[MOD] Eye of the Dragon

[mg79]

Ok, now I am stumped. In level 14, Temple Ice Gardens at the room with the 3 doors and 6 handle switches and a moving Statue on a track that spits fire balls and Ice balls when I press the switch.
I think I am supposed to get the 3 ice balls to hit their target behind the 3 doors but can't keep the doors up.

Any helpful hints?

It's a question of speed.

SpoilerShow

You've got to open the gate then run to the button to fire the ice before the gate closes

I'm at this point right now and I can't get the ice ball go past the 3rd gate. It's a question of milliseconds or what?

Ok.. made it..

[Rodpulsar]

Hello Drakkan, hello adventurers

First of all please excuse me for English is not my native language (frenchie inside).

Drakkan, I just finished your Mod after like 4 or 5 days of intense playing (4 or 5 hours a day, thx christmas break !). I never wrote a review nor any thanks for a mod before that, but today has to be the first time : your mod is incredibly well done, and for that I warmly thank you Drakkan. You probably spent a lot of hours designing all these levels and you deserve these warm thanks :



THANK YOU DRAKKAN !



Now you wrote that you needed feedback on that mod, I will try to make it as short as possible.

First of all I am a 39 year old player, fan of RPG's, especially old school dungeon crawlers. I played a lot on amiga / PC / 8bit machines while teenager, and finished almost every game of the genre : Black Crypt, Eye of the Beholder 1, 2, 3, Bard's Tale 1, 2, 3, first Ultima's, Legend of Faerghail, D&D, Hired Guns, Might and Magic, Wizardry's, ROA Blade of Destiny, Captive, Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back, Ishar 1, 2, 3, etc. Recently I bought Grimrock of course, Etrian Odyssey (a must have), and right now in the pre-release of Might and Magic X legacy. Well I AM old school (and still have my hand written / annotated maps for all these games in a book somewhere lol)

If I tell you that, it's just to illustrate the fact that I am well trained in this kind of games (like a lot of us I guess), and of course I tend to be in demand of a certain excellence and quality : both of which you provide with this mod Drakkan.


My Grimrock Team :
- I played (and always play) in hard mode.
- I played the whole mod with my original Grimrock party, all lvl 15 except for my Magician lvl 14. The beginning went fast, however I slowly perceived the increase of difficulty, and felt totally tuned to the game for the last 10 levels or so. Still, I died a lot.
- Team Rank 1 is made of a warrior full unarmed in heavy armor AND a thief full daggers in light armor
- Team Rank 2 is made of a thief full throwing weapons in light armor AND a magician Air / Water / Spellcraft (dressed like a rainbow lol)


Pros :

SpoilerShow

- The possibility to say at the beginning : "Well no, this mission is not for me !" made me laugh
- Ambiance and chars from EOB2 (However there is a gap in the middle/end of the game where that feeling totally dissapears)
- Musics and sounds !
- Some written riddles (empty flask, stone head series, etc) => We need more !
- Some room puzzles (disco room !, 2x3 parallel pressure plates room, water streaming room !, holes from Ogre levels, leading to Ogre level, etc...)
- The coin collect system during all the game
- The TP system with the treasures (brilliant)
- You PERFECTLY quantized the available food during the whole game, making it a real option at the end to buy some for golds.
- Water, new textures, exteriors !!! Some nice fresh air !!
- The room filled with Thunderbolts with the Air Resist Scroll in the middle = LOL
- Item dropping was ok except perhaps for too many scrolls and too many flasks (including empty ones). It depends of the playstyle however : I would not replace any hand of my caster by some charged parchment except for one or two exceptional situations.
- Expanding room has been a real challenge for me in Hard mode, I had to start it again like 12 times ! It reminded me of the warrior challenge room in the original Grimrock. In fact I like to be forced to use magic shields and bombs and everything I can to win, otherwise I prefer brute force like probably a lot of us lol. I have been proud to finish this particular challenge
- Level with the instakill cubes was stressing enough too : perfectly "dosed" (sp ?)
- Level with the 5 Ice Spiders : perfect too. Finished it with two chars only, but alive. In fact I finished a lot of levels with one or two chars alive only. Just in time to meet a rez crystal usually, which made me think that you are totally conscious of the hardest parts of your mod
- OMG you have hidden some secret buttons with some "perversity" lol
- "Listen to the music of the dead" is just one of the BEST challenge I ever met in this kind of game ! (2 free skillbooks as a reward made me love it immediatly again lol)
- The feeling that we go UP a kind of giant tower, floor after floor like in EOB 2, is interesting. I would have loved to be able to break some windows and see distant mountains, or better : some real balcony views / static picture, during daylight, then dusk, then night (and the awful lag with it lol). Best would be to hear some dragon screams from the last balcony :p
- The final Boss is well thought, and I have been positively surprised (read : dead) with his "Crab Move" !!

