The Old and The New: Eye Of Beholder & Legend Of Grimrock

Some ideas for gaming grow old, and tend to be forgotten for a REALLY LONG time. Some genres became obsolete  when greater capabilities came to people who create video games. One such genre is the "dungeon crawler". Anyone heard about "The Bard's Tale" (the old one, from 1985) ? Cold... "Wizardy" ? Warm... "Might And Magic" ? Warmer...

Have you noticed I haven't named any newer games? It's because this genre was pretty much dead since the 1980s. There were a few released games of this type in the 90s, but not as much, as ten years before. So, the whole idea here, is to see how these games changed over the course of time. And I am going to compare two games from this genre: 

Eye Of Beholder and Legend of Grimrock

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Why these two? The reasons are quite simple: I have both the games, I like, them, and they are 14 years apart. Enough to see how time has changed both the genre, and us, the gamers. I will sort this comparison in parts, each with a short video/set of screenshots to show you what I mean in the text.
But for starters, what is an dungeon crawler? To be short: it's a genre of game, where you/your party spend most of their time in a dungeon, trying to go lower/higher, fight monsters, beat puzzles, and defeat the "Evil One" (whenever it's an beholder/dragon/demon/evil archmage/etc. ). The focus of these games are exploration, puzzle solving and turn-like based combat.

Eye Of Beholder required from me to install DosBox on my PC. No chance running it natively on Windows XP/7/8

Here you can see the minimal requirements to play this games. They are here mostly to show you how LARGE is the time gap between these games. Years mean nothing when you talk about PC's, the hardware, however tells you everything.

Game Name	Eye Of Beholder	Legend of Grimrock
Processor	20 MHz	Dual Core 2GHz Intel or 2.8GHz AMD
Ram	< 1mb	2 GB
Graphics Card	Any VGA	ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 or better
Sound card	Any	DirectX 9.0c compatible
Other	None	A mouse
Release Date	1990	April 11, 2012

Character creation and customization 

The character creation process in both games are similar,yet they differ from each other. To be more precise: Eye Of Beholder uses the AD&D 2ed. rule set  that is simplified during the character creation. You can't even select the spells your character know at the beginning of the game, which is... meh :/ Also, you can change your characters stats in ANY way you want. Yes, you can create a PC which has all stats maxed at the start of the game.

Legend of Grimrock uses his entirely new mechanics, and you have much more place for customization. Each character gets 10 points to give to statistics, up to 4 points to give to skills and can pick up to two traits. Oww, and I would forget. They are four races to pick, each of them change the available options to your PC. 

Gameplay

Let's face it: old games had to have something else then beautiful graphics to captive the players. In case of Eye Of Beholder it's the difficulty which attacks us from time to time. There is also an added handicap, that may not sound terrifying, but it is: NO MINI-MAP. Other than that, another difficulty builder are the environmental puzzles, that are the main cause of frustration in this game. You can sometimes spend half an hour clicking walls in search for an hidden switch. Below a short gameplay of the old timer. A little rushed one, but you can get the main idea :) 

In Legend Of Grimrock we can see... the same? o.O The gameplay is almost the same as in Eye Of Beholder. The most innovative thing is the way spellcasting is solved: you find a scroll with a magic spell. It says what kind of skills you need to cast the spell, and what runes you have to pick when casting the spell. You can see how it works at the end of the gameplay below, somewhere around the 11 minute mark. Also, THERE IS A MINIMAP. The game gets much simpler because of that, no more getting lost. There has been enough writing, you can see more at the video below :) 

About food

Suprised food has got a paragraph of it's own? It's vital in these games, LITERALLY. If your characters will go starved for a prolonged period of time, that will effect your characters capability to fight. And that is a REALLY bad thing. For you as a player. Just a small remainder of this fact :)  

The conclusion 

Old ideas do not die, they just go to sleep. And after someone wakes an idea up, he needs to take it to a plastic surgeon, and teach him how the world works now. In case of Legend Of Grimrock we have a good example of that: an idea from the previous century changed, so that it will be playable in the modern times. 

