The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure

Cut Content

Most of the content, unique to playing an evil campaign was taken out of the game due to pressure by the publisher (Atari). An entire area with subquests (the brothel) was also removed because they were afraid to lose the T rating.

Luckily, the 'Circle of eight' fan group re-enabled the "Brothel" Map, NPC's, quest, and companion in their unofficial patches.

Patches

Upon release, the version out of the box was plagued with bugs: quests not ending properly, glitches in the D&D 3.5 rules, bugged items, crashes, monsters spawning in walls, ...

An eager fan community listed all the bugs on the Atari forums, hoping for a quick fix. When time passed and no patches appeared, one of the Troika developers stated in a post that Atari had ended the contract with them when TTOEE was released, so they wouldn't get paid for developing patches.

There's nothing worse than a bunch of angry gamers, so some fans decided to reverse engineer and decompile some of the code. They were successful and a group called 'Circle of eight' created custom unofficial patches that fixed all the bugs.

This was too much of a stain on the Atari corporate image, so they announced an official patch on 30th september, 2003. Almost two months after the release, on 10th november, 2003, the patch was finally available, but without the efforts and persistence of fans, the game would have stayed bug-ridden.

Awards

• GameSpy
  • 2003 – Old School RPG Award (PC)