Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance early gameplay screenshot from the pre-alpha

[Update]: Co-op focused Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance has now arrived, though not without trouble.

While Dungeons & Dragons licensed games were all over the place during the rise of PC RPGs, for some reason they have become pretty much extinct these days. A real shame given that the Dungeons & Dragons universe is a genuinely fun one to roam around in, especially when developers decide to set the action in some far-away place that's rarely ever explored.

With that in mind, I should be extremely happy to announce that Wizards of the Coast and Tuque Games have partnered up to develop a Dungeons & Dragons action-RPG called Dark Alliance, but let's just say that the trailer doesn't exactly inspire a lot of hope. Have a look, it's certainly a very... special one:

To be perfectly honest, I don't even know where to begin with this one. The weird fisheye lens, the drunken camera swaying, the dated character models, the GMod-level animations - this trailer is so poorly made it's actually a work of art!

I can only hope this is because Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is an isometric RPG and the trailer people thought they needed to jazz it up, yet they didn't have access to high quality models or animations needed to do that because the game was never supposed to be viewed from such extreme angles. The last few seconds of the trailer certainly point towards this being the case because the actual pre-alpha gameplay looks great!

So once a better, more coherent trailer becomes available I'll make sure to let you know as I'm also genuinely curious about what a game starring Drizzt and his companions will be like.