Drakan: The Ancients' Gates
Rynn and Arokh have packed up and headed to consoles. See how Surreal Software's first PS2 effort fares.
Published: March 18, 2002
A couple years back, I piled into a car with a few of my best friends and began the road trip to end all road trips down to LA for the biggest event in gaming: E3. The trip itself (part of which can still be read here, the rest has since been deleted) was almost worth the time spent, but it was my first E3, and I was in awe. Aside from being literally glued to the Eidos booth and the endless parade of hotties they'd hired, I didn't spend much time at any one booth, as I was too busy wandering aimlessly from booth to booth wide-eyed and awe-struck.
During one of my scheduled trips to the Eidos booth, however, my attention was snared by a girl dressed up is Rynn, the female lead in a game called Drakan: Order of the Flame, kicked out by then-unknown PC developer Surreal software (who I learned had offices in Fremont, just minutes away from where I would later live). They had sent around the Rynn look-alike around to entice people to try out the multiplayer dragonback deathmatches that the game boasted. I did, of course, and promptly had by butt handed to me by a Surreal employee. This is was my first experience with Drakan.
Unfortunately, I never had a chance to really play the full game. I had run through the intro a few times, but it never really seemed to hook me. The combat was fun, and varied, but it was missing that certain "something" to really hook me. Whatever that something was, Surreal filled barrelfuls of it and threw it into the sequel. Despite some serious bugs (more on that later), Drakan: The Ancients' Gates has a convincing storyline, a well thought out combat interface and great character designs that draw you in even as you curse the men who created them.
I'm all for a long game. In fact, I think in almost every case, if you're going to pay $50, you should get a good 20-25 hours of solid gameplay. Obviously, some games are good in short bursts, and others need much more time with which to unfurl their story elements, but you should at least have a couple days' worth of solid gaming fun your first time around with a game. At last count, Drakan took me somewhere around 40+ hours to beat. For an action game, that's fantastic, and completely justifies the purchase price – that is, if it's a good game. Drakan is indeed good, and it makes that $50 you just spent feel like money well spent; if you can see past some glaring flaws.
Drakan picks up where the first game left off, directly after the events that sent Rynn's friends and family to the grave, her village burned to ashes along with a sizeable chunk of her world. The world of Drakan is a war-torn place, and the only standing major civilization is Surdana, a fortress that managed to survive the wars largely unscathed. With monsters on the rise, and advancing hordes from a multitude of angles, the only hope for humanity's survival is to reactivate four ancient gates that will summon the Dragon Mother Mala-Shae, who will awaken the other sleeping dragons around the world. The only thing that can turn the gates back on, however, is a Elder Dragon, who we luckily have in Arokh, the dragon Rynn was bonded with accidentally at the start of the first game. The two share a soul now, and as Rynn is a knight of The Order of the Flame, it's her job to protect and preserve what's left of humanity. Thus begins your quest to awaken the Dragon Mother and bring peace to the land.
Essentially, that's it for the storyline. Your main goal is to use Arokh to reactivate the four gates scattered throughout the world of Drakan. Of course, if it was as easy as flying up and just flicking a switch, there wouldn't be much of a game. Instead, there's almost always an elaborate series of events that must take place as you help drive back the hordes of monsters that threaten to eke out the last remaining pockets of civilization still cropped up around the gates. Each gate, then, takes on average about 10 hours to clear out and activate, give or take a few hours, depending on whether or not you decide to embark on the rather lengthy and interesting side quests. Your journey is a varied one, allowing you to explore a nice variety of different environments, from snowy peaks to sun-bleached desert to lush green fields to entire worlds high in the sky. Whatever you may say about Drakan, you can't say it doesn't try to paint a big world.
