Drakensang Fluent Plays Drakensang! Rah!!

Hello everyone.

Since Pillars of Eternity needs a bit of patching, I decided to install Drakensang, which I picked up a disc for in an Ebay auction awhile back.

I'm digging it! It's certainly an RPG and won't be mistaken for anything else.

I just had a few questions.

I know in Realms of Arkania, items all had a specific use. Are there 'junk' items in this game, such as lucky charms, wolf paws and the like? Or, do those items have a specific use at some point?

I'm basically just wondering which items I should hold on to and which I should sell. In other words, is the junk really junk?

Anything else (non-spoiler!) that I should know? The game seems incredibly deep so far.

Oh, and the amazon chick gained a level, but I couldn't find anything I could increase. Is this normal?

Thanks!

Everything this side of the city is a long tutorial.

Two things about magic:
1) Mages can't wear metal.
2) Everybody, even the mage(s) needs reasonable mellee capabilities. You'll often be heavily outnumbered in certain areas.

If you played the first Blackguards you should see certain similarities in the character development.

Thanks, Gorath!

I rolled a Charlatan but I might restart, mainly because I didn't really customize my characters talents much. I just took the default load-out pretty much. Hmm. We'll see.

I did restart, focused on a Fencing Weapons/Parry build, with some pick locks and the usual Charlatan skills.

I'm curious, though. Is there a way to get the camera to follow the selected character?

Fluent said:

I'm curious, though. Is there a way to get the camera to follow the selected character?

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The camera has actually less problems than games with similar party structure like KotOR, etc.
This seems system immanent. I haven't seen a reliable camera in such an RPG ever. AFAIR the only times the camera really screws up when you walk up or down. Check the camera controls again. Maybe you've overlooked something.

I was really just hoping for a simple "camera follow" option, so the camera would follow the character around. In combat, though, the camera is quite awesome, because you can really move it to a spot where you can see clearly, and I admire the zoom features as well. Not too bad. Maybe there is a mod for camera follow or something, but I'm not sure it would work properly in combat.

Game is quite fun so far. I'm really enjoying myself, actually. I like the world, it's a bit more of a relaxed feel to the game, lots of rewarding exploration and the character building stuff is really nice if you're into pen-and-paper style RPGs.

The best thing I can say about this game so far, is that "it's an RPG". No, I mean that. You will not mistake this game for an action-RPG, or some other hybrid that sacrifices the RPG elements. This is a real RPG. I like that.

I must be the oddball on these forums as I enjoyed Drakensang: The River of Time more than the first game. It's a shame the sequel & expansion wasn't a financial success.

After its failure to sell Radon Labs declared bankruptcy, and was acquired by Bigpoint Games. The Drakensang series was then turned into an online browser game.

I don't think your odd for that, Couch. When I did a quick Google search of which game I should play first, most people recommend Drakensang: The River of Time. I just wanted to play them in the order they were released which is why I started with this one.

Is the second game a really big improvement? I really don't know much about the Drakensang games, unfortunately.

The second game is a basically prequel to Drakensang. It also focuses more on narrative, and telling a story better than the first game. Combat is the same though.

Sounds cool! I'm sure I'll get to the second game before 2020...maybe.

Fluent said:

I know in Realms of Arkania, items all had a specific use. Are there 'junk' items in this game, such as lucky charms, wolf paws and the like? Or, do those items have a specific use at some point?

I'm basically just wondering which items I should hold on to and which I should sell. In other words, is the junk really junk?

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You can "loot" animals - with a proper skill better and better if you put more points into it - and yes, most of the items can be used for crafting ! Especially leather, if I remember correctly … But only if you have fitting recipes for that. And the first ones can be bought in Ferdok.
However, only a character with a smith skill can use smith recipes.

You can even make some money with crafting and then selling what you have crafted. I don't know, however, if you can buy it back later - I doubt so, but I don't remember anymore.

Me, I'm on the brink of starting Drakensang again. I've been digging out my official "cluebook" again, so if you have any questions, you can ask me.

There should be a special thread about lore here somewhere, there you can find some background information as well.

The official forum at dtp seems to have vanished completely. Sad.
The whole official pages seem to have turned into Bigpoint "Drakensang" pages.

Another lore thread can be found in the forum of Ulisses, holder of the print license of DSA / TDE : http://archiv.ulisses-spiele.de/forum/showthread.php?t=2766 and another one here http://www.ulisses-spiele.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=538 (you can read both in this order, since the first link links to an older discussion, of which the second link is a kind of "sequel" or what the proper word for this might be).

It was huge fun discussing with Farflame there and in the dtp forums.

I was reading "Das Ferdoker Pergament" last week (the accompanying novel to DRASA), it's sad that this isn't translated yet. Ulisses remains astonishingly stubborn towards translating anything. They concentrate on the German market alone. Sad.

It's sad that American audiences barely know about Drakensang (imo, you can't even buy it on Steam, I think). All of the books I researched about the game are in German. I'm sad that they never translated the books to English.

Thanks a lot for the tips, Alrik! I'll keep them in mind. I'm really enjoying myself with this pen-and-paper style experience, and I'm really enjoying The Dark Eye world. I'll play more today and post more impressions.

