Drakensang: The Dark Eye Review
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RPG veterans will fondly recall the TDE property under the name of Realms of Arkania, the three titles released between 1993 and 1997 that became the Northland Trilogy. To this day, they're still remembered by many as some of the greatest accomplishments in cRPG history. To keep any unfair comparisons at bay, Drakensang: The Dark Eye is not Realms of Arkania IV, nor does it make any pretense to be. It is based on the 4th edition of the TDE ruleset (which is fairly different from the 3rd edition that the NLT was based on) and clearly inspired more by Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights than Realms of Arkania. It really doesn't help to compare this game to a classic series it has nothing much to do with (other than one amusing little easter egg remark in the game) and makes no claims to be related beyond using the same license, which makes them cousins in the same way Gold Box D&D games are related to the Infinity Engine D&D games.
So how does it measure up on its own strength?
Basic Gameplay
We'll cover all elements more in-depth later, but to give you a basic idea of what we're looking at here: Drakensang is a third-person, bird's eye view RPG that utilizes real-time with pause combat. In these elements, it basically follows the rough design set down by BioWare's D&D titles, so if you've played those, Drakensang will feel at least somewhat familiar.
Drakensang is structured along a fairly linear main path, in which you unlock areas to explore and then find many of these same areas locked again as you leave them, giving you only a handful of locations on the fairly small area map that you can return to whenever you want. Along with the main quest, which determines when areas are unlocked, there are plenty of side quests to find in each area or spanning different areas. These are broken down between dialogue-centric, thieving, and predominantly fighting quests.
Movement within each area is alotted quite a bit of freedom, with a few restrictions. One such restriction is the seemingly "standard" restriction of many a third-person RPG, by which your character is incapable of jumping, climbing, or swimming, meaning your mighty hero can easily be stopped by a river, steep hill, or knee-high fence. This same logic applies to most buildings, which cannot be entered.
Drakensang is a party-based RPG. You create a single character (from 20 archetypes offered by the game), and then recruit others as you go along your adventures. A balanced party is important, so the freedom of customization granted to the player (you have full control of where and how characters invest skill points) is a welcome addition.
Technical Design
Smaller European releases have a bad reputation when it comes to technical polish, but Drakensang is a pretty positive exception. It ran with refreshing stability on my rig, with only one consistent crash-causing bug I could find (it would crash whenever I tried to read the second page of a certain alchemic recipe). The only major annoyance I ran into was a quest-killing bug a ways into the game, which I could not recreate after reloading, leading me to believe it was a freak occurrence.
Loading screens seem to get longer as you get along in the game, but the game's designers were sensible enough to generally place you in single large areas, forcing very few loading screens onto the player. Nor are the loading screens ever excessively long. In general, the game seems pretty well-optimized for the average PC gaming rig.
The interface is refreshingly intuitive but has some head-scratching moments. It takes a while to get used to its combination of both WASD and left-mouse button clicking for movement, while maneuvering the mouse itself swivels the camera angle. However, the game has all the standard features quick-slot bar, logically mapped hotkeys for different menus, mouse sensitivity settings that we've come to expect from cRPGs.
The biggest issue in interface is the fact that the game asks you to do a lot of walking. Not a problem by itself, except that your characters walk really, really slowly, and there's nothing in the options to fix this (though an INI settings tweak is possible). On top of that, conspicuousness in their absence are a (toggle walk on/off) button and a (click on the map to walk there) feature. This all combines to not just make walking probably one of the biggest chunks of your gameplay time, much to the game's detriment, but to also force you to sit there and hold the W button while your characters slowly crawl across the map.
Graphics
Drakensang: The Dark Eye can't compete with the mainstream headliners when it comes to graphics, but it is a pretty good-looking game nonetheless. With the high-resolution pack enabled and graphic settings tweaked up, many of the environments in the game look absolutely gorgeous, of course helped a bit by the fact that you're usually looking at them from some distance, unless you opt to play much of the game keeping the camera fairly close (not recommended, for gameplay reasons).
