Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor

aka: Black Adder, Pool of Radiance 2, Pool of Radiance II, Pool of Radiance: As Ruínas de Myth Drannor, Pool of Radiance: Ruiny Myth Drannor
Moby ID: 5072
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Description official descriptions

An homage to the DOS-based Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box game Pool of Radiance, Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor returns again to the worlds of the Forgotten Realms.

Although the game begins in the city of Phlan, which was reclaimed in the previous game, the majority of the action takes place beneath Myth Drannor, once a beautiful city of peace, where men, elves, and dwarves could live in peace and harmony, which is now in ruins.

Despite its visual similarity to contemporary games that utilized real-time combat (such as Baldur's Gate), the game features a strictly turn-based system, similar to those implemented in Gold Box games. Orisons and Cantrips, straight from the then new Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules, have been added. The game features new character classes and races such as Barbarians, Monks, Paladins, and Half-Orcs. Clerics and Sorcerers can cast over 100 spells. The Dungeon Master communicates all important findings and events throughout the game.

Spellings

  • 光芒之池II之剑与魔法的传说 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 光芒之池:迷斯卓諾遺跡 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Windows version)

208 People (160 developers, 48 thanks) · View all

Game Design
Special Effects & Interface
Multiplayer Engine & Gameplay
Graphics Engine
Animation Engine
Gameplay Engine
Pathfinding & Collision Systems
Dialogue Engine
Interface Engine
Tools
Additional Programming
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 63% (based on 36 ratings)

Players

Average score: 2.5 out of 5 (based on 29 ratings with 5 reviews)

Unplayable

The Good
er...

The Bad
Having thus dealt with "The Good", let me turn to "The Bad".

Recommended system requirements are a Pentium III 500MHz, 128M of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM. I have an AMD XP2000, 256M of RAM, a 64M Nvidia GeForce graphics card, and, like everyone else nowadays, a 52x CD-ROM. I had at first done a medium-size installation (845M). My hard disk kept thrashing, its red light on for minutes on end, getting nowhere, the mouse pointer dead and frozen. Once in a blue moon the mouse would wake up and allow me a click. Then more disk thrashing. Eventually I did a full install, which took so long that I was more than once tempted to abort it, so persuaded was I that it had frozen up. Eventually I could start playing. This time there was no disk thrashing. The CD-ROM did not seem to get accessed either.

Yet everything was sloooooow. Movement like wading through thick molasses. The mouse pointer hopping about, making weapon selection a nightmare of pixel hunting with your mouse never quite where you want it except by sheer luck. Right-click on a character. It opens up a microscopic menu. Think of it as a mini-arena where to hone your mouse-taming skills. I wonder what it would be like with the minimum system requirements: a Pentium II 400MHz with 64M of RAM.

And it's dark in there. There is no gamma-correction to adjust, so you just have to crank your monitor's brightness right up to its maximum to see anything much.

Inside dungeons you can usually tell your characters from the background, but in the open where the background is typically meadow and stuff with a more complex texture than flagstones, they blend with it.

Combat takes forever. With four heroes engaging a party of three orcs, count on half a minute for every round. The interface is at first incomprehensible. But once you've figured it out it becomes another exercise in pixel hunting and mouse taming, and waiting for your selected hero to act. When it is the orcs' turn you wonder what the dumb beasts are day-dreaming about. Hey, I'm here, right under your snouts! What are you waiting for to deal me that lethal blow?

The Bottom Line
I had thought that I had scraped the bottom of the barrel with "Dungeon Siege, Legends of Aranna". It appears that there are more barrels, each with a deep bottom. And this is one of them. It is unplayable and thus, in legalese, "not of merchantable quality". In plain English: if you have had the misfortune of paying good money for it, be it even as little as a few cents, you are entitled to return it and demand your money back.

Windows · by Jacques Guy (52) · 2004

About the original game Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor

The Good
If this game plays at all like the original 2001 release, I don't see what anyone is complaining about. It was one of the best D&D games I have ever played and I have played almost all of them. I disagree with one person's recommendation of a warrior in the party. It's better with a paladin that can double as a cleric to help turn the undead and even do a bit of healing. The survivability goes up surprisingly a lot with that combination. A rogue is a must and I recommend a mage. That's the secret combination I found that works best.

The Bad
It was so long I didn't get to finish it and now I can't find anyplace to download it since my new comp doesn't have a disk drive.

The Bottom Line
And awesome action-packed adventure among the ruins of an ancient city of the era when the races lived together and great spells were weaved that has sadly been run down and the magic has become unpredictable. A place where great and ancient treasures can be found...and death for the unwary.

Windows · by Rhaazyk Koch (2) · 2020

Mediocre, boring Baldur's Gate clone

The Good
In the 80's SSI released now classic Pool Of Radiance game, which I played like crazy. It has a huge area you can travel while doing various mission which range from finding objects to slaughtering monsters in the slums.

Pool Of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor contains also a huge area you can go through and it is a sort of a sequel to the classic 80's game, while it's been made by a different company. It's not prettiest flower in the meadow but the graphics look okay, while it does look noticeably uglier than Baldur's Gate, which is a game that comes to mind from this one. And that's pretty much all the positives I can say about it.

The Bad
The huge dungeons are the fall of PoR:RoMD. The idea of large area of adventuring sounds good, but the execution lacks badly. Main feeling I got from playing the game is sheer boredom. You just run around the ruins, kill monsters and rarely meet anyone who you can actually talk to.

This could be okay, but the navigation system is so idiotic, it makes the gameplay more of a chore than a treat. While the game has a map, you can't use it to plot your course, nor can you even get the screen roll so far a way, that you could just click directly in the far away spot you want to go. You are forced to take small sprints at a time, as the screen is pretty much locked to your main character.

As a note, the games map system show a button for world map, which I foolishly thought would actually allow you to access a world map at some point. It doesn't. The designers of the game thought that the VERY small area before you enter the ruins is the world.

Other huge minus are the fights. The system works okay, but it all happens so slowly. It's just not fun to wait for all those pesky skeletons or ghouls to slowly walk towards you.

I won't be giving any roses to music neither. There seems to be only a couple of tracks, which are played over and over again. Mostly the game is silent, but it starts to get pretty annoying when the same battle music starts blasting from the speakers for a millionth time.



The Bottom Line
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is a pretty mediocre and especially boring Baldur's Gate clone. It really has nothing going for it that would make it a fun game to play. When it was originally announced I recall it having quite a hype, but just like many other games with the hype, PoR:RoMD didn't manage to fill any of it.

Windows · by tomimt (397) · 2010

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

Bugs

The first US version of this game was a technical disaster: not only that the installer accepted no other drives than C: - one could live with that although it's a sign of sloppy programming - the uninstallation program would accidentally erase some core components of Windows 9x, rendering the system unusable after rebooting. Because of this, the game was withdrawn and re-released with a fixed installer. This delayed the German version too.

Cover

Both the game box artwork and the cover illustration of the tie-in novel are by renowned fantasy illustrator (Gerald) Brom.

Inspiration

The game follows a November 1, 2000-published novel of the same name by Carrie Bebris, both the computer game and the novel sharing a common source of a pen & paper RPG module from Wizards of the Coast.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • April 2002 (Issue #213) – Coaster of the Year

Information also contributed by Entorphane and Pseudo_Intellectual.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Jeanne.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, phlux, JRK, chirinea, Wizo, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, firefang9212.

Game added October 5, 2001. Last modified February 29, 2024.