Hey gang!

I just started to play through the first Dracula game and I can't believe how bad the voice acting is. Not only are the lines delivered very poorly, the actual writing is just abysmal. I know that the series really picks up with Dracula 3, and I am enjoying my play through, but I'm amazed the original was able to sell well enough to garner a sequel in the first place.

I guess the point-click landscape was barren enough in the early 2000's and the graphics were enough to convince people to buy the title.

Question for anyone who might remember, how much did this game sell for at launch?

Hey bud,

if I remember properly, I think I paid about 19.95 US Dollars for it at CompUSA. Now playing on a 1600x900 flatscreen thought I do remember the graphics being more polished like glass plate photos as opposed to the way they look now.

Yeah the dialogue is kinda ehh, that and the stuttering, and the graphics suffer on modern screens because Im of the opinion that games always looked better on the computer Monitors that were in Vogue at the time, so though the graphics are beautiful the higher resolution coupled with the monitor being LCD reveals too much of how old games are sprite based.

But for the money back then it was fun and kinda still is if you haven't played in ages.

Also 2000 is still close enough to the heyday of Dreamcatchers Point and Click adventures personified most by the Beyond Alantis games which were a lot of fun and Gabriel Knight Beast Within and others that appeared throughout the nineties.

Be Well.

*necro...

Same here, it has the look and feel of a 1994 era game with the worst dialogue and voice acting ever. LOL My first thought was that the FPS engine was a fair bit dated but I play older stuff so no big deal right? Then I discover it isn't an FPS engine, but more of a Myst like fake-3D VR thing with jumps and transitions from one point to another. Ugh, that's brutal. After every move I have to do a 360 do mentally place what just happened and where I am currently. As brutal as it is though, there's a certain entertainment value from how horrible it is too, and it generates some laughs from that. :)

I too am left wondering how it managed to sell well enough to fund any sequels though, but maybe they found some gold in Dracula's castle in real life while researching the game? LOL Apparently some of the sequels are good I've read so I'm going to see if I can bare ploughing through it to the end. :)

I'm totally loving the VOs in the first game, it really fits the atmosphere.

I'm guessing it wasn't anywhere near as bad in the original French, both in writing and acting but I can't be sure about either as I don't speak French Out of interest, what language are you playing in? Perhaps some versions were better than others.

English. To be honest though, I haven't gotten far as I missed a location and got stuck running around the inn, trying to figure out what to do next until I looked at a guide and realized there was one spot I didn't go to. And I haven't picked up again since then. However they seem to have nailed the "weird, Hungarian/Transylvanian/Romanian" accent, it's like watching some cool B-rated vampire horror movie. :D

Uhhh, are we playing different versions of the game? From what I remember (played the game a couple of weeks ago) the villagers had various regional British accents, I think the innkeeper had a sort of west country accent, definitely not central European.
Even weirder, after giving the villagers British accents they gave Jonathan Harker (who is British) an American accent.

Oh, I played it over a year ago, let me check it again. I just remember thinking the innkeeper had a really cool villager accent.

Yep, you're right, it was the innkeeper whom I was mostly remembering and she has that sort of a rural/cockneyish English accent. Not that the accent is a "villager" accent per se, but it's that type that sounds like a lower class accent which is often used in media to portray the lower classes, so I thought it was very funny and on point/fitting the character. Now that I've seen the beginning again I remember that I thought when I played it that it was both funny and ridiculous in a good, hammy way, that they were using English accents in Transylvania and that's what made it seem so cool to me, esp. since you usually have American accents in games and this was the exception (and kind of played into the 'American = good, British = evil trope as well, with most of the villagers being so much antagonistic, haha!).