Solid world design helps keep your surroundings looking interesting. While Drakensang actually does appear to reuse art assets pretty extensively, it manages to keep this fact fairly well-hidden from casual inspection. It mostly does this by refreshing the world design in every new area, sending you from a crowded city to a dense forest to murky swamps. The differences aren't huge - every area is still recognizably on Aventuria (TDE's setting), but they're enough to keep one interested. Character modeling and animations are not as solid as the world design, but they're still pretty good. Human body types consist of a fairly limited set of standards, but a rich variety in clothing, faces, and hair means you're not apt to actually notice any (sameness) in design. In both character and world design, Radon Labs dealt with their budget restrictions in very adroit ways.
If you're apt to notice anything, it's the odd face expression modeling and dialogue animating (more on this later), and an occasional half-hearted attempt to cover up graphical shortcomings with some bloom. A final thing to the detriment of an otherwise artistically well-designed title is a pretty unnecessary predilection to give almost every female an impressive bust, and cleavage shot to go along with it.
Sound & Music
There's not much to say on Drakensang's sound & music, beyond that it's solid. Sound effects and grunts in combat are a bit subdued but functional, equally the ambient sounds in the world are very subdued.
The music is more present, Drakensang having a fairly rich soundtrack with a different selection of tracks for situations and locations. It won't surprise you at any point, since nearly every track is of the fairly predictable type (to the point where walking in some caves had me imagining I was playing Gothic from the sound of it), but it's pretty good overall.
Setting
The setting of The Dark Eye, the continent of Aventuria on the world of Ethra, is an old one, having been enriched for nearly 25 years with added modules, world lore books, and novels. There's a lot to pick and choose from, but before it can appeal to us, the consumer, there's a bit of a mental barrier to cross.
Aventuria is not the recognizable standard high-fantasy fare, though it is deceptively close to it, and it is diametrically opposed to the currently popular (dark gritty fantasy) as visualized in The Witcher or Dragon Age: Origins. Instead, it is best described as (whimsical), a kind of mix of the standard high-fantasy settings as known from The Lord of the Rings and a more ebullient approach, close to fairy tales.
This is not the same thing as approaching everything with a sense of comedy and dismissive disinterest. TDE as a setting and Drakensang in itself have plenty of darker subplots and distinctly human motives of folly and evil, but it will easily come out of left field to approach a topic like murder or political scheming with a kind of light-hearted step, sometimes crossing the boundary and joking about it, which can be a bit jarring. One can criticize this approach wholesale, and if you're more purely into (dark 'n gritty), it will obviously not appeal to you. If you do take in the setting and it clicks with you, you can approach it with a new, if critical eye. Because while this setting might sound like a piece of cake to get through, it isn't. Beyond having to juggle a lot of setting details and canon as a designer, you have to constantly balance on the thin line of being whimsical or just being ridiculous, and have to ensure that your approach is consistent as not to jolt the player from embracing the game's world.
Does Radon Labs do this well? Yes, for the most part. There are a few moments in Drakensang that feel lightly out of place as you are faced with rather dramatic characters and situations (the first moments in Moorbridge marches, the elf in Tallon), but they are not so dramatic that they ruin the overall feel. NPCs remain identifiable individuals through the use of delightfully recognizable archetypes, without falling straight into the stereotypical, while the story design approach outside of the main quest has a fitting light-hearted approach for the vast majority of situations.
Aside from the approach, the main advantage to players in playing a game based on TDE is the richness of the setting. The difference between playing something based on an established IP and something just made up is often tangible even without being familiar with the IP, and that is the case for Drakensang. You can feel the pieces of the setting fit together better than they would for a new franchise, that the various gods' temples show up at the right places, that the cultural oddities of dwarves and elves (the latter you hardly meet as you mostly move through urbanized areas), while stereotypical, feel more like a consistent part of an overarching structure of cultures.
