisoft made here.

I played the original...what a let down. Bad interface

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: October 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I was hoping to pick up something that would fill the time till the release of DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot), so I went with PoR. Big mistake, the game wants to be a "Fallout" but can't even come close. It has almost no RPG, the first character I came across only speaks the first line of text and nothing else. When you find treasure of any kind there are only 3 graphics: 1.) bag of gems 2.) pile of coins 3.) shield. You would think that with all the delays they would have added more graphics to things. The original interviews said that you could interact with many objects...this is untrue. They said that you could block doors with objects...not in this game. If the game was selling for under 20 bucks then it might be worth buying, but as it is right now...NO WAY. This is just another example of a game company less interested in the product then the $$$. Its too bad to, the original series of D&D games were great.

very experienced gamer

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: October 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is the worst rpg game I have ever played. I have a long history of rpg game playing. I have played this original title on commodore 64 - my thoughts are that the Commodore 64 version was more interesting and better. This game consists of repetition of the same 3 monsters like you've never seen. If you like to not be able to move around in a dungeon except at a very slow walk pace, then you'll like this game. if you like fighting 500-1000 of the same creatures (with very little variation), you'll like this game. If you like your characters to progress slowly (level 2/3 after 11 hours of gameplay), then you'll like this game. I was only able to get to the second dungeon level of the dwarf dungeons after 11 hours of play. It's a much more brain numbing version of Diablo but ALOT slower. If you like to cry from boredom and minimal role playing in your role playing games, just go and kill at an extremely slow pace, then this is the game for you. But if you're like me, who enjoys conversation with NPC's, waypoints, portals, anything other than walking around an overly large leveled dungeons that all look the same, then do not get this game. You will be asking for your money back! Read the reviews on their OWN website under 'General Discussion'. You will see that I am not the only one who feels this way.

From a very disappointed gamer who fell into the trap of Pool of Radiance...out!

Pool of Radiance

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: October 23, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have only made it partly through but it seems to be getting better and better. The only drawback to this game is the type of computer system you need to run it.

Great game once you get started

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: October 24, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I won't say much, but I do want to post a small gripe about the way the game starts. I'd much rather "roll" my stats as opposed to using the points system. This way takes a lot of the fun out of character creation, and makes the character less unique.

I also don't like that you can only have sorcerers, no wizards. Those who don't play the D&D rpg may or may not understand the difference.

Finally, I wish you had more control over your feats and skills. I understand that maybe some of them wouldn't really translate well to the computer environment, but you should have more say-so in the way your characters advance and develop.

I was REALLY looking forward to this game. I had it pre-ordered for months...and as the subject line says, the game itself is great once you get going. But the thing that made me want this game so much was that it used the new 3rd edition d&d rules, and now that I have it, I don't feel like it does really...more of a neutered version. Oh well, I still give it 4 stars, but if anyone at WotC is listening....

:)

Can't tell much

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: December 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

All I know for certain is what I have read in the instruction book that came with the game. I have installed this thing 4 times (fortunately, I didn't get any of the major problems others have experienced with corruption of OS when I uninstalled - or I should say I haven't noticed any yet), and I have never been able to get it to go past the first screen (selecting between options and play, etc - the main menu). I have installed with their first 2 patches (which are patches for getting the game to install and run - they were still in the process of getting out the first batch of fixes for the gameplay glitches), but they haven't helped. I have read of people having to install older drivers to get this to work. Some people seem to have the lucky combination of whatever it is they need to make this thing run, but there are a bunch of us programmers (yes, I have been programming in the real world for 5 years, I'm not exactly new at this type of thing) out here who can't seem to find that combination. Avoid this thing like the plague. Wait for a while. After the game drops to [a fraction of its current price], maybe UBI Soft will have out all of the patches necessary to make this silly thing actually work. (...)

Flawed but repairable

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 07, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game expecting I was buying a 3-D Baldurs Gate. Boy was I wrong! ROMD seems to be more like a turn-based Diablo II, with plenty of guys to kill and treasure to pick up, but other than that no real substance.

The graphics are good, certainly better than Baldur's Gate. You first explore outside of Myth Drannor which is infested with orcs and zombies. The locales outside are fairly intresting, in the first area alone there's a orc camp, dark tower, shop, a hidden shelter for elves, a fountain that heals you, and a strange floating rock that may or may not be a Mythal.

However, the most boring part is actually exploring the underground lairs! They're totally bland, with all the rooms looking like any other rooms, except with the furniture rearranged! The encounters differ alot from rescueing friends to defeating a large and powerful foe, but they all have to do with combat. Subquests are little more than treasure hunts, but they are numerous. Talking has no roleplaying to it at all, you cannot intimidate other characters, flirt with them, quite a bit different from Baldur's Gate, all you do is ask them something or tell them something.

The worst part of the game is that you can't customize your character! Things like feats and skills are already chosen for you, even the Ranger's favored enemy! Many of the character classes, such as wizards, druids, and bards, are not available in the game. You cannot choose a prestige class. They've eliminated everything 3rd Edition D&D was made for.

There is one saving grace, however. Despite the game's many flaws, its combat is nail biting and sometimes intense even though it's a turned based game. Most of the battles require you to be a tactian and it may be fun for strategy enthusiasts. Maybe.

I'll give it a two because it is fun for some. Otherwise your playing a game with no soul. It needs heavy patchwork, I can tell you that.

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