You know a game I love? Pool of Radiance. Hell yeah! Now that’s a proper CRPG for your bucket list. So can you blame me for being as possessed as The Flamed One himself when Stormfront Studios’ Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor hit the shelf in ’01? ‘Cause that one’s for a different bucket.
When I interviewed Susan Manley in 2014, she told me a funny story about the titular Pool in Pool of Radiance. Apparently the artists had come up with one that looked exactly like a toilet. Perhaps that artist was having a vision thirteen years into the future–The Ruins of Myth Drano.
By the Bitch Queen’s teeth, what the hell happened here? How bad was it? Well, let’s put it this way. You think Monster Hunter Wilds had some bugs? Try a game that would delete essential system files off your computer when you tried to uninstall the shite. That’s right–you couldn’t boot your PC. And this was after taking an EXTRA YEAR of development time.
But let’s put aside this minor issue with destroying your PC. I mean, it’s such an awesome game, who’d ever want to uninstall it anyway? Oh, wait.
The goal was revive the gold box series by incorporating the D&D 3rd Edition rules, one of the first games to do that. However, they switched from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition midway through production. Now they did make some smart decisions. For example, unlike Baldur’s Gate with its real-time with pause nonsense, this is turn-based, with 3D characters over pre-rendered 2D backgrounds. You only get four characters instead of six, but you can add two NPCs, so fine. They also kept the story basic to focus on combat and exploration, which isn’t a dealbreaker IMO–but that only works if combat is fun and you have a cool world to explore.
This gameworld is about as fun to explore as the backlot of a Dungeon Depot. I mean, there’s a lot of cool parts lying around, but you kinda hoped when you bought it it’d be assembled already.
So what do you do when you got no content but have to give players the hundreds of hours of gameplay they’d come to expect from a $60 game? How about grinding? Oh, and why not slow the battles down to the point where the Commodore 64 game looks like Tales of Vesperia. Look, the zombies and skeletons in this game are so slow getting into position I’m pretty sure they’ll decompose naturally before you can attack them.
On a positive note, early on you could get a patch to speed it up. Did that fix it? No, not when your UI is so bad you wish you could play it with a PowerGlove–so you could punch it in the face! The mix of 2D and 3D make it janky as hell, making it hard to target, and there’s no visible movement paths–kinda a big deal with tactical turn-based combat. Don’t get me started on the inventory system, spell menu, map, resolution and scaling, and corrupt save games…By Mystra’s mercy!
I mean, at least if you’re going 3rd edition, you’ll have feats, right? Everybody loves feats. Oh, wait, they’re automatically assigned? And we have no way of knowing if they’re even working because the UI is such a freakin’ disaster? Tyr strike you down! You need iron will just to keep from SCREAMING.
So who was responsible for this affront to the dignity of the Gold Box franchise? Stormfront Studios was Don Daglow’s company, an Intellivision programmer and producer at EA. Did he have the goods? You betcha. Daglow did one of the first CPRGs ever, Dungeons in 1975 for the PDP-10. He also did Utopia, a groundbreaking city-building sim, on the freakin’ intellivision. Then he did the Neverwinter Nights online game for AOL, an amazingly ambitious game that brought the goldbox into an online multiplayer format.
So what the hell Don? Meh, it’s not really fair to blame him, not when you have Ubisoft in the picture. Rushed schedule, hopelessly great competition (imagine playing this turd bucket instead of BG II, NWN, or Arcanum)…Reviewers called it a poor man’s Diablo.
There are lots of bad CRPGs out there, but this one really broke my heart. I was all about resurrecting the gold box series, and a really solid turn-based game would’ve been a nice alternative to the competition, even if it wasn’t quite as polished. But as sequels go, this makes the Quickening look legendary. In fact, this game could’ve used some Quickening. See what I did there? That joke is more entertaining this game, so you’re welcome. #crpg
Source by Matt Barton
