Listening to the new game/rap mashup The Ocarina of Rhyme online. The samples from Zelda are clear and easy to identify, but the lyrics don’t seem to relate in any way. Its good if you like rap, but if you’re just a Zelda fan, this isn’t the album that’s going to make you jump up and say “finally! rap that I can relate to!”

For all the skills you have in Drakensang, the game doesn’t give you a lot of flexibility in how you deal with situations.  They tend to be rigidly scripted.  You can’t target the pack of giant rats from a distance because you have to trigger the “encounter” in order for them to become targetable.  Your perception ability won’t allow you to find that hidden item because you’re supposed  to find out about it from the barmaid first.  You can’t use stealth to sneak up on the group that your chasing because the script calls for a lengthy chase sequence.  Okay, fine, its a linear game but this last case - the chase scene - was a particular annoyance.  What’s that?  You want to me to rant about it?  Well, okay.

Now, everybody who has played videogames for any length of time knows that most chase scenes are rigged.  NPC’s will tell you to hurry up because somebody is getting away and every second counts but, in reality, you can take as long as you want and when you turn the next corner, your quarry will be just a few steps ahead of you.  Drakensang is no exception in this regard and I can accept that it’s a legitimate design decision.  I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and plunge headlong after the murderous band that is ostensibly trying to evade me.

The problem is, while I’m willing to play along, the game seems intent to thwart me by throwing up distractions from the sidelines!  My dwarf keeps detecting hidden side-passages with (rather unimpressive) bits of loot in them.  Now I’m forced to make a choice between role-playing the chase and skipping the loot or grabbing the loot and destroying the believability of the scenario.  Why would a designer want to present me with that choice?  Either way, I’m going to catch these guys.  Why reward the player for ruining the scene?

This is not the first time I’ve seen this in a game.  So a word of advice to game designers: If you want me to behave in a certain way, don’t tempt me to do otherwise!

Baldur’s Gate was possibly the first game I ever paid full price for.  I only caught the tail end of SSI’s golden age of “Gold Box” D&D games, so when I heard everyone raving about this new revival of TSR’s flagship product on the PC, I was in.

Unfortunately, I hated it.  The precise tactical battles that I enjoyed in games like Secret of the Silver Blades and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands were replaced by chaotic skirmishes full of characters bumping into each other, not finding their paths and sometimes just not doing what they were told.  The unpredictablility of having everything happen at once made it seemingly impossible to make meaningful tactical decisions.  Eventually, I was able to make some peace with the game when I discovered that setting the game to auto-pause after each round and turning off the AI gave some semblance of turn-based gameplay, but it’s clearly not the way the game was intended to be played and resulted in a lot of rough edges.  It was the beginning of a long hate/hate relationship between me and the words “real-time strategy”.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to read claims by the makers of the german game Drakensang that they were bringing the turn-based style of pen-and-paper games back to the PC.  Finally, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way (just the only one in my country, apparently).  The combat actually plays out a lot like Baldur’s gate, but the turn-based mode is easier to turn off and on and the game seems to be made more with that mode in mind, while still seeming like something that…*shudder*… real-time combat fans will find enjoyable.

Everything is still happening all at once in combat and player positions aren’t confined to any kind of grid, so its difficult to know just how your commands are going to translate into what actually happens on the battlefield, but so far I’ve managed to play it for several hours without wanting to break my keyboard.  I can at least take some reassurance that somebody else out there doesn’t think that turn-based, pen-and-paper style combat is something broken that needs to be fixed.