For the first time ever, the original Greyhawk campaign setting is brought to life in a computer role-playing game. Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil combines the premier role-playing system of D&D Third Edition, the CRPG expertise of Troika Games and the excitement of the original Temple of Elemental Evil module by Gary Gygax.

Key Features:

• Multiple story paths and multiple endings
• Five controllable characters and three followers in each party
• Richly varied environments populated with reactive NPCs
• Based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 ruleset
• Characters that can be customized with skills, feats and spells
• Brought to you by the creators of Arcanum
• Party-based adventuring and tactical turn-based combat
• Gameplay that supports all alignments
• Formidable obstacles including a wide array of monsters
• First PC game based on the classic Greyhawk module

Game Chronicles goes inside this exciting new game with an exclusive interview by John Carswell.

GCM:

Please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about the team behind The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure.

Tim Cain:

We have 14 team members. I (Tim Cain) am the lead designer and project leader. Michael McCarthy is the lead artist. Steve Moret is the lead programmer. Tom Decker is the producer and also a designer as well. Mike oversees 6 artists - Peter Delgado and Lucas Feld (both level artists), Chris Glenn (concept artist), Corey Pelton (animator), Craig Matchett (modeler), and Bryan Warmack (level layout). Steve has 4 programmers - Lee Needham (rendering and optimzation), Sean Craig (core d20 implementation), Aaron Brunstetter (interface and d20) and Huy Nguyen (interface and magic system).

GCM:

Starting off, please give the basics of The Temple of Elemental Evil’s plot.

Tim Cain:

The story begins ten years before the player enters into it. A great temple devoted to the worship of a malign demoness had grown in power, and the combined army of several good nations was needed to defeat her priests and their minions. For ten years the nearby villages had enjoyed a relative peace, but recently bandits have been disrupting trade, and there is talk of darker, more malevolent creatures in the area. For different reasons depending on the party alignment of the player’s group, the player will get involved in the story of the temple’s attempt to rise to power once again.

GCM:

Please give our readers some sense of the freedom they’ll have in The Temple of Elemental Evil in terms of character alignment, moral choices, and how this freedom affects the overall game.

Tim Cain:

There are two kinds of alignment in the game. The first kind is the standard D&D concept of character alignment. Each character picks one of the nine alignments, and this determines the character’s outlook on life. We check for this alignment in dialogs, to give special choices to particularly aligned characters, and with aligned magic items, especially weapons, to determine how effectively the character can use it. The second kind of alignment is party alignment. Party alignment is your way of telling the game what kind of characters you are making and how you intend to act. The game reacts to party alignment by changing the starting location of the game, which gives your party its reason for adventuring, and by changing dialog options and storylines in the game. The game has several possible endings, some of which are restricted to certain party alignments. Your selection of party alignment will also restrict what alignments of characters you can add to your party. You can only pick character alignments that are at most one step away from the party alignment. For example, if you select “True Neutral” as your party alignment, then the five alignments of “True Neutral”, “Neutral Good, “Lawful Neutral”, “Neutral Evil” and “Chaotic Neutral” are highlighted, which means you can add characters of those five alignments to your party. Note that some party alignments preclude certain classes with alignment restrictions. For example, monks cannot be in any chaotically aligned parties because their alignment must be lawful, and paladins cannot be in any evil or chaotic parties. In fact, paladins provide an additional restriction in that they will never group with an evil character. So even though a “Lawful Neutral” party could contain Lawful Good and Lawful Evil characters, such a party cannot contain both a paladin and a Lawful Evil character. Once one such character is added to the party, the other is prohibited.

GCM:	Please give us a feel for The Temple of Elemental Evil’s scope and length.
Tim Cain:	It’s hard to say, given the non-linearity of the plot and the various side quests that can be skipped. I am guessing a 30-40 hour game play, with the caveat that some people will skip things and play through faster, and others will do every quest in an area before moving on, and therefore have a much longer play time.

GCM:	Have you been pleased with the public’s response to The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure thus far?
Tim Cain:	For the most part, yes, I am pleased. There seem to be a lot of people playing and enjoying the game. But I do wish we had had more time to fix the bugs that people are uncovering (that we should have found by ourselves). It seems that every game I make is so complex that shipping it in a bug-free state just doesn’t happen – but that’s the goal.

GCM:

In reading over the reviews for The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure, are there any important features or gameplay elements that you feel have gone unmentioned / under explored? If so, please tell us a bit about what they are and what they add to the game.

Tim Cain:

Overall, the reviews seem very fair. But several reviews have surprised me, in that it appears the reviewer did not spend much time with the game. For example, one review lamented the lack of user-definable hot keys, which the game has! And this fact is not buried in the manual – it’s listed on page 1. Another reviewer said there were only a dozen NPC followers in the game, when in fact there are 35. And another reviewer complained that the dialogs had fewer options that he wanted, but he wasn’t using characters that possessed dialog skills (like Diplomacy or Bluff). There are over a hundred dialog trees in the game, and more than 70 make use of at least one dialog skill, and some use three or four. If you talk to NPC’s in the game using a character with no points in any dialog skill, yes, you will receive far fewer options than with a character that has these skills. ToEE is a complex game, and part of its richness is that it rewards those people who seek rewards. For anyone else, the game is a rich, tactical combat simulation.

GCM:	How pleased are you with the retail version of The Temple of Elemental Evil and what, if anything, do you feel could use some tweaking?
Tim Cain:	As I said, I wish we had had more time before the game shipped. We are working to fix the bugs people have found, mostly the crashes and quest problems. There are also some inconsistencies with the 3.5 rules that we want to work out too.

GCM:	Above all else, what new features and/or refinements does The Temple of Elemental Evil introduce to the RPG genre of which you are most proud?
Tim Cain:	I think ToEE has the best implementation of D&D combat ever made on a computer. Our turn-based combat is really fun to play, and there are loads of tactical options to consider. I also think our implementation of feats, skills and spells is quite large, and we have a darned good online help system. In fact, our game is a good basic engine upon which to build a lot of great D&D adventures.

GCM:	What is The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure’s future? Can we expect to see additions made via downloadable patches and/or expansion packs?
Tim Cain:	We are working on a patch now, which Atari will have to QA and copy protect. Expansion packs and sequels are up in the air.

GCM:	Thank you for your time. Would you care to close this interview with any last thoughts or impressions for our readers?
Tim Cain:	People are just starting to finish the game and discover the multiple endings. I heartily suggest playing the game more than once, with very different characters each time. The game can end in very different ways...

---