Slashdot Mirror
Chris Taylor Talks Dungeon Siege II Details
Thanks to GameSpy for its overview of the changes and interview with Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor regarding PC action RPG sequel Dungeon Siege II, due out via Microsoft later in 2004. Taylor, lead designer of the classic RTS Total Annihilation, discusses the original Dungeon Siege ("Overall the response was very positive, and most criticism was offered as a call for features in a sequel"), and reveals features for the sequel including (Phantasy Star Online mag-like?) "exotic pets", of which he explains: "You can buy these and develop them by feeding them different items you find in the world."
How about this. Make me care about the character, the storyline, and give me more than four skills to improve on and then we can talk. The first game in this series made Diablo seem like a deep RPG...
It reminds of the classiest 'garbage collection' design I encountered in early gaming.
Back in the day there was a frickin awesome game, Alternate Reality, published by Datasoft. Being an very old game, and having fixed memory limits, the developer had to keep players from hoarding too many items.
Thereby 'the devourer' was added to the game. It was a mean-and-nasty that would track down and attack the player. During combat, the devourer would eat random items from the player's pack.
The thing is, (unknown to me at the time) the devourer only came out when the player was getting dangerously close to the item limit.
Sure, you could eventually get powerful enough to fend one off before you lost an item - but another would always come.
It was just a real classy, practical design solution to a hardware limitation.
Though this has only tangential bearing on Dungeon Siege at best - Damn I loved that game.
(There were in fact 2 connected AR games, of a larger planned series. The City, and The Dungeon were the released games. I played primarily The Dungeon, and am only certain of the devourer in that context. I'm not certain if it was present in The City.)
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Don't even get me started on the hackneyed "top down, resource management, build a building to build a unit type, mass them and attack your enemies" game type. Man is that worn out!
My wife and I bought Dungeon Siege when it came out as we like Diablo-esque games and the previews painted a picture of it being so. After getting it we were overjoyed with the graphics and overall polish, but he game itself sucketh verily:
* You had little to do in the game other than tell the characters where to move - fighting was automatic.
* The levels were quite sprawling with many parts leaving you wondering where to go next.
* The end game was a huge let-down, with the rest of the game being so graphically beautiful, we were expecting something impressive.
* The enemies weren't very difficult so you could get through the entire game in one playing.
* No jump-to-town spells or potions, meaning that you had to walk huge distances to sell your stuff.
* Due to all of the above the boredom factor set in quite quickly.
The multi-player side of the game was actually worse. Take the above faults and add:
* You had to complete an entire world in one go as the save-game didn't record what you had already done.
* Each world was huge.
Put those together and you effectively had to play for 12+ hours straight to finish a world, otherwise it was a waste of time.
After finishing the game once (took a day) we gave up on it altogether.
The only positive side of the game might be the mods, but there weren't any available when we last played it (two years ago).
Damien
Sorry, the guy is a brilliant computer game engine maker, but he wouldn't know a good game if it bit him where the sun doesn't shine.
They've never heard of the word "gameplay", never played Nethack or Angband, thus they do not know their roots and in general, they have no clue.
Like many others, I was astonished at how great the engine was, how smooth and pretty and how there was no load time, etc...but THE GAME??? What about the GAME? Where is the gameplay?
I'm not going to buy DS2 unless the reviews rave about *gameplay*.