Getting started...

As stated in the introduction to this article, DSLOA is a stand-alone expansion pack for the original Dungeon Siege and it contains all the content from the original. In fact, after installing the game from the three CDs it currently inhabits, you will find two shortcuts sitting on your desktop. One to launch the original Dungeon Siege and another to play Legends of Aranna.
Since this is a preview of Legends of Aranna, we'll only refer to the original Dungeon Siege when absolutely necessary. It's what they call staying "on topic", I guess. This isn't the RPGDot forums after all. :) . Anyway, if you want to learn more about the original Dungeon Siege, you might want to check our database page of the game and follow one of the links to the other ~100 net reviews we've listed or maybe even read our in-house review (written by *gasp* yours truly).

OK, where were we? Ah, getting started. Right. Well, those of you who have played the original Dungeon Siege will feel right at home after launching DSLOA. The in-game menus have not changed much and even if you have never touched Dungeon Siege in your entire life, you will find your way around very quickly without feeling the need to consult the manual.
Since multiplayer is not fully finished in this beta copy yet, we decided to stick to the single player part of the game.
The first thing you will have to do is create a new character. Your old character from the original Dungeon Siege can not be imported nor continued in any other way. This is because the background of your hero in DSLOA is totally different and even in some way woven into the whole new story. Since we haven't mentioned the story at all yet (oops...) now may be as good a time as any to fill you in (from the official site):

You've heard stories of great adventures in years gone by, of the heroes who crusaded across the Kingdom of Ehb, battling the stubborn Krug, the poisonous mucosae, and horrifying zombies. You've longed for adventures yourself, while spending your youth sharpening your skills in the quiet little garrison town of Arhok.

Piecing together a strange story from an old tattered journal, you discover that your mother and father were also heroes, known for adventures throughout the continent of Aranna. The journal sends you on a journey to the mysterious Island of Utrae, a place brimming with thousands of years of history. Here you'll encounter strange primordial creatures such as the magically gifted Utraeans, the saurian Zaurask, and the feline Hassat - each of which have long been at each others' throats.

However, after generations of war and conflict, the Hassat and Utraeans are now all but extinct, and the Zaurask are proliferating, with their numbers far exceeding those of their enemies. It's only a matter of time before the saurian race overwhelms the Island of Utrae. With their powers and machines almost completely exhausted, the Utraeans have turned to the day-to-day business of mere survival. Having never been a fertile people, and after the heavy losses sustained during the Race Wars, the Utraeans are slowly dying out. And with them dies the knowledge of, and access to, their great machines.

Playing the game...

After watching the intro sequence, you'll find yourself all alone in a small snow covered village which you can not leave because the mayor has issued a curfew.
The starting village is quite obviously supposed to serve as a tutorial for new players. You're well advised to converse with every NPC. NPC conversations are kept exactly as in the original Dungeon Siege. You don't get multiple choices or any dialogue options at all for that matter. You just click an NPC and if they have quests to give away, those quests will be automatically added to your journal which will then flash up to notify you. They will assign you a variety of minor tasks and talking to the mayor is the key to leaving the village where the real adventure begins...

Since DSLOA is a party-based action RPG, you should always be on the look-out for new party members and you will find a variety of potential candidates along your way to the finishing line. A good party will ideally be made up of ranged combatants, melee fighters and characters adept in either nature or combat magic where nature magic is more geared towards defensive spells such as special magical protections or healing.

There are a total of eight character slots and you will have to choose wisely at some point whether to keep or kick a character later in the game when you meet new NPCs with better stats and abilities than your current ones.

One of the character slots is once again reserved for a special critter, the pack "mule", except in DSLOA it's not a mule (like in the original Dungeon Siege) but a reptilian-like creature, a Tragg. Its inventory seems to be slightly smaller than that of a pack mule but this is supposed to be outweighed by the fact that the Tragg is able to deliver powerful attacks.
Ahum, yeah right. I know this is not a review but I would like to take the opportunity to suggest that if anything needs fixing until the game is released, it's the pack animal! Seriously, I've spent the last third of the game constantly healing and resurrecting the pack animal after every other fight. It gets very annoying after a while when you select all characters, send them in a fight and your pack animal is rushing forward like no tomorrow. Hell, if I wouldn't be so nice (or selfish because the extra space is nice to have) to revive the critter there would be no tomorrow for the guy! The only workaround right now is to not select all characters when initiating combat and to make the pack animal stand ground instead of attacking... which is a tedious task.

