{"id":4565,"date":"2009-07-29T05:12:45","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T21:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=4565"},"modified":"2018-03-14T11:23:12","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T03:23:12","slug":"drakensang-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/07\/29\/drakensang-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Drakensang – Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a follow-up to my post on Virtual Worlds the other day, here\u2019s a post on Drakensang<\/em> – after spending about six evenings in it, several of which with Hannah cradled in my arms.<\/p>\n

Visually, the game\u2019s amazing, the more so considering that the game wasn\u2019t from some big California-based game studio. I ran the game on my two year old game rig and it ran very well on the 1680×1050 resolution my screen can handle \u2013 with all graphic options enabled. There\u2019s also a High Quality Texture pack option, but I don\u2019t think even that is going to stretch modern machines much.<\/p>\n

The artwork itself is marvelous: there\u2019re sunny plains, dark forests with little light escaping from the overhead canopy of trees, snow covered landscapes, caves, mines, a huge Dwarvern underground city, and suitably medieval-looking towns, villages and cities.<\/p>\n

The game has a main quest storyline, supplemented with numerous other side quests, several of which are nicely tied in with the main story through dialog. The quests themselves span quite a wide range: you have the medieval courier pigeon types (\u201cFetch this\u201d) and roach infestation and cleaning operation (\u201cKill all the bugs in the storage warehouse\u201d) type. But you also have quests that require you to do other things: including be stealthy, or to play detective in solving a crime.<\/p>\n

For those of us who love building up unique characters, Drakensang<\/em> is nirvana. Character growth is facilitated by two types of point systems: Adventure Points, which continually accumulate and serves as a broad indicator of your character prowess, and Experience Points, which you expend to improve a skill, talent or attribute. The game nicely balances the number of growth points versus the range in which you can develop your party characters \u2013 i.e. there aren\u2019t nearly enough points to create Godlike characters who can do everything.<\/p>\n

\"blog-drakensang-06\"<\/p>\n

That said, Drakensang<\/em> drops the ball in a couple of departments. The most significant one is the game\u2019s difficulty level. There are no difficulty sliders in the game, and the game is very<\/em> hard. The quests themselves are alright, thanks in part to the helpful in-game hint system that provides tips in the Quest Log, and also highlighting of \u201cNext Place to Visit\u201d on the overview map. Rather, it\u2019s the combat system that\u2019ll have you reaching for the Quick Save and Load buttons repeatedly. Party wipes are very common, and mobs typically make a beeline for your weakest characters first in a fight.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a lot of dialog in the game, which while are reasonably well-translated from the German source, could also be just a little too much for players to digest. In a typical conversation with an NPC, expect to be clicking 8 to 10 times to progress from conversation paragraph to paragraph before you even get to the first dialog option. The recorded audio and exaggerated character animation during conversations have also been panned by game critics, but I personally didn\u2019t find them any more cringe-inducing than the voice-acting in typical games of this type.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s the funny path finding in tight corridors or rooms. Oh, your party of characters follow you well-enough. But when you tell the entire party to fight the same mob, the path finding will run amok with your characters running circles around each other as though it can\u2019t decide where it wants to position each party member. It\u2019s a cute sight though, watching your party of four chase each other\u2019s coat tails in a room.<\/p>\n

All that said, I enjoyed Drakensang<\/em>. The story isn\u2019t anything you haven\u2019t already seen or experienced in other RPGs, but one has to compensate considering that there just aren\u2019t very many traditional RPGs out there. There\u2019s character c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a follow-up to my post on Virtual Worlds the other day, here\u2019s a post on Drakensang – after spending about six evenings in it, several of which with Hannah cradled in my arms. Visually, the game\u2019s amazing, the more<\/p>\n

Read More Drakensang – Notes<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-entertainment","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-10-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}