Drakensang - Review @ IGN

Raising attributes costs about ten-times as much EXP than a single skill level and it won't help you to get around handicaped checks. If you don't have enough skill points to outweigh the handicap, all three attribute checks will be handicaped by the differential. Also sometimes the remaining skill points after a skill check (called SP*) have influence on the result of the check.

You have to find a balance between raising skills or attributes.

Then make you mage or thief your herb picker. That seems more synergistic.

Looks like I have 2 choices for a synergistic "nature freak" the spellweaver, or the seaming super-character that starts with rediculously high skills in a wide array of crap, the healing mage. I hate not being a fighter-type, but for the sake of some sort of min-maxing I'm going to have to start over and go with the healing mage. It is going to suck to have to destroy all those barrells and pick all those herbs again. I'm on the last leg of the harbor quests and I finished the oracle quests. Sucks I wasted all that time. Curse you Radon labs! Curse You!

You don't really need min-maxing. I guess with your skill and experience in rpg gaming you won't have a problem to get around.

In the moor you will find another possible companion, an elf. That one should be able to take over the herbal / animal things.

Yes i do have to min-max, thats half the fun of a crpg. The other half is tactical TB-combat. I make enough choices at work to get my fill at that, and my wife and oldest kid do enough talking. What i don't get to do is create a party of pure awesome with every point painstakenly placed, nor do I get to employ a party i created in tactical TB-combat. Since this game decided tactical TB combat (or even challenging comvat) is for the birds, and creating your own party is for better games, if I want my moneies worth I am left with min-maxing with the crap this game thows me.

And I don't switch people out in stupid games that give you members bit by bit. I stick with what I have due to vesting and if you the devs wanted me to change characters they should've given it to me sooner. What are people supposed to do, not pick any herbs before they get to the moor? Phooey. I know the first 4 characters I get and how I can make it work.

So you got this game and were disappointed it was not turned based, did you happen to read any press on it.

While I must agree that, so far at least, the combat is too easy, I don't have a problem with the character talents and skills as they are. I figure if the devs wanted us to have blank slates to min/max, they would have included that option.
Yeah, I'm using the Amazon as my herbalist. She doesn't successfully harvest all the herbs, but she doesn't fail all the time either. Surely I could have built a streamlined character from scratch who has more complimentary stats and skills, but I personally like overcoming the negatives. Just personal play preference for me.

Thrasher said:

That's not thinking. That's reacting.

BTW when I google "TDE" I get nothing. Where are the rules for TDE documented on the internet? Hopefully in English, otherwise, nevermind...

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Register at the TDE Yahoo group. They have a quite huge PDF file with some fan-translated rules. I actually translated some stuff for the group.
The rules at play in Drakensang should all be explained in the PDF, but I'm not sure.


Aaaand. I can argue this point over and over.
Drakensang is NOT RTwP.
It is (in my own terms) "round-based with pseudo-realtime".
First all player-characters act (more or less at the same time, but in one round, so it wouldn't really make a difference), then all the enemies act, and so on.
So it is basically and at its core pure round-based combat (don't mix that up with turn-based, which it is obviously not).

Unrestigered said:

Since this game decided tactical TB combat (or even challenging comvat) is for the birds,

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Yeah yeah, just wait for the later areas, and see if combat remains "§unchallenging"; even with min/maxing. You'll be suprised.
Also, I hate Flight Simulators. Thats why I don't feel I could give a valuable opinion on them. Maybe you should do the same in some instances?

I noticed my 3 guys all attacked at the same time...reminded me of the three musketeers for some reason.

Glad it worked.

I'm going to split the thread and move some parts to our Drakensang forum. So if anybody misses a few of his posts, they can be found there.

Unrestigered said:

Yes i do have to min-max, thats half the fun of a crpg. The other half is tactical TB-combat. I make enough choices at work to get my fill at that, and my wife and oldest kid do enough talking.

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A wild guess: mondblut?

Unrestigered said:

I can see why when it comes to a lot of crap, but ruining min-maxing for me is too much to take. I can’t believe I anticipated this game so much.

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Try playing it for what it is then, not for what you expect it to be. As far as min-maxing goes, yeah - in retrospect I would have loved to be able to create my entire party from scratch. And I didn't like that my own character didn't have any voice at all. Aside from that, I thought that character creation offered enough options. You select an archetype but you can still customize the stats a bit.

What I also did was to plan out my party from the get-go and ditch companions I didn't want as soon as I got my "dream team". Filler characters got to train the same talents that I imagined my real party members to have. If your main character can't harvest herbs, there's no need to make the amazon train in those skills. You'll find a Elven Spellweaver later on who can do all the herb work and there'll always be plenty.

Just as a side-note : www.drakensang.de works again ...

ulixes said:

Drakensang is NOT RTwP.
It is (in my own terms) "round-based with pseudo-realtime".
First all player-characters act (more or less at the same time, but in one round, so it wouldn't really make a difference), then all the enemies act, and so on.
So it is basically and at its core pure round-based combat (don't mix that up with turn-based, which it is obviously not).

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That's how Baldur's Gate works, and the term RTwP pretty much comes from Baldur's Gate.

Putting the horse in front of the cart a bit there.

