Reply 6700 of 6978, by newtmonkey
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- Oldbie
clueless1 wrote on 2025-03-08, 14:13:Pool of Radiance […]
Pool of Radiance
Unfortunately, I decided to bow out of this one. By my count, I spent about 50 hours, but a lot of that time was spent reloading after tough battles. I got my characters to level 6 (fighter/thief was 5/6) and started exploring the wilderness. The "last straw" was the three phase battle in the Kobold Caves. I actually got through it a couple of tries ago, but forgot to save before walking into the next room with another ginormous battle that ended up doing me in.
I never played the Gold Box games when they were current, so I don't have nostalgia helping me through. There was just too much combat and not enough story. The combat was really fun and well-designed, but even so, I felt like 70% of my playtime was in combat, not exploration, character development or plot developing. GBC helped a lot, but even with it it was still pretty rough around the edges. It didn't help that the graphics and sounds were so archaic even for the time, and no soundtrack. I supplemented with Rush's 3rd studio album, "Caress of Steel" (which is very proggy and complements old RPGs well), but that wasn't enough. My gaming time has whittled down to 5-10 hrs per week max, and I felt I wasn't making enough progress to warrant continuing. For example, I've literally spent two weeks retrying this same set of battles. It got old and frustrating.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. There's about 3 weeks til GOG releases KCD2, which I'm going to be all over. I might try to sneak in a 2nd playthrough of System Shock Remastered. There's always Control, which I also DNF, or starting another FPS like Doom 2016 or Bioshock Infinite. We'll see.
I'm sorry to read this! Not just because I love this game, but because it seemed like you were enjoying it until now, and finally because this is basically the most difficult set of battles in the game, and you're actually very close to completing the game. There is definitely a lot of combat in the game, but one thing I really appreciated about the game is that every minute I spent playing it felt like I was making progress and actually playing a game, rather than just following a plot or being made to fetch stuff (like in Fallout 3, for instance).
I mean no disrespect at all with saying this, but you had mentioned earlier that you were trying to get through the game as quickly as possible so that you could play Kingdom Come Deliverance II when it comes out on GOG, and that might be influencing how you think about the game. I know you really loved the first game. However, you might consider putting PoR aside for now, to revisit/finish later. Even though PoR is in my top 5 games of all time, I took many breaks along the way, and I think if I had been forcing myself to finish it on a deadline, it would have ended up annoying me.
Who knows? It might end up being a nice change of pace after you play through KC:D II?