Game 278: Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (1991)

I think this is the last time we hear about the "legend series."

      

Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon

United States

Westwood Associates (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS, 1992 for Amiga, 1993 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 2 January 2018

Eye of the Beholder II was released in the same year as its predecessor, and I have book-ended the year with the two games, but the more important aspect of Darkmoon's positioning is going to be the contrast we see with the first game of 1992, Ultima Underworld. I don't want to spoil my opening paragraphs for Underworld, but let's just say that it loudly sounded the death knell for the very sort of game that Darkmoon represents. The genre didn't die immediately, of course. We'll still be looking at tile-based games in abstract dungeons into the mid-1990s at least. A whole bunch of them are in the pipeline right now and will be released in 1992, including Might and Magic IV, Wizardry VII, and The Dark Queen of Krynn. These will be fun games. But after Ultima Underworld (and Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM on the action side), no one's going to be complimenting "wall textures" anymore. Any serious developer is going to quickly jettison discrete movement in 10-foot blocks with only four facing positions. Eager players finding Darkmoon under the 1991 Christmas tree don't know it, but we're simultaneously at the apex and end of an era.

I will be sad to see it go. I love the immersive, realistic near-simulation dungeons that Ultima Underworld introduced. But I won't be hand-mapping them. There's something enormously satisfying about my mapping process. I love drawing walls and annotating squares, even though I know I'm recording all this detail for no one. Why do I need to know that this square had a treasure chest when I've already opened it and I'll never be coming back? Who am I making these maps for, exactly? Not you; there are already dozens of examples of the maps online, probably more accurate than I'm making. Not myself; in the unlikely event that I ever play this game a second time, I'll almost certainly throw away the maps and create them anew. But purposeless as they are, I wouldn't dream of not making them. The enticement of one more square, one more room, one more corridor is what turns midnight to 03:30 in what seems like seconds. It's possible that I'm more addicted to mapping than the game itself.
          

The sequel starts with a lightly-animated sequence.

        
Eye of the Beholder II uses essentially the same engine as I, which itself owes a lot to Dungeon Master (1987), the first first-person game to break from the Wizardry template by pairing tiled movement with real-time combat. The system allows a player's digital dexterity to make up for poor character attributes or low levels, which of course has some interesting implications when it's applied to the Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. "Armor class" almost becomes a superfluous concept when the player can just side-step enemy attacks. We've come to call a particular pattern of movement the "combat waltz": attack, side-step, turn, wait for the enemy to walk into the adjacent square, attack again, side-step before he can turn to face you, and so forth until he's dead. You have to have at least a 2 x 2 space to do it, but as long as you don't mess up the pattern, you can eventually slay a titan with a pencil. Although that might not be as possible in Darkmoon for reasons we'll talk about.

Eye of the Beholder had a party of up to 6 characters (a mixture of player-created characters and NPCs) explore the sewers beneath the city of Waterdeep to destroy the threat posed by a beholder. During the process, they found some pretty cool equipment and went from Level 1 to at least Level 7.
          

"...and the three other losers accompanying my friend."

       
The sequel starts with the victorious party enjoying a night in the tavern, when all at once they're summoned to the residence of local archmage Khelben Blackstaff, who tells them that a threat is emerging from nearby Temple Darkmoon. Several people have disappeared in the area, including an archaeologist named Wently Kelso. His journal was discovered by a captain of the city guard, investigating the disappearances, and it describes Kelso's search for a village named Torzac, which had been conquered by the Drow long ago. Khelben sent a scout to investigate Darkmoon, and she never returned. He now asks us to take over the investigation and teleports us to a forest near Darkmoon.
        

Do you think I could get a fireplace like that constructed for my house? For how much?

      
The game gives you the ability to create new characters or to import the victorious party from Eye of the Beholder. (And you can import the four characters you created or any of the NPCs in your party at game's end.) If you create your own, you have the usual AD&D races (human, elf, half-elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling), classes (fighter, ranger, paladin, mage, cleric, thief), attributes (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma), and alignments. You have the usual race restrictions, such as only humans can be paladins and only non-humans can be multi-classed. The game uses AD&D second edition for its rules, so there aren't any level caps based on race. You choose a portrait from a small selection.

