Pool of Radiance: Final Rating

The heroes and I enjoy a strong one after a long quest.

          

Pool of Radiance

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released 1988 for DOS and Commodore 64; 1989 for Apple II, Macintosh, PC-88, and PC-98; 1990 for Amiga and Sharp X1, 1991 for NES

Date Started: 31 May 2011

Date Ended: 11 June 2011

Total Hours: 30

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 65

Ranking at time of posting: 57/57 (100%)
Ranking at Game #453: 451/453 (100%)

      

You don't need to read to the end to get to the important news: Pool of Radiance is the best game I've played since starting this blog. I knew it would be from the second or third day. The variety of encounters is rivaled only by Might & Magic, and the tactical combat system is unparalleled. I loved it.

Here's the GIMLET. Incidentally, I'm drinking an actual gimlet right now--a tradition I will continue when writing "final rating" postings from now on.

1. Game World. It's tough to evaluate this, because Pool of Radiance is part of a larger Forgotten Realms campaign setting that has more history and lore than I will ever read in my lifetime. I grant you that it is not the most exciting of D&D campaign settings. It's a sort-of generic high fantasy realm, large enough to include derivatives from almost every mythology. Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Planescape, and other settings are more interesting (if more confusing sometimes!).

Even judging solely by what is presented in the game, however, the game world is evocative, thorough, and well-built. At the outset, the player knows the important history around the Moonsea and the circumstances that have led to the party's immediate quest. As the game moves forward, the player learns about the land and its lore through conversations with NPCs and entries in the Adventurer's Journal.

Particularly notable is the way that the game responds to character actions. Once cleared, areas remain clear. If you kill Yarash, the land around the Barren River stops being polluted (the game even changes the look of the map). Break cover after sneaking, and the entire area is on alert for you--even after you leave and return. Once you solve quests, you can't do them again. If you make friends with the nomads, they stop attacking you in the wilderness. This sort of dynamic game world is rare in the era. Heck, it's rare even now--most games deal with this issue by constantly propelling you forward and refusing to let you re-visit older areas, where they'd have to program new reactions from NPCs. It's satisfying to reclaim the blocks of Phlan, one by one, and see signs that the entire city is improving from the effort. One quibble: I never did get the guards next to the gates to the slums to stop looking at me suspiciously.

The contrast on these two screens, one from the beginning of the game and one from the end, epitomize the game's attention to an evolving game world.

           
I can hardly think of anything negative to say about this aspect, but I want to reserve 10s for games that offer a truly original experience and really pack it full of lore (e.g., Morrowind, Dragon Age). Score: 8.

2. Character Creation and Development. The first edition AD&D rules didn't offer a lot of customization, and this game strips it down even more. You have your basic set of six attributes, and a standard selection of races and classes. The level caps on certain races are annoying and simply discourage use of those races, and the level caps on mages and clerics--which you reach well before the end of the game--are infuriating. But overall leveling is well-paced (barring setbacks from level-drainers).

My biggest complaint is that the game doesn't use any of the races, sexes, classes, and alignments in a way that changes the game encounters. Perhaps the only exception is that if you have a thief, there's one section where some other thieves show you a shortcut. That's about it.

To make up for the lack of character customization in the adaptation of the AD&D rules, the creators did allow some customization of appearance, which is rather rare even today. I thought the character portrait choices looked silly, but I did appreciate the ability to customize the icons. In games that give you a standard icon, like Demon's Winter, I often forget who's who. And appearance can be an important step in role-playing, allowing you to create (literally) a white knight or an assassin dressed in black. Score: 6.

3. NPC Interaction. Although the game doesn't go so far as to offer "dialog options"--the only game to really offer that so far has been Starflight--it does offer various options at certain NPC encounters. Sometimes these are basic--"talk" or "attack"--and other times they are quite extensive--as when I had dinner with the Zhent commandant and had options to talk about politics, magic, the city, and so on. NPCs like the dutiful clerk, the traitorous Cadorna, and the pious Dirten are memorable even if you don't get to talk much with them.

The ability to take on NPCs in your party is a fun addition. Might & Magic offered it, but once you hired them, they essentially became part of your party. In this game, they still have minds of their own--as the final battle with Tyranthraxus made all too clear. Score: 6.

