The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure

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Description

Temple of Elemental Evil is a turn-based role-playing game using the AD&D Greyhawk campaign setting with 3.5 version D&D rules. The game plot revolves around the (suspected) rise of evil, originating from the Temple of Elemental Evil.

In this game, players start with five generated (or pre-generated) party members in the start of the adventure (a maximum of eight, the later three comprising non-player characters). Unlike most AD&D games, the maximum level cap for characters in this game is the 10th level.

The party itself has an alignment (in addition to individual character alignments) which greatly affects the plot and choices the party makes throughout the game. Character alignments and the party alignment are now closely related. For example, a Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil character may not be selected within a True Neutral party alignment. Additionally, Paladins do not want to be in the same group with anyone evil.

Thus, depending on the party alignment (nine default alignments to choose from), players may either take the course of being the good heroes ridding evil from the land or be the evil raiders butchering anything that moves, all of which (may it be good, bad or neutral), may effect the party reputation.

Screenshots

Promo Images

Alternate Titles

• "灰鹰：邪恶元素的神殿" -- Chinese spelling (simplified)
• "ToEE" -- Formal abbreviation
• "Świątynia Pierwotnego Zła" -- Polish title
• "Le Temple du Mal Elementaire: A Classic GreyHawk Adventure" -- French title
• "Il Tempio del Male Elementale: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure" -- Italian title
• "El Templo del mal elemental: Una aventura clásica de Greyhawk" -- Spanish title
• "Der Tempel des Elementaren Bösen: Ein klassisches Greyhawk Abenteuer" -- German title

Part of the Following Groups

• Best of Infogrames / Atari releases
• Dungeons & Dragons Campaign Setting: Greyhawk
• Dungeons & Dragons (D&D / AD&D) licensees
• Fantasy Creatures: Elves
• Gameplay feature: Optional permadeath / permanent death
• Middleware: Bink Video
• Software Pyramide releases

User Reviews

Faithful conversion of the Greyhawk P&P module with the same name, spoiled by bugs	Windows	Cadorna (222)
Here's 400 reasons to play Troika games 400 weeks after its official release.	Windows	Indra was here (20839)
Passes the time well, but won't be your favorite cRPG.	Windows	Tennessee Ernie Ford (18)
Decent combat rules implementation - really really bad UI. What happened to Troika?	Windows	weregamer (169)
Gary Gygax rules!	Windows	Jeff Whichello (3)
A disappointment.	Windows	tomimt (405)
Design and code flaws ruin yet another Troika RPG	Windows	tbuteler (3146)

Critic Reviews

Game industry News (GiN)	Windows	2003		100
GamePro (US)	Windows	Oct 06, 2003		90
GameZone	Windows	Oct 21, 2003	8.4 out of 10	84
Armchair Empire, The	Windows	Dec 03, 2003	8 out of 10	80
GameSpot (Belgium/Netherlands)	Windows	Nov 07, 2003	79 out of 100	79
GameSpot	Windows	Sep 22, 2003	7.9 out of 10	79
Fragland.net	Windows	Nov 17, 2003	79 out of 100	79
Game Informer Magazine	Windows	Nov, 2003	7 out of 10	70
GameBanshee	Windows	Oct 03, 2003	6.6 out of 10	66
JeuxVideoPC.com	Windows	Jul 09, 2005	13 out of 20	65

Forums

Topic	# Posts	Last Post
Troika Patching Nightmare v3.0	4	Indra was here (20839) Oct 09, 2007
What's wrong with this game?	22	Atomic Punch! (194) Aug 05, 2007

Trivia

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)

Related Web Sites

• Circle of Eight (A fan group that has developed unofficial patches fixing various issues and restoring removed content such as the Nulb brothel and the quests associated with it.)
• The Temple of Elemental Evil (Official website)