Drakensang: The River of Time - Dev Diary #4

The fourth Drakensang: The River of Time dev diary is up at the official site, discussing the technical game design and the role of Technical Designers:

The base for the setting in our game is of course very well known and loved DSA cosmos from the Pen & Paper roleplay game of the same name. Because of that we have a complete roleplay game system as background that we can build our game world on. Although it brings certain problems along because it’s not possible to take over rules one-to-one from the Pen & Paper roleplay game to a computer game. We’ve tried that with “Drakensang” but had to realize quickly that it’s not possible because computer games run in speed as well as interaction fundamentally different.

And here is where our technical game designers appear to the scene. They are in charge of adjusting and optimizing the DSA rules so they’ll get suitable to be played on the computer. The maybe most symbolic example of such a modification: The computer is your game director. He even throws the dice for you and that hidden in the background. Even the dicing results stay hidden and will only be shown to you specifically at your demand if you belong to the ones who want to know. The ones of you who prefer to just play and experience the story without finding out to much about the mechanisms in the background can do that unobstructed.

Read the English version here and the German version here.

Thanks to Alrik, who also points to this article at Spiegel Online that says DraSa sold 600,000 units, with half in German and half internationally.