Saturday, October 22, 2022

Dungeon Master II: Won!

 
The endgame cinematic reveals the real villain, and it doesn't make much sense.
       
I was pretty close to the endgame when I wrote last time. There were only two more levels, and one of them (the roof of Skullkeep) was completely open and flat. The other wasn't even a complete level, although like the others it was packed with puzzles.
   
The fun started shortly after I arrived from Level 3 and found a locked door with a keyhole. There was a water source in the area and a pentagram back to town. The first "puzzle" involved a corridor of five squares with electrical pylons on both walls. Blasts of electricity arced across the corridor in a cyclical pattern, with a brief pause between blasts. It took a couple of reloads to get the timing right, but with the "Speed" spell active, I was able to just fly through. A switch on the other side turned them off.
      
Can't I just hack through that conduit?
     
The room on the other side had an alcove with a couple of keys. I picked them up and found myself sucked into some kind of magnet in the square just before the alcove. Nothing I did would release the party from the squares. I tried several spells, dropping everything, and a few items. The only thing that worked was to throw one of the keys back into the alcove.
   
Some experimentation revealed that the onyx key was the one I needed for the locked door. The other was a skull key. At first, I thought I could just open the door with the onyx key and then take it back and swap it for the skull key. Unfortunately, removing the onyx key from the lock just caused the door to close. I forgot about the skull key for a while and just explored the area beyond the door. I soon found a ladder that, when lowered by a lever, took me back to the third floor. With this new way of accessing the interior of Level 4, I no longer needed to keep the onyx key door open, so I returned and traded it for the skull key. 
       
Trapped in some kind of gravity well.
    
The center room on Level 4 is an open 7 x 7 area. In the center is some kind of enormous, pointed stone set on a kind of receptacle with electronic indicators on it. A path of square tile (the rest of the room is more rough-hewn) leads south to the corridor, at the end of which is some kind of gate.
  
There are four switches in the room. The first is in an alcove at the north end. It causes a lightning bolt to shoot from a box with a couple of electrical coils on the north wall. The bolt goes directly to the stone and shoots down the walkway to the gate, but by itself it apparently isn't enough.

Two other switches are on the southeast and southwest walls, right next to two fireball launchers. When activated, they launch fireballs that shoot completely past the stone on the right and left sides. I figured I'd have to find some way to angle them into the stone. I started hunting around and, sure enough, there were a couple of reflectors behind a locked door to the west.
    
The final level and the setup of the final room.
     
To open the door, I had to use the skull key in a keyhole. This activated a teleporter that took me into the small room with the two reflectors, a brazier, and a table. The problem was, there wasn't room for anything else. I couldn't even leave the square I landed in, let alone make my way to the other side of the locked door. Among all the items in the room, I knew the table was the only destructible one, but it was at an angle from the party, so I couldn't hit it. Then it occurred to me that's exactly what reflectors are for. By shooting arrows or spells into the reflector in front of me, I could angle them to hit the table and eventually destroy it. This gave me enough room to get to the door and open it, and then to push the reflectors out of the room and into the stone room, angling them so they would reflect the fireballs into the stone.
   
Moving a reflector into place as another goddamned minion appears.
   
Once I got them all set up, I pulled the switches. The two fireball launchers worked fine, but suddenly the electrical current was no longer running. I figured it must have something to do with the generator, so I returned to the generator room on Level 1, and sure enough, it had stopped running. Down in the basement, I found that some enemy minions had arrived and driven away the cyclops-golems, who were no longer feeding the furnace. I killed the minions and the golems got back to work.
   
I had to kill about 50 minions while exploring Level 4. They essentially never stopped coming. As I covered last time, I found them horribly annoying, although I have to admire how the game has them work against you by undoing the puzzles you've already solved. I'm not sure that's a "first"--I'd have to look through my list and think about it--but it's certainly rare. Back on the unfortunate side, the minions were the only enemies on this level, and unless I'm already misremembering, they were also the only enemies on Level 3.
   
