In Drakensang Online players take on the role of a daring adventure tasked with defeating numerous ancient evils; a fantasy cross-platform action RPG the game has been around for a number of years, faced numerous updates and expansions, and is generally a feature-full title. Developed by Bigpoint, let’s take a look at one of their hottest titles and see how it holds up…
THE GOOD
Skill Point System – Players earn skill points as they level up and can allot them into their various skills to improve them, however, unlike other MMOs players can freely move their points around, taking them out of old skills and upgrading new ones on the fly as well as having saved templates for PVP and PVE as they need them
Action Combat – Combat is very fast and fun. As a hack n’ slash title, players are often facing scores of enemies at any one time and unleashing various dynamic attacks, whether fighting solo or completing more challenging content with friends, groups and guilds
Frequent Updates – Whether bug fixes, additional mounts, pets and costumes, new features or full expansion patches adding new regions and end-game content, the game frequently sees new content being added to it for players
Quality Graphics – Whilst from time to time the game can show its age, in general the title looks pretty amazing having had the benefit of a graphical facelift in recent times; from animations, special effects and general world building and immersive environment design, the game still holds up visually
Diablo III For Free – Although Diablo III is a little deeper when it comes to story, class customization and features, Drakensang Online offers a free alternative to a similarly themes RPG classic and is a great place to start for players interested in trying a free action RPG title
THE BAD
Scheduled Events – One of the issues of being multi-region but not having a huge player population like other MMORPGs is that big events are often scheduled at a set time to get people to come online, as opposed to just being constantly available; the result is that the schedules fall out of a lot of players play-time hours and so they miss them
Shop Flash Sales – Occasionally the game has flash sales in the shop that can be available for as little as an hour, giving players the chance to purchase things like premium currency for cheaper; unfortunately these sales generally focus around the European time zone so, as with the Scheduled Events, players can easily miss them
Early Game PVP – The game is rife with alt “twink” characters, alternate characters of high level players that are powergamed and acquire all the best gear, but then engage in PVP with new players who are both majorly under-equipped to compete as well as inexperienced, creating a sour early PVP experience
Quest Tennis – There are way too many quests that send you into an area to complete a quest, then bring you back to an NPC to hand it in, then send you back to the very SAME AREA with a different quest, then rinse and repeat; a very frustrating and tedious waste of time
RNG Crafting – For the most part the game has grindy elements, particularly with trying to acquire powerful materials to craft the best gear, repeatedly fighting through the same content for low drop rate materials… only to then go and try and craft an item and be screwed by the random number generator (RNG) system that randomly determines the final stats on your gear
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