I am going to say it straightly - The Temple of Elemental Evil is the worst cRPG based on DnD I have ever played. Is this really a game from Troika? The famous devs of Fallout 2? :O

The Temple of Elemental Evil is a game about ... nothing. The game lacks of any videogame concept, there is no story, there is no reason why you are doing what you are doing, sidequests are often resolved just by a bit of talking and they are underdeveloped and lead to nowhere. You did a favor for the lord of the tower in Hommlet? He would just tell you to go to Nulb. That's it! LOL...Why? Why am I supposed to go there? What's the purpose? .....Or when your characters force "evil" traders to tell you where The Temple of Elemental Evil is. Why the heck they want to know that? They even did not come to the town because of it and they have absolutely no idea something like The Temple of Elemental Evil actually exists, so why are they asking that out of the blue?

I played a neutral good party, thus my begining was in the streets of a town where I witnessed a murder of a priestess. The party "decided" to bring these terrible news to the resident church in Hommlet. I did it and that's pretty much it and the game does not bother with the murder anymore. That's basically the end of the plot. Since that, the game's progression towards the end becomes more and more poor and absurd.

I have been doing a DnD marathon since 2018 and one by one I beat Baldur's Gate + expansion, Baldur's Gate 2 + expansion, Icewind Dale + expansion, Icewind Dale 2, Planescape Torment, Neverwinter Nights 2 + all expansions and Neverwinter Nights + all its expansions, and I was so happy that I was finally going to play The Temple of Elemental Evil, but ...I am really sad ....The Temple of Elemental Evil lacks of everything the previously mentioned DnD games makes so deep and enjoyable.

On the other hand, I love the game's dark atmposphere, fantastic graphics and awesome ambient music. I liked the combat system as well, but the turn-based system here is too basic and battles can become stereotypical after a few hours. The game is also too short. 40-50 hours?

The Temple of Elemental Evil may be the purest DnD PC game (personally I cannot tell) but that actually does not matter at all because as a computer game it fails basically almost at everything.

I am utterly disappointed.

It failed miserably, of course. Coffers ran dry and Troika pushed out an utterly unfinished game. In your version, many hands breaking bugs have patched out, but nowhere near as of them.

But the engine! The engine is fairly solid. It's the only DnD3.5 implantation on pc that comes close to doing it right. The combat is highly tactical.

And that is why a small group of people bought the game, played it, and then dreamed of what it could be. Those people are the Circle of 8.

Now you can play Temple+, which overwrites the engine, plays out the story with additional scenes and characters, and brings more life to the game.

Is still not a masterpiece, but until Divinity Original Sin, this was certainly my favorite turn based rpg. And it still has a lot of great depth of combat even today.

It could have been a masterpiece. Here and there are some bright ideas but they are just unfinished. During my whole playthrough I was dreaming about how amazing this game would have been, had it been completed.

The engine is amazing, but the level cap 10 just destroys all the possibilities the game's characters would have had had the cap been higher. Characters just cannot reach their full potential because of the level limitation.

I know the Circle of 8 and I am sure I will try it out! :) Cannot wait.

The mods should fix many problem but not all.

For the level cap you reached, on start game design allows grinding so it's a problem with turn based and no scaling which is a very complex topic... if not by using mouse as strong than dragon thanks to the scaling.

Moreover I think the game is tuned for 7/8 characters, not a party of 5 that don't share any xp. Quote the mod allows create up to 8 characters. With a party of 5 max level is reached faster.

Myself some hours played before to decide that I had to try install the mod, sure there's weird stuff, but I didn't quoted anything destroying the gameplay, except how first town feels too big for its content, so it feels empty, and then it feels very amateurish.

Even the burden from companions is minor, it's annoying but not major. For sure the UI is keyboard oriented for the combats, so you define yourself as many shortcut than you want. I don't like much and the mouse UI is rather slow for combats. But again, it's not major.

I have seen worse finished games than this unfinished game, and it's quite playable.

