[PC Game] Temple of Elemental Evil goes GOLD! Now with chat transcript!

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Just an announcement for the General folks who may not visit the Software boards:

The new D&D 3.5 Computer RPG, Temple of Elemental Evil has gone gold, and is due to ship on September 23rd.

For those not familiar with the terminology, going gold means the game is content and code complete, has been playtested, passed publisher QA, and the original gold master CD has been made from which the game copies will be duplicated -- meaning all that is left is to duplicate CDs, package them, and ship.

Temple of Elemental Evil is published by Atari and developed by Troika (who previously developed the Arcanum CRPG and has developers who worked on Fallout, and is also developing a Vampire CRPG). If the press and previews are correct, the game will most likely be the most accurate party-based, single-player D&D CRPG to date, with a very strict adherance to the D&D 3.5 rules -- to include turn-based combat -- as well as an extremely close interpretation of the original module. The Troika team are PnP D&D players as well as CRPG game designers, so the game shows a lot of promise.

There's a chat today (5 Sept, 4 PM PST) with the head of the development team, Tim Cain, at Gamespy Arcade.

Here's one of the gone gold announcements.

EN World discussion of the game has been going on at this thread on the Software boards.

 

[NiTessine]

Coolness! I've been awaiting this for a long time... I was on the brink of cracking down and buying Morrowind.

I buy only one computer game in a year... It then takes me two to finish it. Now, just to find out when this one will hit the shelves in Finland...

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

The European members on the official Atari ToEE boards have been reporting European release dates of anywhere between 3 October and 23 October, depending on source -- as usual with software, official dates are hard to pin down, but it looks like it will hit Europe fairly soon.

 

[Li Shenron]

I really hope it is closer to D&D rules than Neverwinter Nights.

 

[mhensley]

Sweet! Does anyone know what the hardware requirements are?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Well, this FAQ is a little bit out of date -- it was made before the announcement that the rules would be 3.5 -- but is a pretty good indicator. For everything I've seen and read (as well as the development team's info -- they regularly post to a couple of message boards to answer questions), the game will be much truer to the rules than NWN.

Combat is turn-based; all the actions are implemented -- ie standard, move, 5' steps, etc -- a lot of the "special attack" feats like trip are in, magic missiles are individually targettable, item creation feats are in, Attacks of Opportunity are correct, etc, etc. Obviously, they have to make some compromises to put the game in CRPG form, but unlike NWN, Troika says they didn't invent any mechanics to add to the game. According to Tim Cain, they tried to be as true to the core rules as they could possibly be.

We'll see when we really get our hands on the game, but all of the reviews/previews thus far have held up to expectations. The game is single-player and party-based, so it won't be replicating the DM+players multiplayer aspect that NWN does, but otherwise looks to be completely true to the pan-and-paper game.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

The minimum system specs (PC) are:

Q. What are the minimum system requirements?
A. (T.C. - Game Banshee - 2/3) Our min spec is a 700 MHz processor, with 128 Meg of RAM and a 2nd generation 3D video card, running DirectX 8.1. We don't have a recommend spec yet, but the two biggest factors that improve performance are video cards with high fill rates and CPU's with lots of on-chip cache.

They do say that this is a bare minimum, but they have been testing the game on a machine with these specs to make sure it runs.

 

[Henry]

Moved to Software & Computers.

 

[Aeolius]

Here's hoping that Atari hands the game over to MacSoft, to get a Mac OS X version on the shelves, faster than NWN was ported.

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

Awww, yeah!