Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to revive the beloved Dark Alliance brand of hack-and-slash Dungeons & Dragons games is coming to the ends of its life. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, released in 2021 to middling reviews, will go offline and be removed from sale on Feb. 24, 2025, the publisher announced in a notice posted to digital storefronts.
“We will be shutting down (shut down) [sic] the Dark Alliance servers on 2/24/2025 and it will no longer be available to purchase starting that day,” reads a note from the publisher. “The base game and all DLC are still available to play in offline single player by anyone who currently owns it.”
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was announced in 2019 as a spiritual successor to — or at least its developer Tuque Games hoped to evoke — the two Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games released in the early aughts. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance shared little with the previous Dark Alliance games, however. The spiritual successor was set in Icewind Dale and starred characters from R.A. Salvatore’s The Legend of Drizzt book series as playable heroes. Players could play Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance in single-player and cooperative multiplayer.
From the get-go, Wizards of the Coast and Tuque Games’ approach to Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance felt inconsistent with the sub-brand it was meant to revive. The game was revealed at The Game Awards 2019 with a bizarre trailer featuring Swedish heavy metal band In Flames and was mocked for its GoPro camera-style cinematography. Instead of the top-down, Diablo-inspired action-RPG mechanics of the previous Dark Alliance games, DA played more like a Gears of War game, thanks to its over-the-shoulder perspective on combat.
When Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance shipped in June 2021, reception was tepid at beast. “Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance isn’t necessarily a bad game, but it doesn’t differentiate itself from other action-oriented live service games, offering a fantasy skin that feels generic some 33 years after the release of the novel,” Polygon said in its review of the game. Players had a somewhat harsher take on Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, which currently has a “Mixed” review rating on Steam.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance costs $29.99 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, if you want to grab a copy. Tuque Games released an expansion, Echoes of the Blood War, in 2022, which adds new playable character Auralla (a Tiefling warlock) and two new dungeons. Publisher Interplay re-released Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 for modern platforms in 2021 and 2022, respectively, if you’d prefer the classics.
Tuque Games has since changed its name to Invoke Studios and is working on a “AAA game derived from the Dungeons & Dragons universe” developed in Unreal Engine 5 for Wizards of the Coast.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/news/498079/dungeons-dragons-dark-alliance-shutting-down-date
