Other Tidbits

Monsters

After a bit of deathmatching in the various modes, Rick was nice enough to show off some of the cool single player levels for me. Whether it was the volcanic level or the jungle level, or any of the ice levels, each one is absolutely immense in size and scope. Likewise, some of the monsters are mind bogglingly large, dwarfing Rynn in size and in some cases, even Arokh the dragon seemed small. Monsters aren't just big though - they are quite widely varied, from small goblins, to larger land beasts, to other flying dragons and succubi. There was even an evil armored knight that has a magic "shimmy" (descriptive of how he looks when casting) defense to avoid getting hit. Rynn's weapons go right through. I even got to see one of the bigger beasts throwing a smaller Wartok (orc type of monster) at Rynn! Funny stuff.

Lightning!

Going underground

Other eye candy

There are some nice graphical effects in Drakan. One of the things I liked a lot was how arrows stay stuck in opponents. You can turn a big monster into your own personal pin cushion just by firing arrows into it. Now that's cool! It's also worth noting that Drakan supports environmental bump mapping, a feature only available in the soon to be shipped Matrox G400. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to see how bump mapped water looks or how some of the creatures look different at this demo - the machines were running NVIDIA TNT cards. One final cool graphical feature I noticed - some magical weapons have a sparkle to them. Carrying them around leaves a sparkly trail of…fairy dust I suppose. This is important because such a trail can help you track down an enemy during a multiplayer match.