Cons (you will see that some come from the game engine, or from my perception, however maybe you will find some ideas for further work) :

SpoilerShow

- Instant death has no sense for me in this kind of game, plus loading back a Grimrock save may be long
- Exteriors with snow make my comp graphically lag. It's probably not your fault tho. My computer is an Haswell 4700, 16gb of DDR3 and a NVidia GForce 770, when I run recent 3D games at 100+ fps, I can't understand why Grimrock becomes slow at times (I guess each weather effect is reproduced on each square or something like that (?)
- There is NO chainpull activated kind of doors. These doors are fun when trying to kill certain hard mobs then hiding behind the closed door (or killing yourself casting too early lol). This is a must have in a squared type dungeon crawler imho.
- I would have appreciated to know BEFORE STARTING that I could meet some dead adventurers to revive in game. I would have played with Toorum instead of my usual team, to hire all of them. (However it's my fault I red nothing about the mod before starting it). Plus I must now live with the fact I didn't open ONE door
- As I wrote before, I loved the way items were slowly but surely availables. HOWEVER : 3 Assassin's daggers = too many Assassin's daggers. One is enough imho.

- In the last levels, (beginning with the frozen ones), I started to think that the mod was too long, especially with that graphical lag occuring. I would have loved more stretched levels / riddles sometimes. Long corridors / halls with nothing to do = no interest imho. If you remember well, In the EOB series, all maps where like 32x32, which forced the designers to fill each space with something to do / watch / activate / fight / search. You see the point I think Some details about this felt lenght :
- - Level with the Ogres : too many ogres (it's simple and boring to kill them).
- - Level with the Rainbow puzzle : too many gems to collect, without really knowing wich ones will be used at first. Plus putting a Rez Crystal right in front of the puzzle made the solving laggy. Plus putting an inscription right in the middle of each puzzle made it difficult to properly insert the gems, especially middle row ones. However, I liked the idea of this 4 areas gems collecting / coin buying puzzle. BUT I disliked to hear the Game Intro music in the 4 Skull halls. This particularly Epic music doesn't stick to the ambiance at this moment imho.
- - Floating squares in space with the four Daemon Hearts to put on altars was particularly long whan I already wanted to meet the big boss. Plus it's a level where we loose a LOT of missile / throwing projectiles (if the mob dies in "space"). Strategy VS frustration here
- - The mine at the beginning of the game is of no interest to me, or too big for what purpose it serves (?)
- - I didn't understand the puzzle with a frostball / fireball shooting Dragon Statue and the double-lever-activated-3-doors. In fact I came, activated like 20 times very fast each lever, moved the dragon @ every position making it fire like mad... and passed the puzzle...

Well, that's all I can think about for the moment. I found 5/6 treasures, including the one in the final boss room. Since we only have 5 seconds to pick up anything after the boss killing, I will have to do that fight again. I would love to be able to TP somewhere else from this level :p

And I feel like I missed some kind of big secret tho, I will come back to it asap


Thanks again for your time and hard work Drakkan, transformed into several times of fun for all of us !

Bravo !


Rod Pulsar
rodpulsar.com

[Drakkan]

Hello Drakkan, hello adventurers

THANK YOU DRAKKAN !

Rod Pulsar
rodpulsar.com

Hi Rod,
I am not around for some time, so read your message just now and want to thank you for this nice and long comment. I think one of the thing I really liked about Grimrock is, that it attracted many people, which played all these wonderfull games, which you have mentioned, which we were playing in our "young" age. That we have the same understanding for games. That it is not abut graphic, but about feelings.
As for my level - I could only agree with your comments. Not just for pros, but for the cons as well. I know this level have many flaws and you have noticed them all from the same view as I have noticed it.
I do not think that some more corrections will come, as at the end I was only trying to make the game longer (like adding astral level etc...) which was probably not best idea. But at the end - I am glad you finished the level and you had fun playing it, which is the most important thing.
Thanks
D.

[Eobersig]

Hello, returning Grimrock player here, decided to try out a few mods. I played the heck out of Grimrock at release.

Thank you for this mod, Drakkan. I'm still in the early levels, with a brand-new party playing on normal difficulty. Very nice mod so far (well, to be honest, everything is nice but the very first snow forest, he). What I've seen from the rest is very well done. Gratulation!

Going fine so far with my party but I run into a problem: I have no mortar and pestle. I assume I've missed it - I'm at the spiders now and it's getting difficult to run all the way back to the crystal to get rid of the poison - no potion brewing without mortar and pestle of course. Please don't tell me it's hidden somewhere in that dreadful snow forest.

Question: what's the deal with flasks filled with water? And "empty" scrolls that don't do anything? I don't think those existed in the original Grimrock.

Edit: Ah, got it, scribing scrolls to cast from paper. Now I only need to find out what water is good for.

[Drakkan]

Hello, returning Grimrock player here, decided to try out a few mods. I played the heck out of Grimrock at release.

Thank you for this mod, Drakkan. I'm still in the early levels, with a brand-new party playing on normal difficulty. Very nice mod so far (well, to be honest, everything is nice but the very first snow forest, he). What I've seen from the rest is very well done. Gratulation!