As usual, you can "modify" your starting attributes "to match a favorite AD&D® character," which of course no one ever used to cheat every attribute to 18 or higher. Re-rolling (or manually modifying) can get you some pretty high hit-point scores, too. I only had to hit "reroll" a few times to get offered 69 hit points for a Level 7 paladin, compared to 55 hit points for the Level 9 paladin I imported.
      

Cheesing up a new party member.

    
An imported party starts with a reasonable advantage in power and a significant advantage in equipment. New characters begin with 69,016 experience points, enough for Level 7 for single-classed characters and Levels 5 or 6 for multi-classed characters. My imported characters started with 179,000 experience points, enough for Levels 8 or 9 for single classes and 7 for multi-classes. The cap in this game is Level 13.
        

As far as I can tell, the only things I lost were "luck stone medallions," plus a bunch of keys and quest items.

           
New characters get some packets of food and potions, plus a mixture of appropriate weapons and armor, most regular, some enchanted at +1. The imported party, on the other hand, starts with almost all of their equipment from the first game, including some very high-leveled magic items. I'll cover what I have below.

My party from Eye of the Beholder consisted of:

• Starling, a lawful good human female paladin. She has a long sword +5, banded armor +3, regular leather boots, shield, and helmet, and a Ring of Protection +3. Rings of Protection don't seem to stack with magical armor, so shortly after the game started, I gave it to Gaston.

• Bugsy, a chaotic good dwarf male fighter/thief. His primary weapon is a +5 polearm, but somehow that doesn't stop him from carrying a +1 shield, too. In his inventory, he has a +3 long sword, a +3 axe, a +3 mace, and a spear. I don't know why I'm carrying around so many extra weapons except that it seemed wrong to just drop +3 stuff. He also has a Scepter of Kingly Might, which can be wielded as a weapon, but I have no idea how it compares to other weapons. It doesn't register as magical when I cast "Detect Magic," so maybe it's just useless. Another mystery is a "Ring of Adornment," which is magical but seems to have no effect on statistics.

       

My fighter/thief and some of his inventory.

     

• Marina, a neutral good elf female mage. She's wearing a magic robe, a helmet, leather boots, Bracers of Protection +2, and a Ring of Wizardry that confers extra spells. There's a long sword +4 in her inventory even though she can't use it. Her weapons are a bunch of daggers and knives that she can throw, including a dagger +3.

• Gaston, a chaotic good half-elf male ranger/cleric. Oddly, he doesn't have a single magical weapon or armor item, just regular plate mail, helmet, leather boots, and a bow with 21 arrows in the quiver. He's wearing another mysterious Ring of Adornment and a Ring of Feather Fall and an amulet that doesn't even register as magical. He has a bunch of scrolls that I never used from the first game. If I ever need him in melee, he can wield many of the extra weapons that the other characters have, including the swords--I guess his ranger abilities override his cleric restrictions.

      
After I started playing, I checked the original game and saw that many of my magic weapons had names there. My long sword +5, for instance, is called "Severance" there. The import process kept the weapons' pluses but not their names.

The character names come from "Best Picture" nominees for the Academy Awards in 1991. I guess I didn't have room for The Prince of Tides.
         

The small forest map.

      
The game begins within a small forest, which in some reviews gives the game extra credibility for featuring an "outdoor area," but it functionally isn't because the trees serve as "walls" and you can't really roam very far. It's a dungeon with outdoor wall textures. The forest is crawling with dire wolves, which are easy but respawn frequently. In the northeast section of the forest are a bunch of shallow graves which may mark the burials of the recent missing persons; if so, it was awfully nice of their murderers to erect grave markers. A secret passage through one forest path leads to a small underground area with a "Blur" scroll and some magic leather armor.
          

Dire wolves supply grinding opportunities in the forest map.

