Games Convention: Greyhawk Impressions
Jaz, 2003-08-27

The Games Convention 2003 in Leipzig was significantly bigger than the first GC in 2002 - and what's more, this time a significantly larger amount of CRPGs (or games with RPG elements) were shown. Unfortunately, the two days I spent at the GC weren't enough to cover all of the RPG/like games - in fact, I was really glad I glimpsed as many games as I did, because sprinting from booth to booth, from award ceremony to press center and back while elbowing my way through hordes of gamers took a considerable amount of time.

Here is a short overview of Grehawk: Temple of Elemental Evil.

Temple of Elemental Evil (Atari, PC)
Now here's a game many dedicated CRPGers have been awaiting for quite some time now: The Temple of Elemental Evil, a classic isometric, party-based, ‘old-school' CRPG built around the D&D v3.5 rules. Where the direct predecessors - the Baldur's Gate series and multiplayer-oriented Neverwinter Nights - took place in the Forgotten Realms setting, TToEE is situated in the World of Greyhawk which happened to be the first AD&D world boxed set all those years ago. The plot is based on the old Temple of Elemental Evil series pen&paper adventure modules… but we'll come to that later.

First off, the graphics are excellent, mixing very detailed true 3D characters with 2D backgrounds. As it was quite loud I couldn't hear anything, so I can't even tell you if there was any kind of voice output, but the masses of text in the corresponding text windows reminded me so much of NWN's dialog display that I'm pretty sure some of the dialog lines are spoken as well. Combat is round-based and a bit slow to behold, combat (and general) controls correspond to what we know from earlier games; while gamers new to the genre might be overwhelmed by the - at first glance - intimidating mass of control possibilities, veterans will not encounter any problems and feel at home very soon.

Now let's get back to the story. After the somewhat disappointing single-player campaign of NWN, it would be nice if a new D&D-based CRPG was carried by a strong plot. Unfortunately, though, the early pen&paper Temple of Elemental Evil modules belonged (in my opinion) to the weaker of their kind, with a wee bit of horror and a main focus on hack'n'slash. We'll have to see what Troika (the developers) made of the ‘master copy'.

First Impression
Very good. D&D veterans and hard-core CRPGers wont get around this one.