Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard

I remember there being a tiny amount of disappointment for me when Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard was revelead to be a real-time strategy game instead of another D&D RPG. And I totally missed the release of the game, as I was doing my military service in 2005.

And I guess in 2006 Dragonshard was already buried as a failure. At least I never saw it even mentioned anywhere until recently in one of TotalBiscuit's This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things videos on YouTube.

Dragonshard must have the fanciest installation menu I've ever seen in a game. The same theme continues with menus and loading screens. They really did put some effort into those, maybe to make up for the lack of content... The game features a seven-mission campaign for two of its three races (thus 14 missions in total); the Order of the Flame and the Lizardfolk. The third race can be played in skirmish and multiplayer games with the other two.

The game reminded me of Warcraft 3 but doesn't have the depth of its story -- everyone just wants dem dragonshards. Hero units are there like in Wc3 but they don't gain experience, instead the experience goes to leveling up captains, who then in turn summon soldiers for them; the higher level the captain, more soldiers it gets. D&D's d20 ruleset is not used at all, despite the game's license. Only thing Dragonshard has common with D&D are the units and their abilities, and the fact the game is set in the world of Eberron. Whose fan I am not (Forgotten Realms all the way), although I appreciated the Eberron lore the game provided.

Base building in Dragonshard is similar to Battle for Middle-Earth, complete with upgradable walls. I found it to be quite a chore to bring enemy bases down to the ground. And like in BfME, there are no builder units; your buildings produce gold automatically. Another resource needed are dragonshards, which rain down on the map in nodes from time to time and you must use your units to gather them. However, the dragonshards are added into the pool on the spot and no transportation is required.

Under each map is an underground map of equal size, which can be entered by your champions and ground-unit captains for dungeon crawling, which rewards loot and gold in addition to experience. It's a pretty nice feature but doesn't add that much.

There's also a reward shop where you can purchase gear for your champions between missions. The currency used to buy them, the rewards points, is gained for completing certain things in the missions like not allowing your units to die or not spending more than a set amount of gold. I found couple of these objectives to be quite challenging; completing the mission under 30 minutes and only training up a set amount of captains were impossible to achieve every time for me on normal difficulty.

The rewards are also slightly redundant; I found an ice hammer from the mission after which I finally had the points to purchase the most expensive item, a hammer too, for Lady Marryn, who I decided to be the best champion of the Order of the Flame because of her mass heal ability.

Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard is a decent RTS but it doesn't really bring anything new to the genre, of which I don't like much anyway (Dawn of War being the sole exception). How Atari billed Dragonshard is also bit questionable -- "the first D&D RTS experience" -- when Stronghold preceded it by a decade. [Wikipedia]

The game has a quite nice soundtrack, though. I especially like the one that can be heard in the video below.