In my enfeebled state this morning I set the Drakensang demo downloading. I’d been looking up developers Radon Labs, and the reason for that was my uncovering their 2002 game Project Nomads in a great heap of rubbish in my office. Nomads was a stark-raving mad quasi-strategic action game, in which you traveled about on a flying island, and I’ll write a retro piece about it next week. Anyway, I wanted to see what those imaginative developers were doing now – having been surprised they still existed at all. It seems they’ve learned their lesson, because they’re developing the generic fantasy of Drakensang. There’s a demo! What I somehow failed to realise until I came to install it, was that the demo was in German. Undaunted, I set out on a quest. Impressions follow.
Things start out well. I make a dwarf. It’s dwarves, ladies, or men as the options for characters in the demo. Larger men aren’t available in the demo, it seems. I’ve probably missed out on something utterly vital at this stage, like skills, professions, or magic shoes, but no matter. We’re just going to take a look around.
Immediately things come to a halt. Not a language problem this, but an invisible wall problem. You can (not) see that invisible wall above. Having run in the direction I was facing, I find myself stuck. The road to nowhere lies ahead. I turn around and run towards busier scenery. It’s the right direction, thankfully, and a soldier tells me something in German. I also notice that the camera makes a kind of spy-hole effect in scenery that you clip through, as you can see below. I quite like that.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to muddle through a game in a foreign language, I’ll admit. I played Flashback from beginning to end in French (dictionary at the ready) and I suspect I might have passed a couple of French exams as a result.
Playing a text-heavy RPG, however, is rather different. The logic and mechanics of an RPG as generic as this are not hard to master, but knowing what else you’re supposed to be doing, or how to do it, is rather impossible. I talk to people, guess which of the three dialogue options accepts the quests (it’s the top one, natch) and then off I go. I’ve talked to a jester and a sexy lady, and they told me to go do something, probably. They’d previously they’d had an argument with a soldier, but I have no idea what it is about. (Obviously.)
So anyway, I run off to do the thing-that-I-don’t-know-what-it-is, stopping briefly to fiddle with my inventory screen, and to look at the wares of the shopkeeper. I have no idea what I’m doing, of course, and the impenetrability of tutorial boxes mean I have little notion of how to highlight a quest on my map. Figuring this out will take some time. It seems that you do actually need to be able to read to play an RPG, even a fantasy action one. Tsk.
Refusing to give up without at least some small modicum of action, I charge off into nearby woodland. Rivers prove impassable, and I have to look for a bridge. A soldier talks to me at a log bridge, and might be warning me about something. I suspect what he is warning me of is “Random Encounters Ahead!” but I might be wrong.
Time for random encounters!
Interestingly, my first encounter proves obscure, as dramatic music occurs and the action freezes. I spend some time deciphering the tutorial box that has popped up. It seems that combat is turn-based? No. I spin the camera around, but can’t see anything to fight amid the paused trees. Nor can I figure out how to disengage the freeze… Eventually I realise that hitting space sends me back into real-time. There is squealing, and I beat some pigs to death with a hammer. Next: vicious wasps! They’ve gone and killed a man. Exploring as revealed a quest… possibly? Argh. Wasps are easily slain.
And so on.
In conclusion: I need to learn other languages. Drakensang has some minor defects – invisible walls, horrid generic fantasy setting – but nevertheless looks like it might be a fun time, and I probably would play an English version… until I got bored. It doesn’t look like the game has an English-region publishing deal at the moment, which is something of a shame. Get a move on, publisher types! If you’re in Germany, I think you can play Drakensang right now. But I might have muddled that up in translation.
Related Stories:
To answer to Okami’s point of having every imaginable climate zone in one tiny continent:
This is actually explained ingame. Don’t ask the exact explanation, all I know is that it had something to do with Pyrdacor and the elemental key of ice (and also some other key, since he had two of the six in his posession – I think).
So before the Dragon Wars the north of Aventuria was actually much warmer.
My point being: TDE is one of the most plausible (generic…) Fantasy settings there is. Everything is explained somewhere, why and how magic works, how exactly priests can summon miracles, and I could even explain to you the historical background of so many cultures in Aventuria (and don’t forget that the continent only has arround 2 million inhabitants, which isn’t that much for a continent this size).
