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Dungeon Siege - Review by Moriendor, 2002-04-15
The life of a humble farmer is irrevocably changed as peaceful farmlands are beset by marauding Krug, casting the character, and all that is held dear, into a desperate struggle for survival. The call to glory is one that only the simple farmer is uniquely qualified to answer. Courage and wits may be all that holds the kingdom from the brink of disaster... Introduction
Dungeon Siege is the debut title of Gas Powered Games, a company founded by Chris Taylor back in 1998 after he left Cavedog Entertainment. At Cavedog, Taylor was the producer of the award winning 'Total Annihilation', a real time strategy game that was supposed to defeat Westwood's almighty Command & Conquer series. I'll leave it to others to decide whether he succeeded in achieving that goal. What we want to do here and today is do a little investigation on something Chris Taylor said in an interview in 1999: "We want to take what we did with Total Annihilation and take it to RPGs. We want the same over-the-top intensity to be blended with Diablo." Character Creation
There is not much to create here though. You only select your charcter's gender, determining whether you start out as a human farmboy or farmgirl. You then continue to choose your character's appearance in the game like your general looks, skin color, and clothing. The number of choices is pretty limited here but that is not too surprising since the game engine will really render your character according to what you've opted for. Offering more choices would have resulted in a tremendous amount of extra work for character animations to display all possible outfits. Well, I found the male characters were all rather ugly or tumb looking so I went for a female avatar, assigned her a name, clicked on 'Next' and selected 'Medium' from the difficulty settings menu. Gameplay & Controls
Your adventure begins on your farmland. It has been raided by the Krug, primitive scavengers supposedly driven by a superior force. You've lost all your belongings and your last good friend, Norrick, died at your feet after he assigned you your first quest. You need to find a passage to Stonebridge and meet someone by the name of Gyorn. Time to get going. What you will want to do first is getting used to Dungeon Siege's engine. It is an all new type of 3D engine that -while basically offering a 3rd person view on your character- lets you rotate around your alter ego just as well as vertically adjust your point of view. You can even zoom in or out, switching to an almost isometric perspective when zoomed all the way out. It will take a few minutes before you get used to it, and if I were to give you some advice then I'd recommend checking your compass before you do a lot of turning, tilting and zooming or you'll easily get lost. The overview map also helps but it can't be scrolled due to the engine's limitations.
Moving your character around and fighting enemies is as easy as it gets. Dungeon Siege is a very simple point-and-click game. To fight an enemy you just need to click on it once and your character will attack until further notice or until one of you winds up dead. Once you've beaten the first few Krug, you'll be able to equip your character with some new weapons, spells and armor. There is one slot for melee weapons, another one for ranged weapons and two slots for quick spells plus a total of another 10 slots for spells in your spell book. You can easily drag and drop spells from your spell book to your quick spell slots and vice versa. On the defensive side there are several spaces for body armor (main armor, boots, gloves) and one slot for carrying a shield. What is very nice here is that you can equip a shield even if your ranged weapon slot is occupied. Your character will draw the melee weapon and the shield when you switch to close combat mode. Regarding ranged weapons there's no need to play storage keeper. The different types of (cross-) bows all offer an unlimited supply of ammo.
Your character improves depending on his/her actions in the game. If you fight a lot with melee weapons you will increase your melee combat skill and strength whereas keeping your enemies at a distance will raise your ranged weapon skill and dexterity. Same goes for magic. There's basically two types of magic you can use. Nature magic and combat magic. Both types offer offensive and defensive spells, even though nature magic is a little more orientated towards the defensive side of the spectrum. Magic is closely related to your character's intelligence. Thus, if you cast a lot of spells your character is going to become more proficient in one of the two magic schools and intelligence. This is a very nice feature really as you have total freedom in developing your character and party later on.
How you make up your party is all up to you. Some NPCs will offer to join you for free because of a particular story event. Others will charge you for their services. You can always view an NPC's stats and skills before adding him/her to your party to determine beforehand whether he or she is a valuable addition or not. Until you've gathered a decent party, there's not much strategy involved in combat. But once your party has grown to four or five characters you will start experimenting with the different formations and AI settings. The formations allow you to position your ranged weapon specialists and spell casters behind the melee fighters. The AI settings influence how your characters react to an attack. There are three different settings for each behavior (attack, defend, and targeting). The attack and defend parameters mostly influence character movement. Your heroes will chase an enemy to its death or stand ground depending on your choice. The targeting option lets you choose which enemies your characters are supposed to attack first. Options here range from attacking the closest target to fighting the strongest creature first.
