Ty Arthur
BloodyaugustDefending the Maligned Part I - Dragonshard
June 8th 2008 20:00
As a companion to the segment "Skewering Sacred Cows" comes "Defending the Maligned", which will spotlight games that get lots of negative press that either don't deserve it, or are simply worth playing despite their flaws. Much like "Skewering Sacred Cows", the segment isn't meant to cause conflict or force anyone to start enjoying a game they don't like; it will just explain the reasons why the game is worth giving a chance.
Dragonshard was a highly advertised game that showed much promise, offering to combine the role playing aspects of Dungeons and Dragons with the frantic combat and strategic elements of a real time strategy war game. When Dragonshard was finally released it received almost universal disdain, suffering negative reviews on nearly every gaming web site, magazine, or blog, and was generally ignored from that point onward. Why all the hate? The general complaints against the game seemed to be focused on the lack of Dungeons and Dragons flavor, odd "nexus" base camp design, complexity of the "resistances" system, and the lagging that occurs in large battles.
For the most part, these criticisms are either unfounded or easily overlooked. Dragonshard actually incorporates the Dungeons and Dragons elements in surprisingly innovative ways that don't overshadow the real time strategy elements. An RTS could never work properly if the full d20 system rule set (the system of rules used by Dungeons and Dragons) were implemented, so there have to be some concessions and workarounds. The standard Dungeons and Dragons items and equipment are all present, but they are utilized in slightly different ways than they would be in a game like Neverwinter Nights or Baldur’s Gate. The heroes might still find a masterwork breastplate, but instead of being an equipable piece of armor it is instead a one use item that gives a unit a permanent bonus to it's resistances against certain forms of damage. There is also a large part of the game that consists of dungeon crawling. Each map has both an "upside" and an "underground" where units can travel into to explore ancient ruins, discover and deactivate traps, and battle Dungeons and Dragons iconic monsters such as beholders and mariliths.
Resource management has a very different mechanic than in many other RTS games. Rather than building the "gathering" units like the peasants in Warcraft or the drones in Starcraft, any unit can harvest Dragonshards (the equivalent of vespene gas in Starcraft). Money is in the form of the gold piece, and it cannot be mined from the ground, but instead has to be found by plundering dungeons or breaking into the chests of gold found in an ogre settlement. Since both resources are in limited supply and are not always located together or even near your base camp, there is a greater emphasis on careful unit management and deciding on which combinations of units you will need for the coming conflicts.
The "Nexus" system of buildings is actually one of my favorite aspects of the game, although many other gamers seemed to find it frustrating. There is not unlimited space to construct buildings anywhere. You start with a "Nexus", or base camp, which has a keep in the middle and space for buildings which are surrounded by protective walls. A limited number of buildings can fit within the keep, and the location that you place them and number of buildings of each type you construct will change how powerful you can upgrade units and what abilities they will have. Although this is a drastic change from how the average RTS handles buildings and unit upgrades, it adds a truly challenging element that requires careful forethought and planning.
As far as lag or game slowdown goes, I've never experienced it while playing Dragonshard. My gaming rig is a pretty high end Alienware however, so there may actually be problems with this on lower end computers.
I only have two criticism of Dragonshard. The first would be the voice acting for the Warforged character, which is a little too cliché and robotic. The warforged are living golems, not futuristic robots, so it's a little jarring to be playing a fantasy game and suddenly hear something that sounds suspiciously like it belongs to the Goliath units from Starcraft. The other problem is that the dialog goes for a more humorous and cheesy approach than a heavy and serious one. In a polar opposite from Warcraft III, which had cartoonish graphics but a serious and dark story, Dragonstorm has more defined graphics but a more cartoonish story.
The real highlight of Dragonshard is the frantic and massive scale combat. Because the various commander units have underlings that fight with them, there can easily be dozens of different units slugging it out on screen at once, and with a huge number of abilities and spells for each unit to take advantage of, battle becomes an amazingly fun frenzied click fest where strategy has to always be kept in mind.
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