Anyway, back in the portal chamber, I got both the lightning and fire hitting the stone, then went into the corridor to the south and threw the switch. A wormhole appeared in the middle of the gate, showing me a black void on the other side with a blue pathway.
      
Gates to another world!
     
I didn't go in right away. I had a hunch the endgame would be on the other side, and yet I'd found another ladder up. I figured I'd check the next level before proceeding further. The ladder went to the roof of the keep, which was swarming with those horned slug archers that I'd faced on Level 2. Each one had a quiver full of slayer arrows and began pelting the party immediately.
  
In the center of the roof was some kind of electrical contraption. It had a lightning rod on top and four coils in the corners. I couldn't find any way at all to interact with it. I don't know what it does. I get the impression that the electricity on the level below is powered by the generator. If the lightning rod is meant to be a fourth power source, the stone doesn't need it.
         
One big waste of time.
       
I spent some time clearing the slugs, having to resort to a bit of ladder-scumming, but I eventually got bored and decided to try the final area. Before I did, I refreshed my memory of the game's backstory, as I had lost track of what I was doing a long time ago. The stone, the energies that power it, and the generator that produces those energies must be what the backstory calls the "ZO Link." Some evil entity is trying to cross "the void" to our world. The old woman had told Torham to turn on the ZO Link and use it to enter the void and "attack him there before he attacks us here!" The framing story doesn't mention who "he" is, but elsewhere the manual gives the name of your foe as Dragoth.
   
As I entered the void, I found only more minions at first, but then, across an expanse of nothing, I saw a large character who looked credibly like a "Dragoth." He started hurling missiles at the party, so I tried to find a way over to him. The void area has a number of platforms connected by pathways that appear and disappear. I had to time crossing the pathways to reach Dragoth's platform. I fell a few times, and even more during the battle with Dragoth, and falling seemed to take the party to a random location back in Zalk. Sometimes I landed in Skullkeep; sometimes I landed in the graveyard or some part of the wilderness. I mostly reloaded these times rather than make my way all the way back to the top of the keep.
       
Dragoth across the void.
   
I eventually made it to Dragoth's platform. The original Dungeon Master served up a difficult, chaotic final combat, and this game certainly lives up to that precedent. Dragoth blasts the party with devastating magic attacks, including "Poison Field," which screws up the battlefield. He has a spell that shoves the party a square backwards and I think he can also perform a separate physical shove if he gets adjacent to the party. I had a hard enough time not walking off the platform--god, I grew to hate the screaming sound effect when the party falls--let alone avoiding his shoves. He is excellent at dodging spells, and when he doesn't dodge them, he often casts the "Reflective Mist" spell and sends it hurling back at the party. He continuously summons minions to annoy and distract the party and whittle down their hit points. Finally, if he gets too low on hit points, he goes through the portal to his homeworld to chug some potions (I didn't know what he was doing at the time, but a spoiler site told me about this later).
    
Dragoth, about to shove us off the platform.
    
I tried several strategies, including various offensive and protective spells. I tried summoning my own minions, but he killed them almost immediately. I tried dodging around him and using physical attacks, but even when I avoided his attacks, I got walloped mercilessly by his minions, and before long, he would manage to push me off the platform. I'd tried casting my own "Reflection Mist," but Dragoth just shoved me out of it. Everything happens so fast that there's very little time to line up spells, let alone enter your inventory and drink healing potions and such. Maybe some players can navigate this battle effectively, but it destroyed any illusions I had about having achieved any proficiency with dodging and attacking.
     