As part of the setting, this game offers a number of creatures and cultures, and there is certainly a feeling of the possibilities never running out, as every area offers new if often fantasy cliché enemies, such as undead, orcs, and goblins. Sadly, this is often given a light touch. Witches, aka Daughters of Satuaria, are a fairly interesting and unusual class in TDE, based on the archetypal women who do magic by being closer to nature, but deepened out from there. In Drakensang, they come across as just more women with a good bit of cleavage. The cave-dwelling grolms are shown feuding with dwarves, but it is never explored fully, and you're just left accepting it as a given. This feels like a poignant shortcoming for such a large game.
One noticeable bit of fan-service for those of us familiar with Aventuria is the appearance of a few familiar faces, such as the confused but brilliant Rakorium Muntagonus, or the studier of human nature, the druid Archon Megalon.
Storyline
The storyline of Drakensang is pretty linear and well pretty damned reminiscent of the plot in Neverwinter Nights, or any number of clichéd joe-turned-hero high fantasy tales. You start out simply trying to get into Ferdok to reply to a request from an old friend (written in rather stiff English), and, inevitably, you turn out to be the chosen one. My Lord, what a surprise. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though it's more apt to bore the hell out of most RPG veterans rather than have them at the edge of their seat. The quality still depends on how the developer approaches the story, and in the case of Drakensang... it's not particularly well done. Eyeroll-inducing clichés are richly strewn across your path, as you're taken by the hand and lead into a linear path of ever-increasing challenges and rewards without much of a satisfying experience in sight.
Crucially, Drakensang does a few things spectacularly wrong. One is in how shoddily the game is trying to draw you into the story. This can be hard to do in overly linear games to begin with, but Drakensang handles it particularly clumsily, seemingly offering the player a choice at points, only to tell you (no, wait, you can't do that) and just cutscenes you into where they want you to be. It's not like you're comparatively more involved in the story in most RPGs, but at least they often manage to keep up the illusion of choice better.
You're further repelled from feeling involved in the story by the flatness of your adversaries. You're never really told who they are or satisfyingly explained why they're doing what they're doing. Instead, you just kind of run into them and have a second to think (who the hell is that?) before they start spouting clichéd one-liners. I'm not arguing 2D opponents do not work by definition, but they certainly don't work when presented as lazily as they are in Drakensang, even in TDE's setting, which does encourage the use of archetypes.
Part of me thinks Radon Labs recognized the story isn't that engaging, and they go to the worst fallback imaginable to fix it - loot and ego-stroking. You're steadily giving a stream of overpowered magic items, a number of which are tied to the main quest meaning you get the same items in the same order every play through. Even more irksome is the constant (you are a hero!) and (you will be remembered forever!) announcements that are the mark of a self-conscious bad storyteller. This is a pet annoyance of mine, and this game sure does a lot of it, from start to finish.
Game Pacing
What makes this ego-stroking particularly more poignant is how damned easy the game is. I don't know if I just happened to stumble upon the ideal party build somehow, but there were only a handful of fights in this game that were much of a challenge (and by challenge I mean (I had to quaff a few potions)), and way too many of the ones that weren't (more on this below). This makes the game telling me I'm a legend all the more laughable.
The game's pacing feels off, anyway. It's particularly odd to someone who used to play a bit of The Dark Eye to see how easily you stroll into levels that I never could dream off in the pen and paper version. Even more so, in a world where magic items are exceedingly rare, it is odd to see a party of four easily bedecked in magic items by level 10. And, finally, the amount of ducats you get goes far beyond the reasonable, let alone actually having any use. I ended up lugging about literally dozens of magical boost and restorative potions, and a ridiculous amount of ducats (over 1000), I could never find a fight challenging enough to force me to drink a strength elixer.
Drakensang is a really long game, easily over 60 hours provided you do quite a few side-quests. Normally, these type of long games start with rich, well-designed areas with interesting NPCs and quests and slowly devolve into a boring dungeoncrawl with uninteresting design. Drakensang avoided this for the most part. The ending areas are fairly combat-heavy, but more in the way of throwing up a final challenge then in feeling like lazy design.
