The Gold Field video games are legendary amongst RPG followers of a sure age. Printed by SSI via the late ’80s and early ’90s, they’re primarily based on quite a few basic D&D settings together with Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Darkish Solar, and Ravenloft. They seem to be a seminal old-school RPG expertise, and later this month they’re going to lastly be out there on Steam.
The Gold Field video games will probably be a part of eight separate collections:
- Forgotten Realms: The Archives Collection One (Eye of the Beholder 1, 2, and three)
- Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection Two (Curse of the Azure Bonds, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, Hillsfar, Swimming pools of Darkness, Pool of Radiance, Secret of the Silver Blades, Treasures of the Savage Frontier, and Limitless Adventures)
- Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection Three (Dungeon Hack, Menzoberranzan)
- Krynn series (Champions of Krynn, Loss of life Knights of Krynn, The Darkish Queen of Krynn)
- Dark Sun series (Shattered Lands, Wake of the Ravager)
- Ravenloft series (Strahd’s Possession, Stone Prophet)
- D&D Stronghold: Kingdom Simulator
- Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse
The Steam editions are being remastered by SNEG, a small writer based by former GOG staff that focuses on remastering and re-releasing previous video games. They’re going to function a lot of enhancements together with a particular Gold Field launcher that may simplify the method of managing the video games and shifting events between them, enhanced DOSBox help, and numerous companion apps.
These collections are already out there on GOG, and it is not clear how, or if, the Steam releases will probably be meaningfully completely different. The GOG variations do not embrace the auto-mapping apps, for example, however that is not an enormous deal as a result of they’re freely available for download; they do embrace trace books, which the Steam pages do not point out—however the Steam listings additionally do not point out the instruction manuals and imagine me, you are fairly nicely hosed with out these, so it is cheap to imagine they’re going to be included.
I’ve reached out to SNEG to ask in regards to the variations between the Steam and GOG releases, and can replace if I obtain a reply. Within the meantime, some private recommendation: The precise Gold Field video games are extraordinarily previous, and except you wish to play them, you in all probability do not. Eye of the Beholder 2: Legend of Darkmoon, then again, stays an especially playable, and extremely good, dungeon crawler.
The Gold Field video games and different SSI classics will arrive on Steam on March 29.
