Farflame spotted a review of the Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny remake on Christcentered Gamer:

Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

In today's gaming environment it's hard to find a classic style RPG game that brings back memories of Baldur's Gate as well as Icewind Dale and other numerous classic PC RPGs that are long forgotten. I have seen that in the last few years smaller developers are bringing back the turn based and older action based RPGs that myself and others have been wanting to play again. Realms of Arkania: Blades of Destiny was a very successful old RPG (1990s) in Europe and saw a smaller, but dedicated fan base in North America during the game's original release. I never heard of it but if I did I would have loved to play it back in the early 1990s. The game has been remade from the original 1992 version and looks much better. Since the remake launched on Steam in 2013 it has seen numerous patches that have improved the game.

[...]

Even though the game isn't on par in many ways with today's RPG's I did enjoy it. Besides an occasional bug and the overuse of identical NPC models and clothing I would recommend giving it a chance; you just might find that you like the fun story. This game has a special charm that many modern games are lacking and I hope that the developer will bring more games of its type in the future.

Score: 71%

Kordanor spotted this new free DLC for RoA: Blade of Destiny HD:

Free DLC "With Blade and Brilliance"

Celebrating the two year anniversary of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny, Crafty Studios is proud to present an eventful blend of extra content - new classes, new spells and new events, along with various updates and additions - all packaged up in the free DLC “With Blade and Brilliance”.

Features:

• Additional classes: “Juggler” and “Skald”
• Extended magic: “Destructibo “, “Fury Blood”, Ball Magic for mages, Extended Spell descriptions and complete revision of magical items
• Additional NPC: Gerbald from Riva
• Additional events: “Days of the Nameless”, “Tula of Skerdu”, “Asleif the Bald” and “Rotten timberwork” in the Mine of Prem
• Additional items: Thorwal trousers, leather trousers, linen shirt, leather shirt, belt, silver ring, golden ring, silver tiara, golden tiara, feather hat, throwing dagger
• Atmospheric images for many dialogues enhance the game experience
• See Forum for the full list of additions: http://steamcommunity.com/app/237550/discussions/0/530649887218772370/

Two years after release we get a new 381 MB patch for RoA: Blade of Destiny HD:

After months of development and just in time prior to the 2 year anniversary of the Blade of Destiny release, Crafty Studios and the Beta Team of BoD HD are proud to present Patch 1.35, consisting of more than 300 changes, additions, modability extensions and fixes. Detailed patchnotes can be found in our official forum at Patchnotes 1.35[forum.schicksalsklinge.com]. Just some highlights:

Content changes and extensions

• Castle Felsteyn: Mod of Viana included as Event
• In Thorwal there is now the building "The Black Finger"
• You can now sell books in the Thorwal Mage Academy
• New event "Revenge of Ottaskin"
• New event in Phexcaer: Nancy's Note of Validor the villain
• Random city event "A pickpocket"
• Random city event "A Carriage"
• Random city event "A shooting star"
• Random city event "A beggar" extended
• 8 new events for resting at an inn
• 6 new events during outdoor camps
• 4 additional random battles after camps

New and updated Features

• User Interface is now scalable (e.g. for 4K resolutions)
• The console now logs experience points
• Console messages are in different colors
• Battle Avatar look improved (rimshader removed, specularity reduced)
• The spell "Solidirid" can now be used in the game
• The group now shares its food and water reserves
• The Spider demon is now a significantly bigger avatar in battle to diversify from the lesser spiders

Extensions to Modability

• Displaying images (up to size 256x256) possible in dialog boxes
• Character classes can now have custom portraits by mod
• NPCs can now have custom portraits
• Temple flags (in size 256x512) can now be replaced

...and a myriad of Bugfixes.

Enjoy and spread the word!

Kordanor brought to my attention that Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny has been pulled off Steam due to the developer stopping their publishing deal with UIG.

