Drakensang: The River of Time - German Demo Released

dtp released a German demo for their upcoming Drakensang sequel Drakensang: The River of Time. The game is scheduled for February 2010 in DACH.
Download links can be found in the official forum. More mirrors should be popping up soon.
More information.

Ok, ok, I got the point.
Divinities, Venetica, etc. then a mass of awsome adventure games and now this.

There is only one solution.
I'm off to german language courses.

I had no idea it was so close to release...

Yiiiiiippppppppiiiiiiieeeee!

If I knew this I would have taken my german language lessons seriously in highschool. Anyway, I'm downloading it now....

"They keep coming, they keep coming..."

Wowie!

They must be damn sure they got all the nasty critters out of their game already by now again.

I mean, this is well over two months before release,… one would think the beta testing has not yet phased out… and they come straight out of the closet at a point where others are just maneuvering around the question whether to release a demo at all, save of the matter of when.

Let´s just keep the fingers crossed this is a very good sign.


Looking forward to the ongoing streak of good RPGs flowing steadily since last year.


Ragon, the hopeful Mage

You guys will be surprised how much of a difference all the smaller and bigger changes make.

JDR13 said:

I had no idea it was so close to release…

Click to expand...

It is; I wrote this elsewhere.

I tried the demo. Since I don't know German language, I don't understand anything about the scenerio or dialogs. But, all the menus and interface are the same. So, I can find my way in the menus without a problem Graphics and animations are similar to Drakensang 1. But, the demo uses lowres textures, I'm sure the game will look much more better than the first with higres textures. It seems devs developed the lighting and shadow effects a bit. Anyway, it seems like an expansion pack rather than a full sequel because it resembles so much to the first, which is fine by me. Advantage of using the same engine: much more quality quest writing and scenerio with a relatively short development period. The people who like the first game will feel right at home I think. I hope we won't have to wait too long for the english version.

Great! Looking forward to an English version!

Ok, I played it through now and when you liked the first Drakensang you'll surely like the new one just as much. I really don't see the need to make new engines every single time. I mean graphics are not like 1980 when there still was much space to go up. We reached a point in game graphics where there is IMVPO little need to advance the graphics anyway. At least not in my point of view. I don't really need more. I mean, heck I played when Ultima was new and it was still fun. Ok, no going back there, but I am quite satisfied with that level of visual detail.

The combat could be a bit faster IMO, but such is the nature of The Dark Eye.

Perhaps i should try to dust of my "durch für gegen ..." and try it out.

I loved the first Drakensang.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

It is; I wrote this elsewhere.

Click to expand...

Sometimes it is hard to keep it all straight ... I couldn't even keep straight what came with which Dragon Age version from which place ...

Well, no, I rather meant that I hinted towards it, and I couldn't write imho much more than just hints, because of my NDA from the "focus-testing" in Berlin, remember ?

I then said that the game is … well, practically almost finished, everything they do since October (I assume) is finetuneing and testing.

So - they are testing this game for about … 3 months ? now - which is quite a long time. And given that it will be releasen in February, they have one more month for testing and bug-fixing and fine-tuneing available …

I think this explains perhaps the high quality regarding bugs the first game had - and which i also expect from this one.

Will this game allow you to carry over characters from the previous game?

No, due to the structure of the story, which is actually quite interesting. The whole thing happens immediately after Drakensang but it's a story told by Forgrimm to whatshername (Kladdis?) about the things which happened 30 years ago. See the trailer. So you actually learn the back story to Drakensang. Many chars you killed in DraSa are still alive and much younger.
If you die Kladdis says to Forgrimm "Oh come on, this can't be true. You are here, you must have survived ..."

Gorath said:

No, due to the structure of the story, which is actually quite interesting. The whole thing happens immediately after Drakensang but it's a story told by Forgrimm to whatshername (Kladdis?) about the things which happened 30 years ago. See the trailer. So you actually learn the back story to Drakensang. Many chars you killed in DraSa are still alive and much younger.
If you die Kladdis says to Forgrimm "Oh come on, this can't be true. You are here, you must have survived …"

Click to expand...

Oh, ok - thanks for info...

I've only played the demo for half an hour now, but am liking it very much.

I very much like the character customization-options you get. Sure, you only have choices in 3 different categories: face, hair (including beards) and body-size. But hell who really needs the myriad of options you get in Dragon Age with thousands of sliders, when you can get a dozen very well designed (and very pretty) faces and hair-styles for each archetype?

What I also liked is how the game seems deeper rooted in the 'The Dark Eye' lore. At least judging from the bit I've played.
Already heard hints about the Flussvater (the river-father), the Khom-War, the Batlle of the 1000 Ogres, the curse on Thorwalians relating to the Big River. Really cool if your a TDE nerd All these little things, I really like it.
Also read somewhere that the game's story will be somewhat integrated with the (second) reissue of the Phileasson Campaign. Awesome.

The two new character-classes are also cool, although you can only choose one of them in the Demo (the Gjalska Tribal Warrior), the other one being the Geode (a kind of dwarven druid). Hoping they'll include human druids and witches in the next installment, they could make up a group of nature-casters in the char-selection.

Whats also really nice is that one of your party members aparrently is a Phex-priest, although I think he only has 4 different liturgies (priest-spells). Still cool.

Don't know if I'll play any further in the demo though or if I'll just wait till february. This way I won't have to play through the beginning again.

I'd be perfectly happy if they said "We'll use this engine for the next 10 years" and just worked on gameplay features for the next 10 sequels.

Whee!! They uptuned the dodge to same level as in my fixpack. Now I can make a true offensive warrior without spending points to parry.

I agree with engine, the game looks good enough. just hope that the dialog options and social skills have done better. And I was kind of a waiting for dual wield, but the new archetype (barbarian) is cool enough.

I'd also like to see the witch as archetype as well. I'm actually a bit surprised because the witch would be really ineresting class to any RPG.