One of the biggest problems I had with the first game was that it didn't quite feel right on foot. In the air, the keyboard and mouse were perfect, and Arokh was an agile, graceful instrument of airborne warfare. For the PS2 version, it seems things have been flipped. While on foot, Rynn controls perfectly with the DualShock 2, which seems made for her movements. Sword combos are executed effortlessly, and moving her around is done almost without thinking. Surreal even built in a basic character recognition system for spell summons, so painting a lightning bolt with her left hand will reward you with the lightning spell (provided you bought it, of course).
While on Arokh, however, the movement seems klutzy and unresponsive, particularly at lower altitudes. Part of the problem springs from the fact that objects littering the countryside, be they trees or entire castles, are usually walled off by bounding boxes that are larger than their visual representations would indicate. You'll often find yourself slamming into what appears to be empty space, hung up on the invisible corner of a building's bounding box, or caught between what appears to be a space big enough between two trees to take off or land. These issues, obviously aren't prevalent when higher up in mid-air, which is where you spend most of your time on dragonback anyway, but eventually you do have to land, and that can be more strenuous an effort than necessary at times.
Graphically, Drakan has a quiet way of wowing you. Other than the spell effects (which I'll get to in a bit), there's not a lot thrown on the screen to wow you. The Riot Engine from the first game has gotten a PS2 upgrade, and the differences over the PC prequel show. For one, nearly everything is bathed in a healthy coating of high-res textures, with the only exception being the terrain itself, which is understandable considering how much of it there is. Even the terrain is varied, with cracked and baked bare earth occupying parts of the desert, and a nice mix of snow-blanketed and frozen patches of ground in the mountain.
Interiors, too, look astounding, with tons of extras like beds and chairs, sacks of grain. The blacksmith shops are amazing, with their smoky insides (complete with light streaming through slits in window covers) brimming with thick volumetric fog. One blacksmith, tucked into the base of a windmill, actually had all the working gears and parts of the windmill next to him. There are plenty of games out there that waste polygons on making the most intricate walls ever, which is completely unnecessary. Instead, Surreal focused their time on making things look presentable with the general environments, then set about thickening them up with organic, natural looking torches and tables, gearworks for elevators, shoring up the sides of a mine with oddly-angled lumber. There's a lot of personality in the environments that's done in a very subtle way, so you never really pay specific attention to them, but every once in a while, the level of detail just hits you, impressing quietly.
The character models are fantastic, getting a significant boost in poly count and resulting detail. The Grull, the first monsters seen in the first game, show themselves early here as well, and the difference is astounding. It's the little details that impress, like kilts on monsters, spinning drill-like clubs, and of course massive nipple rings (I won't tell you on who, though). The polygons on each of the models are well-used, too, giving the illusion of muscle and mass, or used to detail things like horns or jewelry. And again, it's all painted with a healthy helping of clean, sharp texture work to help accentuate the details.
Ah, and then there's the particles. I don't think I've seen a game yet that really takes advantage of the PS2's ability to generate an absolutely enormous number of particles like Drakan does. All of the spell effects are brimming with unique little animations and particle accompaniments. As an example, when using the healing spell, dozens of bright blue balls of light enter and then explode from Rynn, while a second group swirls and coalesces around her in busy, quick arcs before finally "sticking" to a point in space and slowly fading out. Very late in the game, I remember pulling a level and a jaw-droppingly huge amount of tiny particles began slowly sink earthward from above. There were quite literally hundreds of thousands of particles all dropping slowly. The coolest part was that they weren't just there for show; as they drifted lazily down into a massive pit, small patches of them would stick to an invisible platform, thus illuminating your way.
For the most part, the animations for all the different characters and actions are well crafted. When something's in motion, whether it's swinging a massive club your way or tilling up the ground with a hoe, it looks good, with plenty of fluidity and smoothness, but there are some minor snags. It appears that just about everything in the game is actively streamed from the disc, from textures to environments to models to speech to, yes, animation. This can create small glitches, such as the time after loading up a game I took off on dragon back and watched with amusement as I soared through the sky stuck for a few moments on all fours as if I was still walking along the ground. Luckily, the level of interaction in the cutscenes is incredible. Subtle, nuanced motions like the wave of a hand or a pat on the shoulder of another person is just right. There's something a little indescribable about it, but unless done just right, when two rendered characters interact, there's no illusion of contact, even when it's something that's motion-captured with real-life objects. A person's hand might pat a shoulder, but it doesn't ever quite make proper contact. Drakan has the contact, and it helps breathe life into characters that already have plenty of personality thanks to some great voice acting.
