Posted December 14, 2009
The Dark Eye / Realms of Arkania series is one of the best translations from tabletop to desktop, demanding a similar level of attention to detail. Even among other CRPG epics that followed the paper-to-PC path - AD&D Gold Box by SSI or The Elder Scrolls by Bethesda - Realms of Arkania remains the most loving tribute to its source material, particularly the game mechanics.
Other reviewers mention the difficulty, and herein is the irony - how many PC gamers complain that CRPGs are just a nice story broken up by level-grinding monotony? Well, expect many of those same gamers - and I'll include myself - to complain that Realms of Arkania falls into the other extreme. The difficulty derives from 1) the depth of character management and 2) the free and open world offering little guidance. Of course, the experience is constrained by the medium. After all, no single-player PC game yet captures the experience of playing with human beings and dice and book, beer and pretzels, allowing players and the referee / game master to improvise in real time. But leave out the improvisation, and Realms of Arkania remains to this day the truest examples of the live role-playing experience condensed into a single-player scenario. I'd like to award that honor to TES:Daggerfall or Morrowind, but the TES series lets the player sleep outdoors in any weather without special gear and suffer no consequences. In the Dark Eye universe - and, incidentally, this one - that's a recipe for fatigue, illness, and eventual death.
I'd like to share my experience with both these titles.
I started Blade of Destiny over Christmas some years ago. Over several hours, I managed to learn the lay of the starting city and overcome the first dungeon. Then, my party took their first steps outside the city into the larger world - and there were so many new cities to explore, places to travel, and experiences to live. To bad I lost my saved game files to disk corruption at that point. During the half-day I spent on Blade of Destiny, I was as absorbed as I had been with Betrayal at Krondor and Darklands.
Moving straight on to Star Trail, I first fumbled and died in the wilderness, eaten by the local fauna while fighting off "numbskull" and other illnesses my party caught while sleeping in their civvies on the cold, wet earth. Perusing a handy walkthrough, I better provisioned the party and made my way to a city under siege by orcs, complete with neat orcs-leering-from-behind-fortifications textures and a war-drums MIDI track. While surveying the siege and I exploring the city, i became entranced with the first-rate MIDI tracks, some of the best I've ever heard in an MSDOS-based game. I don't remember what happened, but as my party wandered that city, we became lost, a few little people in a big world that revolved around the plot, rather than the plot and world revolving around my party.
I since lost the CDs for all three games, unfortunately. The first time GOG offers all three games (these + Shadows over Riva) in a $9.99 bundle, I'm there.
Other reviewers mention the difficulty, and herein is the irony - how many PC gamers complain that CRPGs are just a nice story broken up by level-grinding monotony? Well, expect many of those same gamers - and I'll include myself - to complain that Realms of Arkania falls into the other extreme. The difficulty derives from 1) the depth of character management and 2) the free and open world offering little guidance. Of course, the experience is constrained by the medium. After all, no single-player PC game yet captures the experience of playing with human beings and dice and book, beer and pretzels, allowing players and the referee / game master to improvise in real time. But leave out the improvisation, and Realms of Arkania remains to this day the truest examples of the live role-playing experience condensed into a single-player scenario. I'd like to award that honor to TES:Daggerfall or Morrowind, but the TES series lets the player sleep outdoors in any weather without special gear and suffer no consequences. In the Dark Eye universe - and, incidentally, this one - that's a recipe for fatigue, illness, and eventual death.
I'd like to share my experience with both these titles.
I started Blade of Destiny over Christmas some years ago. Over several hours, I managed to learn the lay of the starting city and overcome the first dungeon. Then, my party took their first steps outside the city into the larger world - and there were so many new cities to explore, places to travel, and experiences to live. To bad I lost my saved game files to disk corruption at that point. During the half-day I spent on Blade of Destiny, I was as absorbed as I had been with Betrayal at Krondor and Darklands.
Moving straight on to Star Trail, I first fumbled and died in the wilderness, eaten by the local fauna while fighting off "numbskull" and other illnesses my party caught while sleeping in their civvies on the cold, wet earth. Perusing a handy walkthrough, I better provisioned the party and made my way to a city under siege by orcs, complete with neat orcs-leering-from-behind-fortifications textures and a war-drums MIDI track. While surveying the siege and I exploring the city, i became entranced with the first-rate MIDI tracks, some of the best I've ever heard in an MSDOS-based game. I don't remember what happened, but as my party wandered that city, we became lost, a few little people in a big world that revolved around the plot, rather than the plot and world revolving around my party.
I since lost the CDs for all three games, unfortunately. The first time GOG offers all three games (these + Shadows over Riva) in a $9.99 bundle, I'm there.