Pool of Radiance Update

We visited SSI's booth at Gen Con and got a firsthand look at the alpha version of Pool of Radiance: The Ruins of Myth Drannor. The game looks even more polished than it did at E3; since then, the designers at Stormfront Studios have added a great deal of new content, including the game's day/night cycle, real-time light sources, 3D effects on magical spells, and a great many new character animations. Though the game's character movement is extremely smooth, it turns out that the animations themselves are in fact hand-drawn. Each character is based on a skeletal model and has built-in interpolation, so the transition between the walking, running, and fighting animations is completely seamless.

Ruins of Myth Drannor will be the very first PC Dungeons & Dragons game to fully incorporate the new 3rd Edition rules, and as such, it will include a great deal of new content. The 3rd Edition adds, among other things, a streamlined multiclass character system - which makes playing a character that belongs to multiple character classes much simpler and more manageable - and a heroic-feat system - which is a set of powerful skills, like improved initiative, iron will, and cleave. In addition, producer Jon Kromrey assured us that Ruins of Myth Drannor will have a tremendous amount of territory to explore. Myth Drannor itself will be a huge city, and many of the game's dungeons will be several times as big. The game's enormous area will not only add value to the Ruins of Myth Drannor's single-player game, but also to the randomly generated dungeons of the game's multiplayer mode.

Unfortunately, all of this new content will come at a price - Pool of Radiance: The Ruins of Myth Drannor won't be out this fall, as was previously expected. Instead, the game is scheduled for release this Christmas. In the meantime, the developers at Stormfront will continue to add new dungeons and areas to explore, as well as continue to balance and refine those areas that are already in the game.