virumor...
Drakensang is far from a blatant AD&D clone. As I said before, the setting is low magic, which the most well-known AD&D settings (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms) are not. The setting is also more inspired by medieval Germany rather than an emulgation of all fantasy tropes in the book like AD&D.
If it has to be compared to any AD&D setting, it's closest to Eberron.
Being low magic does not stop something from being a D&D clone. Let's face it, ALL RPGs are ultimately derived from D&D in some way, just as everything Fantasy ultimately owes its origins to Tolkien. There's no escaping the shadow of either.
Doesn't mean any of the clones are not good games in their own right.
In Dragon Age, most of the world's lore is conveniently written down in 'the Codex' instead of shared with the player through the actual game world.
It's not just the lore, it's also stuff like the Chanters, Leliana's stories (& her song), Morrigan's mother and her connection to the history of the world... The characters seem to be immersed in their world, not separate to it.
In any case, it's very hard for Dragon Age to compete with any established PnP setting like DSA or D&D which are over 25 years old. The sheer amount of lore in Drakensang just meant that the devs couldn't copy paste all of it in the game like Dragon Age.
True. But judging Drakensang just as Drakensang, rather than an extension of TDE, it does not do a very good job of conveying the idea that the world would exist whether your character did or did not.
Using an all tank party in DA works too, since one can make unlimited health potions (while in Drakensang it's much more difficult to obtain a large amount). In fact, mages make the game so much easier that for a challenge one should probably play without one.
All tank parties never work out in DA, because the difficulty ramps according to the toughness of your party. Or at least it seems to. Any time I tried it, I got completely massacred. I didn't find it that easy to accumulate masses of poultices, either.
With Drakensang, all you need is the bandages & the tea and you can pick them up in vast amounts. Four tanks aren't going down so you'll never NEED combat healing.
I found that my mage became unstoppable as soon as she picked Cone of Cold spell, which she did in the first town after Ostagar. Freezing enemies followed by shattering wins any battle, since all battles outside of bosses are essentially the same.
True. Some more variation in encounters would have been nice. Shattering isn't all that easy to pull off, though, and you can't deal with massive numbers that easily.
I don't understand what you said about archers, they seemed totally useless in my game.
It's all the crippling/pinning/killing shots that make the difference. An archer just shooting is weak, but a fully ramped archer with all those trick shots is pretty lethal. Archers only really get into trouble if the opposition can get to them, as they shoot fast enough to disrupt spell casting, too.
That's subjective of course, but I think Drakensang is on par with Neverwinter Nights 2, and both to be better than Dragon Age.
I think Drakensang is actually better than NWN2 for one simple reason: I truly loathe being put on railroad tracks. The amount of ability you have to wander off and do stuff just for of the heck of it is almost non-existent. Throw in the fact that the designers still had not worked out that D&D is a system optimised for a party of six (A thing which they understood as far back as Baldur's Gate! Go figure the logic...) just makes it even more frustrating.
That said, I like
Storm Of Zehir a great deal, and would consider that more equal to Drakensang.
Needless to say, I think DA is vastly superior to both, but opinions and all that
