A lot of attention has been paid to fine details that establish a feeling of venturing into real places. Every cave, chamber, and forest clearing has been dressed up like a movie set, with lots of dungeon accoutrements and trees adorning every place you go. All of these background effects can be a bit much, though. When adventuring outdoors, the dense foliage of the wilderness gets in the way so much that you have to constantly rotate the camera to keep an eye on your party. This problem is even worse indoors, given that the camera cannot be scaled back much beyond ceiling level. Instead of the bird's-eye view of the action provided in most third-person RPGs, here the camera locks in tight on your party leader, making it nearly impossible to scroll back far enough to see the way ahead. In the darkest passages, you have to navigate using the minimap because you simply cannot see well enough to move around properly in the main screen.
Drakensang has plenty of depth, but it's a lot to figure out in the early stages when creating a character.
Sound consists of standard sword-smashing clangs and the celestial swooshes of spells, along with some of the most god-awful voice acting ever committed to a game. You almost wish that the developers had left the dialogue in German, because even though the end result would have been unintelligible to most of the North American audience, at least then the conversations would have sounded kind of cool. After being stuffed into English, every spoken line is wildly oversold with excessive shouting and exaggerated hand gestures. The lone saving grace is that most NPCs deliver their conversations through text after the opening blurt of words has brought shame to voice-only thespians everywhere. The core script itself has actually been written and translated well, with a minimum of the flouncy language that tends to creep into European RPG imports. On the other hand, most chats regarding quests are quite dull, which lessens the impact of saving the world D&D-style, but is still better than the florid alternative.
Larger-than-life RPG epics like Drakensang are few and far between these days. The story and quests are generic, and the character management is unnecessarily complex, but this is still a fairly captivating adventure that delivers most of what old-time RPG fans want and expect.
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