4. Encounters and Foes. Both rock. I can't think of any other game so far with so much variety in the types of encounters that you face. There's a traitor chained to the wall: do you free him, kill him, or interrogate him? Your mission is to stop the lizard man menace: do you do it by championing the old lizard man against his rival, or by just killing them all? You need to rescue a little boy from the buccaneer den: do you pick the lock and sneak out with him, free some nearby zoo animals to create a distraction, buy him from his jailers, or just kill all of the slavers? This is one of the only games to allow real role-playing options in the way you handle encounters, both quest-based and non-quest-based.

At the same time, the foes are well-described in the game manual and have satisfying variations in strengths and weaknesses. It's hard to call them "unique," because Dungeons & Dragons is the template on which all other games are based, but the creators did do a great job including each monster's unique characteristics. Trolls regenerate and get up if you don't finish them off quickly. Phase spiders are un-hittable every other round. Fire giants shrug off fireballs. Basilisks and medusas turn you to stone--unless you have a mirror. This, admittedly, is no different than Might & Magic. But the tactical combat grid offers you the additional advantage of seeing each foe as a distinct creature instead of "16 skeletons." [Later edit: As Petrus points out below, the encounters in this game are also somewhat unique for the era in that they make sense both internally and externally: you don't find parties consisting of elves, mummies, and trolls strolling together down the Phlan waterfront.]

The ability to parlay with most sentient monsters is a great inclusion, rendered even better by how different creatures react to different options. I loved watching kobolds run in terror when I yelled at them, but I was careful to be "sly" with ogres and "nice" to nomads--at least, if I wanted to avoid a fight. This game ties with Starflight as the highest-rated so far: 8.

5. Magic and Combat. I honestly can't think of many games in the 30-year history of CRPGs whose combat systems I like better than the Gold Box series. It is hands-down the most tactical system I have encountered--a perfect blend of CRPG and strategy game. It only gets better in future games as the number of spells increases and give you more options. Because you can only recover spells by sleeping, and because you can't go to sleep in most places until you've cleared them, the game strikes a good balance between individual-combat difficulty (as in Might & Magic) and accumulation-of-combats difficulty (as in Wizardry). The times that I died in combat, I never thought that my failure was random; rather, I could see how a specific change in tactics would turn a battle in my favor.

Duskfire's end-game spellbook.

The magic system is inextricably a part of the combat system, from the buffing spells you cast before a big encounter to the offensive spells you cast during combat. Although I thought some of the spells were useless, they all work as advertised. I've never quite understood the rationale behind the "memorization" system of Dungeons & Dragons spellcasting, but neither do I mind it. Yes, repeatedly resting and casting "cure light wounds" was annoying at times, but that's my only real complaint.

The turn-based, tactical nature of the combat allows you to really role-play in combat, something you can rarely do in other games. If you decide your lead fighter hates giants, you can have him recklessly charge ranks of them without waiting for support. You can play a mage who fancies himself a melee fighter, or a scared cleric who likes to hide in the rear. You can attack in formation--lining up and moving relentlessly down a hallway--or make it a free-for-all.

A line of fighters blocks the entrance to the hallway to protect the cleric.

I allow, of course, that many later games improve upon combat by offering more interesting and advanced spells and character-specific abilities, liking hiding-in-shadows, setting traps, summoning monsters, shapeshifting, special attacks and defenses, and so on. Yet how many of these later games have a "guard" option, or let you take a swipe at a fleeing enemy's rear, or allow enemies to flee or surrender if their morale gets too low? There are hardly any other games--ancient or modern--that achieve such a perfect blend of melee combat, spells, item use, morale, and (albeit limited) special abilities. Score: 8.

6. Equipment. Not bad but nothing special. There are the standard D&D selections of weapons and armor, with various pluses, and some special items like the "flame tongue" long sword. There are a few magic rings, potions, wands, and such. A couple of cursed items. For me, D&D won't start getting very high scores in this area until the Infinity engine games introduce detailed item descriptions, and even they don't score that high because the location of each magic item, as in this game, is entirely fixed.

Karnov's inventory at game's end.

