BoLS Prime: That Time A D&D Game Trashed Hard Drives Out Of Spite
With Baldur’s Gate 3 gearing up for release, let’s take a look back at one of the most dangerous D&D games ever made, Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.
There are games that have bugs, and then there are games that will trash your hard drive. Today we’re taking a look back at one of the latter. One of the most infamous games was Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. This was to be a return to form for SSI and TSR. It was going to be an homage to the glory days of the gold box games.
Gold Box Games Presents Pool of Radiance
Gold Box games were a legendary series of D&D video games. They helped boost TSR into the forefront of the 90s with classic games like the original Pool of Radiance.
Towards the tail end of TSR’s existence, SSI and TSR teamed up once more to try and bring back the good ol’ days of D&D gaming. Unfortunately, they started work on the game back as TSR was coming to an end. At the same time, WotC took over the reins. Which meant that TSR became Wizards of the Coast’s property and not long after 3rd Edition was on the horizon.
That meant midway through development, the game had to switch over to 3rd Edition rules. In fact the game brought 3rd Edition into the public eye before the new ruleset was released. The announcement came in 1999.
Now, over a decade later, SSI and TSR have teamed up again to attempt to recreate the magic of the original series while at the same time introducing an all-new set of tabletop rules. In ‘Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor’, SSI will continue the tale it began so long ago but this time with the very latest in graphics, sound and interface design as well as the all new Third Edition AD&D Rules due out later this year from Wizards of the Coast (who recently gobbled up TSR). After listening to us whine for a few months, the developers finally decided to give us a quick peek at what they’ve got up their sleeves. While the game is still shrouded in secrecy, we were able to see enough to convince us that this is what RPG fans have been waiting for a long time.
The developers wanted to hit the ground running. By then we’d seen the release of Baldur’s Gates 1 & released in the background, along with the action-oriented Diablo. This meant Pool of Radiance was going to need to do a lot to stand out.
Stormfront Studios, taking over for SSI, developed a better UI. Players could push tables around, climb on stairs for height advantage, fight in formations. And if all of this sounds familiar, that’s because you can do this in Baldur’s Gate 3 too.
But the developers had to do it all a ruleset that hadn’t even been released to the public. Much of it was experimental, still being tweaked ahead of 3rd Edition’s eventual release in 2000.
And it wasn’t just new rules. It was also new spells. New monsters. All manner of new content to be brought in. The team had to implement more than 100 different spells from 3rd Edition. And adapt more than 30 new monsters. All while also trying to push the boundaries of what graphics in these kinds of games could do. The team understood that art sells. As one reviewer put it:
In fact, Stormfront has gone all out to make this game as beautiful as they possibly can. The aforementioned Skeletal Dragon took up nearly a quarter of the screen and moved with the grace and smoothness of a cat. Where there we holes in its putrid wings, you could see the ground or other body parts where they belonged. Best of all, this all held up during animation. The player characters have also been rendered with exceptional skill, each one featuring a load of different motions far outside the walk/run/swing standards we’ve gotten so used to. All of the creatures in the game are huge in comparison to Baldur’s Gate, a fact that really comes through in the attention to detail that the team is already known for.
While I sat looking at one particular model and his animations, I noticed that I could actually see him breathing. In addition to incredibly smooth monster and character animations, the team has really focused on architectural design trying to figure out the way buildings should look before they set about modeling them. The results are already quite impressive.
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Then they added multiplayer. That’s right, multiplayer. Multiple people could control characters in the same party. All of this was built in from the ground up. The game had a lot riding on it.
For Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, the devil was always in the details. Whether it was building tables and chairs and other objects that you could manipulate or pick up, to letting your armor determine your character’s audio footprint, to things like weapon length and elevation into account, they went a step beyond what 3rd Edition had to offer. Still, in the lead-up to the game’s launch, spirits were up.
While the game does feature full voice acting for key scenes, it also features an actual working DM. Occasionally, you’ll see a message from the DM when you want to do something but you can’t such as attempting to take one more action per round than you are allowed to. Also, the DM will give descriptive dialog for various objects and events, which is easily differentiated from other text simply because it’s colored blue while regular text is white.
