Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance

One of my friends is a D&D guy and pretty jazzed about Dark Alliance. We haven't co-oped in ages and this may be a good excuse to jump back in but I'm not entirely sold on it yet either. It hasn't helped that I don't have any attachment to the D&D lore behind it nor the original PS2 game. I've got it wish listed but will wait for some reviews. It's $51.99 in funny canuck money on Steam. Still not quite the "why not?" budget pricing I would have hoped for.

Maclintok wrote:

One of my friends is a D&D guy and pretty jazzed about Dark Alliance. We haven't co-oped in ages and this may be a good excuse to jump back in but I'm not entirely sold on it yet either. It hasn't helped that I don't have any attachment to the D&D lore behind it nor the original PS2 game. I've got it wish listed but will wait for some reviews. It's $51.99 in funny canuck money on Steam. Still not quite the "why not?" budget pricing I would have hoped for.

Play it on Gamepass?

pandasuit wrote:

“Jermaine Clement makes everything better”

Now I want one narrated by Matt Berry.

NathanialG wrote:
Maclintok wrote:

One of my friends is a D&D guy and pretty jazzed about Dark Alliance. We haven't co-oped in ages and this may be a good excuse to jump back in but I'm not entirely sold on it yet either. It hasn't helped that I don't have any attachment to the D&D lore behind it nor the original PS2 game. I've got it wish listed but will wait for some reviews. It's $51.99 in funny canuck money on Steam. Still not quite the "why not?" budget pricing I would have hoped for.

Play it on Gamepass?

Yeah, this. If you've never been an XGP member before, you can get the first 3 months for $1CAD, which is the dealiest of deals around. And even if you have been a member, at $17CAD per month, you'd be able to play Dark Alliance (and many other games) for 3 months before breaking even with the full MSRP of DA.

Yeah that sounds like it could be good. I could at the very least go in on a Game Pass trial. My gaming habits are not such that I would get the most out of an ongoing sub but to check out Dark Alliance and a few other things easily, seems like a great option.

Dark Alliance is now available for pre-install in the PC Xbox app, and will unlock in about 15 hours.

merphle wrote:

Dark Alliance is now available for pre-install in the PC Xbox app, and will unlock in about 15 hours.

Thanks for the heads up!

Fedaykin98 wrote:
RawkGWJ wrote:

Gamepass? Couch co-op? Maybe this will be the game that both of my kids will play with me. The minecraft Diablo clone didn’t click with them.

Oh man, that's too bad. My wife and my son are still playing Dungeons. And my daughter, a little.

Dredging this not-too-terribly-old comment back up.

Fwiw, I hated Minecraft Dungeons at first and found it simplistic and flat out boring, but it gets better after you gain more abilities and the like. There's some neat design twists to it that I like, for instance they give you back the stuff (mana?) you spent upgrading a weapon/armor/etc. They didn't have to do that for the player but I'm sure glad they did as it gives incentive to invest in your current stuff but not be afraid to try out the new thing you pick up.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Review "Buy, Wait for Sale, Never Touch?"

Well, good thing it's on Gamepass to try it out instead of shelling $40! Some harsh reviews coming in..

Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance 4-player co-op gameplay - PC [Gaming Trend]

I’ve not paid attention to any reviews, etc. I’ve kept my expectations low, and I don’t plan to play this before it gets a few patches in.

I do hope people enjoy it, regardless of what the media etc think.

farley3k wrote:

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Review "Buy, Wait for Sale, Never Touch?"

Best laugh I had all day starting at around 2:10, absolutely brilliant.

If you keep getting frozen by the ice traps like I did and can't figure out what to do because the game doesn't overly explain it's status effect system:

Spoiler:

There's usually something big and flaming next to the ice traps. Standing next to it gives you a 4-5s warmth buff. Using this, sprint through the ice crystals to avoid being chilled and spiked.

trueheart78 wrote:

I don’t plan to play this before it gets a few patches in.

I think I'm going to do this as well, I ordered a physical copy but I think I'll let it chill on the shelf until a patch or two, from what I'm seeing it sounds like this game could have used a bit more time in the oven.