Similar Games:

In case you think you will like these kinds of games, you can also check out other titles where exploration, monster slaying, and thinking how to open the door standing before you are the main fun. Such games include (but it's not all of them):

• The Might and Magic series
• Wizardy 1-8
• The Bard's Tale (the ones from the 1980s)

The Good and The Bad, vol. 1 Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Review

Can a legendary game like this be still playable after so much time elapsed?
Is the new content worth ANYTHING?
These and other questions will be answered in this review :D

Information:

Type: good old cRPG

Specifications: a toaster will do fine (with exception of the ones with Intel graphic cards)

Release date: 28.11.2012 (FINALLY)

Developer: Overhaul Games

Distribution: Beamdog (very little to no chance of additional options)

Costs: 20$

First of all: IF YOU DON'T LIKE TO READ, GO STRAIGHT TO "THE GOOD". And the review contains SPOILERS, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. 

IF YOU PLAYED VANILLA BALDUR'S GATE, then SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH.

But, on the other hand, if you read this, there is a huge chance you at least heard about it. The adventures of you, and the companions you will meet on your way. Then, it was epic. An story that you could totally immerse into. And it made that effect only using worlds. The combat system was also good. If you like to think, and plan every move, you could always pause each second. In which you will learn quickly how a bad father can make your life an hell on earth with tons of people trying to kill you. That's for the plot you need to know. I won't say, that it sounds awesome. But that is only my short version of the tale. The writers that created the story have done a much better job then me. The used an well known fantasy world. Created a story that brings that place to life, more than an above-average game master could have done. That's what you get: a rich world, full of adventure, worth every second spent on it. So, if you did not play Baldur's Gate, just stick to the idea that this is an Enhanced version of an masterpiece.

The new main menu

So, I won't write about the story too much, let's focus on what has Beamdog changed in this piece of the old glory days of cRPG's. Baldur's Gate was quite a beautiful game at the time of it's release. It didn't have 3D graphics, but the places you visited during your journey were great-looking. Nope, I got that wrong, THEY STILL ARE great looking. Not only that, the character models which were, without any doubt, the worst part of BG's graphical side, were changed to their counterparts from Baldur's Gate 2.

The new and the old: BG 2 models in BG:EE

Also, the interface has gone through a quite intense facelifting. Namely, the inventory and character screens, which now show our chances of hitting, the damage we can do, bonus hit points per levels, and so on. Also the paperdolls that show what your character is wearing have been improved. Mostly these changes are slight, however they make your characters look great. 

The new inventory screen

Also, one thing worth mentioning: Overhaul has made new cinematics. The change of style is rather disturbing, however it all depends on your taste. Some call it a little too comic-book like. Decide yourself. Just watch the intro, right below.

If you looked closely on the screenshots up to this point, you could seen a few things you haven't seen before. Most importantly, it's the "Black Pits" option in the main menu. When you click it, and then select to start a new game, you will see... something different. Instead of creating a single character, you can create a whole party. Then you see your team landing on a arena, and having to fight monsters. The plot? Nearly nonexistant. The difficulty? Rises with each battle. Fun? Hell yeah, as long as you like to fight and think how to fight. For me, it was an ideal way to relax after an annoying day at my college :D

The Black Pits

However, not everything is great. The game was supposed to be released at summer 2012. Yet Overhaul has changed the release date to 28 November. The official reason was the need of extended bugfixing. I don't know what kind of bugs they were fixing, but they created a few more...  A ton more. For the first three days a major part of players couldn't launch the game. The other half had lots of graphical glitches, in game bugs, such as an lack of abillity to add one of the new characters to the party. The only thing that saved the devs from being eaten alive by the community was the quick patching they have done. But still, the game was fully playable by the start of December. Yup, that's one cold summer I got...

The Good
- it came out
- the story is left untouched...
- ... except for the new characters, which are good. And they fit good in the canon Baldur's Gate
- stress reliever "Black Pits" add-on
- graphical rework (taken from BG 2 and added some extra touches)
- lots of old bugs repaired
The Bad
- Lots of NEW bugs at launch
- ... which was delayed for an eon. 
- the extra areas introduced with the bonus characters could have something more than the character sidequests
The Verdict  - PLAY IT
If you played Baldur's Gate when it came out, you can buy it. First, to have a great remainder of the good old days. Secondly, because the bonus content and overall game improvements fix all the flaws the vanilla BG had. And most of the newly created bugs are fixed by now.
If you didn't played this game earlier, do it now. Because the story is worth it, and beats somewhat 90% of the games released today. And also you get a pain-free visit to the museum of gaming. And the visit will be long and worth it's every second.