Like most of the games that Blizzard has produced, the original Diablo laid down many of the rules for the hack and slash adventure genre. Followers of the Diablo design have been numerous, but few have been as well received as 2002's Dungeon Siege. The sequel, imaginatively named Dungeon Siege II, follows faithfully in the footsteps of the original fantasy RPG from Gas Powered Games. Solid, satisfying combat and a worthwhile storyline mark this solid genre title. Read on for my impressions of this medieval slasher.
- Title: Dungeon Siege II
- Developer: Gas Powered Games
- Publisher: Microsoft Games
- System: PC
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 7/10
If you've ever played a fantasy hack and slash game, you've played Dungeon Siege II. This double edged sword swings heavily. On the one hand, you'll be familiar with the tropes, the controls, and the expectations. On the other, if you know you don't like hack and slashers you can safely avoid DSII without missing out on content you might have otherwise appreciated. That said, if you do enjoy the genre there is a lot to like here.
The first Dungeon Siege was widely hailed for its combination of strategy elements and party based combat. Dungeon Siege II doesn't mess with a good thing. As a mercenary far from home, you begin the game working for a powerful evil force that is just starting to work its way across the land. As with the original title, characters develop abilities by using them. If you want your main character to be a melee fighter, you equip him with a sword and start him swinging. If you want him to be a combat mage you put a spellbook in his hands and let him blast away. During the course of the adventure, you can recruit other hearty travelers to round out other roles in your party. As with your main character, you control their inventory and can thus guide their ability development. Though this may initially seem like a system with possibilities to exploit you quickly realize the "multiclassing" capabilities are limited. While you can give a spellcaster a sword to swing around, you're going to want to focus each character on a particular set of abilities in order to maximize their power. Unlockable critical powers are revealed with higher levels of specialization as well, giving you very little incentive to have jacks-of-all-trades.
Those critical powers are used when your characters enter combat. Combat is a major focus of the game, and while there isn't a lot of innovation here the hacking and slashing is very satisfying. Holding down the mouse button on an opponent tells your main character to go to town. NPC allies can be given instructions to focus their attacks on your target, or put into a spree mode where they'll cut down anything that moves. Combat moves for both melee fighters and spellcasters have a lot of crunch to them. Opponents are dispatched with zeal, explosions of blood and body parts accompanying your victory. While the makers of the Dungeon Siege series have a background in RTS games, there isn't really a whole lot of strategy involved once the axes start falling. As long as you've got all the characters equipped with the best weapons and spells you could find or purchase, the chaos of battle will mostly run itself. The downside to this is that it's very hard to protect your weaker NPC allies. Magic users in particular fare badly, as the monsters all known the "geek the mage first" addage. In large combats you'll almost certainly be waiting on your spellcaster to regenerate from the large holes that have been ripped in his thinking parts. Additionally, while the entertainment value of new critters to kill is high, the combat mechanic never really changes and thus can get old in a hurry.
Combatting creatures, as always, nets you experience which eventually allows your party to level up. Depending on what they use in combat, you are given several options in a skill tree for ways to focus their advancement. While multi-classing is again not the best idea, each character has available all the different skill trees. Using the weapon type appropriate to each tree nets you skill points for that tree. For example, using a bow nets you a skill point for the Ranged Tree after a sufficient time spent in the field. Within the trees you are given several options to customize your adventurer's attacks. Melee fighters can specialize in one handed weapons with a shield, or can go the path of the strongman and wield a two handed weapon. Combat mages can focus on different elements (fire, electricity, etc.), while ranged combatants can focus on crossbows or throwing axes. Given the limited number of allies you can have, this ability to focus their abilities is crucial to ensuring that you have party roles fulfilled to your satisfaction.
Combat and mechanics are all well and good, but roleplaying games should be about storytelling. Questing and story are always important elements to a roleplaying game (though in this case I use the term lightly), and in this respect Dungeon Siege II manages to break a little ways out of the cookie cutter mold much of the rest of the game adheres to. Starting your career as an adventurer in a Dryad prison is hardly an auspicious start, but from there you are swept up into fight against your former employer, a wielder of a deadly dangerous artifact from an older era. Aside from the main quest pushing you ever outward into the world at large, folks you meet along the way have a series of errands and personal vendettas to settle up. While they're the usual "i can't be bothered to go five minutes down the road" type of RPG sidequests, the writing and voice acting are usually fairly well done. This adds a level of personality and polish to the experience that many other games can't touch. Additionally, the game isn't shy about giving you quests some time before you can complete them, giving you time to consider you objectives and watch out for the opportunity before you can actually fulfill the request. The only real frustration with the game's theming is the vanilla nature of your NPC allies. They occasionally stop to have prescripted interactions between themselves, and those are well done and usually amusing to listen to. You'll never grow that attached to your companions because they simply don't have a lot in the way of soul. The blank faces of DS II can't hold a candle to the likes of Minsc or HK-47.