I’m quite liking the game so far. Have taken each of the four characters through the initial mission. Still can only find 6/8 Mugs though!!!

It’s a HARD game. I would subtract 200-300 gear score from the recommended because if you pick a difficulty that’s too hard it’s just a brutal time waste. I tried the first mission at 1,250 score on the Catie-Brie and it honestly took me 45 minutes to an hour because I couldn’t do enough damage so I’d just sit outside of aggro range and slowly chip away at health pools. Subsequently did it on the default level of 1,000 for intro characters and breezed through in 10-15 minutes with Drazzti, Hammer Man, and Dwarf Dude. The systems and interactions are cool and other than the enemies being very passive, the variety in abilities and combos is a neat way to play.

I knew nothing about this getting released. dark Alliance was easily a top 3 game on the GameCube for me. This could get me in the nostalgias.

About 10 min of playing the release version was enough to complete my assessment that it's not for me. Movement and combat felt mushy/cumbersome, and it just wasn't engaging me. I have a lot of nostalgia for the older top down 3/4 perspective games, so perhaps this wasn't meant to be.

Thankfully, Gamepass allowed me to investigate without committing, and I appreciate that.

Initial impressions

The bad
* Combat is pretty clunky. 3rd person action games these days need to be pretty responsive and easy to jump around between bad guys. The lock-on system is atrocious but if you aren't locked on then your attacks kind of lock in a straight line and it's easy to miss.
* Combat animations are pretty slow/long and there's no good way to interrupt, which again just doesn't feel great.
* There's lot of environmental stuff that is really poorly communicated. I died multiple times for unknown reasons until I realized the icy areas were doing cold damage. Nothing communicated that to me at all, I just died. Now that I know what it look for it's not so bad but it was pretty frustrating.
* Camera is pretty awful too, way too up close. It was better when I maxed out the field of view but when locking onto enemies it still tends to zoom way in and is pretty frustrating.
* Camera is also super slow, even when cranked way up. I might need to max out camera speed.
* Ultrawide support is all messed up. There are black bars on the side but parts of the UI go into them? Bizarre.

The good
* Graphics are really nice, I like the environments and character models.
* Loot system seems decent.
* I like the "either take a rest and reset your loot bonus or skip the rest and crank up your loot bonus" thing. Makes respawning a little more annoying but not insurmountable so I'm not entirely sure why you'd ever rest as there seems to be little penalty other than time, but maybe that decision gets more interesting in later levels? Dunno. Conceptually it's kinda cool.
* Cool attack animations and the combat feels more weighty than I expected.
* Drizzt

So far I've only played the first two missions with Drizzt and Catti-brie but right now it seems like a pretty hard recommend. It does feel like the basic systems are solid, it just needs more time to polish. If the devs keep working on this I could see it being one of those games that turns out to be really awesome in a year. Right now though I'm not sure I'm sold.

(Played via PC Game Pass)

Initial impressions

The bad
* Combat is pretty clunky. 3rd person action games these days need to be pretty responsive and easy to jump around between bad guys. The lock-on system is atrocious but if you aren't locked on then your attacks kind of lock in a straight line and it's easy to miss.
* Combat animations are pretty slow/long and there's no good way to interrupt, which again just doesn't feel great. Dodging and blocking are frustrating, I really want them to interrupt my attack animations. I guess it makes you do more than button mash but the animations are so sluggish and imprecise that timing things feels really hard.
* There's lot of environmental stuff that is really poorly communicated. I died multiple times for unknown reasons until I realized the icy areas were doing cold damage. Nothing communicated that to me at all, I just died. Now that I know what it look for it's not so bad but it was pretty frustrating.
* Camera is pretty awful too, way too up close. It was better when I maxed out the field of view but when locking onto enemies it still tends to zoom way in and is pretty frustrating.
* Camera is also super slow, even when cranked way up. I might need to max out camera speed.
* Ultrawide support is all messed up. There are black bars on the side but parts of the UI go into them? Bizarre.

