Might and Magic 4-5: World of XEEN feedback

[Manny79]

I used ScummVM to play through World of XEEN, and here is some feedback. It was the first time for me to play this game, so Iam not too familiar with it and many things in the list below might be intentional or even features. It took roughly 50h for me until I saw the final cutscene. It is a great game and the scummVM implementation worked mostly very well.

Used scummVM daily build from 27. Aug 2020 on a Win10 PC

I used the GOG version. I saw the instructions for the talkie version, but could not get it running. So I used the non-talkie version included in the GOG directory for the playthrough.

List of things I noticed:
- Sound of drums in clouds over wizard tower is broken.
- Sound of lightning during cutscene after defeating lord XEEN is distorted
- Sound effects or music or both sometimes stopps being played completely. Maybe when too many sounds during fights are played at the same time?

- Strong cursing (for example in the sphinx dungeons) leads to negative luck numbers which are not displayed correctly

- Elemental Affix distribution: I only get items (loot or vendor) with the strongest elemental affixes available. According to the xeen wiki at xeen.fandom.com/wiki/Item_Enchantments
there are elemental affixes of various strength, but I only get scorching, cryo, noxious, kinetic, dyna etc..

- wrong graphics for hits with elemental weapons:
-- noxious looks like cold attack
-- cryo looks like electricity attack
etc.

Affix distribution of accessories is also strange: I get tons of "accelarator", "kinetic", "ego", "cryo", but nearly nothing else

- Clairvoyance heads nearly never do anything
- Whenever loading a saved game where clairvoyance was active, the left head is always shaking
- danger sense gargoyle is activated too often, for example even if there is no monster in the level

- U and D keys in the quest menu do not work

- Fight vs 3 armadillos results in graphics glitch at the border of the world view. Part of the grey border will stay red after the battle
- Similar glitch for fight with minotaurs

- Castle Alamar level two is completely shown in the automap without/before exploring

- Using the magic mirror to travel to dragon tower sends you to the desert instead

- Opening the safe and reading the book in the safe at the top of the pyramid crashes the game always

- Darkstone tower: auto notes entry is bugged for the last statue on the top level

- Wizard eye minimap at the skyroad: one of the wagons at the skyroad near the earth elemental plane is in the minimap displayed at the wrong position.

[dreammaster]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll add them to the bug tracker. Not sure if there's enough time to look into all of them before the release, but I may be able to fix some of the easier ones. Do you happen to have any savegames from the problem areas? If so, you could attach them to the bugs I've created here.

[dreammaster]

I think I'm mostly at the limit of things to easily replicate and fix. For the remaining bug stories I created, I'll ideally need savegames just before combat or before the sound occurs, etc. to investigate further. Keep in mind some things may simply be bugs in the original, or the way it's meant to work. For example, I checked in the original, and Castle Alamar level 2 also is fully mapped by default (presumably due to being a wide open level). Also, the original also had an incorrect destination for the Dragon Tower, although that at least I was able to do a workaround for.