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Dungeon Siege II Busts Out Trailer
Thanks to RPGDot for pointing out there's a trailer for Microsoft/Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege II available from the official DSII site, as well as via Gamers Hell, showcasing a lush cinematic-style teaser (using the in-game engine) for this PC RPG sequel, which is simply listed as "coming 2004". The original Dungeon Siege was largely well-received, but sparked some complaints about repetitiveness/linearity, so it'll be interesting to see how the sequel develops the gameplay.
Some things I liked about the original Dungeon Siege:
- No load time between levels!
- the pack mule is very convenient for hording loot from the dungeons.
- cool variety of weapons and spells like the goblin flamethrower or railgun.
- the group/party feature
Some things I didn't like:
- repetitiveness of a hack and slash type game
- not enough unique items
- multiplayer online was laggy at times and wasn't fun
I got DS the day it came out, and got a little bit past the Dwarf Mines (for those of you who have never played it, thats maybe 2-3 hours into the game, IIRC).
:)
The graphics were outstanding, you really feel like you're in a fantasy setting.
However, as PA put it around the time of the games release, you dont really play the game. Your character pretty much auto attacks whatever is in sight (handy for multiple character parties, but since you can (IIRC) pause a la baldurs gate to issue orders somewhat unneccesary), and it seemed to me that experience was only given to the character who got the deathblow. I know for a fact that my swordsman advanced hella fast compared to the mage (guess who usually killed stuff...) who was getting almost 0 Xp. The real killer was the lack of character depth. At least Diablo 2 your character was sorta different (unless you're the same class, and even then, they COULD still be different, not so with DS)...
I will probably take a look into DS 2, if they fix the XP system to be more DnDish (ie, equal shares of XP, with maybe a small *kill* bonus), because DS 1 was a good idea, just needs some polish.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Dungeon Siege was pretty fricking boring.. looked great ran well, easy to play... wait no I didn't really have to play it.. the toons played the game itself. Other than a few special abilites it felt like the game was on auto pilot.
Way to linear as well, follow the path kill monsters get stronger follow path monsters get harder kill monsters..
Lets hope the 2nd incarnation will add some meat to this potato.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Does anyone else think the editors have too much time on their hands? We've had all these game posts lately but, judging by the number of comments they get, nobody is very interested....
I just hope they fix the multiplayer features a bit. To start with, the multiplyer campaign in the first one really seemed like an afterthought. Basically no story, you just fight your way from place to place. To make matters worse the game scaled horribly for multiplayer. All it did was give the eneimies more hit points, and a rather lot of them at that. My group had a couple of LAN parties where DS was the game we played, but we quickly lost interest in it. Why? Well, it got kinda boring just running around, and then spending 20 minutes hacking down 2 or 3 creatures, and with the non-interactive combat system it was like watching someone chop down a tree, not exactly fun. It got so bad a one point that one of the players, playing a fighter type character, got up in the middle of a battle, got sodas for everyone, and then watched over my sholder as I blasted off spells in a vain attempt to kill something. Which brings up the other problem I had with it, since the monsters HP went up dramatically, but the mage's ability to do damage stayed the same, the mage was pretty worthless, you would have to expend all of your mana to bring down one creature, the whole time running around like a bitch hopping it didn't squish you. At least it was interactive, but it sucked never getting to actually be of much use in the battles.
For me, if a game is going to have multiplyer in it, it had better be good. I hate forking out the money for a game, to use at a LAN party, only to have the multiplayer suck. And these days, that's about the only way I like to play RPG/Adventure games.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Best thing about DS was the mule. Setup you party with the ranged weapons and hit stop. Then send in the mule! Monsters chase the mule, so just run it back to your charachters and watch the monsters get mowed. Other then that it was boring as crap, and despite the many interesting names the magic items had each seemed completely interchangeable. Other great parts: spending an hour at the stores trying to optimize your charachters, and having two charachters die at a time so you then had to figure out who had each item. A tremendous waste of time. Technically competent but uterly boring.
I dont do meaning of life questions.
Just a note. The trailer only shows rendered scenes. I am sure the gameplay isn't like that. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Mac OS X, quickime, VLC (latest), Windows Media Player (latest). Sound on VLC. Blank widescreen on WMP and nothing doing with quicktime.
