Drakensang: The Dark Eye Review
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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.