Talking about combat, it is very much like in the original Dungeon Siege. As you follow the linear path that leads through the game, you will pretty much be under permanent enemy fire. Enemies usually appear in groups of 3-6 creatures or humanoids and you will hardly ever pass a screen without any combat involved.
A large variety of new weapons and spells will help you mastering the aggressors.
To make the life of your party easier, you still have a variety of formations to choose from so you can protect your ranged fighters and mages from taking damage and let your melee characters "tank".
In addition to that, there are three options that let you determine your party's behavior in combat. You can control their movement (from "Hold ground" to "Chase till dead"), aggressiveness (from "Attack freely" to "Don't attack unless I tell you to"), and targeting preferences (from "Target closest" to "Target most powerful").

Character development also hasn't changed much from the original Dungeon Siege. It is still an action-based system. A character's abilities and stats will improve by simply performing the related action over and over again. For example, a strict melee fighter will mostly improve in his melee skill and his strength by fighting with melee weapons. He does, however, also raise other secondary stats (like dexterity) but much more slowly than the skills and stats that are directly associated with his prime activity. Due to the nature of the system, it might therefore actually make sense to e.g. let magic oriented characters dabble in melee combat for a while because the ability to wear certain equipment (especially armor) is usually determined by strength and dexterity.

The hunt for better items, spells and equipment was one of the strong aspects of the original Dungeon Siege and you will not miss it in DSLOA. A new feature in DSLOA is the introduction of set items. These usually consist of several pieces of equipment that were left behind by famous warriors. Every set item that you collect will yield an additional bonus. You will find scrolls on your travels that contain a list of all items that belong to a certain set so you will always know when a set is complete or which items are still missing.

To sum it up, the gameplay in DSLOA is much like in its predecessor. You start out alone, gather a party of up to eight characters along your travels, fight your way through hordes of monsters and start developing an item collection fetish as you move from region to region with the occasional dungeon in between.

Getting technical...

The most obvious improvements in DSLOA over the original Dungeon Siege lie in party management. Party management was already a very easy task in the original game but Mad Doc has actually achieved to keep your "downtime" to the least possible minimum in DSLOA.
You may remember that Dungeon Siege already had an auto-arrange function for items in the inventory so they'd take up the least space. You may also remember that there were handy shortcut keys to let all characters consume a health or mana potion when they badly needed one.
DSLOA takes this easiness to new levels. For example, there is now a hotkey ('R') that lets you redistribute health and mana potions among your party members. Hit 'R' and the game will automatically assign more health potions to your melee fighters and mana potions to characters with magical abilities.
Another nice addition to the inventory system is the introduction of backpacks. It lets you store items you rarely need in a place that only covers valuable screen space on demand when you open the container.
And you will surely love the new "sell all" button if you're tired of clicking every single item you want to trade to a merchant.
To make a long story short, you simply won't find another game at the moment with such a great interface and ease of party control.

Regarding the graphics in DSLOA, not much has changed compared to Dungeon Siege. The game uses the same engine with only minor improvements (especially new animations). You may not be as pleasantly surprised as with the original Dungeon Siege in case you have played any recent releases but the graphics are still more than competitive.

The technical brilliance of the game is rounded off by a nice musical score that is never too intrusive. You won't even notice it most of the time but you'd probably miss it if it wasn't there. Guess the music does exactly what it is supposed to do.
The sound effects are always appropriate and never seem out of place. A few creatures make pretty annoying noises but that's most likely just supposed to help making you kill them faster.
Unfortunately, I can't comment on the voice acting. My game CD was scratched and the file containing the voices could not be copied to my hard drive.

Since the engine hasn't changed much from the original, you should be able to run DSLOA on the same machine that ran your copy of Dungeon Siege. Since the world in DSLOA is again seamless, you will not see any loading screens as you move from one region to another. This does pleasantly not affect performance in a negative way. The overall performance of the game is more than satisfactory. It never hangs or stutters and is remarkably stable at this time already. I didn't experience a single crash from beginning to end.

To sum it up...

It is safe to say that players who liked the original Dungeon Siege are going to love DSLOA for its new regions, new features and the improvements that have been made to an already great interface. It is just as safe to say that someone who didn't enjoy the original game, is most likely not going to find any fun in DSLOA either. DSLOA does exactly what an expansion pack is supposed to do. It stays true to the original game and delivers more of the same in a new package. - Dungeon Siege veterans will be looking forward to approximately twenty hours of additional entertainment whereas newcomers to the series who may want to play the included original game first will be treated to considerably more than double the amount of action RPG goodness.