Game Overview

Developer: Stormfront Studios
Publisher: UbiSoft
Pool of Radiance official page: http://www.poolofradiance.com

Back to the Future

In the dark ages of computer gaming (1988) Dungeons & Dragons was huge. It's not a big surprise that the gamers that played D&D were also the programmers that created the first wave of computer role-playing games. Games like Curse of the Azure Bonds, Hillsfar, and Eye of the Beholder set the pace for RPGs through use of the popular AD&D system. Gamers could get their role-playing fix without dragging a group of friends together and hunting for dice.

In the beginning

Atop a tower

Mirror, mirror...

These games were advanced at the time - now they look like an undergrad CS student's class project. They didn't have complex stories, and most of the gameplay was based around dungeon crawling. Sounds simple, but they were great games, so why not make a sequel? That's exactly what Stormfront Studios set out to do.

Story

Pool or Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is a loose sequel to the original Pool of Radiance and the Gold Box series of games. Most gamers don't remember the Gold Box games, or weren't old enough to play them yet, so SSI couldn't pull a lot of direct references. It didn't make much of a difference though, as there's not much to PoR's story.

They give you sidequests

The House of Gems

The Catacombs

The quick rundown: Eliminster has discovered that another Pool of Radiance has spawned in the city of Myth Drannor. Once the most magnificent city in all of Faerun, Myth Drannor is now the hiding place for many a bad monster. Eliminster fears that if the Pool is allowed to fester and grow, whoever is controlling it may be able to take over all of the Forgotten Realms. In other words, your basic end-of-the-world-unless-your-unlikely-band-of-underdogs-goes-and-kills-the-bad-guy story. There's not a whole lot of plot in PoR - it's basically a massive dungeon hack with a few NPCs and treasures thrown in.