         
We meet an old woman in the forest who offers to take us to the temple, which is accessible from two different directions. At the temple entrance, we meet two friendly priests named Nadia and Joril, who invite us to stay and relax. Nearby is a troubled woman looking for her lost sister, Calandra. The sisters are probably the two "warrior women" mentioned in Kelso's journal.
          

You just know these guys are evil.

      
It turns out that Nadia and Joril won't let us penetrate far into the temple, so it's clear that we're going to have to kill them to proceed. I don't like the idea of being the aggressor, but fortunately the game solves the problem for me when I accidentally smash some stained-glass windows while fooling around with the controls. The two priests attack and we kill them.
         

I was trying to capture the lightning bolt killing Nadia, but I was a split second late.

      
The map with the temple entrance turns out to be very small--only 17 squares. There are stairways up and down, a teleporter, and something called the "Seal of the Four Winds" that's either a decoration or an actual "seal" we'll have to open later. The stairs up go to a corridor with a guard and two locked doors, neither of which respond to lockpicks.

They were only useful about three times in the first game.

      
The teleporter goes to a small area with an ankh cross and a promise to resurrect slain characters--up to three times.
       

I think those words are antonyms.

      
That leaves the stairway down. It leads to a larger dungeon area with several guards to kill. The game starts to introduce its puzzle conventions, offering keyed doors, levered doors, and doors that open when you weigh down a pressure plate.
          

Weighing down a plate with a rock to open a door at the end.

      
In a jail cell, I find a halfling thief named Insal the Quick, and he joins my party. Insal is mentioned in Kelso's journal as a guide that Kelso hired but later fired so he could move more quickly. I give him some knives and rocks to throw in combat and leave him in the rear ranks.
            

Insal's statistics. You really can't trust these chaotic neutral types.

      
There are a lot of barrels that we can smash in this area, most of them providing food. Every character has a food meter, but since one casting of the cleric's "Create Food" completely fills it for everyone, there isn't a lot of point in carrying food.

Combat, which I'll cover in more detail in a later post, has been easy enough that I get a bit cocky and stop paying attention to my characters' health meters. This came back to bite me when I opened a new door, entered into combat with a couple of guards, and suffered a wholly unnecessary death. I hadn't saved for about 10 minutes, so this seems a good place to stop my first session.
           

Time to waste one of my three resurrections!

       
From my initial foray, I can report:

• It may be an emulator issue, but the game is horribly unresponsive to my keypresses, particularly when trying to turn. There are times I have to pound on the "7" or "9" keys on the numberpad (to turn left and right, respectively), half a dozen times to get one turn. This is going to have some implications for "combat waltzing."

• So far, NPC interaction has been more verbose than in the first game. I also like that most enemies have a line of dialogue or two before just attacking you, creating what I called a "contextual encounter" in a long-ago post.

      

Contextual encounters are so much more fun than simply being attacked.

      

• This game also has a lot more dialogue from your own characters. They make frequent remarks that fill in bits of lore or provide hints like the locations of secret doors. For instance, when we entered the dungeon beneath the temple, Marina noted that the entire place had been built by the Drow, although they disappeared a long time ago.

         

Some interesting, if ultimately unhelpful, dialogue.

     

• The series still doesn't require any light sources.

• Clicking on things often gives you a little description. I don't remember this happening in Eye of the Beholder.

        

"I hope nothing happens to it."

       
So far, the game seems to be destined to feature a lot of small interconnected areas rather than large levels, but perhaps this will change as I move forward. I'm curious if there are hidden "special quests" in this game the way there were in the first.

I'm also curious, of course, whether a beholder is going to have anything to do with the game, or whether they're just capitalizing on the first game's popularity. The Gold Box games avoided what TV Tropes calls "artifact titles." (Although Curse of the Azure Bonds did briefly feature the Pool of Radiance and thus had a legitimate claim to Pool of Radiance II.) There's no way SSI is going to keep a beholder relevant for three straight games, right?

 Time so far: 3 hours