I mentioned recently that I was interested in playing Temple of Elemental Evil primarily because the combat in that game is very much based the D&D turn based ruleset. Unfortunately, very few turn based tactical games are released these days which is a real shame as turn based games tend to have a very different play style to real time games.
However, as I was thinking about TOEE, something occured to me. One of the comments made about the 4e D&D ruleset was that it was much more easily transferable to a cRPG format. Although no publisher is going to greenlight a AAA turn based game, it was very possible that an indie developer may have made a turn based rpg using the D20 OGL licence.
And after a bit of digging around, I managed to find Knights of the Chalice. In essence, its an indie game based on the older 3.5e D20 licence but what really caught my eye were some of the comments around how complete the help file explained 3.5e rules and how well the game had managed to adapt the 3.5e licence. So it was with great anticipation that I downloaded the demo.
Unfortunately, after playing around with the demo, I uninstalled it. The problem is that the game doesn't appear to be very well balanced. For example, you can only rest your party at designated campsites. You don't get the option of trying to rest in a dungeon but risk being interrupted by monsters. Couple in the fact that, according to comments, quite a few dungeons seal off the entrance after you get in and you can already easily imagine your party going up against the end boss with few spells and limited hitpoints.
But this wasn't what made me uninstall the demo.
While playing the demo, my party of 4 were wandering down a corrider when we were ambushed by bandits. Our party was caught by surprise and lost the initiative battle so the bandits got in 2 turns before my team would be able to act. Two lightning bolts from their mage later and I was left with a mage who had to fight off 6 bandits on his own. This all happened before I got a chance to do anything.
Now, I am generally up for a challenge in terms of gameplay but from my limited playtime with the demo, this game just feels like it would be frustratingly difficult. Furthermore, the game is selling for GBP14.95. Quite frankly, I would much rather pay less money for TOEE and get what is probably a much more balanced game.
2 comments:
Problem with some indie games is that they get put together by "enthusiasts" rather than gamers.
These types are typified by the ramping up of the difficulty as they are so used to playing the games so much.
The level of accuracy in mapping D&D 3.5 makes me think that Knights of the Chalice may fall into this category...
I'm glad you said "some" indie games there as I've been very impressed with the quality of some indie titles in the past (which is what made me start looking for an indie D&D rpg in the first place).
I think that part of the problem is that its always been notoriously easy to kill level 1 D&D characters (although the new 4e rules seem to solve this). When you throw in the fact that a cRPG won't have a human DM to monitor difficulty on the fly, it becomes very easy to have a game which is technically accurate but extremely difficult in practice.
Having said that, from the review I read, I think this game was designed to be extremely hard regardless.
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