Drakensang Complete Saga DVD
 

Well, this might be (and probably is) old news to most of you, but I just recently found out that there is a compilation DVD available, even to European customers(!), which contains the original Drakensang, The River of Time, and Phileasson's Secret in English, in one sweet (and cheap) package. To make it even better, it has no DRM, no online activation, and the disc does not even have to be in the drive to play! Huzzah! (It also has no manual, but that can be found easily online.)

Here's a link to e.g. Amazon's offering: http://www.amazon.com/Drakensang-Com…/dp/B005OGYVKU

This is big news for me, as I eventually gave up trying to get TRoT (in English) when it was released few years ago, as all online stores I visited then were blocking European customers (at least Scandinavian ones) for TRoT or didn't have it at all. Also there was no physical box to buy here either, even though I sure enough looked for it. This was more than infuriating — I had the money, I had the PC to run it, but there was nowhere to buy the freaking game! So, when I stumbled on this package last week and noticed it was no longer region blocked, I was overjoyed. It came in the post yesterday and I installed it immediately. Once it was installed (which went without a hitch), I launched the game expecting it to want an online activation or activation code after all, but gladly that wasn't the case. It launched just fine. For a short while I just sat there marvelling the start screen and feeling happy. At last I get to play this!! :thumbsup:

Thanks for the heads up! I might get this too.

Hum, I'd rather not have Phileasson's Secret in the mix, even if you don't save any money probably (unless in a sale).

All three things are available on Steam for $10, $10 and $20.
The complete saga bundle is available on Gamersgate but with secuROM DRM:
http://www.gamersgate.com/DDB-DRAKCP…te-saga-bundle

Getting all three for $15 and DRMfree is something noone should miss. These are epic RPGs you won't see on consoles nor phones ever, and you won't believe how good they are.

Lurking Grue, please repost this on Pricewatch thread.


EDIT:
Although those who read my posts know that I do say Drakensang saga is brilliant, I just checked metacritic on the first game:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/th…eye-drakensang
Players loved it more than critics did, or Radon Labs didn't bother to pay for reviews? We'll never know. Threee years ago Radon Labs filed for bankrupcy and was bought by Bigpoint GmbH (yea, the agressive advertising of browser MMOs like Dark Orbit on Eurosport is them :().
I could never understand how the developer of Drakensang could go down without being under Interplay's roof.

Interesting. I didn't see that for Geremany so far - but I didn't expect it, either, so I didn't look out / search for it …

Edit : The German equivalent to this package is called the "Platinum Edition" : http://www.amazon.de/Das-schwarze-Au…rds=drakensang

I'm really fed up with your constant stupidity on that subject and feel really offended when some stupid like you keep on posting such nonsense. I won't beg you to stop being stupid but I won't avoid saying it aloud here either ! YOU ARE A STUPID PERSON and I hope one day that stupidity will turn back on you, I really hope that will happen to you.

Just that subject?

Not the constant phone and tablet bashing, mob respawn whining, 500+ bugs bitching or the drakensang is so complex it could never run on a tablet blabbering.

I don't think joxers stupid but it does seem he can't put together even a few post without the same old stuff.

It does get tiring and I find myself skipping over many of his posts now as a result.

Btw though, he is right about drakensang. They are excellent games.

Please stop flaming around, we are not in the Kindergarden.

Joxer is mostly harmless. Everyone can have his opinions.

Well Joxer is just Joxer he takes a little bit of time to get used to. So Like HiddenX said we all have opinions, and I'm guilty of getting mad sometimes also.:blush:

Now with that being said please keep it civil.:police:

Well, the "Boss" told me that too few people actually bought Drakensang - Drakensang , especially.

Nowadays I tend to believe that both Dragon Age games kind of killed it, and another point might lie in the fact that games with social skills needed for any character just don't exist nowadays anymore - which makes everyone choosing combat skills exclusively - which makes the game far too easy - a friend of mine had taken the route of an Warrior for Drakensang (don't remember anymore whether 1 or 2), and he told me that he nixed all social skills )because Warriors just don't have them) - and then the game became FAR too easy for him.

I fear that in this age of combat simulations called "Action RPGs", people simply leave out ANY social skills within games - and Drakensang was - in my opinion, of course - and absolute RARITY in that it actually contained ANY social skills !

What does a younger generation grown up with the belief that D2/LOD/Sacred/LOKI/Titan Quest/Torchlight/Hellgate London/Dungeon Siege = THE RPG (in the sense of RPG = Action RPGs) actually do with social skills within games ? They are simply not used to them. Perhaps - says my "inner cynic" they might view them rather as a nuisance ? And loot - Drakensang actually gave no "phat loot" !

For someone grown up with the nbelief that RPG = Action RPGs , Drakensang must be utterly boring.

Plus, Drakensang wasn't nowhere as "mature" like Dragon Age and The Witcher.

I guess nowadays that these points might have … at least helped Drakensang towards its downfall.

Drakensang - a beautiful game series overlooked by everyone.
Meanwhile everyone else rushed towards Dragon Age, The Witcher, or Torchlight.

Where did Drakensang have 500+ bugs ? That's new to me.

They just couldn't. They were simply too small for that. That's a fact.
From today's perspective, Radon Labs would be defined as an "Indie", although it rather belongs to the middle tier.

In the USA, there only exist giant game making companies at the top - and tiny Indies at the bottom.
There just doesn't exist any mezzannine, or middle tier.
Here in Europe, this is is common : There does actually exist a very big and mostly healthy mezzanine or middle tier - yes, I even dare to say that Europe's game making almost exclusively exist of this middle tier kind of game making companies. Here in Germany, there are almost no bigger companies - apart from Ubi & Infogrames, maybe.

