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I have some very exciting news for everyone, I bought the entire Gold Box series on Steam yesterday which means I will be playing this iconic, prestigious and classic series
I did play a few of these games on release like Pool of Radiance and Eye of Beholder but that was 30 years ago and I imagine things have changed
I will post some questions later when Im going to play around what auto-maps to use and maybe some party build advice but Im looking forward to my impending D&D adventures and experiences
And, oh well, it wasn't that good experience:
1) Small scale exploration got way less interesting; there were 5 segments of the game:
a) Tilverton: after the descent into the thieves' guild, the game greets me with three linear sections (guild -> sewers -> hideout). Here, the dungeon design is still solid enough - a lot of points of interest, search yields results from time to time, multiple safe places to rest. Given the plot, the inability to move freely makes sense.
b) Zhentil Keep: city -> temple -> altar. Of course, the second part of the mission (after getting to the temple) is completely linear. Also obviously, the last phase is filled with repeatable encounters - the only really interesting of them are random encounters with griffons, as they can yield some interesting loot - everything else bar the final boss could just as well cease to exist, for what else awaits me here? The map of the location? Dimswart? Magic mirrors without any consequences? You'd think the game takes place in Dyrwood given how many fascinating things you can encounter here.
c) Yulash: city -> 2-level mound. Peak Azure Bonds design: the city is filled with random, garbage encounters, just like the second part of the mound. Of course, in this entire segment, there are really 5 points of interest (excluding dungeon entrances): barracks, wands (in the city), Alias, Moander, and the final exit with its rough encounter.
d) Hap: pretty decent section, village -> caves -> 4-level tower. Caves had some optionality, I could free the city and then freely rest in the city; and the tower was boring, but at least it had some identifiable encounters.
e) Myth Dranor - the best part of the game; graveyard -> city -> temple. The first two parts were filled with talkative spirits, traps, boons and boosts, and the random encounters were either scarce (graveyard) or easily avoidable (city); both parts were completely open. Then, the temple of Banned, the only place in the game where the inability to rest and handicapping the exploration made sense (given the bond and an implicit time constraint).
There are no puzzles, no riddles, no nothing. Nicely, each area had choices in some form - whether you kill dragons and go for a reward, side with the Red Plumes, or follow Olivia - though their implications seemed to be minor. Also - why in b), c), and d), in the part where I could not come back before whacking the main antagonist, there were no proper places to rest even after committing small-scale genocide? What does exploration reward me with? Maps (sometimes after already exploring the place!) and countless encounters. Why almost all missions and their respective places had eerily similar structure?
2) Streamlined overworld exploration (including cities as hubs) made sense. If they didn't have any idea how to create anything special (and, judging by the rest of the game, they didn't), leaving them in such form was likely the best thing to do. They could've differentiated the cities and their shops a bit, though I'm not sure whether this constraint isn't system related.
3) Money became meaningless from the very start here. It's kind of comical to drop ~2500 pieces of platinum during every visit to the shop in order to be able to move rapidly.
4) Now, the best part; the rewards for random encounters are underwhelming; Money? Irrelevant. Items? Usually generic. Experience? Doesn't make any important difference (level-and-some-other-things-scaling didn't help either; besides, if you fight too much, you'll have your experience cut down by the game's mechanic not allowing two subsequent level-ups - which is wonderful given the inability to return to the city for half of the game). Challenge? From repeated, copy-pasted encounters? Furthermore, those encounters are hard enough to make a quick fight suicidal. The implication: you either grind for naught, savescum for... whatever but fun, or purposefully avoid exploring maps and try to go straight to the point. It's all so tiresome.
5) Combat was more entertaining than in the previous entry; lots of enemies were pretty resistant to magic, and very often I fought parties with varied types and weaknesses of adversaries, requiring a more nuanced approach. Fortunately, the game didn't rely on consecutive fights to make things interesting - the beholder fight and the final one remained very memorable without it.
6) The story was barebones: everything boiled down to killing fellows of questionable moral inclinations (it is even known from the start how many there are), collecting their McGuffins, and then eradicating the even worse fellow.
