Khelben sent a scout to investigate Darkmoon, and she never returned. His journal was discovered by a captain of the city guard, investigating the disappearances, and it describes Kelso's search for a village named Torzac, which had been conquered by the Drow long ago. Several people of disappeared in the area, including an archaeologist named Wently Kelso. The sequel starts with the victorious party enjoying a night in the tavern, when all at once they're summoned to the residence of local archmage Khelben Blackstaff, who tells them that a threat is emerging from nearby Temple Darkmoon. ".and the three other losers accompanying my friend." During the process, they found some pretty cool equipment and went from Level 1 to at least Level 7.
Although that might not be as possible in Darkmoon for reasons we'll talk about.Įye of the Beholder had a party of up to 6 characters (a mixture of player-created characters and NPCs) explore the sewers beneath the city of Waterdeep to destroy the threat posed by a beholder. You have to have at least a 2 x 2 space to do it, but as long as you don't mess up the pattern, you can eventually slay a titan with a pencil. We've come to call a particular pattern of movement the "combat waltz": attack, side-step, turn, wait for the enemy to walk into the adjacent square, attack again, side-step before he can turn to face you, and so forth until he's dead. "Armor class" almost becomes a superfluous concept when the player can just side-step enemy attacks. The system allows a player's digital dexterity to make up for poor character attributes or low levels, which of course has some interesting implications when it's applied to the Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. The sequel starts with a lightly-animated sequence.Įye of the Beholder II uses essentially the same engine as I, which itself owes a lot to Dungeon Master (1987), the first first-person game to break from the Wizardry template by pairing tiled movement with real-time combat. It's possible that I'm more addicted to mapping than the game itself. The enticement of one more square, one more room, one more corridor is what turns midnight to 03:30 in what seems like seconds. But purposeless as they are, I wouldn't dream of not making them. Not myself in the unlikely event that I ever play this game a second time, I'll almost certainly throw away the maps and create them anew. Why do I need to know that this square had a treasure chest when I've already opened it and I'll never be coming back? Who am I making these maps for, exactly? Not you there are already dozens of examples of the maps online, probably more accurate than I'm making. I love drawing walls and annotating squares, even though I know I'm recording all this detail for no one. There's something enormously satisfying about my mapping process.
I love the immersive, realistic near-simulation dungeons that Ultima Underworld introduced. Eager players finding Darkmoon under the 1991 Christmas tree don't know it, but we're simultaneously at the apex and end of an era. Any serious developer is going to quickly jettison discrete movement in 10-foot blocks with only four facing positions. But after Ultima Underworld (and Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM on the action side), no one's going to be complimenting "wall textures" anymore. A whole bunch of them are in the pipeline right now and will be released in 1992, including Might and Magic IV, Wizardry VII, and The Dark Queen of Krynn. We'll still be looking at tile-based games in abstract dungeons into the mid-1990s at least. The genre didn't die immediately, of course. I don't want to spoil my opening paragraphs for Underworld, but let's just say that it loudly sounded the death knell for the very sort of the game that Darkmoon represents. Eye of the Beholder II was released in the same year as its predecessor, and I have book-ended the year with the two games, but the more important aspect of Darkmoon's positioning is going to be the contrast we see with the first game of 1992, Ultima Underworld.
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