I love you, Jim – in a manly way, of course – but I find it disenchanting that nowadays, something like invisible walls would be treated by the RPS hivemind (or anyone else, for that matter) as a “minor defect”.
Albides: Ricardo Pinto’s book is an excellent read. China Mieville however.. I haven’t read any of his books, but he wrote the introduction to one edition of Wells’ First Men In The Moon, and it’s.. pretentious, to say the least. I quote: “For modern science fiction to locate its wonder in the ‘vastness of space’ or some other overdetermined pornography of the infinite would be at best gauche.” And so on. And apparently Lovecraft was an idiot savant. I think I do not want to read anything more by him.
Regarding unusual fantasy worlds, though it’s not a RPG, Sacrifice comes to mind as a great variation on fantasy. There’s also some console titles (Shin Megami Tensei, The World Ends With You) that create very original worlds by merging modern urban environments with unusual fantasy but I guess that may be outside the scope of RPS.
Brog: I wouldn’t hold it against him. Like most revolutionaries, he’s proper-furious and thinks too much.
KG
Maybe at least give the game the benefit of the doubt before condemning how generic it is.
Don’t know if you are referring to me, but I have played Drakensang.
For what it’s worth, I am judging the game on its own – I don’t really care about its p&p roots. Like I said, there might have gone a lot of detail in the worldbuilding, but that’s not really relevant here for me.
Of course The Witcher, or the Gothic series, are not terribly original as well, but they managed to convey more of a unique atmosphere than Drakensang does for me – with both of them feeling more like a “real” fantasy/medieval European than the Forgotten Realms Disneyland version.
Planescape was already mentioned (yeah, I know it’s also D&D) for being really quite different, and I’d also mention Arcanum (even if the Steampunk setting isn’t that rare anymore, either) or even Morrowind, which at least had some unique architecture and landscapes (a real step back in Oblivion, which only showed some originality in the Shivering Isles expansion).
Brog,
Yeah, I haven’t actually read Perdido St Station, but it comes highly recommended, even if I might be tempted to agree with you about its writer. At least from what I’ve seen. His face is eminently punchable, his prose has terribly pathetic romance stylings, and some of his comments are stupidly provocative. But still, he’s highly acclaimed, so he can’t be all bad. M John Harrison is one of my favourite authors and even I wouldn’t agree with China’s declaration “That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment“.
Still, M John Harrison’s Viriconium is another excellent “alternative” fantasy setting, and a book that seeks to subvert the fantasy tropes and, eventually, itself. It’s not for everyone, and some might see the knowing post-modern tinkering and the bombastic prose as pretentious. Also, Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer is an absolutely brilliant, gradual mindfuck. Those two books are both part of the dying earth subgenre, which somewhat straddles the line between fantasy and sci-fi, though. Which reminds me Jack Vance’s picaresque tales in Tales of a Dying Earth paints an interesting picture of a world where civilisation has fallen into ruin, leaving it a sort of glittering, decadent mess. Not generic, despite having a hell of a lot of wizards in it, and even having inspired the magic system of D&D.
I think that kind of shows that there’s a huge variety of interesting fantasy mindscapes out there.
onkellou,
Morrowind’s a great setting that doesn’t feel generic! I’m a huge fan and I’m hitting myself for not thinking of it. Arcanum I thought of but didn’t mention, because steampunk, though not generic, is hella derivative, as any subgenre based around an aesthetic would be.
Gene Wolfe is basically compulsory reading for any serious fantasy reader anyway.
I didn’t like Perdido so much, but it is mostly required reading to learn more about the world in following novels. But Scar is utter brilliance. And of course (in my opinion) for thing to be brilliant, it has to be somehow flawed at the same time. Which Scar is.
China Mieville is really not generic and first rate. Plus props to Gene Wolfe. Probably the only two fantasy authors who spring to mind when I think of which should be allowed into the big authors tent and which should be put in the ‘under 14′ pile.
For individual books, Scar & The Book of the New Sun respectively.
‘Generic fantasy setting’, please.
If the OP had done his homework he’d have realized that this game universe is one of the great-granddaddies of the genre, what FOLLOWED is generic.
His comment was like suggesting that Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a ‘generic fantasy setting’.
There is nothing generic about ‘Das Schwarze Auge’ it is a fully-realized world originally conceived in 1984.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Eye