7) It's nice they added the 'Fix' option, but was it the only thing they saw as infuriating when playing the game? I still can't remember previously memorized spells (which gets worse here given more variety in spells) or have weapon sets. It's comical given they used the exact same engine and barely upgraded its interface, knowing (hopefully) about its legitimate problems.
To summarize, this game was disappointing; it had few improvements over its predecessor and botched multiple things that were outstanding previously.
3) Money became meaningless from the very start here. It's kind of comical to drop ~2500 pieces of platinum during every visit to the shop in order to be able to move rapidly.
Did you miss the magic shops near Dagger Falls, and in Zhentil Keep? they have some useful items, expensive wands, and magical ranged weapons for monsters that are immune to regular weapons.
Did you miss the magic shops near Dagger Falls, and in Zhentil Keep? they have some useful items, expensive wands, and magical ranged weapons for monsters that are immune to regular weapons.
You're right, I didn't see the shop near Dagger Falls, and I rushed Zhentil Keep at the very beginning (later, the city was closed, so I couldn't even enter it). The selection of items in Dagger Falls isn't that satisfying, though.
I played Secret when it came out as a teen…. At the time i was DMing a pnp 2nd edition FR campaign. So instead of throwing lots of baddies at my players, i was finally able to be the bad guy destroyer. Good times…it was VERY satisfying to kill so many Giants, Driders, Banites and other Evil baddies. But future replays…. I never get to the end. 1st playthru was good stuff though.
If you got it on Steam, they updated the packs so that all of them launch into a custom frontend where each of the D&D collection can be accessed. All of the Gold Box games come with Gold Box Companion preconfigured, so that as long as the box for that option is checked in the launcher, it will open the game in windowed mode with the automap in a separate window along with an extremely convenient menu on the top of the game screen where you will see your characters after adding them to the party. Gold Box Companion makes playing the games so much easier; in particular whenever the game directs you to a numbered journal entry, you can just hover the mouse over the top menu bar and select "Journal" then the number of the entry and it will display all of the text right over the game screen.
For me this is invaluable because I only still have a complete boxed copy with all of the inserts for Gateway to the Savage Frontier, so prior to Gold Box Companion I always had to keep separate tabs open for the journal entries and such. It also makes playing these games on Steam Deck possible, though I have to play them in desktop mode to gain access to the extra features.
These games remain among the very best CRPGs no matter how much time goes by. My only issue is that the MS DOS versions of Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds don't have mouse support, and the external keyboard I use to play my laptop on a big monitor is a compact one lacking the number pad, so I can't attack diagonally without opening the laptop up, thus defeating the purpose of my whole desktop setup. There is always the FRUA version or Amiga etc, and I can use my Xbox controller to play the Commodore 64 version thanks to the hero that built the ongoing C64 Dreams project, where he preconfigured every game to work with a gamepad and set standards for modern keyboards. But not being able to take a party through each successive game makes it undesirable for me to play any other version than the DOS ones.
Kind of a pity GOG didn't go the extra mile STEAM did with the preconfigured GBC. Still, it isn't hard to get it up and running. The same can be said for EOB and the ASE.
I haven't either, though I downloaded it some time ago.
By the way Keighn I noticed the recent updated to eXoDOS (6.0) has it so that if you use the light version which is down to only 5GB from 50GB and download FRUA (sort order titled as Gold Box 13), it automatically downloads and configures all of the available modules accessible through the Gold Box Companion FRUA frontend, including the engine hack without having to use UAShell or anything. I already had a manual setup where I downloaded all of the modules and use the frontend to instantly play any of them, but I went to update eXoDOS last weekend and noticed while redownloading FRUA that once it finished and the setup executable was begun that it was a custom version that was inflating a billion trillion things and took several minutes, so I knew something was up. Sure enough when it was ready and I launched it, the GBC frontend came up with the module listing, and the games work without having to do anything else. I wouldn't keep two installations of the exact same thing if it weren't so trivial in size, and its very cool to be able to access the same setup directly from within LaunchBox.