The game is somewhat lacking in personality when it comes to visual presentation as well. Up close, characters and monsters have a likeable roughness, with interesting details and personality coming to the fore. Pul back to keep track of the action, however, and the somewhat dated graphical look of Dungeon Siege II is readily apparent. There are some blocky elements to characters which stand out at a distance, and environmental textures can become somewhat repetitive. On the positive side effects for special attacks and magical combat add the same visceral quality to the game that the melee combat movements do, with sparks of light and fire limning the field of battle during most engagements. The auditory experience has the same quality, grunts and cries adding a first person experience to what could otherwise be dry hacking and slashing. The musical accompaniment is as successful in augmenting the gaming experience without overwhelming the player with its presence. The music itself has a similarity to the musical experience from the first game, but somehow didn't come off as repetition. The orchestrations are different enough that the feeling evoked is one of remembrance rather than ripoff, and works well within the gameworld.
Dungeon Siege II, then, is a competent hack and slash RPG. Built on the Diablo 2 model and paying close attention to the lessons learned from the original title, the sequel to the 2002 hit is a satisfying gaming experience if you're a fan of spilling orc blood. Combat, story, and questing are all well executed, with an eye towards presentation and visceral feel. Even though the game hews very close to the genre standard, the entertaining and visceral combat gameplay can make this a worthwhile addition to your library. If you're looking for some mindless fantasy fun, Dungeon Siege II will provide.
Slashdot Mirror
I played the original hoping it would fill in the blanks of Diablo 2. I found it extremely boring. The character develop as a consequence of what action they happen to be ordered to repeat. Shoot a bow, become better at shooting a bow. Swing a sword, etc.
Well I downloaded the demo and found the game really hasn't changed much. You walk down a predetermined path fighting, casting, and drinking potions over and over again. The leveling doesn't feel special. Just a ++ to your weapon or skills. And speaking of skills, the new trees don't seem that interesting (unlike D2, WoW, CoH, etc.)
I think you summed it up pretty well when you said "the game plays itself". You kind of just sit back and jam the drink potion keys.
Again, I only played the demo so I am not in a position to speak on the final product. I would highly recommend anyone thinking of buying this to download the huge demo first or wait until the price goes down.
My friends and I thought it was fun until we realized early on that the winning solution was to buy as many health/mana potions as you could carry and use them instead of anyone actually developing any support roles. We soon were able to get so much money in the game that we all had godlike equipment. After that, it wasn't so interesting.
I very much enjoyed the original DS. I loved how the game allowed you to advance based on how you play.
BUT...
After 20 hours it gets damn annoying to smash every crate and check the loot to find the good upgrades. I would have preferred fewer crates with more 'valuable' goods in them. After finding my 200th Robe of Defence +1 it gets annoying.
Advancing your character: one fun trick that I found at later levels;
Set your healer to auto-heal himself & you, never attack. Have your character start roaming in an area of low-power bad-guys auto-attacking everything he sees with the weapon you want to increase in power.
Let the game play itself for a few days, and your player & healer have both leveled up 10+ levels.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Retro games aren't necessarily bad. If there's a lot of raw "fun" factor to them, there can be replayability, etc.
Sadly, Dungeon Seige I wasn't that great, and it had major problems scaling well at high levels. XP rewards were totally off, spells were messed up, etc. Totally unacceptable from a single-player game.
My wife and I simply loved the cooperative multi-play in Diablo 1 and especially 2. DS1 was hailed as a Diablo heir so we tried it. The first day it seemed great, some really cool graphics and atmopherics, definitely a step up for us as we'd not bought a game in two years. After a few days of on-and-off play we realized it was boring! The action took care of itself so you were left to do the directing... the land was extremely sprawling and at times difficult to work out or remember directions, so even that was out. And the story wasn't exactly Oscar material. Boring! If they haven't fixed the action aspect then I really don't think this is going to be any great shakes.
