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Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance
By current pen & paper D&D campaign is a gothic horror story. The next one will be about pirates. In previous campaigns we have fought dinosaurs in a jungle, escaped from drow slavers through the Underdark, and prevented the sabotage of a steamship in a steampunk adventure. So I am pretty certain that "Dungeons & Dragons" is not a genre or setting, it is a rules system, which can be adapted to fit a large variety of different genres and settings. That is a bit of problem when you want to apply the D&D brand without using the D&D rules. How is a D&D video action game or a D&D movie different from a generic fantasy video action game or movie?
So I never had high hopes for Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. There have been previous Dark Alliance games, and they weren't very interesting to me. I prefer turn-based tactical combat to button mashing action. Today Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was released, and even a cursory look at reviews revealed that something went massively wrong: Bad critic reviews, review videos calling it the worst game of the year, and a "mostly negative" rating on Steam. Not only did the developers produce a repetitive generic fantasy action game that has nothing to do with D&D, except for borrowing character names like Drizzt. They also managed to badly program it, and produce a nearly unplayable buggy mess.
Meanwhile I am sitting here wondering why there aren't more D&D computer games out there that actually use D&D rules. There are actually more of those than usual, with Solasta just having been released, and Baldur's Gate 3 in early access. But that still isn't very much, and Solasta is a lot shorter than I would have wished it would be.
The only good news is that Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance will be on Game Pass, so if you are subscribed to that, you can have a look at it without spending any additional money.
Labels: Dungeons & Dragons
- posted by Tobold @ 2:52 PM Permanent Link
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The Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance games were pretty good, in 1998 or whenever they came out. The graphics still hold up surprisingly well for 20+ year old games.
However they were shallow roguelikes, with random loot but fixed dungeons. The mechanics were at best vaguely inspired by D&D, though they did do a decent job bringing the Forgotten realms to life.
In any case, that is far from the most promising franchise for a revival. Any genre you care to assign them to has moved far past those original games (it's been 20 years...). They were popcorn games. Even as a fan of the orginal two, I was skeptical of these new games. From the sound of reviews, they aren't even up to the standards of the originals, much less major overhauls to make the games relevant in today's market.
However they were shallow roguelikes, with random loot but fixed dungeons. The mechanics were at best vaguely inspired by D&D, though they did do a decent job bringing the Forgotten realms to life.
In any case, that is far from the most promising franchise for a revival. Any genre you care to assign them to has moved far past those original games (it's been 20 years...). They were popcorn games. Even as a fan of the orginal two, I was skeptical of these new games. From the sound of reviews, they aren't even up to the standards of the originals, much less major overhauls to make the games relevant in today's market.
While I loved classic RPGs like Baldurs gate and Kotor I was never really in love with the D&D based rule sets that were shoe horned into these games. I felt that it limited combat because of an adherence to what was feasible with dice rolls. I actually preferred rulesets that were designed for computers such as Fallout and Dragon Age. Mind you my knowledge of D&D rules is several decades of of date. Perhaps things have moved on from the confusing limitations of THAC0.
Have you played wildermyth? It is a semi-procedural generated tactical rpg that just came out of steam early access. It is pretty good so far even if the procedurally created dialogue is about as good as you would expect. I’m only 10-15 hours in so I haven’t tested the replay ability of the game
Yes, I have. It's installed on my hard drive, I last played it just a few days ago, and I've been playing it already in early access. Wildermyth excels at the idea that adventures can change an adventurer, depending on your actions you might end up with a wolf's head, or your arm permanently on fire. The procedurally generated dungeons work reasonably well most of the time, but sometimes end up with rather unfair situations, e.g. this week I had to fight a monster that was summoning new monsters every round, and the layout was such that it took forever to even get to him, so I was completely overwhelmed by the time I got there.
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