Eye of the Beholder II: Descent

Not barbarians--just interrupted while sleeping.

      

The area one level below the main entrance turned out to have several guard barracks. When I opened them, I got attacked by guys in loincloths. I assumed they were barbarians or something, but after I defeated them, I entered their rooms and found beds with messages that they'd been recently slept in. The attackers were regular temple guards, and I interrupted them sleeping in their underwear.

         

Bugsy was wrong about the "long abandoned" part.

         

I even found a little bed character to put where there are beds.

          

The first time I rested after picking him up, the thief Insal ran off in the middle of the night, stealing Marina's Ring of Wizardry, Bugsy's Ring of Adornment, Starling's long sword +5, and several potions and rations. (Oddly, he left a few things behind, too, like the armor I'd given him and his own lockpicks.) I was tempted to reload and boot him from the party, but generally I believe in rolling with the punches, so I sighed and gave Starling a spare +4 long sword and continued.

    

This is where charity leads us.

     

In his departure Insal left me a note that hinted a secret door near where I'd originally found him. I checked the area and found what he was talking about: a tiny button on the wall that opened the way to a staircase. More on secret doors in a bit.

There were three staircases down from the dungeon one leading to a dead end where a skeleton held a scroll of "Lightning Bolt." The second went to a small corridor that went down again, into a level I've labeled "D-3," or three levels below the main temple.

         

D-3.

         

This level was full of priests and undead. It was the largest level so far, at almost 300 used squares. A northern room was so full of skeleton warriors that it took me almost two hours to fully clear them all. Towards the end, I was convinced they were respawning, but I eventually got rid of them all.

          

Just part of the horror awaiting in that room. I had to lead them out a few at a time.

       

The southern section housed a series of jail cells. Most of them just had bones, but I found living NPCs in two of them. One was a dwarf cleric named Shorn Diergar, who said he came exploring after he had visions of an evil temple. He found clerics who pretended friendliness and offered him hospitality, and then he woke up in a cell. I gladly took him, feeling I could use another cleric, but he didn't have his holy symbol with him and thus couldn't cast spells. I later looted it from a couple of guards. I gave him a sling and a bunch of rocks.

      

The game offers "good" and "neutral" options but no truly "evil" option.

       

The second NPC was a female fighter named Calandra, whose sister had been looking for her when I first entered the temple. I didn't really need another fighter, but I figured it couldn't hurt. I stuck her in the back with a spear and some daggers to throw.

         

But now the other sister is missing.

       

Calandra wasn't in the party long. Elsewhere in the dungeon, we found a set of bones that the game made a point of saying was a "complete set." I figured that meant I could get them resurrected. At the end of the session, I took them back to the ankh on the upper floors, and sure enough they resolved in to an elven mage named San-Raal. He didn't have anything to say as he joined my party, but a mage is more useful in the back ranks than a fighter, so I let Calandra go.

          

San-Raal mutely joins the party.

          

That covers my experiences in broad strokes, now let's get to some of the details. First, the unresponsiveness of the keys is maddening. I'll have an enemy attacking from my right, and I simply can't turn right. Or I want to back up down the corridor to flee, but the "back" key won't work. I think perhaps what the developers did, perhaps in an effort to combat "waltzing," is to make a system by which your movements don't activate until enemies have completed their own actions or movements for the round. There was something of this in the first game by which the game effectively froze until a spell animation completed. Now, it's like it freezes until any animation is completed, and regardless of whether the enemy is actually in view. But that's not quite it, because I definitely have more problems turning than strafing from left to right, and more problems moving backwards than forwards. [Edit: This turned out to be related to the NUM LOCK key. Toggling the key stops the unresponsiveness from happening. I still don't know why.]

As for combat waltzing, it is indeed impossible here, but not just because of the keys. Rather, the AI has changed. Before, if an enemy faced you and you side-stepped, he would reliably step forward on his next step, then turn to face you. Now, he doesn't do that; instead, he mirrors your action by side-stepping with you. You just have to attack, step to the side, attack, step to the side, and so on. On the other hand, it doesn't work well for every creature. Some, like clerics, seem to enter the square already executing their attack. It also doesn't work well for large groups, as they don't move in lockstep here the way they did in the first game. But for single or double skeleton warriors, it was still an effective strategy.

