Realms of Arkania Trilogy to be Rereleased Though JoWooD

Avantenor said:

RoA II also wasn't available in 2CD version, I think.

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You think wrongly . I'm not sure when the 2 CD version of RoA II was first released but the (budget) Topware version of RoA II came on 2 CDs around the time RoA III was released. So RoA II has been available as a 2 CD version at least since 1996.

Gorath said:

- Star Trail 2 CD version

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no they confirmed that the it's the 2 CD version of Sternenschweif (if you believe the triva section on mobygames, there was no English 2 CD version), none of these comments are about an English version. The only mention I can find that there is going to be an English version of this DVD is this newsstory/comments and the English translation of Jowoods financial figures that uses the wrong English language trademark (automated translation? poor use of Wikipedia?).

I don't want to drag anyone down with me. I want this to be rereleased in English too, but I just can't find anything to support that assumption yet...

Moriendor said:

You think wrongly . I'm not sure when the 2 CD version of RoA II was first released but the (budget) Topware version of RoA II came on 2 CDs around the time RoA III was released. So RoA II has been available as a 2 CD version at least since 1996.

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Are you by any chance talking about TopWare's budget rerelease of the German language version?

Avantenor said:

It's the same as for Betrayal at Krondor. It's free, but some people were still willing to pay for a retail release.

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Wikipedia states that it wasn't free.

Only a free download for a limited time.

Avantenor said:

In fact, Attic only exists because of securing the copyright to the old RoA games.

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Attic still exists ? I thought the only thing remaining was the "personal" company of Jochen Hamma ... I don't quite remember its name ... It was something with "Fantasy" ...

noctrun said:

Are you by any chance talking about TopWare's budget rerelease of the German language version?

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Yes, I was. Sorry if I mixed things up. It was hard to keep track of which language version you guys were talking about with all the back and forth in this thread .

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Attic still exists ? I thought the only thing remaining was the "personal" company of Jochen Hamma ... I don't quite remember its name ... It was something with "Fantasy" ...

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Jochen Hamma, besides running Fantastic Realms, is still the CEO of attic, it's inactive it basicly only exists to prevent the copyright of all it's games to be reverted to whatever artist/programmer/etc worked on creating them, that would make such rereleases much harder to get out of the door. btw: there is no such thing as abandonware what so ever.

Wow. The biggest thread of the week is about the release of some 15y-old games you can download from your random abandonware site in 10 minutes. I'm impressed.

Err, if the legal copyright owner is selling it, then it is (no longer) abandonware. Any self-respecting abandonware sites that aren't simply pirating servers in disguise should stop offering it.

The fact that it was abndonware until now (=couldn't buy it, 15 years old, graphics worse than any contemporary mobile phone game) and now somebody is charging money for this again is ridiculous enough. The fuss about it is just awesome.

This comes a few days after the Forsaken Gods fiasco.

As if $Jowood$ had a meeting and worked out a new plan to make some money. "Hey let's burn a CD with some ancient games and DOSBox on it, put it in a box and sell it".

This is ridiculous and I for sure will proceed downloading ancient games instead of "buying" them. ARRRRRRRR!!!!!

I don't think it was a plan from JoWood. It's quite simple. The owner of the game rights is Attic Entertaiment. Attic nowadays only consists of Jürgen Hamma. Jürgen Hamma is producer at Spellbound for Gothic 4 / Arcania: A Gothic Tale. Guess who is the publisher? JoWood. Who would you ask to publish your game if you're already working for one of the bigger european publishers with an own us-american division? I guess the answer is clear.

noctrun said:

The only mention I can find that there is going to be an English version of this DVD is this newsstory/comments and the English translation of Jowoods financial figures that uses the wrong English language trademark (automated translation? poor use of Wikipedia?).

I don't want to drag anyone down with me. I want this to be rereleased in English too, but I just can't find anything to support that assumption yet...

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Did you read JoWooD's PR? I doubt they intend to release the German version worldwide.

Avantenor said:

I don't think it was a plan from JoWood. It's quite simple. The owner of the game rights is Attic Entertaiment. Attic nowadays only consists of Jürgen Hamma. Jürgen Hamma is producer at Spellbound for Gothic 4 / Arcania: A Gothic Tale. Guess who is the publisher? JoWood. Who would you ask to publish your game if you're already working for one of the bigger european publishers with an own us-american division? I guess the answer is clear.

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Who is Jürgen? Jochen's brother?

Ähm, yes. His evil twin who dared to talk to JoWood. The real Jochen Hamma wouldn't do that.

Gorath said:

they intend to release the German version worldwide.

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Unfortunately that's exactly what I'm thinking. You assume that worldwide means "in English too". All you have the to support that is hope and a translation of a financial report that uses the wrong trademark (lost in translation?). I'd really like Jowood to confirm what exactly "worldwide" in case of "DSA Nordlandtrilogie" means before advocating this as passionate as you do.

Please don't mis-quote me.