The infuriating thing is that the game gives you no clues as to how many hit points an enemy has and how much damage you've already done. In my multiple attempts to destroy Dragoth, I didn't know if I'd come close, or if I wasn't doing any damage at all. Even worse, I wasn't sure he was beatable. I thought for a while that maybe there was something I hadn't done that makes him vulnerable. Maybe I needed to follow him into his homeworld (you can't get through the door), or do something with the lightning rod on top of Skullkeep (spoiler sites, consulted after I won, confirmed it does nothing). Until he died, I didn't know any of this. I wasn't even 100% sure I was fighting Dragoth. For all I knew, it was just some intermediary minion, and I'd need to kill him, go through his portal, and scale another 10-level tower.
         
A portal to another world. Alas, it will not let me through.
    
I considered various tactics and strategies:
   
  • Spend more time with the game's various weapons and make sure I have the most damaging ones.
  • Spend more time with spells. Perhaps there's a particular spell that devastates Dragoth or protects from his attacks (an "Anti-Push" spell?) that I don't know because I still don't know what half the spells do.
  • Attack him for as long as I can, then run away and heal before trying again. Maybe he doesn't heal while the party does--although I think most enemies do.
  • Go back to the surface with my fat purse and load up on usable magic items (incidentally, the two magic boxes, which I saved, don't seem to freeze time in the void).
  • Grind some more levels.
  • Stand near the safety of the entrance portal and just fire spells across the gap at him. This would give me more opportunity to line up spells and duck through the portal to heal, but he's so good at avoiding spells that I think it would take forever. 
   
The problem with all of these is that they involved dealing with dozens more minions, and I was just sick to death of them. 
      
Trying to stop the minions by blocking a portal with a reflector. They just moved it aside.
    
So I'm afraid I won in a kind of cheating way. I know this will upset and disgust many of you; you're just going to have to learn to accept it for any game whose success relies on quick hand-eye coordination. I wouldn't resort to this in a turn-based game. But there are times I just don't have the dexterity to win an action-oriented battle like this. Maybe if everything was controlled by the keyboard.
   
In my winning battle, I used various protective and buffing spells, some poison attacks, and a lot of fireballs. I fought him for about 30 seconds, then stopped to save if my actions had been mostly successful. Another 30 seconds, then save again. If I fell off the platform or took too much damage or wasted too many spell points casting spells that didn't work, I reloaded. Even doing this, I couldn't defeat him without losing Seri and Cletus and nearly losing Saros. I had Cletus and Saros attack with melee weapons in the front while Torham and Seri used "Fireball" spells from the back, although eventually I had to stop because towards the end of the battle, he started reflecting almost all of them.
         
Near the endgame, Dragoth returns from his realm.
      
I frankly don't know what ultimately killed him. I was about to reload when from several squares away, he started shouting "No! No!" and then the endgame sequence took over. I think maybe he wandered into one of his own poison fields or walked in front of one of his own minion's spells.
   
The endgame offered a cute animated video. Dragoth gets teleported to a cave somewhere, likely in his own world. He materializes and kneels before a robed man sitting in a large chair between two braziers. "Dragoth!" the mysterious figure says. "What news do you bring?"
    
"Theron's champions are more powerful than I expected, Lord Chaos," Dragoth rasps.
      
Dragoth explains himself to Lord Chaos.
     
"Failure," Lord Chaos responds.
   
"Yes."
   
"You know my price for failure," Chaos says as he reaches into a bowl, pulls out a slimy worm creature, and pops it in his mouth. As Dragoth protests, Chaos surrounds him with magical energies and turns him into a slithering reptile, the same kind that I fought several times in the game. I see from spoiler sites that it's called a "tiger worm." It runs circles around the floor.
        
The fate of Dragoth.
    
Chaos continues: "So, Theron, we are enemies again. How long will your champions survive this time?" Roll credits.
   
This denouement is clearly meant to tie the sequel to the original game, but I don't really understand how. Why did Dragoth refer to us as "Theron's champions," and why does Chaos address his last comment to Theron? Theron doesn't appear anywhere in the backstory or in the game itself, nor is there any NPC who could plausibly be Theron in disguise. And why is Chaos even still around? The whole point of the first Dungeon Master is that both pure Order and pure Chaos were evil, and to complete the quest, Theron's champions had to fuse the two halves back into the Grey Lord again. 
        