      

The new combat dance isn't a waltz; it's a two-step.

         

Still, the unreliability of combat trickery means that I've had to rely a lot more on spells, particularly buffing spells, than in the first game. This is a good thing. And of course it's more in line with AD&D rules. None of that makes up for how infuriating it is to pound the "9" key four times to turn once.

I haven't encountered any serious puzzles yet, just a lot of locked doors for which I had to ultimately find keys in other places on the level. There are also quite a few secret doors, and of different varieties. Some are illusory and you just walk through them. Others require activation with a tiny button that takes some serious scrutiny to see. There was a new type on D-3, in an area where I kept getting messages that the walls were weak. There was one place where I could bash down the wall and find a staircase behind it.

       

A "secret door" identified by bashing a wall with weapons.

     

My approach is basically:

1. Map out an area without worrying about secret doors. Mark all locations that I cannot pass (for instance, because I lack a key) in yellow. Mark all untested staircases in yellow. Mark any puzzles that I'm not sure about in yellow.

2. Once I'm done exploring every direction I can, look for places that might have secret doors and test them.

The Eye of the Beholder series uses the "worm tunnel" approach by which every corridor has 10 feet of wall space on the sides. Moreover, every doorway takes up a 10-foot block of physical space; it's not just an opening it the wall. Knowing these facts helps you limit where you need to search for secret doors. For instance, in the diagram below, there's no secret door that can open up into "A" because that would create shared walls. There's also no secret door that could open into "D" because even in the middle, where it wouldn't create shared walls, there isn't enough room for the door itself and something on the other side that doesn't create a shared wall. The "B" squares have the same problem.
 

       
Thus, the only interior walls that could house secret doors are marked with "C." (I actually missed a couple, in the northeast section of the middle room and in the corridor going south, but I didn't save the diagram and don't feel like re-doing it.) Obviously, most of the exterior walls could have a secret door, too.

Once I'm confident I've found all the secret doors there are to find, I fill in the color on the map. It's entirely possible that a staircase will later cut through some of those spaces and I'll have to render them transparent again.

Miscellaneous notes:

• There is clearly some respawning happening on D-1. Every time I walk through the level, I face a couple of guards.

• At one point, I found a dagger by clicking on a washbasin. You have to really search the environmental objects in this game.

      

And it was a magic dagger!

       

• San-Raal came with an "Identify" spell in his spellbook, something I would have loved to have for the first game. 

• Still enjoying the object descriptions as I click around.

        

The party comes upon a torture chamber.

       

• I've found two horns that I think will be necessary to break the "Seal of the Four Winds" back on the temple level.

• If you choose to heal the party when you rest, resting can take a long time. I'm glad these characters don't have ages or time limits.

       

That's quite a while to be studying spellbooks in a damp corridor.

    

• Picking up all your daggers, arrows, and rocks after a missile-heavy combat is as annoying as ever.

• I found a couple of journal pages belonging to the missing Wently Kelso, but they weren't a lot of help. One suggested that he might have died on a fireball trap.

       

Some of Kelso's comments.

   

Late in D-3, Khelben Blackstaff contacted me telepathically. We told him what was going on, and he asked us to keep adventuring while he consulted with the Lords of Waterdeep. I can't remember another RPG where the quest-giver periodically checks in on you.

             

I'm not sure if this was triggered by location or experiences.

          

As I close, I'm exploring the third way down from D-1. Starling thinks it's "a secret passage long ago forgotten." Giant spider webs are stretched across some of the corridors, making me grateful for my several Scrolls of Neutralize Poison.

            

I don't want to hack at it with my sword. That's how Frodo got in trouble.

       

So far, I'm enjoying the mapping part a lot, the combat somewhat less, and I'm still waiting for the first really tough puzzle. Of course, it's not impossible that I've overlooked it and am missing half the squares on the mapped levels. Feel free to drop me a hint if that's the case.

Time so far: 7 hours
Reload count: 2