Drakensang: The Dark Eye Review
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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.