Well, surely the answers will come in Dungeon Master III. In the meantime, share your strategies for winning the final battle, and I'll try to conquer Dragoth more legitimately for the "Summary and Rating."
   
Final time: 37 hours

66 comments:

  1. 37 hours when it's a 15 minute game ;)
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aOI2qjZk_Iw

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    1. Well, that guy must have played and replayed the game so many times in order to reduce the speed run to 15 minutes that in sum, he probably played a lot more than 37 hours.

      He uses a bug to get all of a shopkeeper's inventory, then uses the money to buy the equipment he needs. So it's not a glitch-free playthrough.

      At the end, he fights Dragoth with a single low-level character. Each attack with a Vorax does about 60 HP of damage on average. Dragoth has 1500 HP and falls after about 25 hits.

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    2. If the CRPGAddict could compress games of 37 hours in 17 minutes, we would probably reaching 2013 right now. And if he would also write each article in 17 minutes, we would be reaching 2021 !

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  2. Congratulations on another victory !

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  3. I don't have anything against savescumming. If a game allows saving anywhere, chances are it was balanced with that in mind.

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    1. I would probably do just about as Chet did here. Give it a few attempts, and if I don't feel or know how well I am doing, take a save when good things happen. As Chet noted before, if you had a more clear idea of weapon power/ability without resorting to extra time testing each one, maybe it wouldn't come to that.

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    2. If it were "save after every successful hit" levels of savescumming I might have issues, but as is this is just using it to save time and not have to do the whole thing perfectly in one go. Time and patience aren't exactly infinite, and taking advantage of methods of saving them, especially when the game gives you the methods, isn't something I'd really consider cheating.

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  4. I played dm2 years ago with my wife,she was a ST dm Fan , but last month I begins to play again and she didnt help me in my Quest!!!! Are all rpgplayers wifes Evil??????????? 😩😩😩😩

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    1. AlphabeticalAnonymousOctober 22, 2022 at 2:31 PM

      No.

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    2. At the risk of supporting a stereotype, I suspect that there are far more single CRPG players than married CRPG players, so most of us will have no experience with this issue.

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    3. That stereotype seemed accurate to me as I was exiting high school in ‘99, but not so much nowadays.

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    4. Second one... buys me vintage computers for the anniversary and Christmas and encourages CRPG playing. First one... umm... Mom used to say "don't say anything if you can't say something nice..."

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  5. I'm actually surprised how small this game is. There's a large outdoors map, but then only four floors that are about 25x25, a small endgame area, and a few side-areas or sublevels. Most games in the genre have 12-15 floors that almost entirely fill a 32x32 map (including EOB3, which felt like it was too short).

    So on the one hand, that's an impressive amount of gameplay they've squeezed into a low amount of maps. On the other hand, it makes me wonder how much time is really spent grinding levels and killing those continually respawning spiky orbs.

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    1. The game's pacing is lopsided. Separating the game into two halves, first the outdoors and then the indoors parts, seems like a mistake.

      The outdoors has lots of fighting, and the respawning is so fast that you don't even feel like "clearing" the areas. You get almost no puzzles until the keep levels, which are incredibly compact and chock-full of pretty challenging puzzles. (I think a DM beginner might have trouble with the puzzles because there are hardly any easy puzzles to learn the ropes.)

      While the keep levels are pretty cool, they're over pretty soon and you suddenly, unexpectedly come upon the endgame. I don't think that the game in total is necessarily too short, but the dungeon levels should have been extended a bit. Like Vince commented on the last post, the game is missing some straightforward dungeon crawling with a nice mix of combat, puzzles and spatial progression.

      I thought the game was at its best for a short while in the south of the overland map, where you go through a graveyard with ghosts and a swamp with moving trees, enter a crypt with some interesting puzzles, and re-emerge outside to find a new shop.

