Well it’s Saint Patrick’s Day already, which means it’s time to go out to the pub with the lads and knock back a couple of brews and eat your body weight in bar nachos. Oh wait, it’s a pandemic still, don’t do that. I can’t say I’ve ever really celebrated St. Patrick’s day in any real capacity at any point in my life, and this year doesn’t seem like the best time to start. So instead I’ll just sit here and talk about an upcoming game that has nothing to do with Ireland or even the color green at all. We’re talking about the upcoming cooperative action game, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance looks to be a 4 player cooperative action game in the vein of something like Vermintide 2. The way that Vermintide 2 was structured had you and your friends in this hub world where you could craft new items, level up your character, and check on your challenge progress, before you all embarked on a mission to kill a bunch of rat-folks with knives and gather the precious XP inside their bodies. Mind you, this is all me speculating, but it sure seems like Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is going to handle things in a very similar way.

I’m going off of Polygon.com’s hands on experience with Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, and they specifically call out how the game itself is geared towards co-op play, with difficulties scaling based on how many players are involved. The article mentions the core loop of the game appears to be about replaying levels on harder difficulties, gathering loot, and leveling up each character class according to whichever skill tree you choose to follow. How much variance there will actually be between different skill trees remains to be seen.

Personally, I would’ve liked the ability to just create a character instead of choosing existing ones, because that’s kind of the whole draw of a Dungeon’s & Dragons product in my eyes. To me that just seems kind of antithetical to what the biggest TTRPG is all about, but even if I can’t create my own character I’m sure it’ll be fine. It also makes sense when you consider that the PS2 era Dark Alliance games also only let you play as pre-made characters, so there is some precedent there.

The only real hangup I have with this early showing of Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, is that I never really got that into Vermintide 2 or games like it, but I really do enjoy Dungeons & Dragons, so that might be enough to keep me interested. Either way, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is coming out for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC and the next generation consoles as well on June 22nd for the extremely attractive price of $40.