If you got it on Steam, they updated the packs so that all of them launch into a custom frontend where each of the D&D collection can be accessed. All of the Gold Box games come with Gold Box Companion preconfigured, so that as long as the box for that option is checked in the launcher, it will open the game in windowed mode with the automap in a separate window along with an extremely convenient menu on the top of the game screen where you will see your characters after adding them to the party. Gold Box Companion makes playing the games so much easier; in particular whenever the game directs you to a numbered journal entry, you can just hover the mouse over the top menu bar and select "Journal" then the number of the entry and it will display all of the text right over the game screen.
Thanks for describing that. I've wanted try these games out and...eh, got the patience to learn old GUIs, but not the time. Think I'll get the first collection since it's on sale. Maybe Krynn too since the setting sounds cool.
I have.
IIRC it was an OK adventure, but your party and/or parties your met were pretentious wankers that spoke lots of Elvish. Like English speaking pretentious wankers used to throw in lots of French.
I wonder if there is a way to get the old NWN game to work with GBC. Also, does FRUA work with GBC?
I wonder why no one created a Dark Sun Version/construction set. I haven't checked the DSO discord in a long while so no clue is Crimson Sands are still lost.
Spelljammer (which some say is part of the Goldbox series; I say NO, it is NOT!!) needs a damn patch and hell, it too could benefit with a construction set and a GBC touch.
Got Gold Box Collections 1, 2, and some funds had enough for titles with settings that just sounded cool, namely Al-Qadim, Krynn, and Spelljammer. Frankly, Al-Qadim looks like it'll be fun so I'm gonna try that tonight. The artwork in these games is just downright nice to look at, too.
I really wish some of the obscure D&D titles would get ported even if they aren't goldbox or SSI. Sure, they're kind of flops but we've seen console ports all over steam and gog and more. It'd be for the ones who won't emulate or don't have old hardware. Sadly, they would likely not fix bugs or issues either (well, i'm sure they'd not put that damn Stardock from Ubisoft in assuming Ubi would even allow the game to come out). The terror of Descent to Undermountain is painful to play at times. Some of the RTS games are missing as well.
I played and FINISHED DTU. If that is not borderline insane, I don't know what is. And one of these days I'll start on Krynn 1st. None of the Radiance baby steps 1st.
Yes, it does. Not only does it work with it, but when you download GBC it comes with a separate executable that launches a frontend specifically built for FRUA, from which you can download any of the FRUA modules including the engine hacked modules (like the Oriental Adventures games, which feature incredible pixel art and character and monster icons). You just use the basic GBC launcher and setup the game (I think GBC lists it as number 13) by pointing it to your install directory, then use the GBC FRUA launcher to start downloading modules. It does everything for you once you select a module and download it, it is very straight forward and super convenient. In fact I cherish the FRUA launcher just as much as I do the automap and attached features.
So, I have finished the Secret of the Silver Blades:
If I had to enumerate things I deemed problems in Curse of the Azure Bonds, it would look like this:
I) Inability to store money or do anything productive with it - addressed in Silver Blades by adding a well requiring 100 gems for a tip, and adding a bank with a convenient option to pool all my money there or convert it to gems. Now, I didn't need to avoid gathering currency. Nonetheless, past ~midgame money became pretty much obsolete - just like in Pool of Radiance.
II) I was unable to leave four of five major areas normally for more than half of their span; in other words, despite having the ability to pick a mission to solve now, the game was very linear - unless I already knew what awaited me where. In contrast, Silver Blades allowed me to explore the city as I saw fit; I was able to backtrack whenever I felt like backtracking, and the exploration was enriched by teleports strewn across the world. Almost every part of the world was different structurally and offered distinct challenges; mines had their long corridors, the well was a hub for teleports, and the dungeon (at the bottom of the mine) had its riddles or rough encounters. The game became lost in linearity only about halfway through.
III) The unrewarding, sometimes outright punishing exploration characterized by repeatable, meaningless encounters. Here, random encounter density was much lower; even if there were locations not meant to be explored (like mines), information on how to resolve the affair quickly was obtainable.
In other words, they did attempt to improve from the previous entry, and they succeeded - to some extent.
