Anybody here play the PC game, Dungeon Siege? I’ve got a couple questions, having just finished the game for the first time. I’ve read all sorts of comparisons to Diablo and Diablo II, and I see that the game has won several awards. But I don’t quite understand the Diablo comparisons, and I don’t get why it won awards. Granted, the graphics are beautiful and the storyline is interesting. But I think the voice acting was unimpressive, especially when compared to Diablo II. Combat isn’t nearly as player-involved as Diablo II – for the most part, I just set what attacks to use, pointed the characters at the enemies, and then sat back and watched while the computer controlled combat automatically. Once combat started, my job seemed to be to just hit the health and mana potion keys.
Another gripe has to do with all those small elevators. It was just plain tedious trying to get six characters and two mules up or down an elevator that would only hold two of them at a time.
So here’s my questions:
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I made sure that each of the characters in my party stuck with a specific combat style, melee, ranged, combat magic or nature magic, so that they would each build up the appropriate skill levels and stats. However, at every opportunity to purchase equipment from a vendor there was usually very little that I could use, because my stats/skills weren’t high enough. Unlike Diablo, once I clear an area the monsters don’t regenerate, so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to build up my character’s stats. I’m sure there were some side quests and optional areas that I missed, but still… When I finished the game, I was still packing around some nice armor that my strongest character was ten strength points short of being able to wear. I had several spells that none of my mages could use, because they had magic skill requirements far above what my mages had. And that brings me to…
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Once I’ve killed the big boss at the end of the game, is there any way out of that chamber??? If not, what is the point of the big bad boss dropping more items? I can’t use them on anything, and I can’t get out to sell them. Frankly, that’s a pretty poor way to end the game: my heroes have destoyed the Big Bad Evil Guy, but alas, they are now trapped for all eternity with his corpse! Is multiplayer the only option remaining to my characters? What’s up with that?
I played Dungeon Siege all the way to the end, and wound up nearly hating it. My experience parallelled yours – despite having my characters focus, there were many items I could not use, and I wound up leaving a huuuuuuuuge spew of items at the last merchant point before entering the end dungeon.
I guess the idea was that you’d take your characters into the multiplayer version, but that held very little allure for me.
Unlike Diablo and Diablo II, you can’t replay DS at higher difficulty, so there’s little point in reaching the end.
The main source of frustration for me, which I remembered AFTER buying the Shadows of Aranna expansion (grrrrr) is that there’s so little combat control and character development that what you wind up doing most of the time is inventory management, and that’s both boring and hard. There’s not enough information in the inventory UI to easily determine what is the best set of items for your character, so so spend a lot of time mousing over things and comparing them. Plus, with no Town Portal (and a linear-as-hell game to boot), you just need to hang on to all the stuff you find until you get to a merchant.
I will consider Dungeon Siege 2, but only if they actually let me control character development. I’m not willing to play Inventory Siege again, thanks.
Ahh, but the entire fun of the game starts when you get the firepots or whatever they called the hand-grenade-equivalent spells.
This is best when you’re playing with a friend: you stop with the baddies just in sight and compare your skill in bowling these little suckers so as to annoy the bad guy you want to run up and attack you. Extra points for bouncing them off obstacles on the way (8 ball in-off the nearside cush!). I could have done that forever.
I think it won the awards for the continuous flow of play, no pauses while new screens or scenes load. IE more for technical achievement than good gameplay.
I got bored in the winter regions. The characters had no real development, no personality. And the fights got dreadfully boring.
I loved having a donkey, though, or whatever it was.
It was the inventory fiddling that broke me after a while. That and the complete and utter lack of anything to do.
Fun to start out, but sooo boring to finish. No compelling story at all. Things that were supposed to be fun certainly were not. Ugh.
I thought the game had a fantastic interface–it could be played almost entirely via mouse, and if you changed the quick-keys, the changes were reflected in the Help screens and popup windows.
My kinda solution for character development was to have everybody start out in melee until they got up to a 13 strength (so they had more armor, weapon & shield options) and then switch to bow until they got a 13 dex (so they had more bow options), and then I had them specialize according to what I needed.
They fixed the elevator thing somewhat in DS2; if you click to move onto an elevator, everybody crams onto the elevator.
Otherwise there’s not that much improvement in the game, and the basic tactics don’t change at all, aside from having a packbeast that will fight rather than run away.
Another question: can you save your character in a multiplayer game? If so, where does the character show up the next time you play? Does it still hang out in the final single-player cavern, or what?
If so, I may end up just playing solo “multi-player” games. I’ll have to look for new maps, though.