Drakensang: The Dark Eye Impressions

Lacking time to do a full review, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen gives us his impressions of Drakensang: The Dark Eye.

But this devotion is its greatest strength. There’s been a tendency in cRPGs for all games to basically become D&D’s D20 malarkies. Das Schwarze Auge works – or, appears to work, as I’ve never played the original – in a sufficiently different way to make the game feel fresh just because you’ve got different character-building challenges than usual. It’s mainly a point based system, with you earning them (via combat or quest-completion) and then being able to spend them instantly. Each of your skills or stats are bought individually, with lower levels being pretty-much exponentially less costly than higher ones. Increase a stat? You’re looking at a few hundred XPs. Just pick up the healing skill from a lower level to a higher one can just be a couple. Do you save or spend? And if you spend, what to you spend it on? It’s not as clean as just spending the XP, as certain abilities – talents, akin to attacks in an MMO – require a trainer to open up the option, and trainers are also able to add new skills to your repertoire. with money. Marry these sort of questions to a party set up, and you’re rapidly not just asking what skills you need to acquire, but who you want to get them. You need to spread them out, so everyone has enough XP to advance the skills to an appropriate level. And hell! you could have used that money you just spent on a load of useless spells for lots of other stuff, y’know?