Dialogue and quest design actually improves as you go along, with the dwarf mines containing some of the best quests of the game. A variety of resolutions and testing of player skill for quests remains fairly constant, but does peak in certain short parts later on, and you'll suddenly find your social skills are pretty damned useful. Heck, for two major invasions into enemy strongholds later in the game, the game actually encourages you to try and sneak in unnoticed rather than go in swords swinging.
This approach of keeping design at the same level throughout is really refreshing, and makes it worthwhile to play the game through to the end. However, the game does feel a little on the long side. Some sequences are a bit too familiar later on, making you wonder if a more focused, slightly less sprawling approach to length would not have been better. Particularly, a lot of time is filled by walking, as discussed, which is an absolute disaster, and much of the rest of the time is filled in combat, which is nearly as bad, but more on that below.
Character System
The character system, from character creation to leveling up to combat mechanics, is one of the strongest points of this game. The Dark Eye's 4th edition is not necessarily my favorite, but it is certainly one of the strongest and richest character systems available, and Drakensang benefits from that.
Character creation does set you off on the wrong foot a bit. You're given a set of archetypes to choose from (albeit a rich set, 20 total), which you can adapt in expert mode, but it is nothing compared to the elbow room normally available in TDE character creation. This is a bit of a disappointment, but you're given a lot of leeway to customize as you carry on, so it's not a big issue on the long term, just not the best of starts. It's a big help for people not overly familiar with TDE, and that would be most of the international consumers.
Drakensang has simplified the TDE basic ruleset a bit, but it still leaves a very complex system: 8 attributes, 9 derived statistics, 11 branches of special abilities, 10 combat skills and 23 non-combat skills. It's a bit daunting, but provided you read the in-game tutorial texts the system is intuitive enough to use without much trouble.
It's still a deep system, and each archetype plays slightly or very differently. As a party-based RPG, you can typically focus on specializing a number of skills, and there are no skills that have absolutely no use though some are more important than others meaning every one is worth investing some points in, either for yourself or for one of your followers.
Party Mechanics
Building a good party with proper balance is vital for the game. I never tried just running around with four fighters, but I suspect it would not have gone that well for me. Spell-casters, thieving skill specialists, social skill specialists, they all have minor or major use for you, even if one or two straightforward bruisers are a must.
The game offers you a set of followers that you can recruit (though you can also choose not to), a selection that runs the gauntlet from elf ranger to dwarf mercenary, from alchemist to battle mage, from charlatan to amazon. The right mix and match is important, but Drakensang makes this disappointingly easy for you as you can keep all your recruits in your house, and they actually gain all the experience that the ones traveling do. This cuts out all relevant consequences to forming a proper party, and gives you total freedom to pick and choose for individual adventuring sallies as you want, not to mention to train your home-stayers in crafting skills, to just construct items whenever you get home. This is the kind of disappointing protection of the player that doesn't actually help the strength of party mechanics, instead making your party feel less unique and relevant.
What brings this feeling of uniqueness down further is the lack of depth in NPCs. They're recognizable archetypes, but of the attractive type that feels like they could be pretty interesting if only they were fleshed out. Drakensang does not make much of an effort to do this to any significant extent. The comments offered by your characters and the opinions they offer are well-written (and the only ones that are more fully voiced), but there's too little of it to really make you feel like they are alive. A bit of promise is shown when your followers recognize people they already know from before they started traveling with you, and take over part of the conversation, but this happens very rarely. One quest for one of your followers is tossed in a bit into the game, but that's it as far as fleshing them out through special quests goes.
Combat
Combat takes place in real time; you don't directly control any character but instead give each character an assignment to attack, use an item, or cast a spell. To facilitate this, the game allows you to pause using the spacebar. The game runs on in real-time, but the mechanics underneath are recognizably turn or perhaps phase-based, as the side have set periods for each action, similar to the Infinity Engine. In case you couldn't already tell, I'm not a big fan of real-time with pause. If you want tactical combat, go for turn-based, and if you want some immediacy in fighting, go for real-time. RTwP is by far too much of a halfway house for me. But provided you do enjoy real-time with pause, it's still a system in which quite a bit can go wrong, and a lot of what can go wrong does go wrong in Drakensang.
