The Dark Eye: Drakensang - PC

I see all these great reviews about this game, but very few people mention the #1, so-huge-I-can't-possibly-review-the-game-without-mentioning-it camera problem?This game is a whole lot of fun. The character development system is (at least for me) totally new, and it works to give you a more well-rounded character, allowing you to spend experience as soon as you get it if you need to. The story is pretty interesting, and the game is by no means easy. To me, this game is very similar to Neverwinter Nights, and if you liked that, you'll surely find Drakensang to be a good game for you.However, there are some quirks to the game system that tend to make this one of the most difficult to play games I've ever met. It's not that the game is really hard in that battles are difficult, or quests are too obscure, it's just feels like developers often went to great lengths to ensure that their game packed in lots of annoying quirks. Looting animals is a great example - you loot them the first time, then you get something, let's say a rat tail. Then if you have a character with sufficient skill, you will be able to search more, and you'll get leather strips or something. So in essence, you have to search every dead animal twice just to get all the stuff out of it. There are a few other things like this that are unnecessarily annoying, and they are frequent enough to be a bother.Another problem that I've noticed with this game is that it is incredibly linear. There is no problem with linear RPGs, but in at least half of the conversations in the game, you get only one dialog option, particularly in the beginning of the game. It would be nice to be able to voice something other than the get-through-the-game-as-a-polite-gentleman option. This is also a problem with character creation; granted, there are a good 15 or so classes to choose from, but all the characters of one type look exactly the same, so you can't do any customization. In addition, some of the characters simply will not get you through the harder difficulty levels of this game, the archer for instance. One would assume that Archery is a great skill to have if you're actually adventuring through this game, but in practice, you start every difficult battle about 5 paces from your enemy, and by the time you've strung your bow, the bad guys are already bashing your head in with a club. And it's not like it's just this way with a few fights, it's a constant problem that never seems to stop. In the end, you can build an archer character and beat the game, but your archer will start to act and feel much more like a warrior than a true archer.Then there is the #1 problem with the game - the camera. Because this is a game with an over-the-shoulder camera system, it automatically presents a big problem if one of your party members is fighting, and another is up a flight of stairs or around a corner. When this happens, you are only allowed to target on things you can see, or if you're lucky, that the camera can see around a bend. If you are on the bottom of a staircase and your party is fighting on the second floor, there is little way for your characters on the first floor to pilot themselves around the staircase and up to the fight without manually controlling them the whole way. And then what do you do with your spellcasters who need attention? Even in non-fighting situations, it can be a bother when you can't position the camera correctly while exploring the world map, and you end up looking down upon your main character, where you can see maybe twenty feet around them. Of course, you can spend time adjusting the camera, but after a while, it just takes a lot of time to fiddle with it, and sometimes, it just isn't worth it.Like I said, Drakensang is a mostly quality game, and hard-core RPG fans will love it, but it's major flaws are too much for it to overcome.

