I think we have a little gem of the CRPG genre here, which has gone under the radar, especially internationally. That's a shame, because I think this German role-playing game is one of the most interesting of its kind. I found the basic mood of the game very unique and beautiful. It is simply a very idyllic, beautiful autumn fantasy world that was presented to me here. Of course there is also a "dramatic story" and dark machinations that need to be stopped, but all in all I found the game really rather relaxing and simply beautiful. It's not particularly deep, but it's not trying to be a Planescape or anything like that. It feels more like a European answer to Baldur's Gate to me and that makes the game really good. The systems are based on DSA, but that didn't necessarily make it that hard for me to understand them. On the contrary, I had more problems understanding D&D as a child. I somehow got into it really well, which makes the game very beginner-friendly. If you're a fan of classic western role-playing games, you should at least take a look, I thought it was really well done.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/RdnLNoOkP3E

One of the worst crimes that can be committed in a tabletop gaming environment is murder - naturally - but powergaming is up there. Even the idea of disregarding flavour, immersion, and any other role-playing activity in order to exploit the game’s rules as efficiently as possible, often to the detriment of the others playing the game, can get people quite upset. I used to hear this stuff all the time back when I was attending 40K tournaments - despite those clearly being a competitive environment, and an unlikely place to find flavourful games where the Dark Angels player doesn’t have 37 Fenrisian Wolves on the table. But in more casual contexts - and especially in regards to tabletop RPGs - I can completely understand why aggressively optimising the rules of a game earns as much ire as it does. The primary objective of one of these games is to facilitate a collaborative story-telling adventure where the destination is tertiary to the journey at hand. Games like Dungeons & Dragons have rules to guide the players toward an objective, but they also require a Dungeon Master to participate who is at liberty to ignore those rules whenever they choose, since the point of the game isn’t to spend hours decoding some masterful puzzle or flicking through rule books with a dictionary on hand just in case, the point is to have fun with your friends. Unfortunately, people’s schedules don’t always allow everyone to play together on a whim but since these games have rules and were popular enough media properties on their own, adapting them into video games for the solo player was an instinctive substitution. Except this presented a bit of a dilemma: should the video game adapt the rules verbatim or should it instead try to adapt the spirit of the game? Whichever their choice, the subsequent video game would regularly divide fans. Bending the rules to favour a friendlier adventure for players would go over well with casual fans and beginners, whereas adhering strictly to the source material pleased the long-time players and the harcore audience. At the turn of the millennium, both groups had plenty of games to be excited about. As the 2000’s crept on, however, the closures of Black Isle Studios and Troika Games gave developer’s pause. Clearly these games weren’t selling well enough, and many big players in the RPG market switched their focus toward the larger customer base of casual and beginner players. Upon noticing the void this move left behind, German video game developer Radon Labs saw an opportunity to give the spreadsheet enthusiasts the game they wanted, and in 2008 Drakensang: The Dark Eye was released.

Drakensang is a relatively standard PC role-playing game, reminiscent of titles like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Icewind Dale. The player picks a class, they can find additional members to join the crew, all of these characters have a wide range of stats and equipment to upgrade, even the combat is similar - using a real-time with pause system, though Drakensang’s version is a bit unusual. There are quests, dungeons, boss fights, light puzzles, and even a coherent plot full of ancient prophecies and rebirthing gods. Narratively, Drakensang is doing nothing new, and many of the characters and environments adhere to the western fantasy standard. But these aren’t the reasons to play Drakensang. Unlike those games I mentioned earlier, Radon Labs did not create another game based on Dungeons & Dragons, and they had a particular audience in mind when designing much of their game. As a German company, the tabletop role-playing system the developers would’ve been most familiar with was The Dark Eye. It is an aesthetically similar game to Dungeons & Dragons, but there are a number of mechanical and philosophical differences that separate the two. While both have combat and conversation mechanics, Dungeons & Dragons is more focused on providing a robust combat experience, while The Dark Eye contains more tools to resolve disputes verbally. Talking with enemies is also incentivised by the game’s punishing combat system. Characters in The Dark Eye will never be strong enough to defeat an enemy in a single attack and being outnumbered is almost always a death sentence. These characteristics have been replicated well within Drakensang. Combat encounters can very suddenly spiral into defeat and many big fights can be avoided through stat checks and investigation. Conversation isn’t quite king - by no means is this Disco Elysium - but among the fantasy RPGs that Drakensang positioned itself, the player can achieve a lot more by investing in those conversational traits. That being said, Drakensang is not a one-to-one adaptation of The Dark Eye’s tabletop rules, and I’m unsure if that is necessarily a bad thing.

