Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Announced
https://youtu.be/3mfjdNf0SDY"Join up to 4 friends, online or on the couch, and battle iconic monsters from Dungeons & Dragons in a new co-op action RPG."
Looks like it's a spiritual re-imagining. Has the name and 4-player coop, but i'm not seeing much else in the way of gameplay or tone similarities.
Back to Dark Alliance: it will be a spiritual successor, not a direct successor, to the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games from the PlayStation 2 and Xbox era. The old story, then, will be left alone.
"It's a new story," Tuque studio head Jeff Hattem told me in an interview. "It's a spiritual successor. It's been so long since the original Dark Alliance and Dark Alliance 2 - it's generations ago, console generations - we felt it wouldn't do that- those two games are really good in their own right and we're putting our own spin on things.
"We felt like this is a new beginning for the franchise."
But Hattem said: "Our game is its own thing. It wouldn't do justice to Vermintide, or other comparables, to one-to-one relate it. Definitely there's the co-op aspects of Vermintide that are similar. Our game plays completely differently to Vermintide since theirs is first-person and ours is third-person. [...] Our game is more group-focused." He wouldn't elaborate how.
Hattem wouldn't specify which consoles Dark Alliance is in development for but bear in mind an autumn 2020 release date puts the game in next-gen, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett territory.
Hattem couldn't talk about the possibility of cross-platform play but did say Dark Alliance will not be a free-to-play game. "We don't know the pricing just yet but it's not a free-to-play game," he said.
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was basically Baldur's Gate for console and therefore sped up and more action packed. The original was developed by Snowblind with help from publisher Black Isle, and released in 2001, and a sequel followed in 2004, made by Black Isle. A planned third game fell apart when Black Isle was closed and Interplay went bankrupt.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-12-09-dungeons-dragons-series-dark-alliance-new-game
Official Site
https://www.darkalliance.com/
Post edited by anastiel on
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Comments
I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not going to judge it based off one trailer (which I'm mixed on), but I'm going to keep an eye on it going forward.
Good they dropped the Baldur's Gate location though. Here comes Icewind Dale... again. Why oh why won't that drow ranger stay dead in his grave! These D&D cameos are the most obnoxious thing of the IP hands down.
I loved the Dark Alliance games though so hopefully it actually plays really well and the art is just not really designed to be shown close up like that but even so a pretty drek trailer direction would have rather seen gameplay or something than a poor imitiation of Blizzard high octane trailers.
On "what console it's going to be on" the answer is simple: all of them. Just like Dragon Age: Inquisition and (lesser extent GTAV) the game is either going to be ported forward or backwards to work on all machines.
...unless it's a Stadia exclusive like BG3 is rumoured to be... then it is definitely DoA.
Also very interesting that a WotC person confirmed that pre-5e FR timelines are fair game for new games, as is the case here. This is set not even in the 3.5e timeline but actually in the 2e timeline. But, it will use highly modified 5e rules and systems.
But yeah, I mostly get into RPGs for interesting stories, in-depth world-building and compelling characters/interactions. Dark Alliance 3 might actually be a good game, but that one trailer isn't doing a very good job selling itself to me.
What I hated the most about dark alliance was the freaking race and sex lock of the characters. I hate elves but to be a mage I had to be a freaking elf...
I hope this is a early video and the games model doesn't look like these and they actuay give customization
Nope it looks like you get to play as Drizzt & company. I expect the 5e rules gets close to how ToC:ToA did it, where each character has a set skill set that can be used per map, but of course, with real time mechanics instead of turn base.
Killing enemies isn't murderhoboing. Killing friendlies for no reason is.
Fair point. This was my logic:
"Drizzt is a drow who acts against the drow stereotype, favoring friendship and peace over hatred and violence."
I'm not saying he wouldn't kill enemies. But Drizzt in a slaughter fest for the sake of a slaughter fest, which is the message this video sent, would apply in my mind. If you are playing a character that doesn't go on killing sprees to go on killing sprees, I'd still consider that murder hoboing, but you have a very good point (my logic admittedly does not fit everybody's definition).
That's what SoD was. People decided to kill it with bigotry and toxic nostalgia. Have fun with what companies fall back on.
Daggerdale is actually for sale on Steam, but you would never know it unless you typed it in the search bar, because it's so unpopular it doesn't even show up randomly in recommends.
Except the game was review bombed by people who never even played it. Reviews by people who actually owned the game were significantly higher. So the crash and burn of SoD had far more to do with people hating something they never played than any kind of actual criticism.
On topic: if the devs indeed include something akin to a singleplayer modus then I hope it won't be anything like Vermintide's. That franchise simply replaced open co-op slots with silent bots of questionable ai quality. That kind of implementation is absolutely frustrating for singleplayer.
Huh? Not everyone that plays D&D video games expects them all to be like the IE games. One of my favorites is Dungeon Hack, and there's very little role playing at all in it. Demon Stone was bad because it was a bad game. I get the impression that is the case with Daggerdale too. Did Sword Coast Legends do well? No, because it had poor design and then was abandoned. People love the Neverwinter MMO and it overshadows Dungeons & Dragons Online, but DDO is much closer to real PnP D&D than NWO is (although in this case, I think DDO would be the better game if it were managed better). It has nothing to do with how low or high role-playing they are.
I wouldn't be surprised if Dark Alliance ends up like Demon Stone, but it won't necessarily be because it is an action RPG. It'll depend on how good of a game it is.
neverwinter nights is alot more niche. you can blame the oc giving people a very poor impression. had the oc been more like dod or sou it would be seen more favorably by more people.
The Neverwinter MMO is indeed very popular, and it also looks like a really good and fun game. It's certainly been supported very well by its developer. But it is a very poor experience in single-player, and that automatically makes it uninteresting to me.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-12-11-expect-seven-or-eight-dungeons-and-dragons-video-games-in-the-coming-years
My cousin and myself enjoyed messing around in the first dark alliance game. I was the elf mage and he was he human Archer and our whole schnick was was trying to wff each other over and get the other killed...
So much fun lol.