I'm not talking about Ego Draconis. Even okayer than that.
Larian is a certifiable CRPG rockstar right now, having taken the once-niche genre to chart-topping blockbuster status with home runs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the superlative Baldur’s Gate 3. A lot of people, myself included, started gnawing the bars of their enclosure last year in anticipation of Baldur’s Gate 4, an idea Larian mulled over before moving on from the series completely.
And so, tantalizing mystery takes the reins. What could possibly follow the first game to score the videogame equivalent of an EGOT? An easy prediction is Divinity: Original Sin 3, but here’s my thought: Baldur’s Gate 3 is Divinity: Original Sin 3 in all but name. Larian has taken the CRPG crown twice over and rocketed to space with it. I declare that the only suitable follow-up to a game like BG3 is a similarly seismic revelation—a niche genre must be reared up from the earth and reborn with new panache.
Yes, I’m talking about character action-RTS hybrids like Brutal Legend and the visionary Sacrifice. Yes, I’m talking about a sequel to Divinity: Dragon Commander.
No, you can’t force me to shut up about Dragon Commander, and I have an allowance of around 800 words to wax poetic about this bizarre little treasure.
Where dragons dwell
Dragon Commander was always a stopgap for Larian—it released after Divinity: Original Sin’s Kickstarter campaign had ended and the studio was about to enter its fourth year developing the RPG—and once the team realized Original Sin was going to take the extra resources, Dragon Commander was, as Swen Vincke put it, “murdered.” Not canned, but rushed out the door.
Despite the early release, the game did well for itself critically and made up for its lack of polish with a premise so fresh it’s still novel today. You play as a dragon strapped with a jetpack and charged with rebuilding a shattered empire. In play, this manifests in thirds. You need to seize territory on a shifting game board, quash enemy armies in action-RTS battles, and keep various fantasy civilizations happy with policy decisions.
The game is visibly stretched thin trying to do all this at once. The RTS battles are visceral when blasting apart foes in dragon form, but tactically toothless compared to full-on strategy games. Like a Silver League game of Starcraft, whoever makes the most stuff fastest usually wins, and your units can comfortably be clumped into a deathball for the majority of fights. Terrain presents no fuss and economy boils to one all-purpose resource. I’m a complete RTS luddite—I like MOBAs because I only have to micro one unit—and even I found Dragon Commander’s battles too dumb to pass as dumb fun.
And yet despite all that, the game is still good! Dragon Commander’s worthy of a revisit because the messy RTS action is bolstered and given context by the oldest metagame of them all: cutthroat politics.
Wag the trogg
The lynchpin holding Dragon Commander together is its RPG aspect, which manifests in a few ways. Between battles, a council of advisors try to sway you to their side on various hot topics. Should the free press remain free? Should public schools include religious studies in their curriculum? Are your imp advisors allowed to tear apart a sacred historical site so they can test a weapon of mass destruction?
The noble answers might seem obvious, but it’s all about which advisors you’re willing to piss off—and who’s offering what in return.
For instance, the undead advisor represents a plainly corrupt theocratic power called the Church of the Seven. They want to institute indulgences, win your support for a state-sponsored inquisition, and grant complete political immunity to their priests. They suck! But playing into their hand gives a bonus to luck, making auto-resolved battles a cinch. If you vote against the undead too much, you won’t have much support among them, and you’ll have to defend their lands with far fewer units.
Dragon Commander is eager to remind you that every soldier on the front lines has a life back home
It’s easy to get lost in an RTS or grand strategy game as a parade of stat blocks and spreadsheets, but Dragon Commander is eager to remind you that every soldier on the front lines has a life back home; it’s your job to make it a life they’ll fight for.
You’ve also got your betrothed to think about. Early on in the game you’ll choose a first lady from one of the game’s fantasy societies; feel free to marry for love, but it won’t keep you safe from the politics for long.
If you marry the elven Lohannah, you’ll win a huge base of elf supporters; but elves traditionally don’t eat meat, which might be buzzkill at dwarven banquets. The undead princess Ophelia is terminally ill, and you’ll have to find her a solution amid experiment-eager imps and snake oil salesmen eyeing on the royal treasury. Your decisions carry mechanical weight, but it’s all tied up in characters you grow to care about. It never reaches for the devastating emotional hits of something like Papers, Please, but it manages to press some of those same buttons in a lighter, sillier setting.
The game’s handle on politics is admittedly shallow and its battles are rudimentary, but in those gripping moments where the different elements play off each other—uphill battles spent defending villas that despise your rule, conversations spent wondering how many citizens you’re willing to sacrifice to a demon in exchange for power—it feels like the best parts of a bunch of unrelated fantasy epics all ladled into a Michelin star stew.
Larian’s later games might be tighter, cleaner, and sure, better. But Dragon Commander has an enterprising, irresponsibly ambitious spirit that’s just begging for a second look.
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