Now, what's this about Diablo 3 on the drawing board?
Damien
I agree with the "plays itself" notion. I used the same exact tactic for every fight and it worked every time in their linear world. D2 kicked the shit out of DS1 because the mobs had varied behavior and what worked on one type of mobs may fail miserably on another type. The Gas Powered Games people just can't seem to get that an action adventure game shouldn't "play itself". Once again, D2, as old as it is, still kicks the competition's ass. How sad is that?
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
You want plot and quests in a Rogue-like? Try ADOM. Available from http://www.adom.de/
There are two features of Rogue-like games I'd like to see implemented in modern hack-and-slashes:
(1) The ability to die without being a moron.
Seriously, unless you try to screw up, most hack n slash games are a breeze. I haven't played a single one where there is fear of what's behind the corner, the difficulty is always tailored to the strength of your character. There's nothing quite like worrying about your Level 5 Troll Monk bumping into a Greater Moloch in "A Nondescript Cave."
(2) Variability.
The gameplay is always the same. How about some more options for character races and classes? How about race differences affecting gameplay? I like to customize my characters in more ways than just selecting from a skill tree.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ridiculous. That's like saying King's Quest is a direct ripoff of Zork.
- Tell everyone in your party to not attack.
- Save the game. (we might want to come back if we mess this up)
- Set one or two of your party members to cast healing spells. (they'll do it automatically.)
- Take the character that the hag is attacking (we'll call him 'bait'), and have him stand away from the rest of the group.
- Set the other members to not advance, so the bait is between them and the hag. (this will be the combat group)
- Have the combat group use ranged weapons (or spells, but spells require babysitting)
- Make sure that the combat group can *not* hit the hag.
- The bait is allowed to heal (even if he's crap at it) or use close combat weapons (but he can't move, so it's mostly useless)
- Save again (just in case you want to try again should this fail)
You need to watch it for a few minutes,but once you're sure the hag is targeting the right folks, and the hags aren't getting hit by stray arrows (you may not want to have the bait directly between the hag and the party, to reduce the chance of accidental shots).Baby sit the setup for a few minutes --mana potions for the healers, etc, but after a while, you'll feel good about leaving it
It's tricker to deal with 2+ hags at once, especially if they target different folks, so you have to subject more guys as bait, but you can get great gear this way, and a ton of levels.
(I was also criticized by my friends for making Command and Conquer unplayable within a week when finding you made money if you sold not quite full silos, and ruining the spirit of Morrowind with my overpowered potions)
Oh -- and a while back, there was someone who had a ranking system for computer games, based on 'crates'. Basically, the more crates (or sooner you ran across them in a game), the greater the lack of originality in the game. I want to say it was done about the time of C&C2
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I like big budget games as much as the next guy. And I'm sure that DS2 is a nice hack'nslash game. But does anyone wonder why slashdot's game coverage is pretty much oriented towards the big studios instead of the small indies that are acutally doing creative and new things? Slashdot's editors are the sort that bemoan the lack of creativity in gaming, but when that creativity shows up, they don't give it any press. What about great old school RPG's like Spiderweb software's Geneforge series, with real plots and dialog? What about great physics-based platformers like Gish? Instead, we get the same EA Games/Microsoft/Vivendi stuff that all the big publishers cover. When is Slashdot going to move beyond asking for creativity to rewarding that creativity with reviews and coverage? I just wish that Slashdot would put their money where their mouth is regarding coverage beyond the shovelware studio system.
I'm with you. I've played through Diablo 2 (and its expansion pack) numerous times. I love that game. It's very satisfying.
I bought Dungeon Siege 1, and found it to be tedious and dull beyond believe. I never finished it. I doubt I even made it half-way. I've never had any desire to pick it up again.
Quite unlike Diablo 2, which I still play from time to time.
I doubt I'll be giving Dungeon Siege 2 much of a look, given this review.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
It's 2005. Computers are fast enough to load the surrounding landscape's data in the background when you get near the edge of an area. If you want to know what good those up-and-coming dual-core CPUs will be for games, well, there's one answer.
Game developers: My gaming money will go to a game with a lower frame rate and no annoying interruptions in gameplay before it'll go to a silky-smooth game that makes me twiddle my thumbs on a regular basis. I bought DS2 specifically to show my support for no-loading-screen games -- and (I hope) it won't be the last game I buy for that reason.
