Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance reviews are out

[Undrave]

Ok, I'm probably biaised here but the WotC ingerence seems an easy excuse to way out. At the first post about this game, I knew it wouldn't be great, guys like this CEO, I met a dozen like him when I was covering the industry. I feel sad for the team that put efforts into this but at the same time, we knew from the start that it won't probably turn good. WotC isn't great when giving away its IP, BG3 probably one of the few exceptions there.

It's not WotC giving the IP away, they bought the studio.

 

[Dausuul]

It's not WotC giving the IP away, they bought the studio.

Yeah, it would be more accurate to say that WotC has a mediocre track record when it comes to having people make digital products using Wizards IP. Which is why their decision to buy Tuque outright was extremely dubious. Even if they picked up the company for a song, how much have they shelled out in development costs since then?

Since we are quoting ourselves in this thread, I'll repeat what I said at the time: They should have stuck with licensing. That was a good model that was working for them. If a licensee delivered a great product, they could build a partnership. And if the licensee delivered a shoddy product, they could just walk away.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Maybe. But the Tuque game CEO is also full of bs, saying that his company can create AAA games. Come on man, deliver than we can compare.

I don't know the man. But as a CEO, it's also his job to say these things. This is an industry built on hype before you having anything to show. And this is a studio that massively ramped up in the last two years.

I suppose the WotC side of the story would be that they had to continually rein in the design/development team to make sure that they respected the characters and setting, and made a D&D game that was in some way reminiscent of D&D. Which one is the truth is probably dependent on your point of view.

Yes, I'm not casting too much judgment. I just heard there was a lot of interventions from WotC; was it warranted because the project was really not doing well? Or were the interventions themselves part of the problem? Can't say.

Ok, I'm probably biaised here but the WotC ingerence seems an easy excuse to way out. At the first post about this game, I knew it wouldn't be great, guys like this CEO, I met a dozen like him when I was covering the industry. I feel sad for the team that put efforts into this but at the same time, we knew from the start that it won't probably turn good. WotC isn't great when giving away its IP, BG3 probably one of the few exceptions there.

It's not an excuse. It's something that I heard happened and didn't help. The full story is obviously much more complex than this. Most people severely underestimate how video games are insanely hard to create. No matter the reason of a project failing, it almost never comes from malicious intent or lack of passion. Almost all failures are sad tragedies, people work on these projects for many years.

 

[Ixal]

This game has the most detailed content warning I have seen so far on steam

“Violence The forms of violence experienced within Dark Alliance include: Hearing grunts and groans while in battle and taking damage. In-game, non-interactive environmental elements including dwarves and goblins impaled on stakes and creature corpses in armor or depicted as bones with weapons or arrows in them. CGI cutscenes including mythical enemy creatures catching fire and burning, enemy creatures dismembering other enemy creatures, and enemy creatures using "magic" to knock other enemy creatures down incapacitating them. Blood and Gore Player characters and non-player characters show brief puffs of blood in various colors to depict to the player when damage has been done. There are in-game and CGI cutscenes of non-player character creature corpses hung up and gutted elk. Language There is use of offensive, rough, impolite, profane language, that can be heard, seen and read (including relatively mild terms such as "damn" and "hell").”

"Hearing grunts and groans while in battle and taking damage" is now something you have to warn from?
It also has a 24% Mostly Negative rating currently.

 

[Zardnaar]

No surprise Tuque claimed thery were a AAA+ studio. People here believed that lol.

Barely heard of them. Currently playing a real AAA+ title. AC: Odyssey.

 

[Thunder Brother]

That makes a lot of sense, especially after watching the review below (backed with actual evidence). It looks like they spent too much time on the changes and ran out of time catching all the bugs.

That bow animation, yikes.

 

[Weiley31]

I'm actually quite surprised that there is no bots for the other three Companions if your playing the game Single Player. I can only think the reason why, in good faith, that is the case is due to the fact that they are patching in Couch-Coop some point after the initial release.

On a side note: wasn't expecting Crispin Freeman as the voice of Drizzt.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Isn't that always the way?

Not normally with IP holders, especially experienced IP holders. Different ones approach it different ways.

For example, Games Workshop, who licence a lot of stuff (and used to refuse to do AAA games for fear it would steal customers from their minis), do a sort of "constantly looped in" approach but don't attempt to interfere with gameplay. In fact, they've allowed a lot of gameplay which is pretty hardcore at odds with mechanics and even setting lore. What they want is to keep the IP intact, so they don't what the actual conceptual lore and history messed with, they don't want the visual design messed with, they want consistency on how the temperaments and speech-patterns of the various races are portrayed and so on. So with Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (aka Warhammer Online, the MMORPG), for example, they had literally daily meetings and were sent any lore that was going in the game, together with concept sketches and so on. Whilst this apparently pretty stressful for the one person who had to speak to them every day, it worked well overall, and WAR came out looking and sounding complete Warhammer, but with its own gameplay and so on (which was very much a sort of mash-up of Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft, as you might expect from a post-WoW game by the DAoC people).

Other companies have also successfully worked closely with them, without gameplay ever getting interfered with, just lore and visual design being ensured to be "correct.

Disney are a bit different. They're even tighter on lore/visual design if it's core Disney stuff (Mickey, Princesses, etc.) but are willing to do some incredibly wild stuff like Kingdom Hearts (basically a Final Fantasy/Disney mash-up), a little looser with Star Wars, looser still with Marvel, and they also don't interfere with gameplay or try to dictate what types of game are being made, beyond saying no to certain games at the conceptual stage but. But they will do is, if they don't like where a game is going, and they don't want it come out, they just throw a huge amount of money at the studio/publisher and tell them to shut it down. This is why there are so many unfinished AAA or AAA+ Star Wars games since Disney got the IP. Disney just goes "That's cool but nah" and shuts them down. This is pretty upsetting for individual devs and especially studio heads, but at least people get paid.

What is abnormal here is WotC apparently/allegedly trying to interfere with the gameplay/type of game it was, rather than agreeing what type of game it would be at the start and letting it go.

Now, that's actually not abnormal from another perspective, because WotC are the studio owners, i.e. effectively the publisher (possibly literally, I forget). So it's more like when Electronic Arts comes to BioWare and says "We need you to make this game more action-y!" or the like, or "This needs to be a Game-as-a-Service!" or "Keep flying in this game at all costs!".

But perhaps it shows that it might be unfortunate for an AAA dev to have the IP holder be both the IP holder AND the owner/publisher of the game.

Or maybe Tuque just made a pretty bad game. It's not exactly unbelievable, given the short timeframe involved.

I'm actually quite surprised that there is no bots for the other three Companions if your playing the game Single Player. I can only think the reason why, in good faith, that is the case is due to the fact that they are patching in Couch-Coop some point after the initial release.

Personally I was thinking it was because the game was rushed out and they didn't have time to code even half-arsed AI for bot companions.

 

[Retreater]

I think this one is coming on Game Pass for Xbox, so I'll try it out that way. I like plenty of mediocre games.

 

[Hurin70]

While there already seem to be some universal themes emerging from those reviews (like the serious need for some patches), I'd point out that the major review sites have yet to weigh in on it...

IGN gave it a 4/10.