With the release of the Dungeon Seige 2 demo, I have to say:
Cool!
I was not a fan of the original. I found it pretty shallow, and not nearly pretty enough to overlook the near-total lack of a story or character. Both forgotten elements appear in the sequel. Though the story isn’t what you’d call deep, it serves to really motivate the character, and presents a basic tale of vengeance or justice. Like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, there’s a good/evil system, although it isn’t very deep. Better NPC’s and numerous sidequests, if not quite up to KotOR levels, round out the mix.
Amusingly, there’re about three ways to get special powers. First, you have spells found on scrolls. Second, you can get special abilities from putting skill points into hings. Third, your skill selections give you other powers to use, which you recharge by fighting. The abilties and skills and powers are quite varied.
Lessons learned from Dungeon Seige 2:
Never ask for your pay after seeing a big bad guy the size of a house kill a dozen Shiva golems bigger than he is. That’s a real good time to shut up.
Dryads are really whiny. Cute, but whiny. I suspect this has to do with the complete lack of men.
I thought the first game was beautiful… but had extremely shallow gameplay. All you did was click on heal potions or mana potions during the fights, and outside of combat, you rarely had any real control over where your party went, since it was all so linear.
I did find it amusing how you sort of jump right into the action in the first one. Here you are, farm girl, working your turnip farm. Old guy shows up, says, “Evil…” and dies. So with a mighty schiiiing farm girl stands up, whips out her turnip knife and starts whaling on evil and doesn’t stop for hundreds of hours. Or so I assume. As impressively smooth the hacking and slashing was, it was merely hacking and slashing, and it ultimately bored the very shit out of me.
[spoiler]The main villain hires you as mercenaries (this isn’t shown) and you’re working for him, presumably to build his vast empire of power. You make it quite clear to your friend you don’t believe in any of that mystical nonsense about good, evil, destiny, etc. Then your friend gets killed saving your life (Can you say guilt trip?) from said evil overlord.
Now, this is after you ran through the tutorial - the invasion of a dryad temple to find some magical artifact. Then you wake up, and the Dryads are keeping you as a prisoner with a collar aorund your neck that enforces good behavior on pain of death.
So right from the start, they’ve ensured you have a number of motives start and continue this grand quest.[/spoiler]
DSII will have to be a vast improvement over the original if I’m even going to think about buying it.
I was impressed with the graphics in the original, but that wasn’t enough to offset:
The way I felt like a passive spectator during combat
The utter tedium that was inventory management
The way the game ended with my characters toting a load of found items that not a single party member could use
The way the game ended with the party trapped in the end-boss’s cavern
The way the end-boss dropped a load of l33t 1t3mz which were utterly useless because the game ends with the party trapped in the end-boss’s cavern, unable to continue on to the next difficulty level
The lie that was “If you liked Diablo II, you’ll love Dungeon Seige!”