It's been about three years since Chris Taylor (creator of Total Annihilation) set out reanimate the roleplaying genre with a fresh action-based attack on your typical dungeon crawl. Dungeon Siege featured fast-paced, Diablo-style slaughter but with enormous handcrafted 3D dungeons and landscapes as opposed to random maps. Although DS never blew the roof off of sales charts, it picked up a great community following. Fans of the original and newcomers alike should be pleased to hear that the sequel is almost here, cruising through its final months of development. The content is all in: only polish and tweaking remains.


We had a chance to sit down and see the latest build of the game during a recent visit to the Microsoft Game Studios headquarters. The focus of the new title is still the same: furious party combat in gorgeous 3D dungeons. But the emphasis has shifted slightly based on the team's experiences during development. We'll focus on these new elements in this preview -- for a complete rundown of all the features, check out our earlier preview or this feature comparison.