And, specifically about this game:
1) The exploration was uneven. On the one hand, each closed place except the Well - giants' village, the castle, the dungeon, and Black Circle HQ - looked exactly as I expected; there were journal parts scattered among those levels, encounters were fixed, and many pieces of text added a pinch of uniqueness to each of those locations along with distinct enemies. On the other hand, there were huge areas amalgamating those places - and, oh well, they had their fair share of problems:
a) The New Verdigris outskirts were terrible. There were 6 points of interest on a map with 1368 usable fields; it was filled with unskippable, banal encounters and had as uninspired a design as a dungeon can have. Just look at
:
Four 8x7 segments of the map are copy-pasted.
b) The encounter density in the mine was reasonable, and the exploration was mostly avoidable - if you used the well. Still, 10 segments of barely anything framed in ten 100x100 maps?
c) Glacier, part I (before the village) wasn't that bad thanks to the implementation: when a random encounter occurred, flying in any direction other than the one from where the adversaries came made them trail me; and running towards them allowed me to flee again.
d) Glacier, part II (after the village) wasn't just abysmal, it reused the worst patterns from Azure Bonds - pointless corridor filled with unnecessary enemies dropping worthless loot. And it was the only hard part of the game, for all the wrong reasons (it's not hard to make a segment hard if it has indefinite length, no place to rest, and random encounters like {6 mages + 12 legionnaires and other meleefellas}).
Also, the game had some basic riddles, but alas, they were mostly just linguistic garbage, requiring players to guess a word or an idiom outside of the game's context. I don't like those enigmas: they require knowledge of the language rather than the game world, they are practically impossible to brute-force with the game's mechanics, and so they could be considered a separate mini-game. Thankfully, it was possible to circumvent them through combat.
2) Combat also wasn't perfect:
a) The implementation of 'difficulty' leaves a lot to be desired; I noticed the ability to change the difficulty midway through the game, switched to 'Champion', and suddenly half of the random encounters in the mines consisted (solely) of petrification-enjoyers trying to defeat my team of mirror-enjoyers. I didn't have any trouble except for the second part of the glacier.
b) The default behavior of AI is still problematic. Having a companion and casting a 'Stinking Cloud' is asking for trouble. Thankfully, none of the companions were spellcasters - in the last entry, I had to strip the mage from Hap of all area-of-effect spells. SSI's unwillingness to move forward with the engine gets on my nerves.
c) I can't complain about enemy variety, but tactics necessary to beat enemies didn't change a lot from Azure Bonds (this might be more related to the system). My technique consisted mostly of abusing foes with 'Hold Monsters' and 'Fireball' spells.
3) The story was barely relevant, but at least there was something more to it than just going around and whacking Bonds owners. The journal, beautiful as always, didn't really bring anything to the table gameplay-wise. Was there any choice with implications in this game? There was a bit of reactivity here and there - like in the Giants' Village, where defeating giants in the tower ceased the onslaught of raining boulders when walking through a passage - but they were rare and uninteresting.
4) As for the other things, the game introduced a permanent companion, which acts like a permanent companion should - warrior without unnecessary speeches, giving only necessary intel about the world, who dramatically influences the battle without the player's control.
I don't get some of the critique this game gets; one can say it overstays its welcome, but the same can be said about this entire series with its lackadaisical attempts at improving the engine. It's roughly what I would expect from a dungeon crawler set in this system. I had more fun here than with the previous entry.
III) The unrewarding, sometimes outright punishing exploration characterized by repeatable, meaningless encounters. Here, random encounter density was much lower; even if there were locations not meant to be explored (like mines), information on how to resolve the affair quickly was obtainable.
In other words, they did attempt to improve from the previous entry, and they succeeded - to some extent.
In Curse there were finite amount of random encounters in any given dungeon. So if you has Search on you would probably get combat every step until they stopped. While in Secret the total number of high level fighters and mages shatters all suspension of disbelief. An army large enough to conquer the Forgotten Realms chasing a band of six adventurers in a frozen mine out in the wilderness???
