Any upcoming AD&D-based PC games?

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So, is there?

What about D&D online, is that any good? I read its free, does that include europe too?

I kind of miss a good ad&d (computer) game. A new one, that is. But not like nwn style, ough...

 

AD&D died years ago, officially speaking. It's unlikely that they'll make any more games based on it. To be honest, D&D games in general are getting worse. I'd recommend giving Dragon Age a try.

 

Ignoring the "A"D&D part of your question and focusing on plain ole D&D, no there's not a whole lot to hope for these days. A big part of the issue is, the gaming license for D&D resides with Atari, and they have garnered a decidely poor reputation with respect to how they've handled this license.

They even managed to mess up Temple of Elemental Evil, which was a great game at its core, but post release support for this game was all but non-existent. There were some patches, but they were always too little, too late, so the game suffered from a reputation hit that it never recovered from. I'm not saying Atair should be blamed for all of this game's faults, but they seemed to work pretty hard to seal its fate.

And let's not forget Dragonshard. It wasn't a good RTS + It wasn't a good RPG = It wasn't a good game. Really, this one was just plain awful.

There's a new D&D release on the horizon: http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=53364. I hold out no hope that it will be any good. Even the trailer was somewhat embarrassing, so I figure, it can only go downhill from there.

 

I see.
Doesn't sound/look too promising I agree to that.
Atari is behind d&d online I see now. So I guess that must be bad also since I don't see it discussed on the forum.

 

There is a forum for it here: http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=39

I never bothered with it, so I can't speak from experience. There was very little interest on these boards for this game, but you can peruse some of the forum posts if you so desire.

 

Oh yeah, don't ask me how I allowed that one to slip my mind.

Oh, and a little news flash for the game devs on that one, any game that claims to be a D&D game and gives you only 5 class options to choose from... well, it's a poser. AND, it raises the very apt question of, what the hell else are they planning to skimp on in order to bring a stick figure of a game to market?

Here it is folks... Dungeons and Dragons Light. We give you less, so you can pay us sooner!

Spoiler

By the way devs, you may not know this, but this is simply a recipe for creating yet another flop. But keep that under wraps, because apparently this is a secret that so far only I have figure out!

 

Drakensang is a similair type of game. It uses The Black Eye ruleset populair in Germany. A second game is released a few weeks ago.

 

I'll be honest, I hold out just a little more hope for Neverwinter than I do Daggerdale. This is only because the Neverwinter franchise, I feel, has been the strongest of the D&D stuff to come from Atari. Although granted, both Neverwinter Nights and NWW2 at least managed to give me all of the core base classes upon initial release, and some prestige classes in the case of NWN2, so the comparison already is lackluster.

It seems that Neverwinter will be an MMORPG with an option to play in single player style, including AI controlled party members. I have a strict personal house rule that I don't touch MMORPGs, but an online game that can be played fully single player is still a possibility for me. But what sort of follower AI can I expect from an apparently already bare bones game that is tailored to multiplayer, with some single player possibilities thrown in, I wonder.

One of my larger beefs with NWN2 is the absurd level of micromanagement required to prevent your followers from acting like absolute and utter idiots, and this was a game that was largely focused on single player play. Playing NWN2 last night, for example, I entered the Fihelis estate, and what does my archer/healer Elanee do? She senses that there are enemies in the room ahead, so she charges forth alone to find out, and manages to get herself completely surround by enemies, and because of the doorway blocking entry, my party can barely even help her out. So typical of this game, and issuing stand ground, follow, attack commands constantly really becomes a chore.

Perhaps I’m spoiled by Dragon Age, where I can easily select my party and no one charges to face the enemy until I tell them to. Hopefully the developers of Neverwinter will get party control “right” but I doubt it, and I have no intention of finding out the hard way that they did not. I’ll be checking the reviews on this one thoroughly… and I **might** end up buying it if the single player experience ends up having something to offer.

Daggerdale on the other hand, I don’t think there’s any chance I’ll get that. The trailer is like a huge death sentence. It starts with the most cliché premise imaginable. So “ancient evil” stirs, you say? Really? And now some heroes are going unite against it? Couldn't you at have at least attempted to feign some small hint of originality in the opening of your trailer?? And then there’s slow and cumbersome battle sequences (sorry Atari, but the dramatic music did not sufficiently distract me from seeing your game). They “show off” some clumsy looking spells. And oh, golly, I get to fight against skeletons and golems? Like I’ve done in hundreds of other games prior? Is this really the most interesting stuff you have to show me? Could you be any more obvious that your game is just another soulless undertaking meant to extract money from a supposedly mindless consumer?

Eh-hem… I pardon me. I think I got on a soapbox there for a moment.

 

D&D pretty much died when they made 4th edition. Since the edition is more or less based on WoW, thats the kind of d&d games we can expect in the future.

 

When I 1st read that a Daggerdale game was coming our way, Iw as thinking, "YES!!!" I loved playing through the modules and participating in Dales Campaings via PnP. But the trailer is not very appealing to say the least.

 

I have no background with Daggerdale, so there's no nostalgia in the name for me. Perhaps ancient evil stirring is a great intro for the longtime fans of this module, but these days that's a pretty stale intro for a new game.

