Din's Curse: Demon War Impressions
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In a recent session, I had just completed a quest when the town above was attacked. I raced back to a portal to get back to town, to find a powerful (boss) fire-thrower laying waste to a lot of the main quest-givers and vendors in the town square. The NPCs were valiantly giving it all the had, including the Warmaster, who had given me the quest I'd just completed. I raced to their rescue, but the monster was seriously nasty, and managed to kill both NPCs in short order, and me as well as I went overboard trying to kill him. I was resurrected and managed to kill the invader before he slew anyone else in town, but in the meantime I had a completed quest in my queue that I couldn't end. I considered dropping it, but held on. In short order, the steward had a new quest for me a new potential warmaster had been found, but I had to do a quest to shut down some demonic gateways in order to seal the deal. Maybe I had to prove the town's worth to him or something. Anyway I did so, a new warmaster was brought on board, and fortunately for me his predecessor had taken very good notes. The new warmaster accepted my old completed quest that his predecessor had given me, and rewarded me appropriately. To be honest, this is actually something that could have happened pre-expansion, but it illustrates the sort of emerging narratives that come through in the game.
All told, Demon War is taking the already incredibly detailed, dynamic gameplay of Din's Curse (much of it first introduced in Depths of Peril) to the next level, across the board. On the surface, it sounds like holy grail kinds of stuff. the kind of (dream RPG) type stuff I would have laughed at a decade ago if someone suggesting stuffing all of it into a game. It's not perfect; it's easy to see there's stuff going on and to see the causality for sequences of events taking place the way they do, and to get a feel for all this incredible simulation taking place under the surface, but it can be hard to do much more than simply react all the time like it is some kind of time management game pushed into hardcore mode. But at under $10 for an already killer-fun game, it's a bargain and a must-have for anybody who already owns and enjoys Din's Curse.
