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Drakensang-Slowest starting game ever?

Self-Ejected

Lilura

RPG Codex Dragon Lady
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
Messages
5,274
The scarey thing is I'd rather play Neverwinter Nights 1 original campaign than Drakensang.
 

RPGMaster

Savant
Joined
Feb 23, 2011
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703
I mean, holy shit. Six hours or more into to this game and neither the plot or enemy encounters have even approached being interesting in any form.

Six hours? Bitch, please; I've played FINAL FANTASY XIII.
 

Turjan

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2008
Messages
5,047
The first Drakensang game isn't exactly exciting, but it's okay. However, after the first half hour, I looked for a solution to the movement speed and the herb picking animations, and you can relatively easily change those with an SQ Lite editor. This doesn't help much with the boring end sequence up the mountain, but it improves the rest (who thought those unskippable animations were a good idea?). The game generally suffers from too much filler combat. That rat dungeon is a side quest though, and it's up to you whether you deal with it or not.

River of Time is, indeed, much better out of the box. It fixes many problems of the first game. Combat is also improved, but more by encounter design than in principle. If you expect any epic plot like the standard "chosen one" BS from the frist one, you will be disappointed. Honestly, I found that refreshing. It will never stop strolling along at a leisurely pace though, which is something I find charming about it. All in all, it's a pretty nice game.

Skip the expansion to RoT, unless it's somehow included in what you get. It is just an example of how to throw away a very epic idea and make a simple combat slog out of it, and combat isn't exactly the high point of the games. The company was already folding when they made this, and it shows. If you play it as an add-in to the main game, it becomes more bearable, as the "story" (i.e., those fights) is then split up in three parts you can do at different times of the main plot.
 

MicoSelva

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The original Drakensang is much improved if you play it with female-only party without any armor/clothes (some specific pieces are allowed). You should try it if you feel your interest in the game waning. There are just enough female NPCs to join your party to make this viable (especially if you create a female character yourself).

Note that this does not work for gay people and male party members (unless really weird taste is involved), due to uneven character design.

Anyway, the game is pretty mediocre (but still better than NWN OC). The sequel is much better.
 

Correct_Carlo

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The plot of Drakensang is completely forgettable, but I remember being taken in and charmed by its atmosphere. It's very much a classical RPG setting. It's tone is more of the wide eyed, "Gee whiz, guys, let's go have an adventure in a brightly colored fantasy world!" variety than it is of the, "We are on a super serious, grim dark, quest to save the world with complicated character development and motives" variety. This might not appeal to everyone, but I liked it. It reminded me of an older 1980s or ealry 90s fantasy game, like King's Quest or Quest for Glory.

That said, I personally think it has an awesome combat and stat system. Probably my favorite of any 3D, Real time with Pause game. I really loved the wound system, for example. Drakensang 1 is trash mob heavy, but you can cut battle times in half by maximizing your party's wound potential, as after 4 or 5 wounds whatever you are fighting instantly dies. Plus, it's one of very few mainstream RPG that I've played in a long time where I actually had to do math in my head to plan out my characters, which is refreshing. So many modern RPGs just have simple STR for melee, INT for magic, and AGL for rogues, type systems, but Drakensang actually has slightly more complicated formulas for determining the impact of stats and skills, which creates unique situations for viable hybrid builds.

Plus, very, very, limited health potions and under powered magic, which I loved. Mages can heal in battle, but it takes them a long time and leaves them very vulnerable while they are doing it. Plus, there are probably only 10-20 potions available for sale in the entire game. You can create more with alchemy, but resources are limited there as well. Which I loved, as I always think it's cheap in games like Dragon Age where you can chug infinite health potions.

In contrast, though, River of Time is a great game all around, that builds on and improves everything about Drakensang. Plus, it's a prequel, so if you hate Drakensang, there's really no reason not to play River of Time as you won't miss anything. In fact, it might make more sense to just play River of Time as, in terms of plot, there's a character in Drakensang who is very unceremoniously killed off in a random side quest in Drakensang 1 that becomes the central character in River of Time. So playing ROT after Drakensang kind of creates a weird sense of cognitive dissonance, as your always aware that the writers kill the main character off with a shrug just to create the basis for a brief questline in Drakensang. I don't know much about the Realms of Arkania universe, so maybe this is all something that's explained more in its lore. But it does make the games very disconnected plotwise, as it's clear they weren't really planning for ROT when they wrote Drakensang.
 

Jools

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I really don't recall all the downsides that you guys are mentioning. I remember it being a pleasant, and somehow original (considered the RPG scene at the time), experience. I think I'll re-play the game, and maybe update my review of it with a hindsight addendum.
 

Crichton

Prophet
Joined
Jul 7, 2004
Messages
1,210
NWN OC v. Drakensang. Crom, talk about midget basketball...

I think I'm going to have to come down in favor of Drakensang for three reasons:

1) Gameplay is slightly less shit (I beat the NWN OC with my character auto-attacking while I folded laundry)

2) More fun as a dolly-dress-up game (and as noted above, the female body proportions are straight out of AAA comic books)

3) Less disappointing contextually; the guys who made Drakensang previously made some shitty browser games or something. When I started up NWN I wasted a bunch of time looking for the promised option to import my BG2 character (I was naive and didn't follow the gaming press much in those days).
 

abnaxus

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There are four making-of videos of River of Time on Jootoob, they show some of the voice actors here

 

Turjan

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2008
Messages
5,047
I don't know much about the Realms of Arkania universe, so maybe this is all something that's explained more in its lore.
They actually cleaned out quite a few references to the world of Arkania from the English version of RoT because they thought these would be lost on foreign players. Otherwise, they chose a largely untouched area for the games, similar to what they did with the Sword Coast in Baldur's Gate, which made it easier to work with. In principle, RoT runs pretty much in parallel to the plot of Blade of Destiny, according to the timeline of the setting. There's no plot overlap though.
 

ghostdog

Arcane
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Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
11,079
I think the reason Drankensang got some attention was partly the licensed setting that drew in some fans and mostly the fact that it came out at an incredibly shitty and stale time for cRPGs. All that I remember is that it bored me to tears and I dropped it pretty fast. Maybe if I tried harder at sticking with it I would have finished it, but frankly there are much better games out there deserving of my time. It's 100 times better to try and get accustomed to an old DOS rpg than spend your time with that banality.
 

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