I've seen games that are quite worse. For example, I'm pretty sure the following are true about ToEE:
* The first town is visible, so you don't have to hunt for it blindly. (In fact, I believe you start in the town, rather than in the wilderness next to an invisible town.)
* Most characters will do more damage with a weapon equipped than without, and if that's not the case for a character, you have the option of un-equipping the weapon.
* Your weapons will do damage to enemies late in the game.
* When you reload a save game, your characters keep the level and experience they had when you saved your game (instead of starting back at level 1).
* You can recover your cast spells without having to die on purpose.
* There is more than one music track that plays during the game.
* There isn't an enemy that, if it gets a turn, is guaranteed to wipe out your entire party.
* Uninstalling the game won't wipe your hard drive.

Yes, there are games for which not all of these things are true (for which it makes sense; for example, Wasteland and Fallout don't have spells so it doesn't makes sense to talk about recovering them without dying).

(That last bullet point is a reference to a game, not available (as of this writing) on GOG, called Pool of Radiance; that game, which uses 3e D&D rules, doesn't even let you pick skills or feats to my understanding.)

The full Pool of Radiance series in on Gog. Myself in past time I played the Mac version with much better UI, modern UI. For sure I hadn't the issue.

There's more than one game called Pool of Radiance; the one on GOG is an older one based off a mix of 1e/2e rules (but including 1e's racial level limits and sexist female strength limits), while the one I'm referring to is one based off 3e rules that apparently wasn't well received, and is rather infamous for the data destroying bug I mentioned.

Now, can you identify what other games I was referencing? (Hint: The first 4 points refer to the same game, and some of the other points refer to console adaptations of games that are available on GOG in collections.)

Edit: Also worth noting that, from what I've read, they did at least patch the POR data deletion on uninstall issue.

I knew this game erasing the disk but not which one it was. I was sure it wasn't PoR, so I search... and found PoR without realize it was the new one.

So no idea for any, perhaps the enemy thing, it seems evokes something but I can't pinpoint it. That said I bet those bugs get fixed, nowadays whe are used to releases with bugs.

Myself I'd like play the new PoR, I almost bought it some time past release and skipped, later I regretted it. I saw a let's play and it wasn't that bad at all. For sure it hasn't the simultaneous turns of ToEE, but ToEE doesn't have speeding up animation, nor skip animations, I think speed up animations have been added after in PoR, still no fast option, but faster than at release.

Past that, it's possible that PoR enemies tend be more numerous or numerous more often. Otherwise it's not same dungeon design quality from what I have seen and think to remind, bigger with less diversity for PoR.

It think a lot of fuss was done on very long combats, but it's not that awful for a player that like TB and don't care if it's not very fast. After all I enjoyed a lot Dungeon Lords which has an awful fame. I even think the millennium edition that tried improve many thing lost compared to original.

If you enjoy turn-based combat and don't mind combat being long, you might want to check out Wizardry 8.

By the way, this reminds me: Why do D&D CRPGs use scrolls for learning spells? Reading the tabletop rules, I get the impression that the primary way of learning wizard spells (other than those gained through leveling) is through spellbooks, like those of defeated enemy wizards. I think of this because Wizardry 8, which is not a D&D game, uses books for learning spells, while scrolls serve solely as single-use spellcasting items. The enemy thing is the NES version of Might and Magic 1. That version has a couple bugs that lead to this effect:
* When a party member dies, party members who haven't acted don't get to act this round, resulting in the enemies getting another turn before you can do anything.
* The Locust Plague enemy is glitched. This enemy can hit up to 10 times, but is supposed to do only 1 damage per hit (which is still dangerous enough to be a threat). However, in the NES version, it seems something got coded wrong (maybe an integer underflow?), and that enemy will hit for 255 damage (enough to kill the character with one hit). Given that Locust Plagues are quite fast, likely faster than anyone in your party, they will do this before you can act.

The result is that, if a Locust Plague gets a turn, there's nothing that you can do to prevent a party wipe.

By the way, the European SNES version of Might and Magic 2 is also badly broken. For example, damage spells do 50 damage (instead of half or none) when they are resisted (even if the spell would normally do less than that). supposedly effects like disintegrate work reliably on enemies, an enemy's frenzy will prevent the other enemies from hitting you at all, and the game can get into a state where it can't load at all. (There apparently was a US release planned; I suspect it was canned because they couldn't get the game past NOA's QA testing.)

(Note that there's also a Super Famicom version of M&M2 which was released only in Japan; it appears to be an entirely different port, though I have not tried it myself yet.)

Also, note that these games came out before the internet, and the console games were stored on cartridges that could not be modified (so a patch would only affect later copies of the game, and existing ones couldn't be updated).

