With its release now almost upon us (for those of you living in the US), Pocketgamer.co.uk fired off a set of questions to Lawrence Liberty, the game's producer at Atari.
Pocket Gamer: Clearly the D&D universe is not only vast but populated by very passionate fans. How daunting did the prospect of trying to cram that mythology into a UMD prove when starting the project?
Lawrence Liberty: This was a challenging project in a number of ways. The greatest design challenge in implementing the latest D&D rules on the PSP was finding a way to clearly present such rich, verbose source material in the limited screen real estate that the platform affords.
From a technical perspective, the multiplayer component proved the most difficult to execute. From a project management and quality-assurance standpoint, the sheer size and scope of the single-player campaign was intimidating. As you can see, it was not easy to cram all of this onto a UMD, but we succeeded.
DHGF: If you were to go look D&D Tactics up, you’d be wondering how I could enjoy it. The Metacritic rating is in the mid-fifties, only six out of over thirty reviews were positive, and the game quickly faded into obscurity. You can’t even find a complete walkthrough on the internet. Heck, I’ve only seen one that made it out of the first act! Clearly, this is not a popular game, so then why should I chose to write about it?
Because people got it wrong.
I thought the game did fairly well capturing 3rd Ed. Dungeons and Dragons. The only gripe I had with it was how cumbersome the menus were, but with all of the options and information and your disposal, it was something I could live with.
WorthPlaying writes:
"It's merely important to keep in mind that this title was designed for a particular variety of person, and if you are not in that target audience (D&D player who likes tactics games and owns a PSP), you should probably spend your hard-earned money elsewhere."
Score: 7.1/10
Even among videogames fans - who are hardly in a position to poke fun - the mention of Dungeons and Dragons conjures up an image of, well, nerds. It's not exactly a fair image; okay, so there are plenty of socially awkward and hygenically challenged virginal males who get a bit too excited about pen and paper role-playing, but there are plenty of perfectly nice, friendly, interesting people who enjoy the pastime as well.
No, really.
