Only Crpg Using D&d's Original Setting Is Finally On Steam, With...

There's never been a better time to enter The Temple of Elemental Evil.

The US edition of PC Gamer magazine liked The Temple of Elemental Evil enough to award it a respectable 79% in 2003, but we still had more than a few monster-sized bones to pick with Troika's D&D RPG: NPC companions silently loading themselves up with so much worthless loot they become encumbered by it; atrocious pathfinding; and numerous other obvious bugs and avoidable snags bringing down an otherwise promising adventure.

This matched my own experience with the game back then. The enticing promise of a full and faithful digital recreation of D&D's 3.5 ruleset—and a chance to throw magic missiles somewhere other than the Sword Coast thanks to the game's use of the Greyhawk setting—was brought down by frustrating technical issues and odd design choices.

I was never quite sure if I was doing something wrong or because the game had got its d20s in a twist again, so I quickly decided to stop playing rather than spend hours scouring forums in the hope of finding the right workaround. Which is why SNEG's re-release of this famously temperamental game, out now on Steam, is so interesting.

The 1000+ community-created tweaks, fixes, additions, and restorations within have been floating around the web for years, but for the first time ever they're baked right into the default install. I don't have to wonder if I should try to preemptively correct a common issue before it's even popped up. I don't have to manage a wobbly tower of patches that must be added in exactly the right order to hopefully fix something that should have never been this broken to begin with.

It's not a completely different experience like a remake would be, with everything simplified and sanded down out of a fear our doomscroll-addled minds won't have the patience for 2003-style tough battles and reactive questlines. It's pretty much the same game. It just works as intended, right from the first click.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's better than intended. Temple of Elemental Evil is littered with thoughtful additions and restored quests, all of them well-integrated and subtle enough to make it easy to believe they've always been there. NPCs can offer sidequests they didn't have before, unlocking further rewards. I can now find a magic chest to stuff my loot in, neatly sidestepping the original's boring, bagless inventory woes. I'm able to freely wander into a building that didn't make it into the original relea

Source: PC Gamer