Secret of the Silver Blades is where all difficulty disappears. My experience was effortlessly beating frost giants to death for 45 hours and then beating the final boss on my first try. The New Verdigris outskirts are completely inexcusable, and although the quality picks up once you get into the mines, the aggressively linear nature combined with a lack of challenging encounters or interesting puzzles makes me never want to play it again. I'll just load up Wizardry 6 if I want a dungeon crawl through a castle.
Unless you come back to it. I remember exploring caves by some unremarkable village (Essembra?), going down the dungeon, and when I came up, it was filled anew with a fresh set of nine encounters. I could've used the exit attainable by 'Search', but then, why include a location in a game if exploring it is pointless? If I recall correctly, the same applies to, for example, coming up in Wizard's Tower by Hap - which was important as the roof was safe for resting. I think those things reinforced the feeling of linearity this game had - pushing forward always seemed preferable to going back.
And what I noticed:
1) About Exploration:
a) Environments in this game were diverse, sometimes memorable - like Moander's body (especially his heart) or Dark Phlan.
b) Each auxiliary place was properly developed; four fully-fledged locations were built around sidequests (Myth Dranor, Silver Blades Cave, Temple of Tyr, Stockade); Minor sidequests were placed statically (unlike in Pool of Radiance) and somewhat interesting (giving me the ability to rest among other things - unlike in Curse and Radiance).
c) Kaliste's land showcases the widely praised tricks used in Silver Blades:
Note that I didn't bother to map them fully - the game even communicates, after finding all the unique events in one of those nothingplaces, that
. To make things worse, two of them only contained some not-so-special equipment.
d) It's nice to see a game changing its environment after beating the almost final boss (overworld map changes; all places get some additional description; Mulmaster gets an overhaul).
e) The game was pretty nonlinear - I could tackle problems in any order I saw fit, and I could always backtrack to safety. One caveat: I could not leave the land past the pool of darkness without losing stuff; but I could still rest freely, so it was not a huge handicap.
f) Having to switch equipment past the pool of darkness was a logical decision from my perspective, given I already had almost optimal equipment in the previous title, and it was one of the few ways to make encounters anyhow rewarding.
2) Concerning writing, story, and so on:
a) My actions did have some consequences; for example, those situations happen if:
->
->
A similar thing goes for exploring Moander's body and getting the drug or carelessly strolling around Thorne's land before confronting him. I like the amorphic character of those decisions, how wildly different their consequences were.
b) The journal had some implications for the gameplay this time, even if relatively minor - I had to answer the question in Kalistes' Temple using the information from a journal; and this interaction is remarkable:
It's fun to think about this conversation if someone did defer reading the journal in this case.
- We want to kill X, do you know about X's whereabouts?
- Sure, we have X in our party.
c) I liked the organic way of indicating rest-safe places - like
.
d) Enemy spawning places usually made sense - for example, in the Red Tower, in a dome engulfed in cold, no one dared to bother me or interrupt my rest.
e) There were fewer jokes than in Silver Blades, but those two were pretty nice:
and
.
3) Visually, the game is pretty. It's nice they reworked monster icons - not that they were ugly earlier, but looking at them through three games was starting to wear me down. The interface improved quite a bit - the game remembers previously memorized spells, and the game shows characters able to level up in a different color.
4) The game is focused on combat, though. What would I expect from a game focused on combat?
a) Proper documentation - I had to use external resources to get all the interesting data about the benefits of level-ups and (what follows) when to dual-class; also, the manual (and journal) didn't give me a definite answer on which classes are bad (and won't get better). It's quite a problem, given that the endgame seems to be built around very intense powergaming.
b) The ability to develop character as I see fit - Here, there is pretty much a single choice for any character I make: when to dual-class. And I have to wait for ~half the game to really see the results if I dual at level ~20, which, if I'm not mistaken, is optimal given the progression of Thac0 and saving throws.
c) Plethora of abilities or different ways of fighting - Here, half of the singular classes felt handicapped in combat. Fighters and thieves had very few options, clerics were simplistic, and most mages' spells were subpar.