Mmm that's the last one? I don't remind if I can play it on my mac. It's probably the previous one I tried and I became mad against the character creation, gave up. There's a hack to soften it, but I gave uo attempt try install it on Mac.

One problemof last one is difficulty huge spike if you don't rush the right part, it's not appealing me much, but a day I plan try it anyway. I think it's really in D&D rules. So nope, I played a bit M&M 1&2 on Mac, the 3 took more time, but it was something with better definition graphics than PC version and better UI. More a problem of cartiddge, computers had various other way to distribute patch. I don't remind when BBS started but it's quite some time before Internet. On Mac the first game on CD ROM was since 1989 (with a reduced floppy version joined). For sure CD ROM cart appear later but quickly used for patches and joined to magazines. Otherwise it's floppy through email.

This exchange on bugs made me discover that the new Pool of Radiance is again available and doanloadable and probably with possibility to run on mac with wine. I started the install fine until it asked the second cd rom lol, not sure if wine can manage that.

EDIT:
OMG I installed Pool of Radiance Myth of Dranor on Mac, launch well but clearly it will need some wine tuning so graphics are properly managed by wine, the config exists but not ready to use. That said now I have a proper install I could use it for another image.

So I played a bit Pool Of Radiance: Ruins Of Myth Drannor (which runs very well in Mac as soon as I don't switch out to another application. I haven't applied the patch yet, I'm worry it breaks all and prefer try a bit more the game before.

But this game should put a bit more perspective for bashing on ToEE. ToEE has more minor issues, but PoRR looks pale in comparison. ToEE is 2 years after and I think they used PoRR to pick elements and improve what's weak or even wrong. Obviously the game tries be more flashy, closer point of view and for 2001 the 3D isn't that bad, but it's still a weird choice with hat was 3D at this time. In attempt to make the play more fluid there's a total dumb decision to remove character end of turn and add a real time element to have it automatic, lol. It's not even a totally weird idea, but it's highlight how crap is the UI, struggle with it when you have a limited time to do it is just highlighting the UI design problems.

PoRR is like an attempt to make a new XCOM RPG a long time before new XCOM, but they hadn't neither the talent nor the budget, moreover I have doubt that Fareaxis could do a proper RPG, even if I'd whish they try.

If PoRR seems have few minor bugs, I still achieved get a party stuck in tutorial (had save and autosave to fix it but still). ToEE choose make a straight forward simpler tutorial, but I didn't noticed any glitch. The interface approach has a lot of shared aspect with ToEE, but in comparison it makes ToEE UI looks like a high polished UI (that it isn't for design aspect).

But I'll stick try PoRR, it could be far behind than ToEE and have many weird design choices, it's still not an uninteresting game for a player like me, even less that now it runs on Mac. But for now, go back to ToEE. :-)

Just don't try to uninstall it, as uninstallation is reported to destroy unrelated datam and you *really* don't want that, especially if you also use the computer for work.

Lol yeah perhaps without the patch, but it's wine, you just delete and don't bother with uninstall, most often it's the same on mac, but sometimes there's a final uninstall that is run when the delete is detected.

EDIT: A precision about deleting the application ported with wine to uninstall it, delete should delete all including all saves and preferences, but some front end could install drive_c outside the .app package, and some games could put saves in windows Documents folder that wine should map to Mac Documents folder so outside the .app.

well I did not say that ToEE is the worst DnD game ever, just it is the worst DnD I have ever played :) I never played Pool of Radiance tho

Lol, ok, but how can I guess what you played? :-)

I think there's more that are worst than ToEE for me, but I played them a long long time ago, they bored me fast, and I don't remind any detail. For Sword Coast Legend, despite its awful fame, I consider it quite above ToEE Gog vanilla. Probably not for ToEE with co8 new content, but I'm discovering it.

You should play the game with co8 new content version. I'm not a fan of mods, and often stick to small utility mods. But despite co8 new content is fan made contents, and they even had the gut to add new vocals, as a non native English, I felt the writing and even vocals was feeling quite pro, beside a few exceptions for both. Some design choices are a bit weird, but despite those aspects, co8 new content version seems improve largely the game, that's why I think it's more pertinent to comment the game with the co8 nc perspective, it's really a special case.