Drakensang: The Dark Eye

I am enjoying this game, but you do have to think long and hard about skills/talents, your party, buffs and hitting space regularly to pause fights.
Spent far too long trying to kill the rat boss on level 6, decided to go back to it a few levels later. I think that they set up that quest as a trainer, the further you go in the quest you higher level you need to be as the swarms of rats can easily kill you.

I don't know if people still read this, and I'm probably skimming, but how the hell do you prevent fear? I'm trying to kill those amoebas in the cellar of the temple, and they keep fearing my group to the point of being rendered utterly useless.

Vrikk wrote:

I don't know if people still read this, and I'm probably skimming, but how the hell do you prevent fear? I'm trying to kill those amoebas in the cellar of the temple, and they keep fearing my group to the point of being rendered utterly useless.

I got through this by trying to engage one amoeba at a time - leave the party far way from the patrol paths, creep one character forward until one of them attacks, then run the character back to the party for the killing. Rinse and repeat. There are a couple of places where it's difficult to pull this off, but almost everywhere else, this works great.

OK guys I just got this off Steam. Suggestions on starting out? I think I am going to go tank or mage as I have heard you can easily get a thief early on.

Yeah, best not to go as a trickster/rogue/thief character as you get access to about three of them pretty quickly. You get access to a tank early on too but the mages come later on.... i don't know how well a mage would do early on in the game though as lots of armour negates the ability to use magic (anything metal).

Metamage is nice as with your summon you get an extra body which really helps early on.

Try out a couple of classes - the system is different enough from most games in the genre that you will probably want to start over a couple of times before you "get it". When I get home, if I remember to, I'll lookup a link that has some good information on the various stats/skills/perks, etc. that you may find useful, if you don;t feel like experimenting too much.

Thanks guys.

Arise, thread! Though the demo didn't grab me, I picked this up on the $5 Direct2Drive sale and I'm loving it so far.

It feels like a more-polished version of Neverwinter Nights 2. Whereas with that game I was constantly fighting the camera and interface, everything flows really nicely in Drakensang. There's none of the incredibly irritating main character issues that NWN2 2 had, where it insisted that the protagonist do all the talking and gets shoved to the front of most combat situations. You have full control over which character's the party leader at all times.

The translation is surprisingly competent, which is good because there's a lot of it. NPCs only voice the first line of their dialogue, which is, um... a good thing in most cases.

The graphics are excellent. All the areas feel hand-crafted, and share the bucolic, brightly colored aesthetic of Fable 2. There's some really neat animations here and there, from enemies staggering back and falling to the ground to deers leaping away into the woods.

My only problems with the game are on the technical level. Loading times are brutal, though you don't encounter them very often. It's crashed a couple of times when the game decides that an NPC should talk to me after I've already queued a conversation with that character. It also bogs down significantly in some areas. Whenever a campfire or reflections are involved, framerates dip into the <1 FPS range. It says something that I'm thinking of upgrading my rig just so this game plays better.

Suffice it to say that fans of CRPGs would be well-advised to pick this up at $5, or even full price.

KillerTomato wrote:

Arise, thread! Though the demo didn't grab me, I picked this up on the $5 Direct2Drive sale and I'm loving it so far.

It feels like a more-polished version of Neverwinter Nights 2. Whereas with that game I was constantly fighting the camera and interface, everything flows really nicely in Drakensang. There's none of the incredibly irritating main character issues that NWN2 2 had, where it insisted that the protagonist do all the talking and gets shoved to the front of most combat situations. You have full control over which character's the party leader at all times.

The translation is surprisingly competent, which is good because there's a lot of it. NPCs only voice the first line of their dialogue, which is, um... a good thing in most cases.

The graphics are excellent. All the areas feel hand-crafted, and share the bucolic, brightly colored aesthetic of Fable 2. There's some really neat animations here and there, from enemies staggering back and falling to the ground to deers leaping away into the woods.

My only problems with the game are on the technical level. Loading times are brutal, though you don't encounter them very often. It's crashed a couple of times when the game decides that an NPC should talk to me after I've already queued a conversation with that character. It also bogs down significantly in some areas. Whenever a campfire or reflections are involved, framerates dip into the <1 FPS range. It says something that I'm thinking of upgrading my rig just so this game plays better.

Suffice it to say that fans of CRPGs would be well-advised to pick this up at $5, or even full price.

I agree with the previous statement.

Also, I am now mad at the game because the rogue you meet early on in the game can't seem to understand the concept of lock picking. What a loser!

Queen Salina of Montwhatever is hot.

KillerTomato wrote:

Arise, thread! Though the demo didn't grab me, I picked this up on the $5 Direct2Drive sale and I'm loving it so far.

It feels like a more-polished version of Neverwinter Nights 2. Whereas with that game I was constantly fighting the camera and interface, everything flows really nicely in Drakensang. There's none of the incredibly irritating main character issues that NWN2 2 had, where it insisted that the protagonist do all the talking and gets shoved to the front of most combat situations. You have full control over which character's the party leader at all times.

The translation is surprisingly competent, which is good because there's a lot of it. NPCs only voice the first line of their dialogue, which is, um... a good thing in most cases.

The graphics are excellent. All the areas feel hand-crafted, and share the bucolic, brightly colored aesthetic of Fable 2. There's some really neat animations here and there, from enemies staggering back and falling to the ground to deers leaping away into the woods.

My only problems with the game are on the technical level. Loading times are brutal, though you don't encounter them very often. It's crashed a couple of times when the game decides that an NPC should talk to me after I've already queued a conversation with that character. It also bogs down significantly in some areas. Whenever a campfire or reflections are involved, framerates dip into the <1 FPS range. It says something that I'm thinking of upgrading my rig just so this game plays better.

Suffice it to say that fans of CRPGs would be well-advised to pick this up at $5, or even full price.

For 5 bucks? Hell, I'll give it a try.

Word to the wise: unless you've played a game using Das Schwarze Auge rules, you will want to read up on it. It is quite a bit different from most RPGs in how the stats work together. I posted a link somewhere in this thread to a couple of resources (but I'm too lazy to go find them; exercise for the reader )

I enjoyed this game quite a bit. It's not what I would consider a modern open world RPG. It's more old school, but still really good for all of that. Definitely a steal for $5.

Thanks for the heads up on the $5 deal. I've been looking for this game to go on sale, and $5 is a great deal.

Five dollars is definitely a good deal for this. I suggest that anyone who decides to pick this up read the entirety of this thread as there are a lot of good suggestions to avoid the more frustrating aspects of the game.

For anyone experiencing significant stuttering/frame-drop issues when walking around in certain areas, turn off the high-resolution textures option in the game settings.

Not only did the stuttering completely vanish when I did this, but the load times decreased dramatically. The difference between the regular and high-res textures must be pretty small, as the game still looks great.