And I get what I came for: A Dark Moon Key. Ten more minutes of "mopping up," and finally the area is clear. Daring to hope, I enter and turn to my right. I venture back to the room where this nightmare began, encountering no resistance along the way. Over and over I do this, and after 30 minutes I'm getting tired and a little bored and I'm really starting to wonder how many goddamn skeletons there can possibly be in this room, when suddenly, it gets quiet. Slide and swing, slide and swing, and then draw in another group and do it again. When things get out of control, I haul ass down a long hallway, luring a group of them into a room that I lock behind us. A stand-up fight is suicide, so I do what we did back in the day: I stick and move, sliding sideways, taking a swing, then slipping back in the other direction for another strike.
I open it, and skeletons pour out, as I knew they would, accompanied now and then by Darkmoon clerics. On the second level of the catacombs below the temple, I come upon a familiar locked door. Fortunately, nobody in the temple seems to notice or care, and even after a solid three-day camp out, I can pick up and move on like only a minute or two has passed. And with healing potions so bloody rare, and crafting not an option, most of the time it's just my lone cleric, Ace, casting and resting repeatedly until we're ready to move on.
#GOG EYE OF THE BEHOLDER 3 FULL#
It seems so strange now, but in AD&D, spells are "forgotten" once cast, until the caster rests for a full eight hours. I spend literally days of game time resting, healing, and readying my party for the next encounter. I could probably live without a thief, but I decide that the paladin's "Lay Hands" healing ability, basically a Cure Light Wounds spell for people who don't know magic, will help balance out the knock against my non-specialist cleric-and there are few things that drive me crazy faster than a videogame door I can't unlock.ĭespite my preparation and liberal abuse of the "modify" button, which lets me crank up every character stat to its max (trust me-use it, and don't feel guilty), fights are punishing, even in the early-stage catacombs. It takes me a few tries, and some early-game ass-kickings, before I come up with a team I like: a fighter, a paladin, a mage, and a cleric/thief.
#GOG EYE OF THE BEHOLDER 3 MANUAL#
Adventuring parties must be smooth-running machines, efficient in every way, and the manual breaks down the benefits and disadvantages of single and multi-class characters, racial bonuses, and more. Character builds are everything in Eye of the Beholder, and there's no space for witty conversationalists or weakling weirdos with preternatural luck. Throughout the process of building my crew, I am thankful that SSI included a proper rule book with the game, and that GOG bundled a scanned copy (and a scan of the hint book as well) in its version. Of course, "we" don't technically exist until I spend some time with the character creation menu. Characters can be imported from one game to the next and that would certainly add up to a remarkably epic dungeon crawling experience, but it would take more dedication than I bring to the table to get through it. Myth Drannor, on the other hand, was built on a more advanced version of the game engine and is thus more technically adept, but it wasn't developed by Westwood, and the change really shows: It lacks the focus, depth, and magic that made Darkmoon so good. Environments are less interactive, and there's only one save slot. The original is good, but it's essentially Baldur's Gate to the Baldur's Gate 2 that is Legend of Darkmoon. There are two other games in the Eye of the Beholder series: the first, Eye of the Beholder, and EOB3: Assault on Myth Drannor. In my memory, it's still top five stuff, maybe even top three. I played Eye of the Beholder 2: The Legend of Darkmoon when it came out, back in 1992, and it was pure magic-a great dungeon crawler, and perhaps more significantly, far and away the single best D&D experience ever created for a PC, a title it would hold until Baldur's Gate came along.
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