The reason for the pull from steam is that we as a developer ceased our publishing cooperation with UIG for good. There are some legal issues to be resolved, and as soon as they are, I will come back with an update. This has of course no effect whatsoever to your already bought game, you can play it regardless of whether it is available to be bought on Steam at the moment.

Check out the thread linked above for information from Kordanor. 

The developers of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny HD have a new forum post with information  that a new patch is now available. Here are some of the changes.

Patch 1.33a - March 8th, 2014 8pm (GMT+2)

• Tavern dialogue made cancelable without the need to leave the tavern
• Introduced absolute carrylimit (strength x 140 in ounces)
• Introduced sleeping in camp battles
• Weathersystem respects sound volume setting
• Introduced helptext for the aventurian calendar
• Haggle-checks for traders are now harder, kicking out is a lot sooner
• Enchanted druid dagger “heal” now only works for Druids
• Female trader names now are also female avatars (at General Goods, Weapons, Herbs)

Steam announces you can now download the Free Ogredeath DLC for RoA: Blade of Destiny HD. As usual here are the details.

Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny - Ogredeath DLC

Your quests through the legendary saga of the Northland continue in “Ogredeath” the latest DLC for Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny. Search for a missing member of Aventuria’s elite messenger team. Join a band of huntsmen as you brave the legendary beasts of Torkil’s Chasm. Navigate the exacting currents of the Great Bodir River. Compete against a skillful jester in a knife-throwing contest. Risking all for fame, fortune, forbidden pleasure, and more - the new challenges for this epic RPG will be no walk in the park.

Features

• New Dungeon/Quest "Torkil's Chasm"
• New Quest "Beilunk Riders in trouble"
• New Quest "Sweet Erika"
• A Challenge near Bodir
• Tavern event "Throwing Contest"
• Four new encounters on sea

Thanks for the tip Capt. Huggy Face.

The developers of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny HD have a new forum post with news that a new patch is now available. Here are some of the changes.

    New Intro
    Extensive rebalancing of all weapon values
    7 new weapons (e.g. Thrust Spear, Andergaster, Battle Bow)
    “Good” and “Masterwork” Weapon variants introduced
    Weapon trader sortiments reworked and spread hints to them
    Extensive rebalancing of NPC values
    Some NPCs now have 2 attacks per turn (e.g. sabretooth tiger)
    Every combat spell now has a unique visual effect
    Unlocked spells Nekropathia and Abvenenum
    Many inside house views reworked
    Individual temple views per god
    Temple distribution reworked according to world background
    Improved modability (new Functions, hook for Tavern activities)
    Battle stances
    Necrophobia checks when battling undead
    Better marking of “Points of Interest” in every town, not only Thorwal
    New Quest marker on the travelmap
    New Druid rituals (using Obsidian Dagger)
    Improved item tooltips
    Extended trader item tooltips
    Groenvelden redone (Groups of People you can talk to)
    Real loading screen for battles
    Evade in battles now uses up a parry attempt
    You can now only either evade or parry once per turn

Steam announces that new DLC is now available for RoA: Blade of Destiny HD.

The developers of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny HD have released a new trailer.

Get ready to return to Thorwal, one of the oldest cities of Aventurien. Make sure your wits are sharpened before walking down the small alleys of Thorwal and Prem, and prepare to stop the Orcisch threat while creating a mighty alliance between nations. Featuring a complete visual reimagining along with a comprehensive overhaul of every aspect of the gameplay.

Seems like an updated patch for version 1.32 was released two days ago. The change log is to huge to list so here is the link.

Patch Diary 1.32ny

Sorry for the relative silence from our side, we are working day and night for the Gold Edition release. I can't really give you an official ETA, sorry, but what I can tell is that we will release a patch for the latest 1.32 fixing the biggest battle problems (circling characters, hangs on Autobattle, no magic in autobattle and so on), as well as fixing other problems (like not being able to do magic in the first camp after starting the game). Moreover, we were able to accelerate the battle on speed multiplication levels of more than 1 significantly. I just did a test autobattle with 4 combatants on factor 8, and the whole thing was over in no more than 10 seconds.