The TDE 4.0 rules should be available in English language, still.

Look here : http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Eye-Basi...8&qid=1428252580&sr=8-2&keywords=the+dark+eye

Description of the world : http://www.amazon.com/The-Dark-Eye-..._sbs_vg_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=1XTJNV3W0F0XW4N05ASM

However, the team at Ulisses is quite close to releasing TDE 5.0 - which is to me (personally) rather like TDE 4.5 or so, than a whole new thing.

It is scheduled for release in Mai, with the Basic Rules book to cost 49 Euros here in Germany.
Edit : Pushed to August.

Couchpotato said:

I must be the oddball on these forums as I enjoyed Drakensang: The River of Time more than the first game. It's a shame the sequel & expansion wasn't a financial success.

After its failure to sell Radon Labs declared bankruptcy, and was acquired by Bigpoint Games. The Drakensang series was then turned into an online browser game.

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I always thought the general consensus was that River of Time was much better than the original.

That was my impression at least. RoT had all the good parts of the original, plus a better story, characters, less trash mob combat. I tried several times to play the original but got burnt out/bored several hours in each time. I had no such problem with RoT.

Seems to me the first game is getting too much bad press here. For the record, I played the fully patched version which must have been quite a different experience than the release version which was lacking many convenience features. So I'm not saying anyone with bad memories of the first game is necessarily wrong but they were probably among the early adopters.
I also didn't think it had a much weaker story. The pacing in both games is a bit snail-like and laid back so I'd say they are about on par in that regard.
The second game definitely has the better gameplay though thanks to a more refined UI, better party controls and many ease-of-use convenience features. It's a more polished experience in just about every regard.

I would definitely recommend playing and finishing the first part and then also playing the second part in its Gold version with the Phileasson's Saga add-on installed. The expansion is by far not as bad as its reputation and it is nicely and seamlessly integrated into the main game.
On a whole, I really like the Drakensangs. They are oozing love and dedication towards the DSA/TDE setting which I have been a fan of since 1993 when Schicksalsklinge (Blade of Destiny) was released on PC.
It's a real shame Radon Labs didn't make it. Everyone who was a fan of the RoA trilogy was anxious after so many years of failed DSA/TDE CRPG attempts whether Radon Labs would be able to create great DSA CRPGs and for many people, myself included, they kind of knocked it out of the park with the Drakensangs. Such beautiful games with the exactly right mix of sticking to the ruleset while also taking liberties due to being a PC game.
I'm pretty much done with KS due to many disappointments but if someone were to launch a DSA CRPG Kickstarter for a Drakensang-style game then I'd pledge in the hundreds in a heartbeat .

Nephologist said:

I always thought the general consensus was that River of Time was much better than the original.

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It was ! It was !

At least in my opinion.

But … Around that time another game with "Dragon" in its title came out : "Dragon Age". And that swallowed up the whole playerbase.

In my opinion, personally, both Drakensang games failed mostly due to the unfortunate release of Dragon Age at the same time.

Had Drakensang been released after a long drought like Baldur's Gate, for example, everyone would remember it as "the" RPG.


Edit : Drakensang 1 wasn't a bad game. It just had so much more dungeon crawling than River Of Time - or so it least it might be remembered as such, because most of the dungeoin crawling part in Drakensang 1 was located rather closer to the end of the game.

River Of Time was rather an open world game, with not that much dungeocrawling, imho.

But the overall amount of combat is similar in both cases, with River Of Time imho having far more social skill checks as well.

But maybe both games weren't received that well by min-maxers as well. Because if you specialize too much on combat on both games, then your game experience is completely differfent than when not specializing that much on combat, especially in River Of Time. A member of "my" pen & paper group told me that he found it totally boring to waltz through the game as a maxed out warrior …

TRoT seems to have better flow, but the first one has really pretty locales and bright scenery. And The Dark Eye is an amazing world. As a native English speaker whose German isn't all that good, I feel cheated that western audiences never took to TDE enough for it to be exported from Germany. It must be the ruleset. It's a shame because the world and lore are totally one-of-a-kind.

Yes, it's much based on medieval Europe.
The makers of the setting had been translating D&D for the German market in the first place, but the setting evolved so much more than that ...
What's *absolutely* unique to the setting are its fairy -tale parts ! Fairies - they are there ! Although not that much within the game ... You'd learn much more about them in the Drakensang novel "Das Ferdoker Pergament", but that sadly remains untranslated ...
And the Jester class ! The "Schelm" ! No RPG I know of has this class. (The Schelm is very difficult to play, however. My game master tried it out in the group, meanwhile another group member was mastering the game, and meanwhile it was hilarious, it was also very difficult to ... perceive, to acknowledge the deeds.)

Sure releasing it at the same time with Dragon Age, may have hurt sales a bit, but wasn't there an huge problem of buying the damn game ? I remember checking steam monthly back then and Rivers of time was never available in my region. I think it was orginally only sold to u.s, canada and germany via steam. I remember this because I wasn't the only one here @ watch with this problem. Now later on its ofcourse available, but the reason why it flopped was this publishing rights mess.