For whatever reason, fantasy settings usually mean ample presence of one of three accents: a) British, b) Scottish, or c) Some combination thereof. Drakan follows firmly in those tried-and-true footsteps, with characters that have regal, faintly English, Irish or Scots accents. This isn't a bad thing, of course, since for the most part, the voice actors that donated their pipes to fleshing these characters out did a superb job. Even chance encounters like farmers tending to a crop or bar flies knocking back a couple tankards of ale have plenty of aural punch. Likewise, the enemies run the gamut of reactionary responses. Scavengers snarl with an other-worldly gurgle, Wartocs bark sentences in broken English or mutter in their native tongue. Half-Men cough out gruff, foreign quips, and all the boss enemies blend their species' accents with English, indicating a little more intelligence than the throngs of underlings you just sliced through.
The effects also stand out, especially if you take the time to slip on a pair of headphones. Sounds like Rynn's feet crunching into the snow are perfect, or the clang of a sword on metal, wood or stone. The music that slowly peeks in from time to time often goes unnoticed, transitioning from light orchestrated background movements to terse, excited bounces when engaged in combat. One of the last big ways to spot high production value is seeing how much effort went into the music and how it reflects on and reacts to the game, and Drakan drips of good presentation and production.
Drakan is a bit buggy (there's actually a bug where you can lose Arokh for the rest of the game - a disaster if you've only got one savegame slot - which has since been fixed for the PAL version), and it requires a lot from a gamer (you must have a memory card to play, and one with 1500KB per save free at that), but if you're willing to look past some annoyances, you'll find a long, detailed and interesting quest, even if it does feel like things were rushed at the end. The dialogue is intelligent, the side quests actually help thicken up the feel of a fantasy world, and the graphics and sound have a subtle way of reeling you in without knowing. If you're looking for a good place to spend $50 bucks, and you don't mind a couple potholes along the way, you've found it.
During one of my scheduled trips to the Eidos booth, however, my attention was snared by a girl dressed up is Rynn, the female lead in a game called Drakan: Order of the Flame, kicked out by then-unknown PC developer Surreal software (who I learned had offices in Fremont, just minutes away from where I would later live). They had sent around the Rynn look-alike around to entice people to try out the multiplayer dragonback deathmatches that the game boasted. I did, of course, and promptly had by butt handed to me by a Surreal employee. This is was my first experience with Drakan.
Unfortunately, I never had a chance to really play the full game. I had run through the intro a few times, but it never really seemed to hook me. The combat was fun, and varied, but it was missing that certain "something" to really hook me. Whatever that something was, Surreal filled barrelfuls of it and threw it into the sequel. Despite some serious bugs (more on that later), Drakan: The Ancients' Gates has a convincing storyline, a well thought out combat interface and great character designs that draw you in even as you curse the men who created them.
I'm all for a long game. In fact, I think in almost every case, if you're going to pay $50, you should get a good 20-25 hours of solid gameplay. Obviously, some games are good in short bursts, and others need much more time with which to unfurl their story elements, but you should at least have a couple days' worth of solid gaming fun your first time around with a game. At last count, Drakan took me somewhere around 40+ hours to beat. For an action game, that's fantastic, and completely justifies the purchase price – that is, if it's a good game. Drakan is indeed good, and it makes that $50 you just spent feel like money well spent; if you can see past some glaring flaws.