And we found a signifcant slowdown problem with one of our fixes right before the holidays, which can have an impact of as much as 50% of the frame rate, which is also already fixed in our beta.

The developers of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny HD have a new forum post with news that a new patch is now available. Here are some of the changes, and updates.

Patch 1.32, 21st of December 2013

• Completely reworked user interface
  
  • clear Character Screen
  • extended Tooltips
  • intuitive handling
  • Questbook improved (Mark completed Quests, Sorting)
  • Travelmap and Battlescreen with Camera control icons
• New Non Player Characters
  
  • From walkers in the streets to the healer
  • individual Faces
  • Authentic “Thorwalsh”
  • Guards with traditional Skraja
• Completely new Music (Original score can be optionally activated)
• Massive Performance Improvements
• Significant Optical Improvement on all game Scenes (Towns, Dungeons, Battles)
• Linux Version
• Beginner mode (choose on new Game)
• Optional Automatic Levelups
• Complete Data-Modding-Ability, even with multiple independent Modules
• Rebalancing Trader Buy Pricing
• Trader locks you out when trying to haggle too hard
• Taverns lock you out when being caught stealing / cheating
• Levelup adapted (Vitality/AE distribution, grand meditation for magicians)
• Combat and Autocombat Bugfixes
• AI-Wizards use more different Spells
• Autocombat also uses Magic
• Reinforcements appear at the exits
• Waterskins are refilled in Taverns (with the first beer) and Hostels (when eating)
• Ingame-Console is saved to a textfile for later reference
• 40 new Steam Achievements (including Stats)
• Steam Cloud Integration (Online-Backup of Savegames)
• Potion effects don’t stack any more
• New Spell “Break Domination” (to counter Horriphobus, Evil Eye)
• English Map
• Corrected Town Names
• Many texting issues fixed
• Problem with Unity Crash when having Corrupted Font Files fixed
• "Campfire Chitchat" with valuable tips for the Heroes depending on their current situation (thanks to Fujak Loganson for the implementation and writing!)

Thanks for sending in the link Avantenor.

Steam is offering Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny HD for 50% off untill Decmber 3rd.

A legend reborn as Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny returns!

Developed by Austrian developer Crafty Studios, Realms of Arkania – Blade of Destiny is a faithful remake of the 1992 original, adored by a generation of Role Players and one of the most successful RPG’s of the 1990’s.

Get ready to return to Thorwal, one of the oldest cities of Aventuria. Make sure your wits are sharpened before walking down the small alleys of Thorwal and Prem, and prepare to stop the Orcisch threat while creating a mighty alliance between nations. Featuring a complete visual reimagining along with a comprehensive overhaul of every aspect of the gameplay, Realms of Arkania – Blade of Destiny is set to captivate a 21st century audience of new and old fans alike.

Old school RPG at its best – for the Fans of REAL RPG games.

Features:

• Remake of the first part of Realms of Arkania
• Roleplaygame with turn based tactical fights
• Cities and dungeons in current real-time-3D
• Dozens of talents, fighting skills and magical skills
• Authentic realization of the TDE basic rules
• Depending on your gaming style – 20 to 80 hours game time

The remake of Blade of Destiny was plagued by a large number of bugs upon release. Fluent checks out if the current state of the game is worth playing.

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover. You've heard that old saying before, right? It means: you shouldn't judge something based on its outside appearance alone, you must first explore its depths. Okay, English lesson aside, that little piece of wisdom seems to ring true for Realms Of Arkania: Blade Of Destiny (hereby known as RoA). The cover is a bit misleading here, as the jacket is slightly tattered, torn, missing parts of the binding and the pages are a bit yellowed with age. Okay, maybe it's not that bad, but it is a little rough at times. The character models aren't the prettiest, the combat animations are simply there to do the job and not much more, and there is little flash in the way of fancy cut-scenes or anything like that. However, there is much more beneath the surface here that deserves exploring for the benefit of the RPG fan reading this review. Let's take a look.