And the Publisher for both Drakensang games was dtp ; a company which went into *heavy* financial troubles around the time of the stalling sales of Drakensang 2 itself.

Yes, they were doing ads in magazines - but dtp is still a small publisher. Middle tier again.

Which just means that both Radon Labs & dtp were of course no-where near/close to a position of excessive money-spending marketing like EA was with Dragon Age. And you do remember how aggressive the marketing for Dragon Age was, don't you ?

I loved the unabashed, charming, and straight-forward high fantasy setting of these games, but The Dark Eye ultimately bored me. It wasn't a bad game by any means, but there was just something about it. I think the sum of annoying little niggles eventually overwhelmed me.

I contrast I enjoyed The River of Time all the way through, despite it being very similar to The Dark Eye. I'm not sure why. Maybe it just feels more focused, or there's more C&C, or the story is just better, or there's (slightly) less filler combat.

Drakensang died because after the first release they didn't bother to market and only half ass distribute the product. Most of the major sites ignored it so it went largely unreviewed. Pretty sad, it looks like a nice game. The first one was a hoot.

That had nothing to do with drakensang. As I remember drakensang was pretty much bug free and as I said they are excellent games.

It wasn't RL's job to buy good reviews. dtp had the exclusive worldwide publishing, distribution and marketing rights.

Their distribution strategy for TRoT was crap. dtp completely missed the boat on digital distribution. Nowadays the game would have chances to become a success, with direct access to Steam instead of having to sell for small royalties through a shovelware distributor like ValueSoft. And to make things worse, these 3rd tier publishers probably still have the distribution rights, making digital distribution complicated.

Another big problem was the scale of the River of Time project. At first dtp said Radon Labs was doing a Drakensang 1.5 - a better stand-alone expansion. Then it grew and grew, good voice overs and better videos … but everybody was still expecting a cheap add-on. TRoT should have been canceled and explicitly renamed to Drakensang 2!

Finally, if you believe that there is no correlation between advertising on big sites (or the related print mags) and review scores you are naive. Just look at the Gerstman-Gate incident a couple of years ago. It debatable to what extend ratings can be influenced, but in case of publications largely dependent on publisher money, there is certainly leverage.

Nope, TRoT is not available to me via Steam or Gamersgate, they're region blocking the sale of it. It might be available for non-Europeans, sure, like it's been all along, but as I said above, this Complete Saga DVD is the first real chance for me to get TRoT (as strange as it sounds).

The publisher of the Drakensang games (dtp) really screwed up their job and doomed these games. With their convoluted distribution deals (and whatnot) they made the game so hard to get, that it took me two years (or so) to actually purchase the damn game. No wonder the devs (RL) went under with this kind of publishing and distribution mismanagement of their games.

The UK retail DVD for TRoT has been available for a couple of years. Cost 10 bucks on eBay.

I recall searching for the UK retail DVD from e.g. Amazon.co.uk and Play.com, back in the day, but none of these either had the game then or were only selling it to UK addresses, if memory serves. It's been awhile. Be that as it may, I have the game now, so all's well. (Oh and I don't use eBay, have heard too many cautionary tales about it from my friends.)

Are you sure the Steam versions don't also use SecuROM?

I'm not sure but wouldn't surprise me.
But I still can't believe that the game was so easily "abandoned" by it's publisher. It could practically sell itself by going viral - if it was available worldwide since day 1 in both retail and digital form.

It is still being sold here - although its price drastically dropped after it was released on magazine DVDs one or two months ago.

Now we're left with Demonicon, a game using Mass Effect as its inspiration for dialogue and Witcher for combat. The result (in the tiny footage we've seen) looks horrible. Combat looks clunky and boring (not to mention that the animations are stiff) and we know next to nothing about everything else.

Games that show little almost inevitably end up being horrible. I have no faith in that.

Perhaps someone will make another game set in the Dark Eye universe similar to Drakensang one day.

Yeah, it's disappointing that these great games got screwed over by a bad publisher.

Well, there's Black Guards ahead, too.
Turn-based, but also "dark & gritty".

A game like Drakensang ? My "inner cynic" replies to this with an : "Forget it ! It will never be !"

And now you might perhaps understand what Germans mean with the "TDE curse".

I had been meaning to pick Drakensang up for ages, but never have gotten around to it until I saw this thread. Just ordered it. I remember enjoying Realms of Arkania 3 (and have all three via GoG now, though I've yet to install them) so I've been interested in it.

*thumbs up* Good choice, you're in for a good time. As noted before (if not on this thread, then on many others), the first one starts a bit slow, so give it time. Well, compared to most modern CRPGs, both of them are "slower" games as a whole (and I'm not just talking about the movement speed of the PCs here ;)).

You might know this already, there's been a mighty uproar about it, but in case you've missed it and given that you're a ROA fan, do NOT get the new remake of ROA 1 - Blade of Destiny. It is a totally unfinished and complete mess as of now. THe devs are patching it as best and as quickly as they can, but it'll need a whole lot of patching still to get that trainwreck of a game in good, playable shape. Maybe in a month or two, but not now.

I'm used to games starting out slow. I have a lot of the old classics. Besides, I'm not fond of most of the newer crpgs like DA. DA started out alright, but quickly became a slog through the same old same old. Every other crpg that's came out besides that here in the last few years, I've either hated outright, or didn't care enough to buy.

I have the GoG version of RoA 1 & 2. I wasn't even aware of a remake. I had never played the original, only 3 (Shadows over Riva), which was given to me for a birthday present.