I'm not sure what you mean with "wrong trademark"?

JoWooDs' financial report says they plan to release the DSA trilogy worldwide. That's a fact.
Whether or not they'll change their mind is a different question.

Shipping the German versions outside the German gaming world wouldn't make any sense at all. Translations do exist. All they need is the right to use them.

Gorath said:

Please don't mis-quote me.

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I didn't misquote you, I used what you said is not going to happen to point out what I think s going to happen.

Gorath said:

I'm not sure what you mean with "wrong trademark"?

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The English language version/translation of that PR you refer to lists the title of this DVD as The Dark Eye: Northlandtrilogy, and that is the wrong trademark. The "The Dark Eye" trademark did not exist until 2003. I suspect it to be a 2008 lost in translation mistake.

Gorath said:

JoWooDs' financial report says they plan to release the DSA trilogy worldwide. That's a fact.

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The report does not list what languages are released around the world, English and German are not the only languages this was released as, I thought we'd established that within this thread.

Gorath said:

Shipping the German versions outside the German gaming world wouldn't make any sense at all.

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Shipping a crappy Gothic 3 addon didn't make much sense either. Oh wait, I remember company profit...

Gorath said:

Translations do exist. All they need is the right to use them.

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Only if they care to release any other languages at all.

Anyway I don't care anymore. I'll wait for Jowood to confirm in what languages this DVD is going to be released. I'm not going to argue with your speculation any longer.

noctrun said:

The English language version/translation of that PR you refer to lists the title of this DVD as The Dark Eye: Northlandtrilogy, and that is the wrong trademark. The "The Dark Eye" trademark did not exist until 2003. I suspect it to be a 2008 lost in translation mistake.

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Nice to see that they have an English translation of the adhoc now. It indeed says "The Dark Eye: Northland Trilogy (PC)". It remains to be seen what exactly this means.

The far more interesting info is in the full quarterly report though. The release list in there only mentions DSA under Europe (GSA).

Anyway I don't care anymore. I'll wait for Jowood to confirm in what languages this DVD is going to be released. I'm not going to argue with your speculation any longer.

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Good idea.

I'll put a ten spot down on Alrik's choice - It will be released all in a bundle, English/German manuals and software. They do that all the time over here in taiwan.

Or you could get this option. It's sent out in German but with English manuals They also do that with English releases of games in Taiwan, it will be shipped with the English version but with Chinese Manuals It seems silly to me but it seems to work for the publishers here and the gamers.

Hi Does anyone know where I can find the realms star trial music from off the cd. I have searched on different websites but they all worse then actual ingame music that i remember playing. Could it be there are two versions of some of the songs? Perhaps the originals composed by Horst and then the upgraded versions that were released with the game????

Gorath said:

Nice to see that they have an English translation of the adhoc now. It indeed says "The Dark Eye: Northland Trilogy (PC)". It remains to be seen what exactly this means.

The far more interesting info is in the full quarterly report though. The release list in there only mentions DSA under Europe (GSA).

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I know I wanted stfu about this but I think I have to adress it again, the DVD has been released it's German language only released in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Now for the part that has me pick this thread up again: Jowood did it again. Yes annother quality release by these guys. They did ship all three games on a single DVD and made it run through DOSBox.

Blade of Destiny: this is really really bad, what Jowood shipped is a no-cd-cracked CD-ROM version of the game without an CD image. Since there is no CD image there is no background music, this game is CD audio only. The crack removed the CD check, the password question and here this is the icing of this entire rerelease the option to choose the difficulty. The game is stuck in novice mode. For those who don't know the game: advanced difficulty does not make the game harder, it means you'll get to level up your characters yourself.

Star Trail: In this very thread it questioned whenever or not the 2CD version would be included. The good: it is the 2CD version, the bad: Jowood only included the CD image of the first CD! This means if the game is configured to use it's CD audio soundtrack (instead of MIDI), you might get asked to insert the second CD, even though you bought a DVD. The game ships without any patches, you'll run into all the bugs that Attic later fixed.

Shadows over Riva: again the game is shipped without any patches which means toward the end of the game you are guaranteed to run into a game ending bug that was fixed over 10 years ago (it was a "on some systems"-bug back in the day but DOSBox is one of those systems).

DOSBox: they shipped v0.72 which is the current release of the emulator, however the Jowoods configurations are horrible: the games lag (note: all three games do not lag on the default configuration that ships with that DOSBox version on the same computer) and they did not even set the keyboard layout to German (note: Riva has a riddle where a "ä" needs to be typed in).

I can't believe that Jowood actually went out of their way to break the games before rereleasing them. I mean DVD only uses about 850 MB, so why didn't they include all four CD images and patches? I don't get it.

Yeah, I had already posted a warning in the forum thread a couple of weeks ago. This compilation cannot really be recommended. German players are better off searching for the original games on eBay. The old Gold Games versions can sometimes be found for cheap. This was the last release including the audio CDs, if I'm not mistaken.

An international release no longer seems likely.