The Let's Play Archive

Eye of the Beholder Trilogy

by Alpha3KV

Part 28: Intro



Intro video

quote:

It has been some time since the defeat of Dran and his vile minions at the temple known as Darkmoon. Your victory over Dran has allowed the citizens of this great city to rest easy once again.

This game came out over a year after the second one, in 1993.



Worth noting that 1992 saw the release of Ultima Underworld, which brought several advancements to the first-person dungeon crawler genre all at once.



That meant that even on a new engine with added features, going back to this series was going to look somewhat outdated by comparison.



It was developed in-house by SSI, since 1992 was also the year of Westwood Studios' acquisition by Virgin Games.



They went on to create the Lands of Lore series.



The party here bears resemblance to the one seen in the first game's intro.



This game also initially has a "Quick Start Party" in its first save slot, with different characters but the same composition as the one from the second game.



Without much knowledge of fantasy geography, I had to search for some context. I found this site, which says that Waterdeep and Myth Drannor are 1,280 miles apart.



I think this guy needs a ring, don't you agree?



Much like Khelben in the previous game, our quest giver immediately teleports the party near their destination.



Characters made in this game don't start with consistent amounts of experience like the first two games. Single-class characters start at level 11, double-classes at 10/10, and triple-classes at 9/9/9. Like the second game, the character creation for this also incorrectly applies constitution bonuses to the static HP gains after a character's last hit die. That does not happen within the game proper. A single-class dwarf fighter with maxed out stats will start with a whopping 151 hit points.



Several new faces were added to this game. Many of the old ones also had changes in appearance, usually not for the better. If a character is given the same name as an NPC recruit from one of the earlier games, they will get that character's portrait. Unlike the first two, this game does allow multiple characters to have the same face.



All that the save import program does is copy the selected file to your EOB3 directory and rename it TRANSFER.SAV. You can cut out the middle man and do that yourself. You can also do that with the first game's save file, but the results will be buggy as seen here. This also shows that this game allows you to look through and adjust inventory within the camp menu, which was not the case in the first two.



In addition to messing up their names and items, a direct transfer from the first game also puts character's stats all over the place. Luckily a proper import from the second game won't have any issues like this.



All mages, including recruited NPCs, start with the spells on the right side of this list. Imported mages will automatically learn any spells they were missing from it. I'll describe the cleric spells at relevant points.