The  Ulisses Medien & Spiel Distribution GmbH, publisher of the German The Dark Eye books, tabletop games and merchandize, sent out a statement regarding the new ROA: Blade of Destiny HD remake. As expected they were not involved at all because the computer game licensor is a different company.

Here's a quick and dirty translation of this complicated legal letter. For 100% precision please refer to the German language original posted further down.

 

Clarification regarding the computer game "Realms of Arkania - Blade of Destiny" [HD remake - ed.]

Hereby Ulisses Spiele distances itself explicitly from the remake of the computer game  "Realms of Arkania - Blade of Destiny", [released] 07/30/2013. The exclusive right to grant licenses for computer games based on The Dark Eye, and their approval, is the sole responsibility of the Chromatrix GmbH.

The The Dark Eye editorial panel was at  no point in time involved in the  game's development process. Neither content nor presentation were known to the publisher [Ulisses - ed.] before the release of the game.

 

The original PR:

Klarstellung zum Computerspiel „Das Schwarze Auge - Schicksalsklinge“

Hiermit distanziert sich Ulisses Spiele ausdrücklich von der Neuauflage des Computerspiels „Das Schwarze Auge - Schicksalsklinge“ vom 30.07.2013. Das Recht zur Lizenzvergabe von Computerspielen von Das Schwarze Auge und deren Abnahme obliegt alleine der Chromatrix GmbH.

Die Das Schwarze Auge-Redaktion war zu keinem Zeitpunkt in den Entwicklungsprozess des Spiels eingebunden. Weder Inhalt noch Aufmachung waren dem Verlag vor Erscheinen des Spiels bekannt.

 

Found at GamersGlobal.

Worlds Factory is the only English review I can find for Realms of Arkania HD. Let me be frank we all know the game is still a mess so the score given is 10/100.

Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny is a buggy, unfinished game that needs a lot of work, and frankly it doesn't deserve your money in this state.

Crafty Studios has apologized for the release and seems to be doing everything they can to fix it, but if the concept intrigues you then buy it when it's a finished product months down the line.

Gamers are more well-informed than ever and it's inexcusable to release a game like this, especially considering alternatives like crowdfunding.

While the Blade of Destiny remake obviously has been released in an unfinished state, there's also good news: So far the developers are releasing a patch every 1-2 days, usually at 8 pm CET. Here is the patch log for v1.07. I'll post the other logs in the news thread.

Patch 1.07 - August 4th, 2013 (8pm GMT+2)
Character: Fix hang for All negative attributes mined
Character: Recalculate Armor mali on Levelup
Trade: Fix free Healers
Tavern: Fix wrong dialogs Branches
System: Performance Setting impact vastly improved
Towns: Improved Animations of the new NPCs
Dungeon: Fix Old Bailey Quest
Dungeon: Fix empty chests in spidercave (only works with new games as chest status resides in Savegame after first entrance)
Camp: Waterskin refill fixed
Dungeon: Fix pirate cave door
Camp: Fix Savegame Time forward
Towns: Add “Master Dramosh” in front of Old Bailey
Towns: Leave House Tooltip fixed
Questbook: Actually hide Hidden quests
Townmap Rybon fixed
.System: Fixed Save/Load-Game-Error on with new Characters, old Savegames should work again

In the works (on top of the schedule):
- Fight Fleeing NPCs (time ran out because of the performance update)
- Class-Specific Equipment Restrictions (the same)
- More Dungeon Fixes
 - More Bugfixes, as always

All patch logs and the plans for the next few patches can be found in the official forum.

Thanks HiddenX!

Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny Remake launched in a broken state. The developers have released a few patches, but the damage is already done as they say. Incgamers has a new article covering this topic if anyone is interested in reading more.

We’ve been alerted to a rather large amount of problems with the game’s launch version on Steam. The first alarm bells should start ringing when you notice that Realms of Arkania apparently only has one achievement right now – called “Testing achievement” – but the problems run far deeper than that.