      (Despite the criticism, I like the game a lot. The gameplay just feels very satisfying, and some situations, puzzles and monster behaviours are very surprising and interesting.)

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    2. Why don't I just give you editing privileges, and you can write my "Summary and Rating"?

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    3. Hey, those old computer magazines had another reviewer giving his own opinion in a short insert. Sometimes because the main reviewer was not as nice as the advertiser would have wanted, so the editor finds someone who liked the game in the company and asks him to write his opinion. Never the other way around, of course.
      I thought jokingly that you should do the same, but then realized you do : it is called the comment section !

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    4. Damn, Chet, that was cold.

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    5. Ha. I totally didn't mean it that way. I just meant that Bitmap was perfectly encapsulating my own feelings about the game--not just here, but throughout this comment section.

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    6. Yeah, DM2 is great'ish. Nicely put the finger on it.

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    7. You did make me wonder whether you expressed appreciation or irritation -- or maybe both. :^)

      I imagine that when commenters say similar things to what you intend to write in the next post, you might be the kind of person that will strive to write about those things more succinctly or more eloquently in order to avoid repetition. Which means that us pesky know-it-alls might make your job harder. Well, consider it payback for ignominiously underestimating glorious Dungeon Master back in 2010...! (Just kidding.)

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  6. watched the ending cutscene, very well animated, almost like a real cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWvREIY_D5Y

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    1. AlphabeticalAnonymousOctober 22, 2022 at 2:36 PM

      That is some seriously high-caliber animation for a 1993 computer game! Almost "Dragon's Lair" quality. Thanks for sharing the link.

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    2. @AA that's becasue it's the Ennglish/Dos ending from 1995.
      The original PC-98 version was rather simpler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiodUTLhDAw

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  7. My memory might be hazy here but I do remember winning the final battle without any reloading, just through perseverance. Every time I fell from the platform I healed and came back up. I even picked up the bones of my fallen party members and resurrected them at the altar. Either the boss doesn't heal between the encounters or in one of the attempts I dealt enough damage. The only offensive magic I remember casting were the minions to deal with the opposing minions.

    Can't wait for your upcoming playthrough of Dungeon Master III :)

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    1. Wait, I thought he said it as a joke. Is there a DM3 ?

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    2. Sorry to get your hopes up. I also meant it as a (apparently failed) joke.

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    3. There is, exclusively on the Sega Saturn and in Japanese, but Chet isn't enough of a MAN to learn all 2000+ characters of the Japanese language.
      (in case someone can't tell, this is supposed to be sarcasm)
      Although come to think of it, by the time Chet reaches then there could be a translation of the game floating around.

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    4. I was joking in my entry but I had forgotten about Nexus. The MobyGames entry doesn't indicate that FTL had any involvement with that one. I need to research whether it was actually licensed.

      The interface looks a lot like FTL's DMs, but I can't imagine how it worked with a controller.

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    5. Looks like you dont have to learn Japanese after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_DNU5X2jGg
      in one comment it says that most text is in english.

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  8. In sort of proving my point from the first entry, there's no plausible explanation for the sci-fi elements in the game, which only purpose seem to be the electric traps and annoying minions; let's say, swap them out for arrows and sentient bats, and nothing of value was lost.

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    1. But sci-fi elements are cooler than arrows and sentient bats.

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    2. I don't know, sentient bats sound pretty neat.

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    3. (Sentient Bat clicked ‘dislike’ on this post)

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    4. "no plausible explanation" is exactly why I don't like it too. It's just there, with no explanation or integration into the story or game world. Would have been better left out.

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    5. Sentient bats... "with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads." Mwahaha!

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    6. Aren't regular bats already sentient though? They have senses after all.

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  9. The final fight is difficult for sure. Dragoth has to have high thousands of hitpoints. But I remember it being manageable if you could stay in the center of the platform to avoid falling off.