First published in 1984, The Dark Eye is a fantasy role-playing game originally created by Ulrich Kiesow. Kiesow had been working as a translator within his company Fantasy Productions, and was contracted to translate both Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls in 1983 before Kiesow embarked upon his own original project. The Dark Eye’s first edition sold very well throughout German and French speaking countries, as well as the Netherlands, and Italy and a second edition of Das Schwarze Auge would see release in 1988, followed by a third in 1993. The fourth edition of The Dark Eye was the first to be translated into English and it was that 2001 edition which formed the basis of the system present in Drakensang. Like many other tabletop RPGs, The Dark Eye makes use of dice, a character sheet filled with a variety of stats and other useful information, and a dungeon master - who is referred to as the “Highlord” which is fun. The Highlord guides the collaborative story the group is creating together, requesting players make Attribute tests whenever they attempt any actions, playing the role of most minor characters in the story, as well as occasionally fudging the rules here and there to ensure the players are enjoying themselves. There are 16 different Physical Talents, 8 Social Talents, 7 Nature Talents, 18 Lore Talents, a handful of Language Talents, and multiple pages of Artisan Talents that players may mix and match at their preference. Demonstrably, Kiesow wanted players to position their characters as experts in specific fields and to allow the Highlord opportunities to integrate that expertise into their campaigns. There are still plenty of Combat Talents, weapon proficiencies, magic capabilities and the like, but the idea that knowledge of popular board games, heraldry, or tattooing could be the key to progressing a situation is uniquely compelling, I think.

Maintaining this gameplay experience was always going to be difficult when adapting The Dark Eye to a video game form, and Radon Labs had to rearrange, remove, and refocus the game in order to make it work. Previous adaptations of tabletop RPGs were often centred heavily around the system’s combat and Drakensang follows that pattern. The Dark Eye’s combat system isn’t its main focus, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the combat is underdeveloped or bad or anything. Most of the weapons and spells from the 4th edition rulebook are present in Drakensang, as well as a range of other magic spells and physical actions that aren’t part of the tabletop game’s base rules. I have to assume that all of the hit chance, parry chance, damage rolls, resist chance, and all of the other combat stages are handled the same since it looks like they are, but there aren’t any rolling dice to be seen. Since Drakensang puts such an emphasis on combat, the example professions from the rule book that wouldn’t grant the character any combat abilities aren’t present, but the number of classes the player can choose from at the beginning of the game is more than enough to overwhelm anyone. I’m sure any Explorer or Messenger players will be able to find something to enjoy amongst this list of professions anyway. Another significant change to The Dark Eye experience is how Drakensang confines the player’s actions. Tabletop RPGs are relatively cheap to produce and the grandiosity of a continent spanning campaign is extremely easy to implement; it’s just putting words on a page and letting the players’ minds fill in the gaps. Radon Labs couldn’t possibly account for this level of scope so their game limits the player’s ability to resolve all of its narrative conflicts. To me, this is acceptable, it would be immensely unreasonable to expect the scale to match, and the way things are implemented in Drakensang at least give the impression that the campaign’s Highlord just isn’t presenting many opportunities to use all of a player’s skills. A character might have a decent cooking skill but the Highlord never gives the players an opportunity to cook anything so the skill goes unused. Basically every tabletop adaptation is going to be this way, so Drakensang isn’t an outlier.