You can pause the game at any time in combat to assign your characters new commands or to consume potions. Consuming potions is nicely solved. When the health of a party member has decreased by 50% you will just have to press a hotkey ("H" by default) and every character in your party with a critical health status will take a refreshing drink. Fighting is kept rather passive in Dungeon Siege and does not require you to do much but clicking on an enemy once. Your characters will also automatically attack all nearby monsters. You are more of a passive watcher and don't really need to do anything except for keeping an eye on the health and mana bars. It's actually a little disappointing to see that any strategic approaches are annihilated by the hack'n'slash combat style. The sheer amount of enemies pretty much renders any combat tactics useless. Your melee fighters can't attack the masses of enemies quick enough to prevent them from breaking through to the rangers and magicians. Enemy AI is not too spectacular. They will sometimes retreat when badly hurt but that's just about all in terms of AI. You might also notice some group behavior. When you attack a single enemy of a group it will attract the attention of all nearby critters. Don't expect any fancy stuff though. All in all combat is very Diablo-like just with more characters to control.
In general, all important options and functions are just a click away and they can also all be accessed from the main game screen. Dungeon Siege definitely offers the best interface and ease of gameplay I've seen in a game to date. Graphics
The different types of landscapes and dungeons are all crafted very nicely. The high overall graphics quality is supplemented by weather effects like e.g. snow fall which really adds a lot to the atmosphere. Character and monster animations are state of the art, and the spell effects are simply breathtaking. The point of view will always adjust automatically when something is blocking the view on your party, and when you're walking through a forest then you'll see that trees and branches become smoothly transparent to get out of your line of sight. The engine sometimes suffers from performance issues. When entering a town with your party you will experience some serious hard drive thrashing. Gas Powered Games should definitely address this in an upcoming patch. The auto adjustment of the camera does also not always work as it should, requiring you to manually switch back to your favorite zooming distance. That would be my only complaints with the engine though. Gas Powered Games has most definitely raised the bar for graphics in 3rd person RPG's. It is actually very exciting to see how well this all new type of 3D engine works. Sound
Well, seriously, Dungeon Siege's musical score is excellent. Never wanted to turn it off. It stays nicely in the background and just adds a lot to the atmosphere. The sound is also absolutely awesome, especially with a four speaker set and environmental audio support. Even simple things like a skeleton that's bursting to pieces is pure pleasure for your ears as you're almost able to hear every single bone falling to the ground. Sound also changes according to your surroundings. Lots of echo and hall effects are added when you're entering a dungeon. Totally cool. The only thing I found a little disappointing is the voice acting for character dialogues. It's not done badly. Not at all. But they surely could have recorded a little more charismatic voices. Anyway, the music and sound could just as well be from a Hollywood movie production. Absolutely terrific. Fun Rating & Conclusion
A short summary of the above would have to read like this: Dungeon Siege is a simple pure Hack'n'Slash action RPG with a very sophisticated interface, top notch graphics and excellent sound and music. However, there's got to be more to a game to make it real fun. So, how does Dungeon Siege keep you going? It's definitely not the almost non existent plot. The story is way too thin to be a source of motivation for playing through to the final cutscene. It really is not easy to tell why you voluntarily surrender yourself to masses of enemies, and why you continue your way through the world despite the -at times- repetitve and tedious combat. It's probably pure curiosity. You continue to see what the next region and its inhabitants look like. You continue because you get addicted to collecting better items, and you continue because you want to see your party grow more powerful. Dungeon Siege does a tremendously good job at all that. But it also has its weak spots. The engine has a few annoying bugs that made me very very mad on several occasions. While pathfinding is not as poorly done as in the Infinity engined games (Baldur's Gate etc.) it's sure enough far from perfect. If you're in bad luck you will have to reload when that happens as your characters manage to run very quickly into the wrong direction which could end up fatal in a combat situation. Another serious point of criticism is the auto adjustment of the point of view. The camera will sometimes zoom all the way in, making it impossible to control your entire party. This is also extremely annoying in combat, especially if you want to turn and run away quickly. The game quite often fails to detect your clicks. I sometimes had to click on an enemy several times before my party turned towards that particular enemy. Same goes for treasure chests, barrels and other containers. It seems like the game does not always recognize who is leading the party. Elsewise, the game is remarkably stable. Didn't crash once on my machine. Not too bad for a Microsoft product *gg*
Multiplayer is fun though. I played some short ZoneMatches on Microsoft's Zone servers, and had quite a lot of fun in there. Unfortunately, all character data is stored on your local hard drive so I'm afraid it will be just a matter of time until Dungeon Siege is overrun by cheaters. Another event worth looking forward to is the release of the so called Siege editor. This is a tool that allows you to design your own worlds and adventures (modifications). Quite a few very interesting mods have been announced by the fan community that could prolong your Dungeon Siege entertainment for a very long time. To sum it up, Dungeon Siege is a very entertaining yet simple Hack'n'Slash action RPG, offering great graphics, sound effects, and an interface that leaves little room for improvement. What's missing is a motivating background story, and more options for character development. It's a little bit too simple. Some extra skills, stats and spells really would have helped to spice it up a bit. If you're looking for a "real" RPG then wait for Morrowind, Divine Divinity, or Neverwinter Nights. But in case you're in desperate need of some good old dungeon crawling with a ridiculous body count then Dungeon Siege is the game you've been waiting for ever since you finished Diablo II.
Average Reader Ratings: 6.5 (196 votes) |
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