Drakan picks up where the first game left off, directly after the events that sent Rynn's friends and family to the grave, her village burned to ashes along with a sizeable chunk of her world. The world of Drakan is a war-torn place, and the only standing major civilization is Surdana, a fortress that managed to survive the wars largely unscathed. With monsters on the rise, and advancing hordes from a multitude of angles, the only hope for humanity's survival is to reactivate four ancient gates that will summon the Dragon Mother Mala-Shae, who will awaken the other sleeping dragons around the world. The only thing that can turn the gates back on, however, is a Elder Dragon, who we luckily have in Arokh, the dragon Rynn was bonded with accidentally at the start of the first game. The two share a soul now, and as Rynn is a knight of The Order of the Flame, it's her job to protect and preserve what's left of humanity. Thus begins your quest to awaken the Dragon Mother and bring peace to the land.
Essentially, that's it for the storyline. Your main goal is to use Arokh to reactivate the four gates scattered throughout the world of Drakan. Of course, if it was as easy as flying up and just flicking a switch, there wouldn't be much of a game. Instead, there's almost always an elaborate series of events that must take place as you help drive back the hordes of monsters that threaten to eke out the last remaining pockets of civilization still cropped up around the gates. Each gate, then, takes on average about 10 hours to clear out and activate, give or take a few hours, depending on whether or not you decide to embark on the rather lengthy and interesting side quests. Your journey is a varied one, allowing you to explore a nice variety of different environments, from snowy peaks to sun-bleached desert to lush green fields to entire worlds high in the sky. Whatever you may say about Drakan, you can't say it doesn't try to paint a big world.
One of the biggest problems I had with the first game was that it didn't quite feel right on foot. In the air, the keyboard and mouse were perfect, and Arokh was an agile, graceful instrument of airborne warfare. For the PS2 version, it seems things have been flipped. While on foot, Rynn controls perfectly with the DualShock 2, which seems made for her movements. Sword combos are executed effortlessly, and moving her around is done almost without thinking. Surreal even built in a basic character recognition system for spell summons, so painting a lightning bolt with her left hand will reward you with the lightning spell (provided you bought it, of course).
While on Arokh, however, the movement seems klutzy and unresponsive, particularly at lower altitudes. Part of the problem springs from the fact that objects littering the countryside, be they trees or entire castles, are usually walled off by bounding boxes that are larger than their visual representations would indicate. You'll often find yourself slamming into what appears to be empty space, hung up on the invisible corner of a building's bounding box, or caught between what appears to be a space big enough between two trees to take off or land. These issues, obviously aren't prevalent when higher up in mid-air, which is where you spend most of your time on dragonback anyway, but eventually you do have to land, and that can be more strenuous an effort than necessary at times.
Graphically, Drakan has a quiet way of wowing you. Other than the spell effects (which I'll get to in a bit), there's not a lot thrown on the screen to wow you. The Riot Engine from the first game has gotten a PS2 upgrade, and the differences over the PC prequel show. For one, nearly everything is bathed in a healthy coating of high-res textures, with the only exception being the terrain itself, which is understandable considering how much of it there is. Even the terrain is varied, with cracked and baked bare earth occupying parts of the desert, and a nice mix of snow-blanketed and frozen patches of ground in the mountain.
Interiors, too, look astounding, with tons of extras like beds and chairs, sacks of grain. The blacksmith shops are amazing, with their smoky insides (complete with light streaming through slits in window covers) brimming with thick volumetric fog. One blacksmith, tucked into the base of a windmill, actually had all the working gears and parts of the windmill next to him. There are plenty of games out there that waste polygons on making the most intricate walls ever, which is completely unnecessary. Instead, Surreal focused their time on making things look presentable with the general environments, then set about thickening them up with organic, natural looking torches and tables, gearworks for elevators, shoring up the sides of a mine with oddly-angled lumber. There's a lot of personality in the environments that's done in a very subtle way, so you never really pay specific attention to them, but every once in a while, the level of detail just hits you, impressing quietly.
