Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale

Posted 1 year ago By kingquagmire - David Collins

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale stood to take the downloadable community by storm. It has been quite awhile since we last had a game sporting the legendary D&D license and and Daggerdale is the first to launch with the new 4th Edition rule set; one of the most easily adaptable versions to date. Unfortunately, the storm seems to have fizzled out before making landfall...

As noted, the game follows the 4th Edition rules of the classic tabletop game, so the first thing to be done once firing it up is to create a character. The options are fairly limited though, providing a human male fighter, a female elven rogue, a male halfling wizard and a male dwarvin cleric. After naming the character and assigning points into feats and powers, you are off and running. No options for making gender or class changes and not being able to re-roll ability scores is sure to be a bit of a bummer for the real role play enthusiasts out there. But, at least it’s a quick start into the journey, so that can’t be too bad, right?

Wrong. Unless, that is, you’re keen on re-treading well-worn territory. Daggerdale’s plot is an example of been-there-done-that at its finest. You (either solo or in a party of four, locally or online) need to head to the top of a tower to stop the big bad from taking over the land. Sure, fans of Faerun may be thrilled to journey through places in the Dalelands like the Mines of Tethyamar, but in all honesty, the representation here is as bland as any I’ve seen in any D&D game.

And that, my friends, is one of the biggest and most glaring problems I had with Daggerdale. It isn’t just the visuals, the entire package is uninspired and lackluster from beginning to end. A strikingly lack of variety of foes, dull sound design, a flat narrative...the whole thing barely hits par. The combat, while typical for hack-n-slash dungeon crawlers, becomes repetitive button mashing once you realize the enemies are all variants of only six different foes. The soundtrack is, simply put, generic. There’s only one small bit of voice work, the rest of the interaction is done via text while the NPCs grunt at you.

Worse yet, on top of a total vanilla package, the game is buggy. Really buggy. Daggerdale is plagued with characters walking through bits of the environment, others who float around like ghosts, and dead bodies that, instead of disappearing, freeze in place like some sort of morbid game of Red Light, Green Light. Sometimes equipment will randomly equip or unequip itself, or at other times players may find they can equip multiple pieces of the same type, i.e. at one point I had two shields equipped at the same time. Graphical anomalies like name plates of NPCs who are no longer there or phantom pieces of the environment that just disappear on their own do little to help things any.

Conclusion

It’s disappointing to see something that truly had a lot of promise turn out so poorly. Shallow role play opportunities, a barely passable presentation and narrative, and more bugs than you can shake a stick at makes it hard to justify the investment, not to mention the black eye it gives to the Dungeons & Dragons license (and owner Wizards of the Coast). When it was all said and done, you can’t help but feel like the game was rushed and haphazardly put together. Daggerdale could have been at the minimum a great appetizer for those awaiting the launch of Diablo III, especially for D&D fans. Instead, it ends up being a bland and buggy exercise in tedium.