I did think it was odd that my multi-classed mages could use any weapons and armor, but I don't know whether to regard that as a positive or negative. Ditto the game's odd compulsion to introduce literally every obscure pole-arm. Score: 5.

7. Economy. Oh, dear. The creators did such a good job with almost everything else in this game--how hard would it have been to program a decent economic system? Some of my commenters have opined that the basic problem was that experience rewards were tied to cash rewards, so you had to get a lot of money to get a lot of experience at higher levels. I say: would that have been so hard to change? Or try this: keep the absurd cash rewards, but give me something to buy with it! Why don't any of the shops sell advanced magic weapons and armor? (Magic ammunition would have been particularly welcome.) Why aren't there more encounters where I have to pay someone off? Why don't the temples have a "heal all" option? (The reason I didn't use them for regular healing wasn't the cost, but rather that casting spells individually on each character took as long as memorizing them and casting them myself.)

Just for fun, at the end of the game I sold every piece of jewelry and every gem I had. Since platinum pieces are worth 5 gold, I have 588,409 gold pieces. And that's without even trying--I left most treasure where it lay. To put this in perspective, I could enter Candlekeep 59 times. I could pay 30 thieves' guilds to tell me where the Cowled Wizards were keeping my sister. I could buy Rosethorn Hall in Skingrad 12 times and still have enough left over to furnish it.

The game gets unbalanced economically very fast. I stopped bothering to collect money from corpses before I had even cleared the slums. I left heaps of gold and platinum sparkling in the sun, because they weigh you down.

I don't even think the game gained a lot by incorporating D&D's full selection of coin types. Aside from the beginning stages, the economy is just one big fail. Score: 3.

8. Quests. Quests in this game come in the form of a series of progressive "missions" from the City Clerk, culminating in the main quest to overthrow Tyranthraxus. The precursor quests seem like steps in the main quest but they're not, really. Other than your level, I don't think there's anything to stop you from marching on Valjevo Castle the moment you arrive in Phlan. There are even quests, like slaying Norris the Gray, that never come up as an official mission. There are a couple of quests that you don't get from the City Clerk, but I actually wish there had been more of these. Again, CRPGs won't start to get perfect scores here until they feature multiple quest endings and better roleplaying opportunities, but this game is second only to the Might & Magic series in its variety in this era. Score: 7.

This was before she liked me.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. This is an era in which the best we can usually say about sound is "I didn't turn it off." I'm not claiming the sound in Pool of Radiance is good, but at least I didn't turn it off. There aren't many sounds, but the footsteps are inoffensive, the sound that melee weapons make when they connect is actually fairly satisfying, and fireballs actually sound a little like big balls of fire. The graphics aren't beautiful, but they're quite good for the era--especially the animated monster portraits (apparently copied from the Monster Manual of the time). Characters and monsters are easily distinguishable by icon. The outdoor terrain actually verges on pretty, although the indoor areas--despite having a lot of textures--suffers from a certain barrenness. It's evolving.

As for the controls (all keyboard), I picked them up almost immediately and never had to think about them after that. This is good. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. The game is well-balanced between linearity and nonlinearity. When you first arrive in Phlan, you can pretty much only go to two places: the slums and Sokol Keep. After that, the game world opens up. Although levels and monster difficulty (not to mention the order of quests) keep you on a somewhat limited path, you do have quite a bit of freedom.

I thought the difficulty was just about right. I want to say maybe a little on the "too easy" side, but I think my own CRPG experience might be showing here. I only had to raise dead three times (and once was because of an ill-advised duel), and I only suffered full-party death five or six times. The game was certainly perfect in length. You can tell when I'm ready for a game to be over because I stop making meticulous maps and notes, and I didn't start doing that until literally the last map area. The only thing keeping it from getting a perfect score is that it's not really "replayable": different character choices would still offer the same basic experience. Score: 8.

The final score of 65 puts Pool of Radiance at the top of the heap, 5 points above its next-nearest competitor (the first Might & Magic). We won't be away from the Gold Box series long: Curse of the Azure Bonds comes up in less than 20 games. I remember it even less than Pool of Radiance--I'm not sure if I ever finished it as a youth--so I really look forward to it.

Next up is a sequel to a game that I didn't play on this blog: Questron II.