Wizards of the Coast announced that it would be delisting Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance from digital storefronts after three years due to middling reviews.
The game is the company's attempt to revive the much beloved Dark Alliance brand of hack-and-slash Dungeons & Dragons games. The game is set to go offline and will no longer be available for purchase starting on Feb. 24, 2025.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance
The announcement was made via a notice posted on digital storefronts and notes that Wizards of the Coast will shut down the game's servers.
Wizards of the Coast added that the base game and all DLC are still available to play in offline single player by anyone who has already bought them.
Wizards of the Coast originally announced Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance in 2019 as a spiritual successor to the two Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games. Despite this, the former shared very little with the previous Dark Alliance games, according to Polygon.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was set in Icewind Dale and featured various characters from R.A. Salvatore's The Legend of Drizzt book series. Players were also able to play the game in single-player and cooperative multiplayer modes.
The approach that Wizards of the Coast and Tuque Games had with Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance felt inconsistent with the sub-brand that it was trying to revive.
The reveal for the game at The Game Awards 2019 featured a weird trailer showing a Swedish heavy metal band.
When Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance launched on June 22, 2021, the creators promised an "exciting, action-driven, hack-and-slash adventure" filled with iconic enemies, legendary characters, and amazing loot, IGN said.
Failing To Appeal to Fans
Some players said that the game was a tedious co-op adventure that featured a lot of goblins but also had a lot more bugs. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance currently has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, and only 50% of reviews are positive.
Now, Tuque Games has rebranded itself as Invoke Studios and is working on another entry in the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. Details about this particular project are still scarce, but Wizards of the Coast confirmed it to be on Unreal Engine 5.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance lets players play as either Drizzt Do'Urden, Catti-brie, Wulfgar, or Bruenor Battlehammer. Each of these characters had their own playstyle, which made using them distinct from the others.
This is a system that is similar to Baldur's Gate 3's colorful cast of playable characters. However, the former focuses on giving players a third-person experience filled with action combat instead of turn-based strategies, according to PCGamesN.