Up to this point, it doesn’t seem as though Radon Labs have made any big deviations from the norm during the development of Drakensang, and it’d be easy to see why their game doesn’t have the legacy of the games they were clearly inspired by. Other than the game’s rules being based in The Dark Eye, Drakensang’s most identifiable feature is its balance and difficulty. There’s a single difficulty level which has been meticulously constructed for the player to contend with throughout their adventure. There are a finite quantity of enemies in each of the different zones, and even within a single zone the player will find challenges they won’t immediately be able to overcome and they’d be better off trying something else first. A little ways in, a guy asked me to help clear some rats out of his basement, and I had been fighting some rats earlier, so, sure, it should be fine. What I didn’t know was the big rat at the bottom of the basement was designed to perfectly counter my team. I didn’t spend 24 hours fighting this boss, but there is 24 hours of footage between my first encounter with Mother Ratzinsky and her death. This kind of thing is pervasive throughout the whole game and I don’t recall any other game where the player has to drop out of a side quest part way through and return to finish it half a game later. Even encounters against normal enemies can force the player to follow a different thread for a while so they can power up a bit before pressing on. In a more narratively focused game I could imagine this constant interruption to be rather frustrating, so it’s fortunate that Drakensang’s story isn’t particularly special.

There is some narrative promise within this game, but I don’t think the story ever really amounts to anything worthwhile. It isn’t a bad story - things aren’t so bad that it detracts from the experience - but Drakensang’s narrative definitely leaves a lot to be desired. The game opens with the player receiving a letter from their friend Ardo. Ardo seems to have stumbled upon a shady conspiracy and, fearful for his life, asks for some muscle to come to Ferdock and back him up. So the player travels to Avestrue, a small village on the road to Ferdok. Avestrue acts as a sort of tutorial staging area, which is good because the Ferdok guards are refusing to allow anyone else to enter the town. There’s a serial killer currently at large and the guards are wary of travellers who may be in league with the killer. In Avestrue the player can meet Rhulana, Amazon warrior and potential party member, as well as Queen Salina and Arch Mage Rakorium, sponsors whose word would allow the player entry to Ferdok. Both Salina and Rakoirum are significant characters later on and I think the game does a respectable job introducing them. Salina’s task for the player involves ascending a nearby mountain to look for her boyfriend, Dranor, who seems to be making a deal with the scaly, green devil. This guy is weird. I got the impression that he was going to be the main villain, or at least a high ranking member of the evil faction’s army or something, and he kind of is, but also not really. He matters until he doesn’t. Once the player manages to gain entry to Ferdok, they discover that the letter arrived too late. Ardo has been murdered, and nobody has any idea who the murderer is. After following some information up, however, the player is able to determine who the murderer will be targeting next and the hunt begins. The killer makes their move and the player chases them throughout Ferdok’s sewers and alleyways before eventually cornering them in the city’s library. It turns out, the culprit is a noble, and he is using his wealth to fund a private militia whose purpose is to assassinate prospective chosen-ones, preventing them from being chosen, buying time for the other members of his cult to resurrect a dead dragon. At this point I was absolutely on-board with this narrative. There’s so much intrigue and potential, and even though there is a chosen-one story at play here, the way it had been handled up to this point was great. The last person the dragon cultists wanted to kill was this apprentice librarian; is she going to be the chosen-one? Would it be the player’s task to accompany the librarian to all of the different locations she needs to get to so she can prevent the return of the zombie dragons? Maybe she’s a fifth party member who can’t leave the team like the player character.
These possibilities are put on the backburner for a short while as the player is directed to the temple of Hesinde, the goddess of wisdom, since deonts of Hesinde are devout historians. They would likely have some information about what the chosen people were actually tasked to do. After helping clear the amoebas out of the temple’s library, the deonts are able to reassemble a magical, golden statue of the Dragon Oracle. The statue rises into the air and recounts the last time it was awoken. 78 years have passed since it was last assembled, and this is the tenth time the statue has been activated in total. The Oracle then names the player character as the next chosen-one and tells them to go out and collect a bunch of magical items without a clear purpose. This was… heartbreaking. All of the game’s potential just melted away so that my petty burglar character could save the world from evil wizards and immortal dragons. Her combat capabilities were nowhere near up to the task. Her whole skillset revolved around sneaking into a place, stealing something, and then sneaking out again. How could this character possibly defeat a dragon? The rest of the game tasks the player with completing a scavenger hunt before the evil dragon cultists can, and I can only be happy that the side quests are as good as they are. Choosing whether to side with a group of witches or a marauding band of inquisition forces, helping the townspeople of Tallon resist the goblin incursion that ends in a full-scale assault on the goblin camp with the town guards, or deciphering Aurelia’s alchemy recipe which went a direction I was not expecting it to go. This is a big game and I’ve only really scratched the surface with these examples. It’s certainly a shame that the main quest became so cliched and uninteresting, but there are a few hints toward the end of the game that suggest Radon Labs may have been running out of time.