My RPG background came from the Pen-N-Paper group up to BGII and NWN when computers became the deal, and having never played DS1, I have to say "It's OK" ... My one true complaint about the game is, as previously posted, is feeling like you're being led around the nose about where you need to go, and how to get there. In NWN, you'd take the FedEx Quests, and get the "general location" of where you needed to be to get part XYZ to finish the quest, but in DS2, you simply follow the arrow. The massive clickfest does get old and my party of 2 ranged, 1 Nature Mage, and my melee dire wolf pet are all level 27 or 28 at about halfway through Chapter 2 (of 3) Act 1 (of 3). Zonk nailed the "Geek The Mage" since my wussy magic wench is always getting jacked 1st, even though she's supposed to be a healer who hides in the background. When getting mobbed by a goonsqud of level 25 Vai'kesh zealots does bring about the pseudo-death (unconciousness) to both my mage and my 2nd Ranger (the pregenerated chick from the beginning who I must say sounds way too "Valley Girl" to be any bit beliveable when we have to stop and listen to her babble on or bitch at the Mage)and when they both get wacked, the wolf and I need to run for cover until they wake up and rejoin the fight. Only once so far as anyone actually gotten tombstoned (real death) but that's as simple as burning a Resurect scroll.
Zonk never did mention the pet owning, which might be in DS1 (again, never played it) and I thought it was facinating to actually have to FEED your pet. Granted my wolf must have an iron gut because I fed his ass armor, swords, spears, magic crap, and now fully grown, is a rather badass beast and very useful. I haven't had too much complaint of another user's post of "collecting my 200th cloak of protection +1" and the loot I pick up actually makes you think about what to equip. Does this ring which raises armor X points over what I have now beset the ring that has some armor upgrade but also some secondary or tertiary benefits. Choices, Choices... in NWN, everything was more absolute that This Ring Is Better Than This Other Ring.
I have yet to play it online and am happy to hear that one copy will suffice for LAN'ing since that's about as Multiplayer as I'd get with it(if I want to play against people, BF2 does the job)
For what I paid for the game, I feel I'm getting my money's worth, however I do trully miss "HERE COMES HALFLING DEATH and NO ONE WALKS AWAY"
Here's to waiting for NWN2.
Level 20 is definitely not the end of the game. You'll find that level 20 might actually be the best level as far as gameplay goes. All the skills have been carefully balanced for PvP at level 20. As a result the later levels are mostly beaten with a degree of skill (and sometimes simple determination); you no longer have the option of leveling up and beating the monsters with a more powerful character and no weapon or skill is overpowered. Having said that, you might find that your biggest problem is finding other players that have some skill. While you're leveling you might also want to look for a good guild and populate your friends list with good players.
Who ordered that?
I have been playing CRPGs since Bards tale on the C64.
Here is my take on Dungeon Siege 2: They tried to figure out what worked in Diablo and failed. It has all the mechanics copied to the point of annoyance. Three play throughs (same story monsters have more HP each time), town portal, teleport locations, skill trees, saves now only save your state, not where you are. Done because I think they can't figure out what actually made Diablo fun. It doesn't work. Throw in some side quests on the linear road to try to inject more Roll play and that does work either. Candy coat it so it is so warm and fuzzy that you 5 year old will be comfy. Pablum RPG.
Action RPG fans of Diablo: No comparison. Diablo 2 is a much better action oriented RPG. This is boring and slow.
Story or hard core RPG: Nothing here. A few pointless sidequest departer from the strict linear game that you couldn't not make it to the end if you tried to get lost. Has nothing on Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Planescape Torment or any good single player games.
It feels like a comitee sat down and picked some elements from succesful RPGs. The result is nothing but a monster/treasure treadmill. For those folks who just want to level up and find more elite weapons endlessly. It is the "spinal tap" of RPG games, with the treasure output cranked to "11". If some treasure is good, heaping piles of it must be great. Somehow the concept of less is more never registers. If you always have tons of crap, it just plain doesn't matter. The value of something is in direct relation to it's scarcity. The best PnP games I played, you might find one magic item during a days play. But when you did find it, it was amazing.
Graphics look pretty much identical, to DS1, which is fine by me, heck they are better than Neverwinter Nights, but NWN is actually a fun game.
Bottom line, there is just a hollow shell again. They just dont' grok action RPG and they don't grok story RPG.
I think you can still buy Neverwinter Nights, or Diablo Gold if action is more your thing. Both cheaper and better.