Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard

I decided, after 25 years of collecting games, that this will be my very last PC game I ever buy! Now, lets see... The game is good, half RPG, half RTS. Graphic is great and colorful, music is epic, the narrator's voice is like a God... It's truly gave me the Dungeons and Dragons feel with a twist! Works great on Windows 10. And GOG is the only digital store at this time where you can get Dungeons and Dragons: Dragonshard! If you like Dungeons and Dragons, this game is for you! I am more than happy with my purchase, thank you GOG!

Summary: a fantasy RTS built to emphasize careful microing of few units with crash-prone game engine w/ bad microing controls and terrible unit AI. The campaign is very well designed in that destroying enemy bases is not the-only-and-repeated mission objective. The narration is very DnD-like and the bestiary selection is very unconventional -- no orcs, goblins or kobolds here and a plenty of lizardmen and dark elves. The incorporated Eberron setting can be summarized with "golems and dragons." They seem most useful at destroying. Oh and the bugs. They are completely random, most common on complex maps and of the type "Unhandled Exeption" crashes. Basically the devs did not make the engine very error resilient. An epitome of under-designed. The music is above average. Neither annoying nor memorable. Rating: It's clearly superior to WC3 especially with the campaign design, +1. Has serious bugs. -1 It has no significant creative aspect or huge fun factor, not torturous. 0 It's average 3/5. I have Intel GPU, maybe it works with more or less bugs on something else. Traits: AI Army Hard Focuses on the First Frontline Unit All About Quests Broken Quests Different Quests for Different Characters DnD in Minimal RTS Clothes Everybody Kills Grim Reaper Gold Gets Rare Fast Hidden Quests Impossible to Select a Grouped Unit w/o the Group It's Raining Dragonshards Meaningless Campaign Conclusion No Death Save Against a Beholder No Sense of Achievement Replayable Quests Temptations of Having a Healer Army Underground Chest Gold Economy Units Get Stuck with Unit and Building Objects Where the Hell Are the Keyboard Shortcuts?

Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard could have been a great game, the concept that mixes RTS with RPG is great, the graphics are nice and it has D&D creatures everywhere, but the realization stinks. Being a Hero exploring a fantasy world is nothing new in D&D but this game allowed you to control several heroes, accompanied by fellow soldiers or minions disputing Dungeon's treasure and territorial control with similar enemy Heroes, this sounds awesome and it would be if not for base protection and management. In both, my singleplayer and multiplayer experiences, bases broke immersion I was having with the game. Exploring the map and venturing through underground dungeons filled with monsters was very fun, being underground and not knowing if on the next turn of the labyrinth I'm going to find the other faction's group was even more engaging but any dungeon run I was doing would be interrupted by an attack on my base and it proved to be more of an annoyance than anything else, and most of the time the enemy faction was actually preparing an attack on my base when I was starting my dungeon run and vice versa, because that's a strategy that really works and there's little each player can do to avoid that other than sticking near to the base and being mindful of it instead of being able to enjoy the other aspects of the game. "It's an RTS moron, of coruse there's base management!" Sure, but in every other RTS I actually enjoy base building and management, in Dragonshard... Not so much, and I actually think the game could have been so much good if it didn't have this issues. This game is neither pure-RTS nor RPG, but I actually liked shard mining and gold hunting, and like I said before map exploration and dungeon run is fun so the fundamentals of the game are there and they work and there is another good RTS with a very similar concept but without base management that managed to be what Dragonshard could't and that is, Dawn of War II. While I'm not saying Dargonshard should have been just like Dawn of War II, but it could have been more fun like Dawn of War II if it was similar in what concerns bases, because everything else is pretty much there. If you don't know what I'm talking about read or watch a review of Dawn of War II to get the general idea. In the end, it's not a bad game, it just could have been so much better and one of the first of it's kind, but as it is, there's just so many better RTS games out there that are way better for the same price, and the D&D license does next to nothing for this game for it to be worth when compared to other RTS games.

Many people believe that this is set on an imaginary non-existent universe just sticking the DnD logo on top of it to appeal to DnD fans. This in fact is wrong as the game is based on the Eberron world of DnD, an extremely detailed world debuting back at 2004 (if I'm not mistaken) for 3.5E. One of the main new features was that the world had more of a magical and steampunk feel than let's say Forgotten Realms, thus the Warforged race and the new class, the Artificer (which ironically is one of the most interesting classes ever released and a potential powerhouse if the game goes that way). The changes in clerics and their ability to cast spells by means of pure faith was also a thing that I liked about the setting. Having played both as a player and a DM in this setting (mainly the latter) I had to spend hours reading the core material and I have to say that the game captures the beauty of the world quite nice, from an artistic point of view. I wanted to like the game so bad since I prefer Eberron to FR a thousand times more so I picked it up upon initial release and got down to it. But the final feel it leaves is a somewhat unfinished product with little to offer and although it has some interesting stuff to build upon in the end it falls short. I must give the game 2 stars but since Eberron is my favorite setting I cannot drop that low (still it is a 2 star if you want to be realistic). If the game's price drops at about 2-3 euros/dollars, give it a chance, else it is too expensive compared to other games that do things better than this

How Warcraft became more popular than this game, I will never understand. This is the strategy game I wanted to play my whole life and didn't even know. ---------------------------------------------------------- Usually, in strategy games, you have your warriors and your workers. Your warriors fights and your workers build and harvest. Dragonshard ignores this, and is a better game for it. The game has no worker class, and only two resources for your warriors to collect: Gold and Dragonshards. Maps have two areas: The surface and the underground, which are excactly what they sound like. Dragonshards are harvested on the surface. A little Gold is found from killing enemies, but the most gold can be found underground. You can't build your main base where you want. There is a site on the various maps where it already exists. Same is true of expansion bases. The more buldings you have of a certain type, the higher a rank that unit will be. Example: To open the level 5 chests, you'll need a level 5 rogue, which means you need to build 4 Taverns in the same city block. Or perhaps you'd prefer unit diversity and don't care about chests. Maybe you want low level archers, clerics, paladins, and sorcerors instead. That's an option, not a bad one either. Older gamers may find the first campaign a little easy, but it's also got a lot of replayability (side missions, mission challenges etc). ====================================== I didn't give it 5 stars because it's a perfect game that everyone will enjoy. I don't think that. I gave it 5 stars because it's perfect for me - not one single pain point for me. Not ONE. Do you have any idea how rare that is for a grumpy loser like me?