The character models are fantastic, getting a significant boost in poly count and resulting detail. The Grull, the first monsters seen in the first game, show themselves early here as well, and the difference is astounding. It's the little details that impress, like kilts on monsters, spinning drill-like clubs, and of course massive nipple rings (I won't tell you on who, though). The polygons on each of the models are well-used, too, giving the illusion of muscle and mass, or used to detail things like horns or jewelry. And again, it's all painted with a healthy helping of clean, sharp texture work to help accentuate the details.
Ah, and then there's the particles. I don't think I've seen a game yet that really takes advantage of the PS2's ability to generate an absolutely enormous number of particles like Drakan does. All of the spell effects are brimming with unique little animations and particle accompaniments. As an example, when using the healing spell, dozens of bright blue balls of light enter and then explode from Rynn, while a second group swirls and coalesces around her in busy, quick arcs before finally "sticking" to a point in space and slowly fading out. Very late in the game, I remember pulling a level and a jaw-droppingly huge amount of tiny particles began slowly sink earthward from above. There were quite literally hundreds of thousands of particles all dropping slowly. The coolest part was that they weren't just there for show; as they drifted lazily down into a massive pit, small patches of them would stick to an invisible platform, thus illuminating your way.
For the most part, the animations for all the different characters and actions are well crafted. When something's in motion, whether it's swinging a massive club your way or tilling up the ground with a hoe, it looks good, with plenty of fluidity and smoothness, but there are some minor snags. It appears that just about everything in the game is actively streamed from the disc, from textures to environments to models to speech to, yes, animation. This can create small glitches, such as the time after loading up a game I took off on dragon back and watched with amusement as I soared through the sky stuck for a few moments on all fours as if I was still walking along the ground. Luckily, the level of interaction in the cutscenes is incredible. Subtle, nuanced motions like the wave of a hand or a pat on the shoulder of another person is just right. There's something a little indescribable about it, but unless done just right, when two rendered characters interact, there's no illusion of contact, even when it's something that's motion-captured with real-life objects. A person's hand might pat a shoulder, but it doesn't ever quite make proper contact. Drakan has the contact, and it helps breathe life into characters that already have plenty of personality thanks to some great voice acting.
For whatever reason, fantasy settings usually mean ample presence of one of three accents: a) British, b) Scottish, or c) Some combination thereof. Drakan follows firmly in those tried-and-true footsteps, with characters that have regal, faintly English, Irish or Scots accents. This isn't a bad thing, of course, since for the most part, the voice actors that donated their pipes to fleshing these characters out did a superb job. Even chance encounters like farmers tending to a crop or bar flies knocking back a couple tankards of ale have plenty of aural punch. Likewise, the enemies run the gamut of reactionary responses. Scavengers snarl with an other-worldly gurgle, Wartocs bark sentences in broken English or mutter in their native tongue. Half-Men cough out gruff, foreign quips, and all the boss enemies blend their species' accents with English, indicating a little more intelligence than the throngs of underlings you just sliced through.
The effects also stand out, especially if you take the time to slip on a pair of headphones. Sounds like Rynn's feet crunching into the snow are perfect, or the clang of a sword on metal, wood or stone. The music that slowly peeks in from time to time often goes unnoticed, transitioning from light orchestrated background movements to terse, excited bounces when engaged in combat. One of the last big ways to spot high production value is seeing how much effort went into the music and how it reflects on and reacts to the game, and Drakan drips of good presentation and production.
Drakan is a bit buggy (there's actually a bug where you can lose Arokh for the rest of the game - a disaster if you've only got one savegame slot - which has since been fixed for the PAL version), and it requires a lot from a gamer (you must have a memory card to play, and one with 1500KB per save free at that), but if you're willing to look past some annoyances, you'll find a long, detailed and interesting quest, even if it does feel like things were rushed at the end. The dialogue is intelligent, the side quests actually help thicken up the feel of a fantasy world, and the graphics and sound have a subtle way of reeling you in without knowing. If you're looking for a good place to spend $50 bucks, and you don't mind a couple potholes along the way, you've found it.