In terms of presentation, Drakensang compares favourably to many of the blockbuster titles that were released alongside it in 2008. The character models are distinctive, the environments are lively, and the music is solid from front to back. Conversations with NPCs can be a little dry since Radon Labs didn’t bother with a complex facial animation rig and settled with mouth flapping and expressive body movements instead, which I think is a better choice for the time. This is bound to age better than those robotic automated conversations, in any case, but it is a bit impersonal. I also think the game’s palette is quite unique. The world is vivid, sunny, and warm, and there are colourful flowers everywhere. In the caves there’s always some moss or algae slathered over the rocky walls, or there’s a bunch of glowing mushrooms giving off a greenish light. I really like the way the fog layers are used too. Not only are they used to make the caves gloomier, with the air thick with steam and spores, but the fog is also tinted orange and used as haze to bathe rooms in sunlight, or a white fog washes out the terrain in the distance. It adds so much richness to the game’s environments, which are already impressively detailed. I think I should reiterate: Drakensang came out in 2008, these textures should not be this high res. Fallout 3 came out a month after Drakensang, and Bethesda spent almost half of Drakensang’s total budget on the Fallout licence alone. Radon Labs pulled off something truly incredible with the visual presentation. But then the game’s soundtrack kicks in. Yes, there’s a lot of strings and horns and it’s all very typical fantasy stuff, but it sometimes gets weird. I like it. It’s a shame that a lot of the voicework doesn’t quite hit the same highs as everything else. Some of these line deliveries don’t seem directed at all, which is odd considering just how few spoken lines there are. Characters will say the first text box aloud, and then nothing from then on. This works for and against the game. Some of the performances are really good so it’s a shame they talk so little, but then other performances are horrible, so at least the player doesn’t spend too long listening to the weaker performers. Similarly, the combat audio varies in quality. Sometimes the enemies sound great, the music swells and the fight is accentuated. And then there’s the fight against the wounded dragon. I spent a while trying to decide what this sounds like and I couldn’t come up with anything. Whatever this is supposed to be, it doesn’t invoke “dragon” in me. Which is strange because the dragon cry in the final movie is pretty good.