    The best weapons are clearly Voraxes with their melee attack. Also there's infinite number of them so you can equip four of them in the front line. What proved almost indispensable is the Numenstaff trident for ranged attack. It is harder for Dragoth to dodge its three fireballs in a row.

    I am thinking I had maybe played some older version of the game with overpowered Voraxes as you don't seem to be using them and it is almost impossible not to notice how good they are. And when the game shows you the relative strength of weapons, it shows full 100 % for them iirc. Also I don't remember so many enemy minions, more like a half. But increasing their numbers in later versions doesn't make any sense for the balance of the game so that must be just a memory thing.

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    1. I remember very clearly my party being nigh invincible with four voraxes. After I figured that out, the final battle was almost… easy (along with the entire rest of the endgame).

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    2. For DOS, there's only one version of the game, 1.0. There's a patch for sound/MIDI but no changes to the gameplay.

      (In contrast to DM1, which was patched from 1.0 to 3.6 over the years, with a few gameplay improvements.)

      Chet may have not looked closely at the Vorax weapon from that shop in the east of the overland map, or maybe he didn't try out its "Berzerk" attack. However, while this weapon has the highest attack rating (a nearly full power bar when examined in the inventory, and a value of 70 if looking at the game data), the weapons that he used, Blue Steele and Fury, are not that far behind (60 and 55, respectively).

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    3. That's exactly what happened. I just got sloppy and didn't realize those axes were superior.

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    4. Quite sure a Vorax is a reskinned Hardcleave from DM1.

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  10. You broke with Irene?

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    1. What would possibly have led you to that conclusion?

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    2. AlphabeticalAnonymousOctober 22, 2022 at 9:46 PM

      Maybe the Anonymous contributer managed to confuse you with Thorgal, who posted above? Though that earlier comment did use a rather higher density of punctuation marks (and emoticons) than we usually see on this site...

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  11. I too hate RPG games that suddenly include a required action sequence. If I had wanted to play an action game, I would have done so. Several times I have been forced to abandon a game in progress because I cannot get past a point that requires better reflexes than I possess.

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  12. It seems like a flawed game, but that story about going to "fix" the generator is really cool.

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  13. "Well, surely the answers will come in Dungeon Master III"

    I've never seen any dungeon master 3 released... Or was this meant in a joking tone?

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    1. Does Conflux count?

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    2. I tried Conflux a bit. But the stupid gotcha! traps was a real turn-off. Like when you walk into a corner and click on a book case and behind you appears from out of thin air a monster squad blocking you, that you have no way of defeating at this point. This is not clever design, but design that encourages save scumming.

      I loved Chaos Strikes Back, which was hard, but it was fair.

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  14. Aside from it not making sense, it strikes me as anticlimactic that in the first game you defeat Chaos and in the second game you only defeat a minion of Chaos. More commonly, in a sequel you fight either the same big bad who's out for revenge, or the master of the first big bad. It is rare for the stakes to be lower in a sequel.

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    1. Well, in Lord of the Rings the villain is only a minion of the villain from Silmarillion (I like the sound of that; villain from Silmarillion).

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    2. Yes, and the Silmarillion was published AFTER the Lord of the Rings. So stakes go up in the second work.

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    3. Silmarillion was conceived and written long before LotR.

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    4. This part doesn't bother me so much. I just like the threat posed by the enemy to be proportional to the scope of the story and the level of the players. You can't always keep escalating, especially when you start with a world-ending threat.

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    5. You can't always have the big world ending stuff, you need to throw some smaller threats in there to help keep perspective on the big ones

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    6. That's true, and that's arguably why first games in a series shouldn't be about world ending threats.

      Still, does the game explain in any way why Chaos is a threat to the world in the first game, and NOT in this game?

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    7. Maybe Chaos was "killed"/"banished" in DM1 so he can't act directly and has to send a minion while he recovers?

