First infos about Drakensang: The River of Time
 

Of course in German. If anybody wants to post a summary… ;)

http://www.pcgames.de/aid,679955/Dra…er/PC/Special/

Sounds like they'll address at least half of the major complaints.

From what I could understand from the Google translation, seems they focused on more 'fluff' than content:
- Much more voice acting.
- Trees are hand designed now?
- Better graphics as game is designed with high def textures from the beginning.
- 2 new classes: a dwarf caster (geomancer) and a melee class (hand to hand maybe?).
- Setting will be around some great river
- I think I understood there won't be any more 'locked' areas.
- Faster traveling?
- PCs now have more 'personality' (you have to be careful who you invite to your group or something)
- You won't be able to use the same characters, as some haven't even been born (game takes place 23 or so years before?)
- Supposedly you now have to think more strategically as enemy's strengths/weaknesses will be more marked. Like fighting a scarab wouldn't be the same as fighting a wolf or something.
- Skills/abilities remain basically the same.

Sure, here is your (quick) summary from someone who speaks German. My comments are in brackets:

- The game plays 23 years before Drakensang during the "Khom-War", the war between the Novadi caliphate and (the totally decadent and awesome) Al'Anfa. The titular river also refers to the actual great river in the region.

- There will be two new archetypes. Dwarven spellcasters and another northern warriortype.

- The game will have full voice acting.

- The party will have a house boat on the river. So your "abode" will often be very close to the actual quest area (great idea IMO).

- The game will be less linear, and you will have more choices as to when you visit which locations.

- Characters will have more depth, be more gray. The player will get to make some decisions that have long-lasting effects on the gameworld.

- There will be significantly less NPCs to choose from. Some of them will be familiar from the first game.

- Combat will be more tactical, as it will be even more important to pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of enemies. The player will have access to miracles from the Gods.

- The game will use the same engine as Drakensang 1. Textures will be hi-res from the start. NPC gestures will be improved due to new animations.

- Drakensang 1 used "speedtree" for the flora. In the new games, trees will be designed by hand to make the game look more "European". The developers want trees to have bigger trunks.

The last piece of information made me laugh. It's by far the most random chunk of info on this list.

They changed the article. These bastards! ;)

When I looked there were only 10 points.

Sounds promising. Then again, these announcements always sound promising :D.

I love the houseboat idea. It is a very nice solution.

I hope we will have Ardo to join the group. That would be cool.

Drakensang was a good game. Looking forward to the next title.

I don't think that full voice over is necessary in this game, Drakensang was really ok, but I suppose it's just been criticised too much for this lack of full voice acting.

"Wow, look at this tree! It's like *sooo* European!" Heh.

I just hope that the locations in next game will be as non-generic as in the first! I liked that in Drakensang.

I also think so.

Just what we need -- a rare, mid-tier cRPG developer using their limited development resources on… making trees look more European.

There are days when I lose all hope in humanity. :p

(The rest sounds good, though.)

Just one word: "Cultural differences". ;)

Aventuria is a setting rather based on middle-age Europe, so I can partly understand the decision.

Creating a game in a distinct setting but using let's say architecture from a completely different real-world place would imho disturb the lovers of that setting. I'm glad they knew that they had to do their buildings in the european (rather: German) style … You can still find that style (but not the buildings, just the style) of architecture still in very old towns throughout Germany, which still have houeses from medieval times.

Examples:

Limburg an der Lahn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburg_an_der_Lahn
Seligenstadt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seligenstadt
Duderstadt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duderstadt (For more pictures there's a link on the bottom of that article named "pictures of Duderstadt. You must scroll down there.)

These are towns I personally know.

But isn't that exactly what makes them so rare and precious? ;p

At last the lack of voice acting was the main reason I didn't like the game in the first place.

And you'll probably say 'bad voice acting' was the main reason you didn't like the prequel, lol .

Prequel?
I was talking about the Dark Eye which had almost no voice acting.

The action in the river of time happens before The Dark Eye. So the new game is the prequel.

Anyhow, your comment before is that sort of thing that sadden me. Past has shown us so many time that full voice acting is limiting the content.

Yeah, full voice acting would be very low on my list of improvements. Actually, there is the possibility that voice acting will make the dialogues worse, since oyu are less in control of the "speed" of the dialogue (unless you skip). Well, we will see.

I read the Gamestar preview. It had a lot of other details, too.

The tree thing is really important for them. It seems SpeedTree can only create thin tree trunks. But Radon Labs wants huge trunks, for example to hide tree houses in the crown. Suposedly one of the screenshots showed a tree house. It was so well hidden that I didn't see it. ;)

Only European trees has large trunk? That said I understand the extreme importance to have European trees, at last!

Quite many spells are useless, there's a lot too many buffer spells, few skills are also quite useless. Too bad they don't fix and stick blindly on tradition, I suppose respect more or less original rules.

Eeek I suppose those mean the companions will be more developed. I deeply regret this choice. Too much developed companion like in NWN2 or MoTB is quite heavy, it's a lot too much, and if the character is just average then it becomes heavy.

Companions of Drakensang are one of the major appeal of the game, not all are very well done, but few are quite good. You don't need ton of dialogs to succeed setup an interesting character and an attaching or intriguing companion.