Retro Revival, Part #14 - The Temple of Elemental Evil (2010, GOG.COM)
48GOG has released The Temple of Elemental Evil, and this is truly a big day for all PC RPG fans.
Getting Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment on GOG in such a short time span has certainly been nice, but given just how many Interplay re-releases and bundles we've seen over the years those games have never been that difficult to find (at least as long as you got a credit card and know how to spell "Amazon" or the name of a similar online service). And the Infinity Engine classics are just that; games which immediately had a huge impact, continue to be genuinely appreciated for their high quality and also sold well enough to make Black Isle and Bioware well-known among huge swaths of the gaming population.
By contrast, The Temple of Elemental Evil was released in 2003 to little fanfare, received a lot of justly deserved criticism for its plethora of bugs and disappeared off most store shelves pretty quickly, never to return in any shape or form. The story could have ended there, but after 3 years a dedicated team of fans produced the final version of a massive community patch known as "Circle of Eight", which includes countless ruleset additions, balance tweaks and bug fixes while also greatly improving overall game stability. The impressive end result of all this hard work is that - in terms of the fundamentals of its mechanics, the sheer depth of its gameplay as well as its faithfulness to the source material - TOEE is now arguably the best Dungeons & Dragons simulation on the PC.
In a nutshell, the game takes the isometric viewpoint and party management of the Infinity Engine and adds to that a proper turn-based combat for significantly improved tactical controls, a more robust interpretation of the D&D ruleset as well as a richer and technically more advanced audiovisual presentation. The Temple of Elemental Evil will not appeal to story-oriented players, nor does it cater to those who want a more easy-going and immediately accessible gameplay experience. TOEE is a hardcore, unabashedly old school dungeon crawler focusing entirely on tactical battle scenarios and stats-based character progression, and everyone who finds that kind of gameplay remotely interesting now has a second chance to get a copy of this underrated classic. As someone who at the time of writing has the most frequently watched TOEE video on YouTube (close to 50,000 views at this point, which indicates that there's a certain level of interest in the game out there), I couldn't be more happy about this.
Buy the game here:
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/the_temple_of_elemental_evil
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