The worst of it is probably the AI. TDE is a system balanced to make it highly important for you to gang up on enemies, as they have only one or two parries a turn, so from the second attack onwards a hit is a hit, with no chance for the opponent of parrying it. In a fight between two groups of three combatants, where you would normally loose by letting everyone fight 1-on-1, you can easily win by ganging up on one opponent, killing him and moving to the next. The party AI seems to have absolutely no clue about this, instead just letting the PC and his followers attack the enemy on a (which one is closest) basis. Nor does it have any mechanic for threat level, withdrawing when you're wounded, or any basic AI setting, instead allowing you only to toggle between aggressive (go in swords waving) or defensive (stand there and do nothing).
The worst of it is probably the way in which assignments don't stick: you give your battle mage the assignment to cast two Ignifaxus spells on a target, but then between the 1st and 2nd spell the target dies. The battlemage, if unattended, does not switch his spell to another target, instead he just runs into the battle in his normal attack mode, even if he's set to a defensive stance. This means you have to be real quick about pausing the game at every death, to resort everyone's assignments and keep your battle mage from running to his death.
Now I don't generally mind having to keep track of my combatants for every move, but since the game requires me to do that thus constantly asking me to pause why is it RTwP anyway? The whole concept I'm describing above fits turn-based combat perfectly, but it really doesn't work well with real-time with pause. Making it even more of an annoyance are two design head-scratchers. One is the way the camera pans to whoever you select, meaning you can't just take a strategic bird's eye view and stick with it, and also meaning you have to deal with quite a few camera annoyances if you're in a tight place. The other is the way combatants want to line up for combat, constantly realigning to face whoever they want to attack. It's fine to have them line up neatly in principle, but during bigger fights the basic effect is that everyone does this odd mad chair dance to realign after every death.
All of this combines to form a combat system that could at best be called ok, but in reality feels more like a chore. That's not a problem by itself, a lot of decent to good RPGs have had pretty horrible combat systems. It is a problem when you start insisting on throwing players into your mediocre combat system over and over.
For Drakensang, it's not even it being a matter of there being a lot of combat, as this was kind of to be expected. The problem sneaks in when instead of throwing up heavy and challenging combat zones, Drakensang forces you to trudge through seemingly endless rows of useless, weak opponents often so weak you don't even get XP for killing them. When I'm at a high level, spiders and small groups of grolms don't actually pose a threat to me anymore, so why is the game sending me long tunnels filled with dozens of these creatures? It quickly got so boring that I would just zone out on these combat sequences, letting the inept AI handle it while I did something else. The aforementioned low quality of the AI does mean it will take your guys a long time to take down even the weakest group of enemies, since they're so stupid about it, but at some points it really is better than doing it yourself.
All this combat feels like filler at best, and is completely unnecessary from any angle. Drakensang would have been a much better game with less frequent and harder fights as the game does in fact offer you interesting, set fighting sequences, tied to certain quests, and those are the few highpoints of a pretty dreary combat experience.
Dialogue
The localization in Drakensang is fairly solid. It has those moments when you can feel something is not quite right, and the game blunders through an awkwardly phrased English sentence, but both the in-game story and dialogue are easily up to par with current AAA RPGs (acknowledging that this is not very difficult). The voice acting is another matter, as it varies from the pretty good to the downright laughable, the game offering a panoply of odd out-of-place accents and bad acting accomplishments. The NPCs that have more voice-acting (like your followers) tend to have the better voice-acting, thankfully.
The game's voice acting is also pretty limited, cutscenes and follower NPCs being the only fully (or almost fully) voiced ones, while in normal dialogue only the opening lines are voiced, and the rest is not. A fine solution to a limited voice acting budget, only it doesn't mesh well with the dialogue animations Radon Labs made. NPCs swing their arms about and contort their faces into odd expressions, which (even without lip sync) works ok for voiced dialogue but just looks kind of clown-ish when it's unvoiced.
