11/14/05 >> Dragonshard (PC)
Genre: Free-form Action
Dragonshard is the first of the "next" line of Dungeon & Dragon games that Atari is hoping to have published within the next eighteen months of so. When I heard of it, I had an impression that this was going to be a combination of Forgotten Realms and Age of Empires. What I ended up getting is a crappier version of Warcraft.
Dragonshard takes place in the new official D&D campaign setting: Eberron which has a Victorian time period feel to it with really cool spells, a new class (Artificers) and new races like the Warforged. Unfortunately, it only got to that point.
The storyline of this game is that you play one of three factions: Order of the Flame, Lizardfolk, and the Umberagen which is probably the german word for Drow, for that is what they are. You start out with the Order, but like Warcraft, you end up playing with all three factions throughout the gameplay. Regardless of faction, you're out to find the Heart of Siberys, a Dragonshard (a gem made from the frozen remains of a Dragon Goddess, hence the title of this game) that supposedly controls massive amounts of power. This would be akin to finding a really large uranium core that you could use for supplying power to your people or creating a weapon of mass destruction, or fifty. You fight on two different areas: the surface world, and the underworld, where gold, treasure, and special loot reside.
There are things about the gameplay that I really didn't like. Mostly it had to do with the way you get gold, dragonshards, and building up your army. Gathering gold happened in two ways, either you find it or you build buildings that boosted up your taxation rate (I'm still trying to figure out that one). It seemed a rather strange way of building up resources. Dragonshards happen mainly above ground, and new ones occur at night during the nightly meteor storm. I am surprised that they did not consider building special units just to harvest dragonshards, since splitting up your units or going back to gather more Dragonshards seems asinine. And the powers your units have only barely related to Dungeon and Dragon skills like disabling traps, casting a small selection of spells, or healing or fixing your war forge.
What I really hate is the nexus idea. Instead of building buildings and a keep wherever you want, you can only build at predetermined nexus sites. Some allow you to build a keep and build a champion or a juggernaut, others were merely expansion sites. These are mainly octagonal (or square in the case of the expansion nexus) sided walls with patches of land to build buildings (four slots for expansion and 16 for main nexus). You have to build several of the same buildings to upgrade your main captains' abilities. So they threw away flexibility in order to force you to decide which buildings you are going to build out of a possible of maybe 20 to 24 slots in some of the more difficult chapters. And really, that makes little sense given the storyline. You're playing one of three army units after a very important item. Aren't you supposed to have absolute control over where and how you want your army's bases constructed?
Eyecandy (graphics, music, and visual display) is fairly poor. The graphics are slightly worse than the original Warcraft series. The characters are a bit blocky. The background graphics aren't as sharp and even the introductory movie doesn't grab you like Dungeon Siege II does. I could not get used to the mouse interface, and the dual mini-maps display makes little sense, nor could get armies to the right place every once in a while.
There are two other modes: skirmish and multiplayer modes which are basically the same deal. It is very similar to the faction’s modes in Warcraft, except I seriously doubt you'll be able to make up new game rules as you go, or new maps. Just not as good. AI on all of these isn’t very good and the differences in settings seem to be just the amount of resources and the amount of hit points your enemies will have.
So, this game ends up being a Warcraft-like game disguised under the trappings of Dungeon and Dragons, and a very bad one at that. And if you're like me you're also disappointed that you were fooled into thinking that this game was going to be a combination between Warcraft and say, Forgotten Realms? It turned out to be a very bad RTS game that just makes Warcraft look better and better. I think Atari should have just stuck with straight RPG games.
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Game Score: 5.9
