The Temple of Elemental Evil

This is one of only a few D&D computer games I've ever played that was actually D&D and not some garbage point-and-click adventure game like Planescape Torment. It is the first (and last) D&D computer game since the the Gold Box games of the early 1990's to stay true to both the rules of the game as well as the published setting and the only computer game to use the third edition rules (Earlier games like Dark Queen of Krynn use the second edition rules, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights use strange variant rules made up solely for those games, and Planescape:Torment and Dragonshard don't use the rules of D&D at all). Additionally it has a better choice of campaign setting than most D&D games, being set in the fun and interesting World Of Greyhawk campaign setting rather than the tediously pretentious Forgotten Realms setting of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Treasures of the Savage Frontier. I highly recommend it.

I used to play this game on my old computer and it was running fine, all good. Some decades later I had an itch for playing this game again after so long, back in the day I was never able to finish it so I wanted to close that chapter once and for all. So I read that I needed some circle of eight mod and temple + to make it run on my system. All good but the first thing I notice is that every monster is super strong and that every attack I make misses all the time. I just made this my test run, gave myself a couple of levels using the console and tried the combat again but I was still missing every attack while the computer was hitting everything and doing a lot of criticals, so I thought maybe I had a bad party. I restarted the game and did my run legit, just reading a guide on GameBanshee to try and get enough experience to get to level 2, great let me try some combat on my party full of min maxed characters with 18 and 20 in their main stats. Nope, miss after miss after miss, I noticed I was never rolling higher than 1-5 on my d20 dice for attacks on the console log, I was baffled, I kept playing but that was the general thing, the only way to hit enemies was to give myself big bonuses with bulls strength, bard song, etc. I felt like a little munchkin, it was very different from the experience I had with this game as a kid, no idea if the circle of eight or the temple + increased the artificial difficulty in some way, but this game is not satisfying to play at all. You know that a low level party will miss everything, it will be a miss fest, but when the enemies keep rolling 20s on my party, it just gets boring eventually.

This aint no review, its more a Question. Sorry if I am posting at the wrong place but I have to ask. Any chance to get this awesome Game in German language? Thanks a lot.

They actually put this on here? unless I'm utterly mistaken and they actually got a Dev team to iron out the hundreds of game breaking bugs in this piece of trash, it looks to me like most of the people reviewing here are astroturf, the only good thing about ToEE is the game mechanics, but the chosen module is so bland and the programming so buggy and horrible that it's basically unplayable without the mod who's name I conveniently forgot, if you're dumb enough to buy it at the very least look for the patches that can fix it. No matter how rose glassed you are about 3.5 and D&D, no one in there right mind would give this rushed broken piece of junk anything more than a 2. On release it made more modern rushed and glitchy games look like perfection.

Yes it may be a faithful rendition of the D&D3.5 rule set, but to what point? As i have mentioned numerous times to others, D&D as a game is fixated on creating by design paragons as a measure of success it's the fact that classes reach a presiding peak at level 20 that a character has become anything of any real note, over for example just having an interesting creature and taking monster levels in hit dice. It is this completion of the fleshing out of an entire skill set (or more correctly the culmination of tens of levels to get to the feat that you're character idea requires) that makes even playing & lets be honest a standard fable/fantasy plot worthwhile. Quite frankly the game is kneecapped as bad as black and white 1 was in how they cut the game in half to make more money although with ToEE i don't think they ever had the material for that second installment they were hoping to gouge people on. The 10 level limit simply was a kick in the pants for those playing any REAL type of specialist. A mage Imbuer for instance, because the creation of golems and other actually useful items that truly set them apart from witch doctors and sharlatans are level 14 and above. The game itself by using such a limited though ultimately slow progression doesn't have heroes defeating the evils of the temple but half trained, feat crippled peasants with shiny weapons and the only way it would have been any different is to disregard the 3.5 ruleset and set a more free & static character generation process. Yes as a mage you will get to fireball, try doing a successful 'null mage' though with only realistically 5 levels to optimise you're character. On top of this where's my Psion? Psionics were part of the core rule set and if i'm going to put up with a 10 level kneecapping i may as well do a psion with a coup de grace weapon. Others may say but overall the game is good, well i can mention about a half dozen or more D&D games that are to me just as good and in fact better and i believe it puts such a significantly poor taste in ones mouth to warrant such a low rating and my utter contempt. As for the hype of keeping to the rule system, quite frankly it was designed as a pen and paper roleplaying game with all the freestyling permitable by having a real GM there with you. History should teach you (for example with console ports) that not adapting a system for the enjoyment of the target audience is quite frankly a bad idea with repercusions on the end user. To be honest even though the system doesn't tightly keep with the 3.5 ruleset neverwinter nights even without the expansions is at the very least 10 times better than ToEE.