In Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance there are optional objectives in each map that reward experience at the end of the run, but should you take the time to complete them? On the one hand, experience is experience, and if you want to level your characters you will ultimately want as much as you can earn. On the other, optional objectives take time to complete, especially if you don’t know where each item or special enemy is. Should you complete optional objectives in Dark Alliance, or are you better off ignoring them?
You can safely ignore optional objectives in Dark Alliance.
Optional objectives in Dark Alliance are all fundamentally simple: you either need to collect an item, break an item, and/or kill an enemy or group of enemies. Thing is, most of these side objectives are off the beaten path, and unless you know exactly where each and every objective is they will take time to complete.
Why does this matter? Maps in Dark Alliance are fairly straight-forward, but they do have branching paths and hidden areas. Optional objectives are sprinkled all over the map, so you will have to go out of your way and even possibly back-track a bit to clear them out entirely. This wouldn’t be a problem if the experience earned from completing optional objectives was worth the effort, but it isn’t. Killing enemies along the main route can net you 200 experience, but clearing all the optional objectives? Try 60 experience.
Needless to say, the time required to clear these optional objectives isn’t always worth the experience earned. The biggest kicker is you need to clear all of the optional objectives to get any experience from them, at least in the top four Challenge Levels. From my testing you get a little bit of experience for partially completing these objectives in the first couple of Challenge Levels, but it still isn’t much.
So, should you complete optional objectives in Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance? If you don’t care about leveling efficiently and want to explore the various maps in the game then by all means, knock them out! But, if you are not eager to spend more time than required within each dungeon, you can safely ignore them.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is available June 22nd on Xbox Game Pass for PC and Console, PC (Steam), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
