LogFAQs > #953682063

Mead posted...

demand from a cult following will do that

It was almost certainly rushed out because, with the original announcement that Larian was working on BG3 (which feels a lot like BG in name only), a lot of old-school fans pointed out that they should have just revived the Dark Alliance franchise since in a lot of ways it meshes better with modern sensibilities in terms of gameplay.

With a lot of people talking up the old Dark Alliance games, someone in WotC or even higher up in Hasbro probably said "Man, we should rerelease that and try and cash in on this."

Either that, or since they were already working on what is essentially supposed to be "Dark Alliance 3" (which itself ironically has almost nothing to do with Dark Alliance and almost feels more like an Icewind Dale sequel), they figured a quick rerelease of the first two would be a nice, cheap way to get a bit of extra PR to help spur the hype for the new game.

WotC has been pushing real hard to get a bunch of D&D games into the pipeline while the popularity of the franchise is high again. We're probably going to see even more coming down the way soon.



Ferarri619 posted...

Can anyone tell me, how is the story? Is it good even if I'm unfamiliar with DnD/Baldur's Gate?

It's barely a story, and it's completely unrelated to the Baldur's Gate/BGII:Shadows of Amn/BGII:Throne of Bhaal games that were on PC.

The first Dark Alliance game is basically "You're a hero, there are bad guys, now go kill them." There's a bit more plot than that, but not much, and it's mostly self-contained in the game (so you don't really need to know much about the setting or the other games to understand it). It actually makes a nice, simplistic introduction to the setting if you're not familiar with the Forgotten Realms already (the Dark Alliance games were actually my first real introduction to the setting, and helped me get way more into it later). You basically start out playing as "Generic Fighter", "Generic Archer", or "Generic Sorceress", and you show up in the city of Baldur's Gate "for reasons". Then you get the cliched "go into the tavern basement and kill rats" starter quest, and then stuff happens.

The second Dark Alliance game has more story (though not a TON more, it's still a Diablo-clone hack-and-slash from 17 years ago), the five main characters are a bit more developed and interesting (and each gets their own unique sidequest), and the main bad guy is a little more robust, but it's mostly just a slight improvement on the original rather than a complete innovation.

If you've ever played the original Diablo games, I tend to think of the Dark Alliance games as sort of falling somewhere between the original Diablo and Diablo II in terms of both game and narrative complexity.
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