A weighty thread on RPG Codex (and an equally weighty number of complaints on the Steam forums) indicate that the game has more problems than you can shake an RPG at, ranging from boring ones like regular crashes, placeholder text, and untranslated text, through to slightly more entertaining ones like “many NPCs have holes in their heads”, “save game randomly deletes itself”, “all weapon models look like crossbows”, and “you start with infinite money, which randomly resets to normal during gameplay.” Entertaining as long as you haven’t paid for the game, anyway.

As those complaints are based on the early German release, some of those problems may have been fixed by now (the “Day One” patch apparently fixes the possibility of savegames being corrupted after a fight), but the patch schedule on the official forums doesn’t bode particularly well for its current state.

The patch scheduled for today, for instance, will apparently “fix random crashes” and “fix half-translated character screen” while one due tomorrow will “continue to remove placeholder [text] based on community reports.”

Even without this, things still don’t look particularly great. I’ve embedded a YouTube video of the game below, but for maximum amusement skip to 3:17 to hear the narrator struggle with poorly-translated text. 

The Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny HD remake  is now available on Steam for $19.99, GamersGate for $19.99, and GreenManGaming for $15.99.

A legend reborn as Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny returns!

Developed by Austrian developer Crafty Studios, Realms of Arkania – Blade of Destiny is a faithful remake of the 1992 original, adored by a generation of Role Players and one of the most successful RPG’s of the 1990’s.

Get ready to return to Thorwal, one of the oldest cities of Aventuria. Make sure your wits are sharpened before walking down the small alleys of Thorwal and Prem, and prepare to stop the Orcisch threat while creating a mighty alliance between nations. Featuring a complete visual reimagining along with a comprehensive overhaul of every aspect of the gameplay, Realms of Arkania – Blade of Destiny is set to captivate a 21st century audience of new and old fans alike.

Old school RPG at its best – for the Fans of REAL RPG games.

Crafty Studios' Technical Director Christian Weinmüllner and Creative Director Ronald Halder answer the questions that Game Media Pro asked them about Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny.

Which ‘old-school’ RPGs are your favourite ones?

Chris: One of my first RPG’s was the orginal  Realms of Arkania:Blade of Destiny (pre-HD!), so of course this game is at the top of my list. I also had a lot of fun with Ultima Underworld 1 and2 as well as Arx Fatali.  Arcanum with its unique combination of Steam-punk and magic was also one of my favourites. I really liked Legend of Grimrock which is not necessarily old, but I still consider it ‘old school’.

Ronny: My passion for RPG’s came a lot later for me. I preferred classic structural games and also have played nearly every racing simulation out there. However, when I got hands-on with my first online RPG, I was just fascinated by the in-game worlds. Imagination, beauty and such density, are all the qualities I find so interesting about RPG games.

What are the future plans for Realms of Arkania?

I think the word trilogy speaks for itself!  We also want to implement the game on other platforms, without making compromises to the story. We also have some interesting ideas for what comes next after Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny… more will be revealed soon.

What we can say is that we will continue to do everything possible to make the games of the trilogy comparable to real DSA games. No high fantasy, no exaggerated flashes!

UIG Entertainment and Attic Entertainment have released a gameplay trailer for Realms of Arkania – Blade of Destiny.

Munich, Germany– 5 ^th June 2013: UIG Entertainment, a leading German publisher, and Attic Entertainment have today released a brand new gameplay trailer for Realms of Arkania– Blade of Destiny, set to release at the end of June on PC with a recommended retail price of£14.99/€19.99.

Developed by Austrian developer Crafty Games, Realms of Arkania– Blade of Destiny is a one-to-one remake of the 1992 original, adored by a generation of Role Players and one of the most successful and legendary German RPG’s of the 1990’s. Featuring between 20 and 80 hours of game time, depending on playing style, as well as being in full real-time 3D for the first time, Realms of Arkania– Blade of Destiny has been fully reimagined for a 21 ^st century RPG gaming audience.