Graphically, the game has almost completely come together. Since the engine uses 3D characters on 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, the characters have a much wider and more fluid series of animations.
Everything is coming together very well in Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. The gameplay is solid, the graphics are great, and the story is your classic D&D tale.
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But as we’ve seen, the hype often fails to match the reality. With such promise in the works, and a very eager publishing studio and WotC hoping to see the game release in a timely fashion to accompany 3rd Edition’s release, many of those features fell by the wayside. In spite of the rush, the game still released a year late, in 2001. And most of the promises that had been made by early previews seemed to vanish.
When the game published, the tables and chairs that characters could push around to reach otherwise inaccessible areas had been done away with. Instead, they simply made most of those objects destructible. Though rarely would you find any treasure hidden inside. And it’s an interesting prospect for Myth Drannor as well, since the game wants you to find treasure, presumably, given that you’ll find loads of it over the course of the gameplay–but there’s almost no chance to actually spend your wealth in the ruined city of Myth Drannor.
The sprawling plot was replaced with combat encounter after combat encounter. And from early user-reviews, these encounters made use of 3rd Edition’s “encounter level” rules. But those rules were often unforgiving and would become unbalanced if you tried to fight more than three or four things at a time. Suffice it to say, the game had difficulties when it was released.
There are few tactical challenges we had a chance to see in similar games; everything comes down to hacking and slashing. If you want to kill a mage just put your fighter next to him; he won’t be able to run, nor cast! The only tactics that make sense in this game are to push your “John Rambo” characters in the front lines and make them eliminate any spell-casters, or what few stronger enemies appear in the game, and have the rest of the party support them. The next frustrating gameplay issue is the Windows-like interface with pop-up menus containing commands. Fortunately, all remotely useful commands can also be issued with hot-keys, which makes playing this game a lot easier.
But it’s more than just failed promises that helped sink the Pool of Radiance sequel into infamy. After all, Fable is one of the most beloved game series, and it’s practically built on broken promises. But Ruins of Myth Drannor was released crawling with bugs.
The main problems that flawed Pool of Radiance are its countless bugs. I only had the chance to experience several of them; apart from the setup program which refuses to install the game to any drive other than c:, I had a lot of trouble with virtual memory under Windows 2000/XP. It seems that the game devours immense quantities of virtual memory, which can eventually make the game or even the whole machine freeze. There are many other bugs (especially in the gameplay).
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor could simply be defined as disk full of bugs, striving to be a slow Diablo based on AD&D third edition rules.
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And these bugs could range from inconvenient, like crashing when trying to save your game, having abilities like Attacks of Opportunities freeze your game, save files routinely becoming corrupt–to downright deadly to your computer. When the game released, it had a bug that would absolutely trash your Windows partition.
If you tried to uninstall the game, the game would in turn delete your system files. Now, UbiSoft released a patch that fixed this. But this was in the days of 2001, before the internet followed you everywhere you went. People weren’t used to the idea of patching their game for four hours before waiting in line for an hour to log in to your game so a 12-year-old can scream profanities into your headset.
It was a simpler time. And so the developers tried warning retailers to warn people about their game. But, by then it was too late:
Well, at least it doesn’t blow up.
That must be what Ubi Soft executives are thinking about their new role-playing game, “Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.”
“Unlikely to erase your hard drive” isn’t usually a big selling point. But publisher Ubi Soft is proud to announce that, statistically speaking, its new game is almost certain not to wipe out your system files — in fact, it’s only happened in a few dozen cases.
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But in spite of all of this, the game sold well enough to top the charts. Until people realized what it could do to their hard drives if they didn’t download a patch. And download a patch in 2001, no less. Once it made it past its first few weeks, the game all but faded into obscurity. It left little more than a legacy of buggy gameplay, publisher overreach, and broken system files.
And while it’s not quite deadly to the people that played it, as the folks from Stay Alive might put it:
When you uninstall the game, it uninstalls you right back.