The good
* Graphics are really nice, I like the environments and character models.
* Loot system seems decent.
* I like the "either take a rest and reset your loot bonus or skip the rest and crank up your loot bonus" thing. Makes respawning a little more annoying but not insurmountable so I'm not entirely sure why you'd ever rest as there seems to be little penalty other than time, but maybe that decision gets more interesting in later levels? Dunno. Conceptually it's kinda cool.
* Cool attack animations and the combat feels more weighty than I expected.
* Drizzt

So far I've only played the first two missions with Drizzt and Catti-brie but right now it seems like a pretty hard recommend. It does feel like the basic systems are solid, it just needs more time to polish. If the devs keep working on this I could see it being one of those games that turns out to be really awesome in a year. Right now though I'm not sure I'm sold.

(Played via PC Game Pass)

Oof. I, uh... I'm glad I tried it via Gamepass.

Played through the tutorial and the first full level. I like what they're trying to do. The core conceits of the game are solid and appealing to me.

The control is, well... maybe not flat out awful, but it's pretty bad. Bad enough to sap the fun out. Hit detection is all over the place. I can't believe how often I got stuck on either simple level geometry or on enemy character models. Commands often register double or nothing. Like the dodge roll -- either I don't roll at all, or I roll twice in succession. Very very bad control responsiveness.

I want to like it. Again, core ideas and design are super appealing to me. But unless it gets some significant polish, I just can't gel with it.

The camera is godawfully bad, and I keep hacking and slashing at the wrong targets. The lock-on is twitchy and annoying so doesn't help; I guess they felt having good-looking character models doing cool animations was more important than actual gameplay. I'll dink with it with a few friends, but very disappointed with this. Really expected to get a better game out of the first really official WOTC D&D game considering how much effort they've put into polishing 5e.

"* Ultrawide support is all messed up. There are black bars on the side but parts of the UI go into them? Bizarre."

This drives me bonkers. Unreal4 engine natively supports Ultra-wide so they had to purposefully screw with that to get the current state of things.

The Act 2 Boss, Stonegrinder, solo at 1,250 score is EVERYTHING that is awful about the game (I'm playing Drizzt at 1,390 score so in theory shouldn't be too bad).

  • Teleporting attacks that hit you even when you're "out of range" or behind the boss
  • Lock-on attacks that hit you even if you dodge
  • Chain stun light attacks that insta-kill you over time because you can't get off the ground and get smashed to a pulp
  • Affix system that's never explained so I'm constantly "Blinded" but have no idea what to do about that
  • Hidden enemy stamina bars that don't give you a chance to understand or play with/against them
  • Jittery lock-on so it's impossible to consistently get behind the enemy for backstabs
  • Missing input detection so even when I try and cheese the boss by kicking him through the geometry with a 50% full ultimate bar, empowered attacks don't work
  • Locking loot behind boss completion meaning I'm literally stuck with the game open in the background because I have to finish in order to pick up the two legendary loot pieces I picked up. Going on attempt number 24 trying to beat the boss
  • Difficulty spikes that aren't fun or challenging. I cleared the rest of the mission fairly easily, not needing to short rest anywhere, yet this boss is destroying me

Even as someone who is willing to give BAD games a lot of room, I'm thoroughly pissed at this one right now.

EDIT: BECAUSE I FORGOT TO ADD THE ABSOLUTE WORST DESIGN DECISION, WHY DOES YOUR BOSS HEAL!?!?!?!?!? Not only is it a super tough fight but then you finally whittle it down to 10% health and it heals back to a 1/3. So defeating.

So, when this comes out fixed for consoles in a year and a half...maybe?

I'm really sad listening to everyone's woes with the game. It's like the first movie they made called "Dungeons & Dragons"...I tried so hard to watch it. There was a Beholder. There was Jeremy Irons. Nothing could save that movie.

I hope all of the massive complaints they get force them to fix this, though.

I doubt it takes a year and a half to be patched up. Sounds like a lot of the issues are patchable in nature, but needed another three or six months to be ironed out. You know, typical modern rushed game.

I figured i'd add a year to get it to console. It's just PC right now, right?