Daggers out
The hack ‘n’ slash past of D&D is littered with both clones and happy memories
There’s an umber hulk in the room that we haven’t been addressing. The vast majority of celebrated D&D games have been developed for PC and only belatedly ported to PlayStation. As such, they bear the hallmarks of their original platform: a slow pace; an isometric perspective; and an awful lot of tiny boxes filled with text and numbers. While you can have a wonderful time with any of them on a telly screen, it’s not wrong to want an adaptation that plays to the traditional strengths of PlayStation: speed; immediacy; and an undeniable sense of cinema.
Game developers have been working towards that end for decades now, with mixed results. There’s no
“Demon Stone filled the screen with clanging swords and marauding trolls in heightened siege scenarios.”
clear and obvious way to turn dice rolls and character sheets into flowing action, but with Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (PS2, 2001, rereleased 2021 for PS5 and PS4), Interplay happened upon a formula that clicked.
Similarities to the other Baldur’s Gate end with the backdrop. After arriving in the city of the title, you’re sent into a cellar by Jennifer Hale to clear out the rats, before stumbling into the sewers to fight thieves, and the crypts to smash skeletons, and then through a portal to kill drow, and so on. This momentum and simplicity made the original Dark Alliance a hit on its release – that and the fact that it made tactile use of the DualShock 2 via straightforward melee mechanics. Rarely have clay pots cracked open with such a satisfying crash.
A dwindling Black Isle handled the sequel directly, with diminished results. And if you played Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale in 2012, only the PS3-era light pooled beneath the torch brackets hinted that a full decade had passed since Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. The formula remained untweaked, and when Diablo 3 arrived on consoles a couple of years later, there was no reason to return to any hack ‘n’ slash pretenders.
NEW ALLIANCE
When Dark Alliance was rebooted in 2021, the results were less reminiscent of its namesake than 2004’s Demon Stone (PS2). Both games pulled heavily from the storytelling of RA Salvatore, slotting adventures in the gaps between the bestselling author’s existing works, and enlisting the man himself as an advisor. For Demon Stone, Salvatore even wrote the script, plotting the scrapes of an unlikely trio of new characters – fighter Rannek, sorcerer Illius, and half-drow rogue Zhai - and weaving their stories into the novels he was writing at the time.
Demon Stone’s other draw was its development talent, Stormfront Studios having put together a popular Two Towers adaptation in time for the release of Peter Jackson’s movie. While Rannek was no replacement for Aragorn, Demon Stone recreated much of the same drama in the Forgotten Realms setting, filling the screen with
clanging swords and marauding trolls in heightened siege scenarios.
Today, 2021’s Dark Alliance is your best bet for a followup to Demon Stone, and for a hands-on D&D spectacle of any kind. Rather than give Drizzt another fleeting cameo, Tuque Games stuck Salvatore’s drow hero front and centre alongside his closest pals, and had them engage in close combat with gobby goblins beneath the mountains of Icewind Dale. Thanks to the modern business of blocking, dodging and parrying, Dark Alliance is a much deeper battler than its predecessors – and unlike in the RPGs, you get to run a sword through a verbeeg named Gutnir Widebelly yourself, rather than directing somebody else to do it.