The player’s party can consist of no more than four characters: the player character, and up to three others who the player can meet as they progress through the world. Each character has a level and they earn experience points throughout their journey as is expected in any RPG. They also have a wide range of stats that influence their Base Values, Weapon Skills, Talents, Abilities, and Spells, but they do so in a way I was unfamiliar with. Instead of simply reaching the next level and being handed a bunch of skill points to assign, the player directly spends their Experience points on their stats, with the character’s level controlling the caps those stats can reach. So, for example, at character level 15 Gwendala the Elven Spellweaver can have a maximum of 19 spell levels in her Balm of Healing spell. What does that mean? This is about to get a bit hard to follow, and I can only apologise. A character must already be attuned to magic in order to learn to cast spells at all - there’s no way to force a character to learn magic if they didn’t start with magical capability. In order to learn Balm of Healing, the character must meet or surpass the requisite Cleverness, Intuition, and Charisma stats. They will also need a minimum of 10 Astral Energy to cast the spell. Okay. Balm of Healing restores 2D6 Vitality points (health) plus the spell modifier multiplied by five to the target. It may also remove up to the modifier number in Wounds from the same target, which is a mechanic we’ll get into later. The modifier is a number shown below the spell’s icon which the player can change at any time, though increasing the modifier also increases the cost to cast the spell. The maximum modifier is determined by the spell’s level. So with Balm of Healing using a modifier of 4, Gwendala must spend 14 Astral Energy to cast the spell, then 2 six sided dice are rolled, which returns an average result of 7, then the modifier of 4 is multiplied by 5 for 20, and the final effect is the target is healed 27 health on average. Fortunately, there aren’t modifiers on every spell and combat abilities don’t have them either, but those are a whole other mess of stat modifications and dice rolling. The big takeaway from all this is Drakensang is willing to tell the player everything. The player will know exactly what level they need to reach to pass a threshold, and they’ll know exactly what each spell will do and why. At the same time, there are so many other places to put points that the player will be swamped with options whenever they decide to level up. I don’t know how thorough Radon Labs were with adding Etiquette and Streetwise checks, but I did find Constitution checks and Alchemy checks in conversation which was cool. And the back half of the game was a breeze with high Perception, Dwarfnose, and Lock Picking talents, though they didn’t do much to alleviate the difficulty of the combat encounters.

Combat in Drakensang can be very interesting and exciting, but it can also be a frustrating slog. The game uses a real-time with pause combat system while simultaneously using a lot of turn-based features and mechanics hidden beneath the real-time stuff. The player is able to issue tasks to their party in real time; sending one character to battle a specific enemy, telling others to cast spells, use items, among other things, but those tasks aren’t just carried out instantly nor do they take a small period of real time to complete, they take combat rounds. Balm of Healing doesn’t take 3 seconds to cast, it takes 3 combat rounds. To me, this seemed really strange at first, but the deeper I got into the combat the more I understood why Radon Labs chose to handle combat in this way. Combat in The Dark Eye is a call-and-response type system; the attacker makes a to-hit roll, the defender chooses to make a dodge or a parry roll, then there’s a damage calculation roll, followed by any armour effects. If the units in combat weren’t synchronised to a global combat clock, these call-and-response dice rolls would be next to impossible to understand. Fights would all be moshpits where an orc could parry an attack from the flinching dwarf he just clobbered, and the player wouldn’t be able to react accordingly because the animations couldn’t possibly sync with the actions. It’d be like an autobattler with ridiculously complex rules, totally incomprehensible to a casual observer. Another consequence imposed on Drakensang’s combat by this is that the system can’t process area-of-effect spells. There needs to be time to display the call-and-response effects so a big explosion spell hitting multiple targets at once wouldn’t work. They did try to add one AOE spell, which is funny but functionally useless. If the enemies aren’t standing in exactly the right locations when this attack goes off then Forgrimm takes a few swings at nothing. Despite this, there are still many locations where enemies will swarm the player and there’s nothing that can really be done about it. Combine the large enemy populations with the lack of a taunting ability and you get some extremely irritating encounters. Enemies just love to rush the squishy backline wizard, though that was probably my fault for giving her a bow. There were a lot of cases where the number of enemies was just too high so I had no choice but to cheese my way through. Sometimes my method would involve hiding the wizard way in the back and bringing her into the battle after all of the enemies chose targets I liked, other times I’d take direct control and run the entire length of the countryside, hoping my teammates running behind me could hit the enemy whenever it turned. There aren’t too many encounters like this, but the worst one came right before that wounded dragon fight I mentioned before. While ascending the mountain toward the dragon’s lair, groups of harpies would spawn up ahead and path back down the hill toward the party. Harpies aren’t especially strong or healthy in Drakensang, but they have a special ability very few other enemies possess. Whenever a party member’s health reaches zero, they gain a Mortal Wound which prevents them from fighting. Mortal Wounds can be healed but only if the party is out of combat. Characters can also gain a Mortal Wound if they have 5 regular Wounds, even if they’re at full health. The player can use this mechanic to kill enemies with lots of health really quickly provided they have some means of dishing out Wounds. Harpies also apply Wounds in combat and man did I get unlucky a lot. On paper, I think this is a solid mechanic that makes sense if the enemy has a low chance to apply the Wound or the enemies that can apply Wounds are few in number, but a group of 8 to 10 harpies Wounding as often as they do is sadistic! But it comes so late in the playthrough that I expect most people who make it here are the ones who were always going to push on to the end.