Unrestigered said:

Yes i do have to min-max, thats half the fun of a crpg. The other half is tactical TB-combat. I make enough choices at work to get my fill at that, and my wife and oldest kid do enough talking. What i don't get to do is create a party of pure awesome with every point painstakenly placed, nor do I get to employ a party i created in tactical TB-combat. Since this game decided tactical TB combat (or even challenging comvat) is for the birds, and creating your own party is for better games, if I want my moneies worth I am left with min-maxing with the crap this game thows me.

And I don't switch people out in stupid games that give you members bit by bit. I stick with what I have due to vesting and if you the devs wanted me to change characters they should've given it to me sooner. What are people supposed to do, not pick any herbs before they get to the moor? Phooey. I know the first 4 characters I get and how I can make it work.

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I think you're reviewing the game as if it was RoA 4, which is not. Once you get that out of the way, realize it's a different game, you'll enjoy it better.
I believe I read somewhere that originally they were including a full character creation for your character, but for some reason (user feedback or something) they went for the pre-created characters that you could tweak within the archetype like we have now. To me it's no big deal, but yes, I would have preferred if they added the option (they could call it extreme expert mode *do not touch*), but no problem.
Not able to create all your characters? Again, this is not RoA, doesn't apply. I actually find it more immersive. You encounter these people, they're who they are, not what you want them to be (at least until you add them to your group).
As far as difficulty goes, yes I do agree, at least up to the point I'm at (investigating the problems in the city) that battles have all been a breeze so far. If they become tougher later, that's cool, but they should at least provide some challenge from the start. Maybe the problem is what you mentioned, mana recovers too fast? I don't know how the PnP version works, but I find myself just casting spells in battle as if there's no tomorrow, since mana will be back to full 10 seconds after the fight.
But those are really nit-pickings in my case, the game is very enjoyable and fun. I don't even see a problem with characters suddenly leaving the party, it's just part of the fun, adapting to new situations. So you don't have the super-optimal group? big deal, nobody does, it's immersive (I do wish they let me take their stuff before they leave, the first character that left my group had all the hairpins, I'm out of hairpins now and can't find who sells them)

Nice review Unregistered! Should be on the main page.

wolfing said:

I believe I read somewhere that originally they were including a full character creation for your character, but for some reason (user feedback or something) they went for the pre-created characters that you could tweak within the archetype like we have now.

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Cost cuts, I assume.

The community even protested when they wanted to just offer the archetypes.

The community clearly wanted more possibilities.

I'm pleasantly surprised by the reviews that I am seeing for this game so far, since games like this are somewhat notorious for getting people to review them who have no business doing so and end up complaining "GAME IS TEH SUXXORZ HAS TOO MANY ROOLZ HURRRR!!11!!!"

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Cost cuts, I assume.

The community even protested when they wanted to just offer the archetypes.

The community clearly wanted more possibilities.

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SOME protested, and SOME wanted more. There was clearly a pen & paper faction that claimed a full character creation. And there was also a faction that thought archetypes would be ok. p&p faction simply was louder, because they didn't get what they wanted.

Full character creation was never planned after the time development of Drakensang was made public.

Yeah yeah, just wait for the later areas, and see if combat remains "§unchallenging"; even with min/maxing. You'll be suprised.

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No I won’t.

Also, I hate Flight Simulators. That’s why I don't feel I could give a valuable opinion on them. Maybe you should do the same in some instances?

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Well, seeing as I only like crpgs and I have impeccable taste in them, no. But let’s explore your statement. Let’s say you love flight simulators only and have played them for 20+ odd years. (I don’t know anything about flight simulators or flying so I am going to make up terms that sound like they apply). All the flight simulators in the 80’s and early 90’s had everything, and “pitch”, “throttle” and “[something(I can’t think of another flying word)]” were a staple in every flight simulator game. But in the mid to late 90’s flight simulators started to get dumbed-down to appeal to a broader market.

Today, flight simulators have taken two different paths: the top down shooter like the mini game in Jade Empire, whatever those types of flying games are called, and the stripped down flight simulator which is 99% auto-pilot with some discourse with the flight attendants and passengers.

And a new flight simulator is coming out were you know it won’t have [flying word I can’t think of] and throttle, but there is no reason to think it won’t, and every reason to think it has, the pitch element. So you think the game isn’t completely dumbed-down. But you get it and find it doesn’t have pitch, for no reason at all. All the devs had to do was not be retarded and not purposefully stop the pitch function, which would’ve made you happy. So you complain on a flight simulator forum and some freshman tells you that you don’t actually like flight simulators. That analogy has just sealed my fate as an extreme dork, hasn’t it?

Anyway, I found a work around to this game’s problem. I found a save game editor that has been converted to English. http://www.fab-dev.de/drakensang
I made a party with a little synergy and sensible distribution. I also made them way under powered so this game can provide a little challenge hopefully.

I knew this game didn’t have TB combat. I played the demo. But what the demo didn’t explain is character creation was going to be so weak, the devs purposefully screwed min-maxers, and combat wasn’t going to be more challenging outside of the start/tutorial area. All my complaints were valid.

p.s.

Nice review Unregistered! Should be on the main page.

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It was a rant, not really a review. I'm on the second dragon quest now and its much better with a party I created.

So you got this game and were disappointed it was not turned based, did you happen to read any press on it.

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Where did you get this idea? You no read good? I always knew this game was RTwP. I always knew I wouldn't be able to create my own party. I didn't know they were going to stick it right in the rear-end of min-maxers for no good reason.