Year: November 26 2010 city
Genre: RPG / 3D / 3rd Person
Developer: Radon Labs
System requirements for maximum visual quality in Drakensang: River of Time recommended by the gameGPU website:
The minimum
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 2.4 GHz above
RAM: 2 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 512 MBRAM Radeon HD 3850 or GS GeForce 8800 above
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 7 GB free space
Effective
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 2.6 GHz above
Memory: 3 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 512 MB RAM Radeon HD 4830 or GeForce GT 9600 above
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 7 GB free space
Optimal
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400 3.2 GHz above
RAM: 3 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 512 MB RAM Radeon HD 4770 or GeForce 8800 GTX above
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 7 GB free space
Review: Playability
The magical world of Aventuria is on the verge of a bloody civil war. A conspiracy is brewing in the Empire, in which influential nobles, knights and powerful magicians are involved. The Empire will be under attack if there is no one to challenge them. A new exciting journey through the magical world of Aventuria. The action will take place twenty-three years before the events that took place in the first part of the fantasy gaming saga Drakensang: The Dark Eye, based on the popular German board game.
Fans of role-playing games in the fantasy style will find a huge fairy-tale world open to exploration, meetings with both familiar characters and new heroes and villains, incredible adventures and secrets, bloody battles with a variety of opponents. Thanks to the functional character editor, the player will create a unique hero, while the role-playing system will offer more than twenty unique character classes and a huge selection of specializations.
Wide possibilities for the characters to interact with each other will allow you to turn a group of the hero’s associates into a well-coordinated fighting team, while it is necessary to qualitatively balance all the skills of the characters used. As events unfold, the player will face many unexpected plot twists, his actions and decisions will affect the course of the history of all Aventuria, so you need to be careful with your actions and statements.
We invite you to evaluate part of the game walkthrough of Drakensang: River of Time, where you can see for yourself the quality of this product:
Gothic this time left its canons and grew into a new genre called “Arcania”. Two Worlds 2 also somewhat retreated into itself and works for fans of its series, and Dragon Age 2 will be released only next year. So everyone who misses “pure-blooded” RPGs can safely start playing Drakensang: River of Time.
Review: Graphics
Drakensang: River of Time, even despite its not the most technologically advanced filling, has a very nice visual design. The locations are varied and colorful, the characters are well detailed and animated, but, of course, the game is still far from the level of Dragon Age: Origins.
The game is based on the Nebula Device graphics engine. Back in 2002, at the beginning of the creation of the computer game “Project Nomads,” the developers of Radon Labs were faced with a choice: license third-party technology for the game, or create their own. Subsequently, it was decided to develop our own game engine from scratch specifically for the game. As a distribution route, the company chose the free MIT license, which gives game developers on this engine the right to freely use the technology in their projects and independently modify game files.
When developing the Nebula Device, the main focus was on optimal performance with large open spaces, sky rendering effects and long draw distances. Now the Nebula Device is not only used in all Radon Labs games, but also in numerous third-party developments.
The engine is written in the C++ programming language and supports several scripting languages such as Tcl, Lua, Python, Ruby, Java and the .NET Framework. It is possible to connect another scripting language using plug-ins. The rendering engine operates in two modes (DirectX and OpenGL), which ensures cross-platform compatibility.
Linux, Mac OS X, IRIX and Microsoft Windows operating systems are supported, as well as the Xbox game console.
Graphic formats supported for textures are DDS, BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG and some others. The openness of graphics formats gives some creative freedom to enthusiasts developing modifications for games based on the Nebula Device engine. Supported 3D model formats are NVX, NXNUMXD and OBJ. Nebula Device also allows you to use shader effects, skeletal animation, particle systems, dynamic shadows and post-effects. The SDK also includes additional utilities, such as the program for controlling light sources “Light Control Tool”; The source code archive can also be downloaded separately.
Criticism was leveled at the insufficient amount of documentation for this engine, as well as the lack of a built-in physics engine (as a result, the developer must integrate it into the project himself). Three generations of the game engine are available for free download.
Review: Resource-intensive game
For Drakensang: River of Time you will need a Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 2.6 GHz processor and 3 GB of RAM. The game is a little unoptimized in terms of CPU resource allocation, but this does not affect the overall gameplay in any way, since it provided a drawdown of at least 40 frames…
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Hardware configuration |
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Processors |
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550@ 4.25 GHz cache L2 12 MB Intel® Core™ [email protected] GHz cache L3 8 MB Intel® Core™ [email protected] GHz cache L3 8 MB |
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motherboards |
Maximus II Formula socket LGA775 product provided by Asus MSI X58 Pro socket LGA1366 product provided by the company MSI MSI P55-GD55 socket LGA1156 product provided by the company MSI |
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Memory |
GOODRAM PLAY 1600MHz (8-8-8-24) product provided by the company GOODRAM GOODRAM Pro 2000MHz (8-8-8-29) product provided by the company GOODRAM |
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Video Cards |
GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB |
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Hard disks |
3×2 RAID0 Western Digital Caivar WD2500GL 250 GB, 7200 rpm, SATA 3 Gbit/s |
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Power Supplies |
FSP GROUP EVEREST 800W 2xSeaSonic S12D 850 Silver 850W product provided by the company SeaSonic |
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System software and drivers |
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Operating system |
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64 |
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DirectX |
DirectX 11 |
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Platform Driver |
Intel INF Chipset Update Utility 9.1.0.1012 |
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Graphics driver |
Nvidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 260.99 AMD Catalyst 10.10 |
The game is extremely unoptimized in terms of consumption of CPU resources, so we performed the test in a place where the influence of the processor is minimal and video cards are given 100%. This time the minimum FPS had to be lowered in tests… Less productive video cards to the level GeForce GTS 250 and Radeon HD 4830 tested based on the Core 2 Quad Q9550 processor, and more productive ones based on Core™ i7 processors.
Our video cards are tested generally in all different screen sizes, and you can evaluate how your video card behaves relative to other modern solutions in almost all different gaming screen sizes.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1024×768
At a resolution of 1024×768, the game Drakensang: River of Time will require video cards of the Radeon HD 3850 or GeForce 8800 GS level and higher.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1280×1024
At a higher and more comfortable resolution of 1280×1024, the game will require video cards starting from the Radeon HD 4830 or GeForce 9600 GT level and higher.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1680×1050
With a resolution of 1680×1050, the required minimum will consist of video cards of the Radeon HD 4750 or GeForce 8800 GT level.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080
And finally, with an HD resolution of 1920×1080, players will need to acquire video cards of the Radeon HD 4770 or GeForce 8800 GTX level. Based on the purchase of video cards specifically for this game, then currently the Radeon HD 5750 or GeForce GTS 250 look most preferable.
Conclusion: Drakensang: The Dark Eye is an exemplary example of the treatment of an RPG classic from Germany. The performance of the configurations in the game is tolerable, but the lack of optimization in terms of CPU resource allocation is somewhat disappointing, although this does not in any way affect the loss of performance, nor, in principle, does it affect the gameplay itself.
