Gameplay Notes - Eye of the Beholder III

Before you set out on your Eye of the Beholder III adventure, you should familiarize yourself with this section. The tips and notes below will make your experience much smoother, help you create a solid party, and point out some less than obvious mechanics.

Running the Game

A useful tool when playing Eye of the Beholder III (EOB3) is the All-Seeing Eye 3 (ASE3). ASE3 isn’t as powerful or as stable as the ASE tool for EOB and EOB2, but it still provides auto-mapping and more, so it’s still worth running. We used ASE3 when writing the walkthrough.

If you’re using DOSBox to play the game, then you can use it to remap the keys so you don’t have to use the numpad for movement. Pressing control-F1 will bring up the DOSBox key remapper. We switched movement to the more common WASD keys, using the mapping shown below:

A=7, S=2, D=9, Q=4, W=8, E=6

For the above mapping to work, you’ll also need to map the reverse (7=A, 2=S, and so forth).

Importing Characters

There’s a trick to importing your characters from EOB2 to EOB3. The charcopy utility included with the game (option 3 from the start-up menu) is actually looking in the main EOB3 directory, and not in your C: drive. So create a directory named Darkmoon in the main EOB3 directory and place your EOB2 saved games in there. Then when you run charcopy, it should see your saves and allow you to import characters. But note: charcopy will only import the first four characters from a saved game, so if those aren’t the characters you want to use, then you’ll need to run EOB2 and create a new save with your party re-arranged. Finally, to use your imported party, you’ll need to select the Summon the Heroes of Darkmoon option from the main EOB3 screen.

Note: If you’re playing the GOG versions of the games, then you’ll find the main EOB3 directory in /GOG Games/Eye of the Beholder III/, and the EOB2 saves in /GOG Games/Eye of the Beholder II/cloud_saves/.

New in EOB3

From the main interface screen, if you left click on a character’s name, the color of their name will change from white to yellow (or yellow back to white). If at least one character has a yellow name, then an “All Attack” button will appear beneath the arrow buttons in the interface, and pressing that button will cause all yellow-selected characters to attack with their equipped weapon(s), making combat much easier.

EOB3 adds polearms (which allow characters in the second row to participate in melee combat) and throwing hammers (two of which always return to the thrower). These weapons mean you don’t need to rely on arrows, daggers, darts, and other weapons that have to be picked up after fights, removing the “chore” aspect of combat.

Party Composition

There isn’t anything for thieves to do in the game. We only found a couple of places where Lock Picks could even be used — and they weren’t even on doors.

So if you’re creating a new party for the game, we’d recommend starting with a paladin, a fighter (or ranger), a cleric, and a mage, and then adding two fighter companions (like Delmair and Tabitha) when you meet them.