I enjoyed this game a lot. It's been ages since I've had trouble tearing myself away from a game. I kept wanting to play just a little longer to see what would happen next, or to explore one more area. It's difficult to put my finger on just what I found so addictive about it, because the game did have its flaws, but it was just a lot of fun. RPG's are my favorite genre, but I have to admit that sometimes they can get tedious. They're prone to repetitive dialogue and/or a lot of running back and forth to the same places to complete quests. Some RPG's leave you wandering around all over the place aimlessly looking for new things to do. Others have battle after battle with very little story. Drakensang wasn't like any of that; it was just plain fun.Even when you had to traverse the same areas again, new quests would sometimes pop up that weren't there before so the area didn't get too dull. In dungeons, as you advanced deeper into them and achieved your main goal, a previously inaccessible route would often open up giving you a quick way back without having to retrace the long route you'd taken to get there. It happened often enough to be a bit humorous, but the convenience was worth the lack of realism.The quests kept me entertained and weren't too generic. If I had any complaint about them, it would be that the map often shows you where to go. If the main goal of the quest was to find someone or something that was missing, then it didn't usually show you the location. So it could have been worse, but it did make things easier than I would have liked. You can hide the mini-map and avoid looking at the map altogether, but I find it difficult to navigate without a map.The NPC's were interesting and fun to talk to. Boring NPC dialogue can kill my enjoyment of a game faster than just about anything, but I enjoyed the dialogue in Drakensang. However, there aren't a lot of dialogue options for your character. Don't expect it to be anywhere near the level of the Baldur's Gate games. Even when you have multiple options, they generally lead to the same result and there aren't any outright "evil" dialogue options. Your character is going to be fairly noble whether you like it or not. :) This didn't bother me much since I prefer to take the "good" dialogue options when I have a choice. But even if you usually go the "good" route, sometimes it's fun to briefly explore the "evil" options just to see what will happen. With Drakensang, I rarely felt a desire to reload and try different dialogue options.I liked the graphics a lot. I haven't played enough recently released games to say how they compare with the general quality of graphics out there today, but I thought they were nice and at times downright beautiful. I enjoyed the music too. It wasn't overly obtrusive, and it fit the mood well. Sometimes I would catch myself humming along with it, or whistling one of the tunes shortly after I'd stopped playing the game.The story wasn't particularly unique, but it held my interest and kept me curious about what would happen next. I thought the ending was too abrupt. I would have liked to have been able to go back and talk to some of the interesting NPC's who had been involved in the story and get their take on how everything turned out and what their future plans were.This is definitely a linear game. If you hate linear games no matter what, then you'll want to pass up this game. If you like linear games, or you're willing to put up with it if the game is otherwise good, then I'd recommend giving this game a try. I can enjoy both types of games, but I actually prefer linear games. I enjoy the feeling of knowing I've seen just about everything there is to see without having to spend hours aimlessly wandering in remote locations that have nothing of interest except yet another cave with more monsters and treasure that I'm probably just going to sell.Some people have said they didn't like the camera, but I didn't have many issues with it. I do prefer a 1st person view in 3D games rather than the 3rd person view in Drakensang, but I quickly found a method that worked for me. If you hold down the right mouse button, the camera swings around to face the direction you move the mouse. I would swing the camera around so that it was a little ways behind my characters. Then I would continue to hold the mouse button down to keep the camera locked behind my characters. Since "w" means forward not from the orientation of your character, but rather from the orientation of the camera, all you really have to do is hold the "w" key down to keep your characters moving forward while you move your mouse as needed (with the right mouse button held down) to make your characters turn to the left or right. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but basically the movement with this method ends up working almost exactly like it does in the game Oblivion, with the only difference being that you have to hold your right mouse button down. With Drakensang there are a lot of different ways to move and orient the camera. With a bit of experimentation, I think most people could find a way that works fairly well for them. The camera does go wonky if you get too close to walls or if you're in confined spaces which could be annoying. It would have been nice if there were an autorun key for those longer journeys, or a way to lock the camera behind your characters without having to do it manually.I think the biggest thing that annoyed me in the game was that I wanted more control over my characters. I didn't like having to change my characters from aggressive to defensive just to get them to stay where I put them. Even in defensive, if an enemy got close enough, the characters would attack. After a while I got used to it, and you really don't need that precise of control over your characters during combat in this game because it just isn't that complicated. But I still felt a bit handicapped. Another big inconvenience along these lines is that you can't travel very far with just one character. Once you get far enough away that the other characters are at the edge of the mini map, they all start to follow whether you want them to or not. This means that, if you want to use stealth, having one character that's really good at sneaking isn't enough. All of your characters have to be good at it or they'll blow the cover of your stealthy character when they start following.As far as character development goes, there are a lot of options and a lot of different ways to allocate points toward improving your characters. I was a complete idiot and somehow missed the fact that you can use these points to increase your main stats (like strength, constitution, etc). You can also use them to increase your skill with individual magic spells. I went through almost the entire game only increasing my weapon skills and my talents. I figured out I could increase my magic skills when I was about 75% through the game, and yet I still somehow failed to realize I could increase my stats. Believe it or not, I figured this out right before the last battle in the game! A few of the more challenging battles would have been a lot easier if I'd opened my eyes earlier. I'm not sure how I missed this since it isn't particularly hidden. It was probably even mentioned in the manual, which I read before playing, although I didn't double check after the fact. I suppose, if I managed to get almost entirely through the game with my original starting stats, it shows that the difficulty level is rather low.A few additional, random comments:- The glossary in the manual was a nice touch. NPC's often mention gods or places as part of a conversation with little explanation. After all, your character should know those things. Just like I wouldn't expound on what I mean if I say "Germany" or "California" when talking to another person in real life. Instead of having to ask the NPC's about everything they mention and getting an encyclopedic response that breaks the immersion, you can look those things up in the glossary in the back of the manual to get the information. This also means you only have to read the information once, instead of hearing it repetitively from every character who mentions the word.- Quest items are kept in a separate bag, which was convenient. Not only does it keep them out of the way, but it keeps you from accidentally selling them.- Going around smashing barrels and crates to find loot was a little goofy. It reminded me of the newer version of The Bards Tale, where the game pokes fun of itself for doing that. In Bards Tale it was amusing, because the whole game was all about poking fun at the various clichés and oddities found in the RPG genre. In Drakensang, it just seemed a little bizarre.- I thought it took too long to use my animal lore on slain animals to get useful materials, and to use my plant lore to pick alchemy ingredients. It wasn't an insanely long time, but it could get tedious when you've just killed a dozen spiders and you want to use your animal lore on all of them.- You can save in the middle of combat, which I thought was nice. Not all games let you do that, which can make those long, drawn out battles especially exasperating if it takes several tries to get through them.

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