If you want an object lesson in how badly the loss of Black Isle Studios has been (and will be) felt in the computer role-playing game industry, rent Dark Alliance II and Champions of Norrath one weekend and compare the two. Both are based on Snowblind’s Dark Alliance Engine and both offer addictive fast-action hack and slash gameplay, but experiencing both together illustrates how much more effort Black Isle took toward improving gameplay and offering a better experience than the original.
Maybe that’s a harsh way to start out a review for the Snowblind-developed CoN, which is actually a pretty fun game, but by releasing CoN a month after BG:DA2 and offering mainly cosmetic improvements, Snowblind doomed its title to live in Black Isle’s shadow from the start. I will say that by the end of the game, I was able to enjoy Champions of Norrath for its own merits, but the comparison never really left me, either.
You start off Champions of Norrath by choosing a character from among several familiar classes and one that may be new to you. There’s Barbarian, Ranger, Cleric, Wizard, and Shadow Knight. The first four are probably self-explanatory, but (not having played Everquest) I was unfamiliar with the Shadow Knight class. Sort of like a dark cleric, the Shadow Knight is a melee fighter that also has some disease and summon undead spells. When choosing your character, you get to be either male or female, but you don’t get to pick your race. You can customize your character by giving him or her a new hairstyle, hair color, and skin tone, which is kind of fun, but also kind of useless with the bird’s eye camera angle and all.
After you’ve made your character, you’ll endure a lengthy speech about why you are in Norrath, written in the pulp fantasy style that screams “this is a fantasy story because it has place names like Faydwer”. Then it’s off to kill some orcs and goblins and take their loot. I don’t think I could accurately tell you what the full story is about. I had a very good time getting better at smacking the bad guys around, but story-wise, there are so many betrayals and characters that show up for no adequately explained reason that I got lost trying to figure how the main plot line goes.
That’s ok, though, because these games aren’t really about plot; they’re about hacking and slashing your way to better loot. And CoN keeps the hack and slash fun of the core Dark Alliance gameplay intact. There are some differences, of course, including using gate scrolls instead of potions of recall and not being able to jump anymore. Yes, it means there are no jumping puzzles, but it still means you can’t jump up on a rock or table and fire arrows from higher ground.
And while we’re on the subject of archery, let me just state that the main beef I had with the game was that no changes were made to the ranged weapon system. One of the best things about DA2 was that you didn’t have to spend your hard-earned money on arrows. To make up for the imbalance, the bosses were much tougher to bring down with ranged weapons, which I thought was a fair trade-off.
For some reason, though, Snowblind went the opposite direction, making you constantly pay to refill your arrow supply and delegate a decent amount of your weight allowance to it. These annoyances are balanced out by the fact that eventually you get to a point where there’s really nothing to buy except more arrows and the fact that just about all of the bosses are easily taken out with bows as you can run to a point where they hit the end of their patrol route and snipe at them as they lumber around trying to find a path that leads back toward you.
I know that CoN is Snowblind’s sophomore effort, but it seems odd that they would design a game that lets you exploit programming to beat bosses so often and gets easier the closer you get to the end. Having said that, I did find it harder than DA2, though. I had to spend a fair amount of the early game standing around waiting for my health to refill, and lost many a battle by not remembering the better part of valor from time to time. Aside from these gripes, I do think that Snowblind did a better job than Black Isle with the item upgrading system.
Similar to DA2, CoN allows you to upgrade weapons with certain jewels and items found out in the field. In DA2, though, you had to take your item back to a weapon smith and pay to have it attached to your weapon, often without knowing exactly what would happen. CoN lets you add the item right on the spot, out in the field, and lets you know exactly what will happen when you put it in a weapon or a piece of armor. The major drawback is that you can’t remove an upgrade item once it’s in a weapon, so you may find yourself hoarding jewels until you’re ready for the last fight. Still, I found myself using this option much more in CoN than in DA2 because it didn’t distract from the tasks at hand.
As far as the complimentary elements go, I’ve already mentioned that CoN’s writing and story are pretty subpar. The same goes for the voice acting, much of which is done by industry veteran Cameron Clarke, whom I can now spot no matter how he tries to change his voice. It’s not that he’s bad at what he does, it’s just that he’s overused. Every character he voices starts to seem like they’re part of the same family. I was kind of amused the first time my Ranger entered a dungeon and said “I hope the monster to treasure ratio is in my favor this time”, but the phrase quickly wore out its welcome.
The graphics are pretty good for a PS2 game running on an older engine. Snowblind made good use of the engine’s much-lauded water-effects, even creating a lake of lava that your character gets to drive across on a kind of lava-tractor. They took the game out of the dungeon often, with quests that take you to a set of islands, a desert, and an icy ship’s graveyard. They even allowed you to zoom the camera in further, if you wanted to admire the scenery. And there was one particular boss whose look and cut-scene was cooler than anything I saw in either Dark Alliance game.
I liked the music in some places, especially the early portions of the game where you’re running around in the forest. It sounded like it was straight from Hollywood, and really created atmosphere. In other places, though, it either wasn’t around, or didn’t do enough for me. In fact, toward the end of the game during my second time through, I actually played much of the game with the radio on and the TV turned down.
While the music won’t provide much replay value, though, there are some good incentives to go back through. You can, if you have the patience (or cheat), take your character up to level 50, playing on three difficulty settings. Also, the separate classes have skill trees differing enough that you would have to use different strategies depending on which class you were playing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, CoN is the only Dark Alliance-based game out now that allows you to play online. I didn’t take advantage of this option, so I can’t really say how much it changes the game experience, but it is there for you if that’s the kind of thing you look for in a game.
Despite my many minor gripes, Champions of Norrath is actually fun to play once you get into it. Some of its elements reflect better decisions on the part of Snowblind, but as a total experience, I don’t think it measures up to Black Isle’s take on the Dark Alliance engine. Unless you really love these kinds of games, I’d say that if you bought Dark Alliance 2 when it came out, don’t run out and buy Champions of Norrath, but definitely rent it.
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