D&D Daggerdale: The New RPG Fun

Dragons: Daggerdale, launched this week, provides a fun (if considerably predictable) dose of RPG action centered on D&D 4th edition policies. Team up with buddies to conserve the Dalelands from the Zhentarim risk, and see how numerous occasions you laugh out loud at the stilted dialogue.

Daggerdale is a straightforward hack and slash action RPG in the tradition of Torchlight, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and other darkly colonial games. You traipse via dungeons, fight monsters, gather loot and level up. Daggerdale doesn't mess with this profitable method. You'll devote a fair quantity of time managing your stock, and your key foes through the game are storage barrels, which must be destroyed on sight. Critically, why does each and every action RPG look to assume individuals just certainly enjoy smashing barrels to locate six gold items? It's torture if you're even a little OCD.

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So Daggerdale is major on the hacking, slashing and smashing, and really light on the tale. The intro devotes all of twenty seconds to the backstory. There's a pasty-confronted Zhentarim guy who declares, "In the name of Bane, I will conquer Daggerdale!" Which, frankly, appears like he's setting his sights very very low. As my brother put it, "So…he wants to be mayor?" Then a lady appears prior to the four generic heroes, tells them they have to defeat pale guy in his Tower of the Void, and disappears mumbling some excuse for not staying to aid. The greatest aspect is that the tower is in a mine for some purpose. Who builds a tower in a mine? How does that even get the job done?

The tale lurches along from there, dropping you right away into a dwarven labor dispute (some thing to do with the kickbacks you're finding from the barrelmakers' union, I suspect). The dialogue and quest hooks are so horribly composed that they verge on "so bad it's good." Video games that only price tag $15 get a great deal of slack – I can excuse the sparse animated cutscenes and lack of voiceover, for illustration. But this game could have been immensely enhanced by employing a good author, and I know (becoming a writer) that this would not have damaged the budget.
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