Radon Labs was a German company and Drakensang basically runs in a proprietary engine from 2008, so technically things are on the decline. The game is very stubborn on startup - it often refuses to show the player the intro movie at all and constantly minimises whenever the player tries to click on the window. My method for resolving this was pretty simple, but I’m not sure if it’ll work for everybody or if I did some sort of miracle. Upon launching the game I’d click on the program window, hit alt and enter once to set the program to windowed mode, click the program window again, and then hit alt and enter again to go back to fullscreen. I had to do this every single time I launched the game, but it wasn’t a big deal. As far as other technical problems go, I think there were a few times where I saw the German text appear in a text-box, and I couldn’t resolve the farmhand hostage situation peacefully because one of the pigs the goblins wanted refused to move like the others. And there were the occasional instances where characters would just endlessly run into walls. And the skeleton cyclops fight is total bullshit but that’s not really relevant to this section. My biggest complaint about Drakensang is the strange distribution situation the game is in. Drakensang and the sequel are both for sale on Steam and GOG but not in Australia. All of the game’s original publishers are defunct and BigPoint only made and maintains the spin-off MMO, so it’s hard to say who’s even selling the game at this point. The only way I was able to get my copy was by buying a key from a third-party site, and as far as I can tell nobody who was even tangentially involved in the production of Drakensang is getting paid for it now.

I liked Drakensang for the most part. It’s an interesting system to play with, the presentation is tremendous, and there is so much to do. The game stumbles a bit toward the end, but the vast majority of the game is a solid experience. I think it’s worth playing if you’ve already exhausted those classic turn-of-the-millenium RPGs, though Baldur's Gate 3 is probably a better use of your money. That being said, this is probably one of the more guiltless pirates of your life.

Drakensang forced me to pay attention to it. I had to be alert to the next potential combat encounter and ready to act at all times. There are thousands of tiny decisions to make constantly, within and without the game’s combat scenarios, and I could easily imagine a perfect team exists on some long-forgotten spreadsheet somewhere. If the purpose of an art piece is to make the viewer think about it then Drakensang’s combat system alone is a work of art. The rest of the game is good, but the time I’ve spent thinking about particular arrangements of enemies far outweighs how long I thought about Avestrue’s golden wheat fields or how willing I was to transform some stranger into a toad because a witch told me to. The game penalises your Charisma stat if you smell bad so you need to keep soap on you in case you need to wash, but I’m too busy trying to concoct a way to kill this really big rat. I feel like I’ve just overcome one of the most granular video gaming experiences I’ve ever played and I did it all because a magic statue is actually a direct telephone line to a cyclops blacksmith who wants to retire from blacksmithing. I’m exhausted. I’m gonna go play something mindless to recharge.