Dragon Lore II: The Heart of the Dragon Man

Dragon Lore II: The Heart of the Dragon Man
Developer: Cryo Interactive Publishers: Cryo Interactive, Interplay Platforms: DOS, Windows Released in US: July 1997 Released in EU: 1996 This game has regional differences.

Dragon Lore II: The Heart of the Dragon Man is the buggy followup to Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins. A third entry was planned, only to be cancelled at some point.

To do: There are some apparent unused items, including a Tankard of Beer. There are many things that don't seem to work properly due to bugs, such as the Friendship spell.

Regional Differences

At the start of the game, the Cavern of the Skies is experienced differently between versions:

• US - A majority of the area is explored by a preselected route of forced animation and dialogue sequences. Also, a selection of necessary items is automatically added into Werner's inventory. (The reason for these differences is unknown.)
• Europe - Free exploration of the entire caverns is allowed, beginning at the first corridor. This allows the player to manually seek out each NPC and have much longer dialogues with each of the NPCs than is allowed by the US version. Werner is also able to visit Loplop's lair and have a conversation with the dragonet, which is completely impossible in the US version. The player must also pick up all the necessary items in each location rather then them being automatically added to the inventory. There is at least one optional (useless) item, the "Illegible Map of the Valley" in one of the rooms, which is not obtainable in the USA version.

The data for both versions actually does exist in the US version. A simple region flag check in DLORE01.COD causes the game to branch into either direction. If the following bytes are changed in DLORE01.COD, the longer interactive European version of Caverns of the Skies will be activated in the US version:

• offset(H): 1581 - change "02" to "01"
• offset(H): 28BD - change "02" to "01"

Note that this edit only works perfectly if the game is started by watching through the entire intro, or bypassing the intro by pressing Esc. If the intro is bypassed with Space, the player will begin at the Armory (rather than the hallway corridor) with some US features already preenabled.