About a month out, Dark Alliance, a successor (spiritual or otherwise) to 2001's Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, launches on June 22. I'm not going to sugarcoat it: D&D video games haven't done anything for me since 1989's Hillsfar. Yes, I'm talking about the Commodore 64. Get off my lawn! Well, Hillsfar and the still-in-early-access Baldur's Gate 3, in Larian Studios' capable and brutal hands.
While Hillsfar is action-strategy, and Baldur's Gate 3 is tactical-RPG, Dark Alliance is on some ol' beat 'em up action. A third-person brawler bringing some of the Forgotten Realms best-loved characters and throwing them into a hack-n-slash rock concert. I'm currently dungeon mastering the tabletop Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus campaign for a few of the guys here at Gaming Nexus. And I'll tell you what. Forgotten Realms might not have the place in my heart that Dragonlance does (yet), but it's working on getting there. Wouldn't hurt if I stopped avoiding for no reason R.A. Salvatore's enormous library of work. It's just that I've recently introduced my 11-year-old to Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's original Dragonlance trilogy and, well, now my daughter wants us to segue into the Caramon and Raistlin trilogy after that. I'll get to your work some day though, Salvatore.
This post was supposed to be about a new animated short, detailing the origins of Drizzt Do'Urden, dark elf of the Forgotten Realms, and one of the stars (if not the star) of Dark Alliance. This is just one thing in a series of things leading up to the launch of the game on June 22. Though Wizards of the Coast is getting better at tying its tabletop RPGs to its video game RPGs. And subsequently letting one pique people's interest in checking out the other. You can listen to a quick interview with Salvatore if watch the video from the beginning—where he bafflingly pronounces Drizzt's name like it's spelled Drits; don't get me started—but if you just click play, I timestamped it to the beginning of the animated short.
Oh and hey: It's narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, so that's pretty cool.