      Voldemort-style I guess

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  15. While the story doesn't play much of a role in this type of game, it's still regrettable that DM2's story is so banal. The manual tells the player to kill the bad guy -- the player goes and kills the bad guy -- cue the endgame cinematic in a Saturday morning cartoon style where the bad guy's boss threatens revenge. Big whoop.

    In contrast, DM1 had a more earnest prologue in the manual, and there was a little bit of mystery about the Firestaff, Lord Chaos, Lord Order, and how the player needs to figure out how to fuse the two personalities into the Grey Lord again.

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  16. I think I distracted the boss by using a lot of minions on him. But with the reflect and the push-back he was really challenging.

    Since it took me a lot of tries I think I originally saw the ending cinematic by renaming the intro and extro files - that was a trick that used to work on a lot of games back then.

    And yes, it's sort of weird how it goes back to Chaos and Theron without any previous explanations or explicit links to the old stories.

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  17. Dm2 lost the chance to apply new gameplay mechanics, as strategy traps, spell chains, etc, the final combat is veryyyyyy large!!!

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  18. Ah, yes, the insufferable final battle in Skullkeep. Played the game when it came out and had little problem with the combat until that point. I reacted to it much worse than you, though - I just switched the names of the intro and outro animations so that I could watch the ending when the game loads, then called it a day. Insufferable.

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  19. So the developers have caused a lot of frustration with the difficulty spike of the final battle. However, at the same time, it seems to me that quite a few DM veterans complain that DM2 is too easy and too short. This seems to be mostly due to the player's dexterity (similar to an action game), and hardly due to the character's statistics and equipment.

    Personally, I found the final battle (and the optional mass battle against the archer reptiles on the roof) fun and not too difficult. In fact, I'd like more variations of these two battles -- battles with a lot of enemies at the same time, and battles where enemies have more skills like reflecting spells, using invisibility, and so on. More battles like those against the Vexirk king, Dru Tan and Dragoth. But then the developers would exasperate even more players. So what they should do?

    a) Keep the game manageable for players who don't play it like an action game. Reduce the difficulty of the final battle. Too bad for those who already think the game is too easy.

    b) Balance the game for players who are very skilled at movement. But this will probably result in a very negative reception from RPG players who will try the game only to fail later on. Potentially, this means critical and commercial suicide.

    c) Offer at least two difficulty levels. However, going by past comments, many people don't trust that higher difficulty settings in RPGs are fair (seemingly in contrast to difficulty levels in FPS games). Also, this can make it hard for the developers to really exploit the system to the full.

    d) Target skilled players, give the game an aura of high difficulty, and set up a difficult boss battle near the start of the game which makes the game's direction clear to everyone. Like the Souls games. (Also, how about a semi-non-linear game world?) The game should communicate clearly that action game skills are non-negotiable. Hopefully this would deflect some of the criticism.

    I wonder whether approach d) is viable or whether the target audience would be too small.

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    1. IIRC the difficulry varried wildely between the Amiga and the PC version, so that might be a reason?
      (also I think there was one weapon who was very efficient against the final enemy and if you used it, it was much less hard).

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    2. @Bitmap I feel that the rise of real-time strategy games makes this real-time RPG format more marketable to players. RTS was not really a big thing yet when DM2 was released (which is after Dune 2 but still before Warcraft and C&C).

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  20. Dragoth not only LOOKS like Ganon from Zelda 1, but his voice sounds a lot like the Ganon seen in the pair of animated Philips CD-i games. "Join me, Link, and I will make your face the greatest in Koridai... or else you will DIE!"

    Also, I misinterpreted the ending animation to mean that Lord Chaos was turning Dragoth into another of his favourite snack. To be continued... in twenty-four hours or so, on Lord Chaos' other "throne".

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  21. I've always loved the Dungeon Master series even if I never did complete any of them but this shows me I got very close with DM2.

    Sadly after this I found a drought of similar things till 1995s Stone Keep which I look forward to seeing attempted here some time around 2032. Any chance I can bribe you to occasionally pick something from ahead of your timeline?

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