I remember Dark Alliance as a fun little diversion, but an era-defining title? Definitely not. Of course that’s subjective. Same as the Fallout game, it was a fun little game but nothing special. Never picked up champions of norrath because Everquest leaves a foul taste in my mouth to this very day.
I don’t think there had ever been an isometric ARPG that controlled well using a controller before. It was ground breaking. Diablo 2 was amazing on PC around that time, of course, but Dark Alliance showed that you could do a fun ARPG using a dual stick controller.
And of course, it helped that the game was gorgeous, and the same screen coop made it super special.
You’re totally right about that. I just had a different experience than yours, coming from PC gaming I wasn’t blown away.
I don’t know about era-defining, but I had more fun with Dark Alliance than I did with Bioware’s RPG.
Ditto, but then this is also (I assume) why I’ve never been able to understand Halo’s popularity. “First successful implementation of a beloved PC genre but with a controller” just doesn’t carry much heft with me.
Dark Alliance was a fun little couch co-op game. It had none of the impact of the PC game for me, which at the time blew me away by actually feeling at least a bit like playing a PnP game of D&D.
Not sure what to make of this…
I remember playing Darkstone on the PS1. I thought it was well recieved.
This group released a pretty poor original trailer if I recall. This one doesn’t seem that much better.
In a way it is correction on Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, which had jackshit to do with Baldur’s Gate. In fact it made talking about Baldur’s Gate more confusing at the time because some people thought I was talking about Dark Alliance.
It was set in Baldur’s Gate, wasn’t it? But yeah, nothing to do with the seminal PC CRPGs.
It was also pretty popular and financially successful; enough to spawn a sequel, and get ported over to other systems. I played it on the Gamecube co-op with my daughter and had a blast. Never got to play the second.
Developer Snow Blind also made Lord of the Rings: War in the North, which I recall had similar gameplay (I didn’t play it, but read about it at the time).
No local co-op? Pass.
Not just those. There was also two Everquest licensed Champions of Norrath games, a Fallout licensed game (which I mostly remember for the sole black character going “Sheeeeit” every two or three attacks), and a Justice League game. Plus it was the engine inXile used for their Bard’s Tale remake.
(I don’t know how many of those were done by the original team - they apparently licensed out the engine. But all the ones I mention except Bard’s Tale were Dark Alliance style ARPGs.)
I think that team did the original Dark Alliance (but not the sequel), the first Champions of Norrath and the Lords of the Ring: War in the North game. The Dark Alliance sequel, the Fallout game were done by an internal at Interplay IIRC. I played the Dark Alliance sequel for a bit, and it wasn’t very good.
A buddy of mine and I are HUGE War in the North fans and have always been bummed that you can’t play it on XBox One. This looks like it might scratch that same itch. Tentatively excited about this one.
“I’m to old for this shit”
The gameplay of War in the North was way more third-person action combat with combat finishers and the like, so maybe more like this new Dark Alliance, but nothing really like the old one at all.
Yes! I really liked that game. Unfortunately I ran into a bug towards the end that made the framerate tank so bad I couldn’t finish it on PC…
I thought they were a really talented studio. I think they were eventually folded into Monolith.
For those interested, this game is coming to XBox Gamepass, day one.
Looks like it’s also supporting Cross Platform play and Xbox Game Cloud play. So while I still think Couch Coop would have been nicer, potentially you could have someone playing on the game console, and someone else playing on a tablet via Game Cloud, or someone playing on a PC to get a coop experience.