Dialogue also feels a bit rigid, not particularly well adapted to your race, gender or accomplishments, to the point of guards barring your way with a (no one enters) until you remind them you're supposed to be there, followed by them actually having the gall to tell you they knew that, now hurry up please. One of the advantages of written over fully voiced dialogue is that you have the space to avoid these kind of oddities, but Drakensang never utilizes this possibility.
An important note is the usage of social skills. The game allows you to do most social skill tests with any follower in your party, and there are 4 social skills that both unlock dialogue options and at a higher level allow for success when they're tested in dialogue. At times this will just unlock an extra reward in a quest, but at other times dialogue can be used to completely avoid combat, or to unlock a new quest or path. It's not checked quite as often as one might hope, but the social skills are certainly not useless.
Quest Design
Most quests in Drakensang fall straight into the open category, meaning the game does not check any particular non-combat skills as you fight or fetch across the screen to get where the quest marker tells you to go. But they are not all like that, several encouraging you or obliging you to use thieving skills, whether your own or that of a follower. Social skills are used in the way described above, but make no mistake that non-combat skills are always meant to serve a supplementary role in quest design, and walking'n'fighting is the number one way to solve the vast majority of quests.
I mentioned quest markers above, Drakensang has them, but uses them sporadically. As a rule, they are only used when your character actually knows where he's supposed to be heading, so if you've only been given vague instructions on a certain area you're supposed to track then don't expect a quest marker.
Still, when they are used, the combination of quest markers and the dominant fight-first-talk-later quest design means you can sometimes just follow the marker, kill whatever is at the end of it and walk away knowing you did your job well. Drakensang falls into this trap relatively little. It has quite a few (find out what happened to) or (convince these people to support your cause) quests, which involve more than just following the quest markers and clicking through dialogue. At times, the game asks the player to pay attention and actively make the right choices, as in a bit of dialogue where you convince someone to give up without a fight, or a lawsuit in which you have to gather evidence and then present it in the right way to the court. But either through quest notes, quest markers or blatant hints, the game does tend to hold your hand a bit too much, and failing a quest can be tougher than succeeding at it.
The presentation of different quests is pretty well done. They can feel a bit contrived, but you don't feel like you're just being sent out to kill 10 floozles or gather 10 dogbits in every new area, and while many quests do end up being just combat or fetch, the presentation and slight changes in how they work out often make up for it.
One thing of note is that while the main quest itself is linear, you are offered pretty relevant choices in new areas, whether it is about joining one side or the other or about choosing between saving or abandoning someone in need. With a linear storyline, it should be no surprise that even the biggest decisions offered don't have much in the way of long-term consequences. Generally, while the way to to resolve quests vary quite a bit in Drakensang, the actual end and consequences of the quest rarely vary at all.
Conclusion
As you can tell, there's plenty about Drakensang to dislike, it has quite a few minor and major flaws, some of which depend very heavily on your tastes. If you're generally ok with Real-Time with Pause combat, you might enjoy it better than I did, but if you tried the demo and didn't like the combat at all, you should probably just not play this game.
But beyond its biggest flaws combat and the slow, endless walking Drakensang is at its core a solid RPG, with an average main storyline, interesting locations and NPCs, a bad-to-bearable combat system, and some pretty good quest design. Not a stand-out in any of these areas, but a solid title nonetheless.
What pulls it up is its license. Without the TDE license, Drakensang would have been just another RPG. With it, it is just another RPG, but supported by a fleshed out and attractively unique fantasy setting and an intricate and intuitive character system, which the game utilizes competently when it comes to making the right skills useful and encouraging a balanced, interesting party build.
Considering how new the TDE license is to many gamers, and how much of a pleasure it is to see it return to the PC platform for us veterans, it's easy enough to give Drakensang a rain check on its shortcomings, and to enjoy it for what it is: solid, but not great. With the potential of this license, I do hope for and expect a lot more from Radon Lab's next title.
