Drakensang Online Beta Impressions

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Written by BuckGB on April 15th, 2012

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So let's say a rare item -- replete with seductive blue text and a come-hither look that may as well fire lasers at self-control -- finds its way into my inventory. Well, I have to identify it before I can actually use it or even sell it at its full value. Or perhaps I want to exit a dungeon and head back to town without backtracking. In both cases, I need special items to accomplish my goals: crystals of truth and location-specific teleporter obelisks, respectively.

Diablo's equivalent scrolls, of course, are relatively easy to come by. Drakensang, by comparison, makes these rather essential items fairly scarce as drops, but widely available in shops for the buyable currency, Andermant. Somewhat brilliantly -- you know, in an evil-genius-perched-atop-a-tower-of-kitten-tears kind of way -- Drakensang starts new players off with a meager supply of 600 Andermant (roughly 70 cents worth) so that, when it runs dry, we instantly realize how essential these items are to enjoyment of the experience.

Andermant can be earned through combat and questing as well, but it trickles in at such a slow rate as to be impractical. And it's not just crystals of truth and teleporters that require Andermant, either. Health potions, inventory expansions, weapons, armor, item upgrades -- all of it's tied to Andermant and Andermant alone. Drakensang's freely flowing gold currency, by comparison, is basically a joke. And so, after about five hours of free play, my experience became tediously backtrack-heavy -- especially when quest chains required me to enter the same dungeon multiple times. Difficulty, meanwhile, remained manageable by and large, but my near-nonexistent potion supply made itself painfully apparent when giant hordes of enemies went into murder-blender mode on my squishy Spellweaver. Grouping with other players definitely helped, but while soloing I felt like I was tightrope-walking without a safety net.

Drakensang's item selection is -- on an individual basis -- actually incredibly cheap. It does, however, add up, making it a nickel-and-dime scheme of a nearly literal sort. So a stack of 10 low-level health potions, for instance, ran me 350 Andermant, or about 40 cents. Playing intelligently, I tended to use up that many in an hour and a half or so. I also found that potions of insight -- which double experience gain -- made progression feel just about perfect. They run 600 Andermant a pop for a 30-minute duration. Fast-travel, meanwhile, usually land in the 40-Andermant range, so roughly four pennies. And crystals of truth are 450 Andermant for a bundle of 100, totaling out to about 50 cents. So a single hour-long play session ran somewhere in the area of $2.50. On its own? Chump change. But if I were to play that way all the time, it'd add up fast.

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