RPGWatch Feature - A Farewell to Dragons Review

Dhruin

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Steam's current sale makes A Farewell to Dragons a tantalising prospect, so we have a comprehensive review just in time. Not quite an action/rpg, not quite living up to the old school cRPGs it attempts to emulate, A Farewell to Dragons is a game full of good ideas lost in unsuccessful execution. Here's an excerpt:
AFTD takes up Arcanum’s mantle of steampunk with a vivid and nicely imagined 19th century-style setting full of period locomotives and gunslinging bandits leavened with colleges of arcane magic wielders and wild clans of catwomen. Dwarves are - as usual - the masters of technology, and in this incarnation rather than being ponderous, they’re agile and nimble scientists as well as miners or smiths. Dwarven gearmasters will provide your party with a large array of potent WMDs, including explosives, poisons, flamethrowers, machine guns, muskets, rifles, pistols, and chain saws, including one entitled The Blood-Stained Maniac Saw. Not everyone can master these weapons, however, and not every NPC fits the bill. Victor is unique in the game in having a variety of skill paths, able to be master of all four elemental magics, a fighter, gunslinger, or any hybrid of the three.
Read it all here.
More information.
 
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An excellent read, magerette - thank you. Such a shame, in the end - it sounds like some solid patching could really make this is a great discovery. Alas, one suspects it will never happen.
 
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Great review. I think I'll pass on freely exploring a world with nothing to discover but the odd barrel and spawning enemies. Seems unfortunate.
 
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If there was a patch I might have bought it…

Crap ... I wrote a bigger post last night by apparently my netbook ate it when the battery died ... but basically I agree. There is enough good there that I would say that for $5 it would be worth a shot ... or with a big patch. At $15 as it stands ... it is a value judgment, and with all of the good games now it is hard to sell.
 
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Great review mags. Too bad about AFTD. It seems like it has some really cool ideas, but it falls short. Hopefully they will patch it up, but I agree with Dhruin's assesment of that ever happening. ;)

I've only played the beginning and will put this one on hold for a long long time. At least until after I've played the better games out there.
 
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There's a thread in the 1C forums about this bug:
"reportedly a bug in the endgame where the entire sequence plays in Russian, but I can’t confirm that one, as sadly I have not mustered the endurance to play past sixty hours."

The ending apparently doesn't play in Russian, it's just plain broken period(apparently just crashes) in English. So someone there wrote a data unpacker/packer and replaced the english text at that point with the Russian, clicked his way to a saveable point, then apparently replaced the English again… gets kind of fuzzy there… No one in the thread understood Russian so… (Oh yeah IIRC this player mentioned that it only took him about 30h or so to finish the game...)

Day/Night Watch the engine was good, but Silent Storm was a better game using that engine.

Price: wait and see if it hits Steam's daily extra off deals(there should be two more days left I think… check at noon Eastern time every day), although I'm losing hope as the last several days have had nothing but junk or pieces of "gold"/"complete" packs that weren't any better of a deal than the complete pack unless you already had some pieces and just needed one expansion pack.
 
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There's a thread in the 1C forums about this bug:
"reportedly a bug in the endgame where the entire sequence plays in Russian, but I can’t confirm that one, as sadly I have not mustered the endurance to play past sixty hours."

The ending apparently doesn't play in Russian, it's just plain broken period(apparently just crashes) in English. So someone there wrote a data unpacker/packer and replaced the english text at that point with the Russian, clicked his way to a saveable point, then apparently replaced the English again… gets kind of fuzzy there… No one in the thread understood Russian so… (Oh yeah IIRC this player mentioned that it only took him about 30h or so to finish the game…)

Yeah, I saw that. Didn't feel like messing with it. AFA the time I put in, I'm a slow player, so my time is far from average. (I spend way too much time shopping and tweaking items and looking in every single barrel and chest, so I'm sure lots of people could get through the game quicker.) Thirty hours sounds like a pretty fast run through, though.

There were times in this game that really were fun in that nostalgic way you don't get too often with modern games, but for most people, I'd think ten bucks would be a realistic money to enjoyment ratio.
 
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Price: wait and see if it hits Steam's daily extra off deals
I got the game on steam when the price dropped below 7 euro's, but that happened about a week ago. I guess most of you missed it.
 
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Yeah, that sounds like the deal I'd want. I feel kind of sad saying that. It's obvious a lot of time and talent went into the making of this game, but when you have no after-sales support on a game that desperately needs not just a bugfix but a voluminous patch, that's about all you *can* say.
 
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A belated thanks for the in-depth review Magerette .

Bought this awhile back for $6.00 at D2D and haven't got around to playing it yet, after reading your review I'm still deciding if I'm going to give it a go or not, love anything with a Steampunk setting like Arcanum so that's definitely the biggest draw for me.
Also have DragonShard lined up from a recent sale to try, so where to invest the time, that's the question lol.
 
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You'd be better off playing Arcanum again. That said, since you already bought it then you might as well give it a shot. Don't exect the awesomness that is Arcanum, but give it a shot and maybe you'll find something to like, if not then at least it was only 6 dollars.
 
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