 

Aaahw... thats too bad. Never looked into the 4 ed rules, but I didn't like the 3 or 3.5, or both so guess 4 isn't any good either.

"Any new d&d game must use current rules" <--- I really hate this, I wish somehow some developers would make a game on some updated/polished 2 or was it 2.5 ed rules? whatever bg/bg2 was based on, that is.

And of course not in the souless NWN-style engine, probably not any such 3d engine.
Maybe if they, you know, made a slight difference to rules or game, whatever - they'd be able to circumvent any copyright issues.

Or maybe I just want to play BG2 again, who knows. Is it really impossible to make a good crpg these days?

 

Well, if someone could make great D&D CRPG, I'm sure I could more than learn to live with 4ED rules. I'm not a big fan of them, based on my somewhat limited knowledge. I find it odd that warriors can, for whatever reason, heal themselves. But give me a good, quality game with an amazing, immersive story, and I'll show you a gamer that's running with self healing warriors.

 

I suspect a 4th edition crpg would be very very easy. Spellcasters (for some reason) regains all their spells after each fight. I think characters heals very quickly too (if i remember correctly). If that had been the case in say...baldur`s gate 2, I am sure alot of the dungeons would have been a walkover.

 

True, but that's not really any different than Dragon Age. "Mana" is regained very quickly after a fight, as are hitpoints. It works well in that game in my opinion, and is a license to make individual encounters tougher. In some ways it's more fun this way, as your casters can blast away with everything they've got in just about every fight, instead of being great for a fight or two and inching toward becoming useless until a resting opportunity presents itself. And in 4ED, because there is no mana, you can't cast your spells more often during encounter than you have prepared for, so in that regard it's actually more restrictive than Dragon Age.

My point is, I think it could still make for a fun game.

 

I don't know if it qualifies as D&D but Knights of the Chalice 2 is in production

 

Don't give 4th ed. too bad of a reputation. I play 4e and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes warriors can heal themselves, once a battle for a limited amount and it takes their whole turn. It's not even close to replacing a healer.

Spellcasters regain some of their spells after battle, not always all of them. However, a spellcaster will never run out of spells, it's true. That doesn't mean they'll always be useful: a wizard just casting magic missile over and over again isn't as good as it was in prior editions. They'll need their higher level spells to make a ready contribution to the party. But wizards have changed rolls slightly in 4e from damage dealers to complete control. They can still deal a lot of area damage, but their main focus is slowing/shifting/stunning/disabling opponents.

The tactics are still there in 4e, but it is certainly more similar to dragon age than to baldur's gate.

4e campaigns are far from a cake walk, an allegory: my parties have come close to death many a time. We were about 8th level, I was playing a dragonborn sorcerer focusing on close ranged spells (think burning hands, sunfire, etc.) who charges headlong into most things. The rest of the party was: a thrikreen barbarian who does tons of damage (and looks awesome), a halfling rogue, a human cleric and a human wizard. Our quest was to enter a floating pyramid and figure out how to destroy it: we found an altar in a glade and shortly thereafter were teleported up into the pyramid. We had a few tough encounters but nothing too hard. Then we were approached by the ghost of an elven king who had done some bad stuff (abusing his citizens mostly). He was eventually killed and cursed to spend eternity in this pyramid. The only way to free him, thereby destroying the pyramid, was to kill him three times.
A bit later after a few more story encounters and a head-collecting ettin (our halfing rogue ended up cutting off his head and lugging it around for a few rooms before getting tired of the hassle), we came across a room with a big sand pit covering most of the floor and a spellcaster looking guy on the other side of the room. I won't detail the whole battle, which was quite long, but it ended with two shambling mounds coming out of the pit and the spellcaster constantly dazing us. I finished off one shambling mound from inside of it (causing me to dramatically roleplay a shout of freedom and his internal explosion) We were all on the opposite side of the room by that time except for the cleric. The thief was inside the other shambling mound, the barbarian was dazed and both the wizard and myself were out of spells. We made the tactical choice to run away, as there was nothing we could do to save the rogue.
The cleric ended up running back the way we came. The wizard and I ended up running a different direction, which lead to a room that was enchanted to look like a forest. We settled upon the brilliant plan of building a house and living there in peace, until the barbarian burst through the doors (having knocked out the spellcaster and then escaping). He proceeded to yell at us.
We eventually went back and managed to get the rogue's bones so that we could resurrect her, but it certainly was a hard fight! Having unlimited acid orbs and magic missiles did not save us in the slightest.

 

I ended up playing IWD2 again (never finished it before) and its quite fun.

On mmos: I read someone here mentioning that "not playing" mmo's was a principle. Well, I think im gonna adopt that principle, I found myself agreeing wholly even though I didn't read his explanation to why. I can just imagine the positive effects it can have.
I used to play wow, for about a year, then was bored. In december I bought FFXIV (very cheap) despite all the warnings i read. I must tell you, the "warnings" was not exaggerated in the slightest, in fact, the wrongness of this game (at least for now) is too great for words.
At least its free to play indefinitely, but I feel kind of disappointed because of the "FF" title, which I have enjoyed most of its members and have good memories of.