Going fine so far with my party but I run into a problem: I have no mortar and pestle. I assume I've missed it - I'm at the spiders now and it's getting difficult to run all the way back to the crystal to get rid of the poison - no potion brewing without mortar and pestle of course. Please don't tell me it's hidden somewhere in that dreadful snow forest.

Question: what's the deal with flasks filled with water? And "empty" scrolls that don't do anything? I don't think those existed in the original Grimrock.

Edit: Ah, got it, scribing scrolls to cast from paper. Now I only need to find out what water is good for.

Hi there,
do not worry, you will do not miss mortar and pestle, when time will come. As I mentioned many times - this mod is really HARD, when playing on normal option, so wish you good luck As for the water flask, there is no special "use", I think it can be used instead food, not 100% sure now...

[Eobersig]

Thanks for your reply, Drakkan, and gratulation again, this is really a good mod! Highly recommended!

I also like that one can download your mod from a "normal" site, I'd wish more modders would make their mods available for download from other sites than Steam and Nexus. After all Steam is limited to people buying Grimrock through Steam and Nexus requires a lengthy registration (that even looks as if it would cost a membership fee!) to download a mod. I reckon many people don't bother. Kinda weird to have a good game and good mods and then to limit the distribution of the mods.

I found mortar and pestle by now, in fact even 2 sets, hehe. Got further into the mod, I'm at the Ogre Cave. Don't have any idea what to do yet - it's one of these dead/reload/dead/reload levels, luckily there aren't too many of those levels in your mod.

[Drakkan]

Thanks for your reply, Drakkan, and gratulation again, this is really a good mod! Highly recommended!

I also like that one can download your mod from a "normal" site, I'd wish more modders would make their mods available for download from other sites than Steam and Nexus. After all Steam is limited to people buying Grimrock through Steam and Nexus requires a lengthy registration (that even looks as if it would cost a membership fee!) to download a mod. I reckon many people don't bother. Kinda weird to have a good game and good mods and then to limit the distribution of the mods.

I found mortar and pestle by now, in fact even 2 sets, hehe. Got further into the mod, I'm at the Ogre Cave. Don't have any idea what to do yet - it's one of these dead/reload/dead/reload levels, luckily there aren't too many of those levels in your mod.

nice to hear about your progress ! fp not forget to use mortar wisely, attack and speed potion will make some fights REALY easier !
As for the dead/reload , there is unfortunately lots of such places, but I think this is something which belongs to this level. As for the Ogre cave, it is not so hard, you need just

SpoilerShow

activate personaly four plates in the corners, starting with left-up. You do not need fight ogres at all.

[Eobersig]

Thanks, Drakkan, though I got past the Ogre Cave now.

SpoilerShow

Defeated the Ogres on the upper level. Found the pressure plates and could lure one Ogre to an isolated corner of the level. Then battled the other Ogre with the 2x2 strafe method. Luckily Ogres are slow, thus it worked well. After that I picked up and battled the one in the isolated corner just for training.

I'm contemplating to make a little speed run through the lower level as well, there's some nice loot down there (Gem, coins, water opal (though I have no idea whether one can use a 5th one, hehe) - and even some food, the most precious resource!.

Problem is still food though. I reckon food is enough if a player follows the "save at the start of a level, then run around, then reload the safe when you know what to do in the level" tactic.

And here's something you might consider to put into your text as hint for new players: when with a new party have a mage with spellcraft and air/ice magic: players will need the spellcraft for the light spell (I ran out of torches early on) - and the early spell scrolls I found had all been air and ice spells, thus a fire or earth mage might be screwed.

Edit: hehe, and I see now, yeah, the next level is from the dead/reload/dead/reload variety as well ...

[Drakkan]

Thanks, Drakkan, though I got past the Ogre Cave now.

SpoilerShow

Defeated the Ogres on the upper level. Found the pressure plates and could lure one Ogre to an isolated corner of the level. Then battled the other Ogre with the 2x2 strafe method. Luckily Ogres are slow, thus it worked well. After that I picked up and battled the one in the isolated corner just for training.

I'm contemplating to make a little speed run through the lower level as well, there's some nice loot down there (Gem, coins, water opal (though I have no idea whether one can use a 5th one, hehe) - and even some food, the most precious resource!.

Problem is still food though. I reckon food is enough if a player follows the "save at the start of a level, then run around, then reload the safe when you know what to do in the level" tactic.

And here's something you might consider to put into your text as hint for new players: when with a new party have a mage with spellcraft and air/ice magic: players will need the spellcraft for the light spell (I ran out of torches early on) - and the early spell scrolls I found had all been air and ice spells, thus a fire or earth mage might be screwed.

Edit: hehe, and I see now, yeah, the next level is from the dead/reload/dead/reload variety as well ...

thanks for response and hint advice. I think light spell could be found quite soon and just few points need to be invested to spellcraft (and also there is quill and pen available to write few light spells if really necesary). And I also want make player to invest some points in spellcraft, so many smart tools wil require it later on

[Drakkan]

version 5c uploaded, some minor changes and corrections. If you did not play this dungeon, you still have chance !