First infos about Drakensang: The River of Time

Originally Posted by Dasale
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.

No, I believe that just means that the selection of skills and spells will stay the same and not a lot of new ones are being introduced (TDE PnP offers a few hundred different spells and many dozen talents).

IIRC somebody actually wrote on the official forums that they promised that they will make underdeveloped skills of the first game more important in the second one by introducting more checks and such.

Furthermore many of the design choices in Drakensang were rather different from the PnP original, especially for special abilities. So they could change quite a lot of the mechanics without making Drakensang 2 less faithful to TDE than Drakensang.

For the skills I don't know, the selection is sample and easy to understand.

For the spells, I feel there's something not that cool. I only area attack spell I saw require 8CR, that's dementia, fight would be over or at least situation changed too much during the time to cast the spell. Some spells last 10 or 15s I don't remember, well those are just boring to use. The spell that protect against one magic attack and then is over is also weird, with the time required to cast it and mana spend it is close to be useless.

I hope they allow for more customization of the characters appearance at the beginning.

Originally Posted by Thoth
I hope they allow for more customization of the characters appearance at the beginning.

The Gamestar preview said something about customizable hair and beards.

Voice acting is very low on my list, I like hearing the first sentence or two and then just reading the rest.

Cringe voice acting: I nearly let them sacrifice the virgin she was so bad!!

Right I noticed that too but in general I feel the english voice acting good. It is often in the exaggeration but like the animations are. In my language they often choose a different path, by tempering a bit the caricature but that doesn't match the animations and that doesn't work always well.

I don't know if it's the comparison with the English version and not get used to a new version but I feel the voice acting in my language not bad but less good than most good recent CRPG.

About full voice acting if the D&D license cannot offer them that, targeting this goal will certainly be big trap. It's certainly weird to get full screen animation without voice acting. But I see the point to have it instead of a sample text dialog as does the NWN series when there's no voice acting. The problem is complicate.

Originally Posted by Dasale
Only European trees has large trunk?

No, this is the wrong question.

The right question should be:

"Only non-Speedtree trees have large trunks ?"

Originally Posted by Corwin
Cringe voice acting: I nearly let them sacrifice the virgin she was so bad!!

I think she's bad in the German game as well.

Originally Posted by Curunír
Furthermore many of the design choices in Drakensang were rather different from the PnP original, especially for special abilities. So they could change quite a lot of the mechanics without making Drakensang 2 less faithful to TDE than Drakensang.

I must stress this. Drakensang has some notable differences from the P&P original.

I sometimes call it "edition 4.2" to me, or maybe rather "edition 4.r", with r standing for Radon Labs. With 4.1 being the newest edition ( I always talk of the 4th edition [4.0], but the newer 4.1 is mainly based on that). I still don't quite know whether Radon Labs used the 4th or the 4.1 edition for the game, but anyway, they twaeked it into a new subset, optimised for the PC game.

Originally Posted by Dasale
For the skills I don't know, the selection is sample and easy to understand.

For the spells, I feel there's something not that cool. I only area attack spell I saw require 8CR, that's dementia, fight would be over or at least situation changed too much during the time to cast the spell. Some spells last 10 or 15s I don't remember, well those are just boring to use. The spell that protect against one magic attack and then is over is also weird, with the time required to cast it and mana spend it is close to be useless.

Well these spells are more to be used strategically. Since the AoE spell also damages your party, it's to be used to start the fight (when you cast the spell and you're not in combat mode, it casts instantly, but then combat starts so you can't cast it twice)

Improved character creation is also confirmed. See GameStar today.

This probably doesn't mean the whole thing, but at least the player gets more influence.

Walkir has translated his complete report from the RPC :

http://forum.dtp-entertainment.com/v…p?f=63&t=12473