Guess they aren't planning a dual release in 2004.
Mind the gap...
Actually you don't need to kill a monster in DS to get experience. Just hitting the monster or casting a spell was enough to get some experience. In fact, I don't think there was any bonus at all for delivering a death blow.
Yet, in my experience, melee characters always advanced far more quickly than all my other characters. I tried going through the single-player campaign multiple times with various party configurations and strategies, but nothing seemed to help (exception: if you can get everyone in your party to a certain critical level, probably around 30-40, it becomes much easier to advance them at the same pace). Even tried making it through as a solo nature mage once :)
The problem is that melee characters just do a ton more damage than other classes, even when at the same character level. Granted, there are a few powerful spells that will allow your mages to keep up, but you would have to spend 90% of your gold on mana potions in order to use them often enough. Meanwhile, your mindless grunts just hack, hack, hack and slash, slash, slash their way to the top.
Mages just plain suck for 90% of the game! For the first dozen hours of gameplay, every spell you've got does LESS damage than a single hit from a decent sword... AND you have to pay mana to cast the thing.
And once a few characters in your party gain a slight experience advantage, it becomes even more difficult for the others to catch up.
I really would have preferred that all experience be equally divided among the party...
So, what is the GAME like?
sig fault
Boycott this, force Mr. Taylor to make Total Annihilation 2. This is what most gamers want.
I think that most people only bought this game because of who made it, and was dreadfully disapointed. Boring as hell.
I want mr. Taylor to develop a new RTS, thats what he is good at, and he should stick with it. Otherwise it's like Blizzard moving out of the Action and RTS's that their good at, and making something lame like, say a MMORPG.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
It looks like most of the video shows in-game cinematics rendered by the games engine. I hope they actually show some game-play video to give a good idea of what the new UI and features are.
I liked DS 1 but, I also found it too repetitive. There was too much hacking and slashing. The "first" character in the game should have been built up a bit better as well as any others you hire. The fact he didn't have to survive until the end tells me the plot development wasn't well thought out.
>> To get the video to play try updating the codec or playing the video a few times. It didn't work at first and after a few tries, it downloaded the codec automatically from the MS server. I'm using WM player 6.x on Windows 2000 so you don't need WM Player 9.x
he is. i cant tell you much more; but i CAN tell you he is making it. now, i mean.
trust an anonymous coward from the inside...
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I agree with everyone above when they say that the mage is almost worthless. My hack-and-slash type chars leveled up far faster than the rest of my party. Why? They are the ones that actually killed everything, so their stats go up more quickly. An experience system similar to the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance would suit this well. In Dark Alliance, the character that killed the beast got 60% of the experience while the teammate got 40%. I know this would have to be modified to fit a party of 6 or so, but the result would be characters you actually cared about not letting die.
I enjoyed the game a lot, and while I think there were a lot of good things, there were areas that needed work as well. Hopefully, the developers will see those areas and improve.
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as the others have said, it did get a bit repetitive. I, too, found that the spells in no way scaled as well as the weapons did (and thanks to the non-existant manual, there was no way to know what was going to be a useful spell until you found it and tried it out). I got every one of followers trained up in ranged weapons as soon as I found the nifty toys in the Goblin Caves (flamethrowers and grenade launchers - woo-hoo!). I kept a couple of these sufficiently trained in Nature Magic to do healing spells and found little trouble once the folks were able to use the more powerful ranged weapons.
I have found that repetitive games can be greatly improved by having friends along for the ride. But DS1 really missed the mark on this. Since the save system only lets you save the character and not the status of the map, it really means that you have to complete a chapter each time you play or have to wade through the same bunch of scaled-up critters you ran through before.
I hope that they rethink this for DS2. The engine for DS1 was nice-looking, but, as soon as I got through the original map, I stopped with the game. Multiplay is where the real longevity of a game can be found for me.
As a comparison, NeverWinter Nights, with its easy-to-use editor and great support for multi-player is still getting played extensively during the LAN parties I have been at...
In short, I got DS for free (Best Buy had a deal with buying EasyCD Creator 6 that gave any game under $30 for free) - at that price, I was happy with what I got. If I had paid the $30, I might not have been as happy.