d) Diverse challenges - The game did relatively well in that aspect, though everything got repetitive in the end (since the disposal of the third lieutenant, the only not-so-new enemies were beholders and extraordinarily weak snakes).
e) Rewards for combat - Except for what awaited me within pools, loot was almost non-existent. Thankfully, experience boosts got very significant in this game; but the difference between having a level 25 fighter and a level 35 fighter was barely visible, except for several very specific fights. It could be more meaningful with dual-classing though.
f) Somewhat capable AI - oh well, in this game, pathfinding seems randomized(?) - If my character is behind the wall, enemies usually won't get to it, they will stroll randomly until they'll get close enough to process the ability to get to my character. It leads to some special tactics - take, for example, the beholder fight in the palace of a bad lieutenant (the minor one): There are four beholders, surrounded by some salamanders and margoyles. How to get my melee units to whack beholders before they get to unleash their wicked attacks?
-> Move everyone to a small room below.
-> Wait until some gargoyles get there and pick them one by one.
-> At some point, all units will go to the outer wall by the room - except for slow beholders.
-> Then, hastened warriors can quickly remove exposed beholders (it took me two turns).
Additionally,
- Difficulty levels are scuffed - the difference between them boils down to monsters' HP and (if I'm not mistaken) the damage they deal. Given that winning a battle is mostly dependent on initiative (and winning a war relies on knowing places where I can rest), lowering it helps only in a small subset of fights. Ultimately, I played everything excluding the triple fight and the start of the game on 'champion'.
- I liked that a lot of places didn't have random encounters, and even if they were present, those skirmishes seemed much sparser than in Curse.
- The balancing of combat was insane; if I play the entire game with the same team with minor problems, I expect that team to be able to beat the final boss after some attempts, not to be unable to even finish the second fight without my characters becoming one with nothing. In the end, I lowered the difficulty to the lowest one, still needing quite a lot of reloading. Only during Dave's quest did I figure out that it might be better to have a default level 14 fighter than a max level thief or an illiterate cleric - especially given that I already had a paladin.
5) Potentially the most interesting thing in the entire game was the Dave's Challenge. Unlike the rest of the game, it explicitly expected swapping party members throughout the dungeon. It's a shame I could not really train my characters during the endgame - I tried dual-classing from fighter to cleric or mage, but I only managed to get to the 7th level in the second class until I exhausted my options before going to the dungeon - and within the dungeon, I can only level up four times, for, just like before, I can only level up once during a single training session, and after that, all the remaining experience goes down the drain. What follows, I couldn't really test any interesting builds there, if I didn't use dual-classed characters already. The last pair of fights was pretty simple with a properly assembled team. Also, how was I supposed to guess the 'mystic clue' at the end of a dungeon? I went through all my screenshots in the dungeon and tinkered with any possible password, only to learn (from external sources) that it was all a ?ruse?. The answer didn't make any sense to me (unless they wanted to sell cluebooks).
6) The game had a lot of frustrating bugs (or features, as they like to call them) - combat was oftentimes crashing (specifically, during the fight with the last lieutenant, I encountered multiple crashes, usually when I tried to summon monsters). Sometimes, rest didn't calculate the needed time properly. If your NPC is unconscious at the end of his quest, he won't acknowledge the end of his mission (which drove me nuts in Kalistes' dimension, as I thought I missed something; ultimately, I just restarted the last fight and got to the end of Storm's mission right after). After the death of Akram, strolling through the dungeon yielded multiple messages remarking that Akram was escaping through the dungeon. And, of course, clicking the Escape button during combat always places my character at the beginning of their walk, even if I have already whacked someone, without losing movement points.
To summarize, the scaffolding of the game (everything except combat) was done pretty much just as well as in Pool of Radiance; however, the game is focused on combat, I don't think the system they used is suitable for what they wanted to achieve, and Pools didn't convince me otherwise; the game wasn't helping either with its AI, unbalance, or the need for external sources to get all the information needed to figure out why certain things were harder than they should be. I have an urge to replay this game with a different party just for the endgame, but the main body of a game isn't that challenging, so I don't think I will.
