The Temple of Elemental Evil Updated Impressions

At a recent press event held by Atari, we had the opportunity to take an updated look at The Temple of Elemental Evil, the Dungeons & Dragons PC role-playing game from Troika Games. The game seems to be coming along quite well, and its interface is now finalized, including options like the game's ironman mode. Ironman mode lets you save your game only once, and while randomly "rolling up" your characters' ability scores for attributes such as strength, dexterity, and intelligence, you get only one "roll" of random numbers.

When creating a new character, once you roll up your attributes, you can drag and drop whichever numbers you prefer to the appropriate attributes, then move on to choose your character's race, gender, height, hairstyle, class, and alignment--one of the most important choices you'll make in the game. The game will include a total of nine different introductory sequences (one for each alignment)--and your choice of alignment will affect the game's conclusion and which adventurers can join your party. You can also choose which deity your character worships, as well as your character's skills and feats dictated by the new-and-improved 3.5 Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules; then finally, you choose your character's portrait, name, and voice.

As we saw, the character "ego" section, which is essentially a chronicle of your character's exploits, is now complete. The "ego" section makes an in-depth record of how many monsters your characters have killed, how much damage your characters have dealt in battle, and so on so that hardcore Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts can experiment with and fine-tune their characters and classes. In fact, the game is currently content-complete, so the developer is now in the process of fine-tuning various aspects of the game and is confident that the game will meet its scheduled release date of September 23.