Pool of Radiance updated impressions

Ubi Soft recently sent us a final build of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, the spiritual successor to Stormfront Studios' classic gold box role-playing game Pool of Radiance. Ruins of Myth Drannor is a 3D role-playing game that takes place in the Forgotten Realms fantasy world, one of the most popular settings in Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper role-playing system.

Ruins of Myth Drannor looks much like the last build of the game we saw at this year's GenCon. The game lets you build an adventuring party of up to four characters, though it also lets you add up to two additional non-player characters to your party for a sum total of six. Ruins of Myth Drannor comes with several pregenerated characters, but you can create your own custom characters using the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules, including barbarians, monks, and characters of the powerful half-orc race.

Ruins of Myth Drannor uses a handful of hotkeys and a nested system of menus, presumably in the interest of keeping the screen as uncluttered as possible. As a result, many of the game options are split between menus and hotkeys scattered across the keyboard. However, for many options, like choosing which physical attacks or which spell you'd like to use next in combat, you have to rely on your mouse to scroll through each menu. We poked around the game's manual and help documents and learned that you can at least make custom hotkeys by pressing Ctrl+F2-F12 to assign shortcuts to a character's last action, which helps somewhat.

Ruins of Myth Drannor is clearly intended to be a slow-paced, deliberate adventure, rather than a quick hack-and-slash game. For instance, though the game lets you handle combat through a "timed initiative" system, like several of the later Final Fantasy games, it's best played in completely turn-based mode. What's more, rather than use a fog-of-war system that lets you scroll your view around the entire map (but obscures areas you haven't yet explored), Ruins of Myth Drannor instead doesn't let you move your field of view past your own party members. In other words, your party must be onscreen at all times, and as a result, navigating a new area (or even an old one) is a time-consuming task.

Pool of Radiance is currently scheduled for release on September 25. We'll have a full review of the game soon.