Drakensang: The Dark Eye Review
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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.
